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The man known as Cudjo Lewis (ca. 1841-1935) was the last survivor of the Clotilda, the last recorded slave ship to the United States, which arrived in Mobile on Sunday July 8, 1860, illegally and under cover of night, 52 years after the country had abolished the international slave trade. Cudjo helped found the Mobile settlement African Town (known today as Africatown) with other formerly enslaved companions from the Clotilda. He gained some small fame at the end of his life when his story was recounted in several articles and a book.
Cudjo Lewis was born Oluale Kossola in the modern West African country of Benin to Oluale and his second wife Fondlolu. He was the second of four children and had 12 stepsiblings. He was a member of the Yoruba people, more specifically the Isha (a Yoruba sub-group), whose traditional home is in the Banté region of eastern Benin. Kossola was born into a modest family, but his grandfather was an officer of the town's king. Kossola and his siblings had a happy and active childhood. At 14, he began training as a soldier and learned how to track, hunt, camp, shoot arrows, throw spears, and defend his town, which was surrounded by four tall walls. The teenager was also inducted into oro, a secret Yoruba male society whose role is to police and control society. At age 19, Kossola fell in love with a young girl he saw at the market, and at his father's urging underwent initiation that enabled young men and women to get married. In April 1860, in the midst of Kossola's training, Ghezo, the King of Dahomey, and his army attacked the town, killed the king and many of the people, and took the rest of the townspeople prisoner.
Kossola and his companions were marched to Abomey, Dahomey's capital, then on to Ouidah on the coast, where they were held for three weeks in a slave pen known as a barracoon (a prison where captives were held before being sent across the Atlantic). Then he and 109 others from various regions of Benin and Nigeria boarded the slave ship Clotilda, captained by Mobile ship builder William Foster and embarked on the journey across the Atlantic Ocean, known during the slave trade as the Middle Passage. During his 45 days on the ship, Kossola suffered from terrible thirst and the humiliation of having been forced on board naked.
In Mobile, he was enslaved by James Meaher, a wealthy ship captain and brother of Timothy Meaher, the man who had organized the expedition. James Meaher was unable to pronounce Kossola's name, so the young man told his new owner to call him Cudjo, a name given by the Fon and Ewe peoples of West Africa to boys who are born on Monday. During his five years of enslavement, the young man worked on a steamship and lived with his shipmates under Meaher's house, which was built high above the ground.
In 1865, with general emancipation, Cujdo regained his freedom and took the name Lewis. He married Abile, a young woman who also had been on the Clotilda. Like their companions, the couple's objective was to return home, but when they failed to raise enough money for the trip, they decided to stay in Alabama and create a town of their own. Because Timothy Meaher had been responsible for their ordeal, they decided to ask him for reparations in the form of free land. Cudjo was chosen as the spokesman. Meaher refused their demand, and they purchased land from him and others and established African Town on a hill north of Mobile. Cudjo worked as a shingle maker but after being injured in a train accident in 1902—for which he sued the railroad company—he became African Town's church sexton.
He and his wife had five sons and one daughter. To mark their attachment to their culture, they gave American and Yoruba names to four of them and Yoruba names only to two. Sadly, all of the children died young: Celia/Ebeossi died of sickness at 15, Young Cudjo was killed by a deputy sheriff, David/Adeniah was hit by a train, Pollee Dahoo disappeared and was probably killed, and James/Ahnonotoe and Aleck/Iyadjemi died after short illnesses. Abile passed away in 1908, just one month before Aleck died. Cudjo again suffered the loss of his family.
Financial hardship forced Cudjo to sell several plots of land. By the early 1920s, all his companions from the Clotilda had passed away, leaving him as the only survivor. During the last years of his life, he achieved some fame when writers
and journalists interviewed him and made his story known to the public. Alabama-born author Zora Neale Hurston filmed him, and he is thus the only known African deported through the slave trade whose moving image exists. Cudjo Lewis
died of age-related illness on July 26, 1935, at about 94. Although he had always wanted to go back home, he was buried among
his family in the Africans' cemetery that opened in 1876. Today, a tall white monument marks his grave. Some of his descendants
still live in Mobile.
Diouf, Sylviane Anna. Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Barracoon. Unpublished typescripts and hand-written draft, 1931. Alan Locke Collection, Manuscript Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
Roche, Emma Langdon. Historic Sketches of the South. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1914.
Sylviane A. Diouf
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Published December 6, 2007
Last updated October 20, 2009
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Tibetans learn skills to improve their livelihoods
In the Qomolangma (Mt. Everest) National Nature Preserve of the Tibet Autonomous Region, Tibetans are learning hospitality and culinary skills to benefit from tourism and increase their family incomes. With support from the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives, the Pendeba Society led a series of training programs for 65 Pendebas, Tibetan for “workers who benefit the village,” in hospitality, English language instruction, and eco-tourism.
In March 2011, the training program culminated with a job fair and a ten-day study tour in Lhasa and Shannan Prefecture, where 11 of the most outstanding Pendebas traveled to learn from other regions of Tibet and to put their new skills to practice.
The training series began with a focus on hospitality and culinary skills. From October-February, 41 Pendebas from Tingri County participated in three 10-day training sessions. Trainees learned hands-on skills in comprehensive Tibetan-style hospitality, including food preparation and guesthouse design. They learned kitchen basics, from hygiene and knife skills to ingredients and recipes. They also studied the principles of hotel management and etiquette. The key trainer was Mr. Badun, who has nearly 20-years of culinary experience and currently works as the Chief Chef of the Mt. Everest Hotel.
In December, the Pendeba Society began a three-month intensive English language program. Participants included 28 villagers, 14 from the remote Qudang Village in southern Tingri County near the famous Gama Valley. The program increased practical skills in the English language with a focus on eco-tourism and hospitality. The Deputy Governor of Tingri County, Mr. Tsering Zhandui, expressed his support during the opening ceremony of the training session by highlighting the characteristics of Tingri County, “One Mountain (Mt. Everest), One River (Pengqu River), and One Culture (Tibetan Culture).” Tingri County’s Director of Tourism, Mr. Gama, emphasized the importance of developing tourism in the region and encouraged participants to appreciate this opportunity to help them take advantage of the tourism resources in their surrounding communities.
On March 16, the Pendeba Society hosted a farewell dinner and job fair. At this event, trainees performed skits in English to demonstrate their accomplishments. All attendees expressed their appreciation and recognized the value of the trainings in their own lives. One participant said: “Before this training, I knew very little about English and barely wrote any English words. But now I can communicate in basic conversational English. This will help me greatly.”
The training series culminated with a ten-day site visit to Lhasa and Shannan Prefecture. The most outstanding 11 students were invited to participate. For many, this trip was their first time in Lhasa, where they visited the Potala Palace, Barkhor Street, Jokhang Monastery and the Tibet Museum. One Pendeba noted, “Without the Pendeba Society, I can hardly image that I might be able to visit Lhasa and other places in Tibet this soon.”
A highlight was a field trip to the Lhalu Wetland National Nature Preserve, a 1,650 acre wetlands in urban Lhasa and one of the largest wetlands within any city in Asia. A manager of the Preserve led a walking tour of the wetlands, known as the “Lungs of Lhasa,” where many protected species, such as the black-necked cranes, overwinter.
These training programs are part of a comprehensive strategy to build the skills of local people living within the Qomolangma National Nature Preserve so that they may benefit economically from increasing tourism to the region. With a network of more than 270 Pendebas, the Pendeba Society prepares local people to manage tourism so that it minimizes harm to the environment and benefits communities. New Pendeba-run eco-tourism businesses aim to create a sustainable income base for Pendeba volunteers and their villages.
As the first non-government organization to be registered in Shigatze Prefecture and founded by an alumnus of the Future Generations Graduate School, the Pendeba Society builds local capacity to integrate environmental sustainability with primary health and community development.
In 2011, Future Generations China, based in Beijing, aims to help start-up more local Pendeba Societies in the Four Great Rivers region of southeastern Tibet. See china.future.org for more details.
For more updates and news from the Pendeba Society, please visit their website at: www.pendeba.org.
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La Jetee Filmmaker Chris Marker Dies At 91
French filmmaker Chris Marker has died at 91, the day after his birthday. Marker is most well known for his 1962 science fiction short La Jetee, which served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 1995 time-travel jaunt 12 Monkeys.
You can watch La Jetee below.
Famously private about his personal life, Marker was part of the “Left Bank Film Movement” that included directors like Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, and Henri Colpi. A philosophy student and member of the French resistance during World War II, Marker worked as a film critic and journalist, including for Andre Bazin’s legendary French film magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema. His first film, Olypmpia 52, was a documentary about the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki.
La Jetee is a story of post-apocalyptic time travel that examines ideas of memory, death, time, and attempt to correct a mistake. The film is famously composed almost exclusively of still photos. Only one sequence is shot on film, which Marker claimed was because he could only borrow a movie camera for a limited time.
Beyond La Jetee, Marker had a long and prolific career, one that extended well into his 80s. Subjects ranged from Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (AK), to the 1968 uprisings in Paris (A Grin Without A Cat) and his cat, as well as more experimental turns, like Sans Soleill. Later in his career, Marker explored the possibilities of digital media, which led to the interactive CD-ROM Immemory. He said the disc would be a “’guided tour’ of a memory, while at the same time offering the visitor a chance for haphazard navigation.”
Marker leaves a deep impression on the current landscape of cinema. His influence can be felt in any number of current mainstream filmmakers, including David Lynch, Christopher Nolan, Richard Linklater, and many more. He is one of the greats.
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CAM use, in general, is widespread and growing in U.S. cancer community, but more research is still needed
to convince doctors of its benefits
It's not unusual to see cancer patients — or those whose cancer is in remission — wash down a handful of supplements alongside their prescription medications, according to research findings from a new American Cancer Society (ACS) study on the use of dietary supplements and other complementary and alternative (CAM) therapies among cancer patients. The study of 4,139 cancer patients, which was published in the September 2008 issue of the journal Cancer, found that 40.1% of study ...
Nutrition Business Journal Subscription-Only Content
As an NBJ subscriber you receive an issue of NBJ each month; access to the exclusive “NBJ Subscriber Only” content of newhope360.com (excludes 3 month subscriptions), which includes power-point presentations, select data charts & archived articles; plus a 10% discount on data charts, comprehensive market research reports and web seminars.
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Cold, clouds, rain, hurricanes and an economic slow-down. Not an appealing list if you’re in the live goods industries, but these are the conditions growers have had to deal with during the spring and early summer seasons.
We may have had a hard start to this year, but does that make our industry different from any other? Isn’t the whole country feeling the effects of a sluggish economy and an unstable stock market? Didn’t the bad weather this spring hurt other businesses?
Live Goods v. Hard Goods
So are we in the floriculture business really so different from others out there peddling more traditional hard goods and services?
The federal government seems to think so. Mostly because of the devastating effect conditions like those mentioned above – rain, cold, hurricanes, etc. – the government budgets billions of dollars to promote agriculture, to fund agriculture relief and to sustain agricultural research. I know most of this money is intended for the more traditional corn and soybean parts of agriculture, but in the end, everything gets lumped together as agriculture, especially when there is some natural disaster like Allison, this year’s first named storm.
And, in this limited area, the government might be right. Those of us in and around agriculture do provide a necessary product (yes, the government has grouped flowers in with the other truly necessary live products) that is more adversely affected by environmental conditions. But, in some respects a product is just a product…no matter how alive it is.
Making Geraniums Into Widgets
How many times have you said or have your heard another grower say they were having trouble with a crop – had tried everything they could think of – couldn’t get those gerberas to bloom – less heat, more light, extra fertilizer – dump the crop? No, they were going to try a few more things. By the time those gerberas made it to the market, if they ever did, the grower had so much money in them there was no chance to break even.
Do you think that’s what happens at Mattel when Barbie’s makeup gets imprinted slightly askew? No. They throw that batch of dolls away and mark them up as loss.
Is it because we are actually working with live goods that we feel this way? Is it because we grew plants from a seed or a tiny sprig that we throw good money after bad, trying to save a crop? Certainly that has to be part of the problem because almost every grower has another crop of impatiens right next to the ones that won’t grow, and more importantly, some of those impatiens will probably go to fertilize the trash pile at the end of the season.
Another part of the equation is not so easy for growers to control. Customers want to plant certain crops at certain times. Stan Pohmer deals with this problem, on page 96 of the GNR section, in his monthly marketing column. We have to see our product as other industries do, convincing the customer that they can use our product at times other than what they might think. Stan calls this a "second spring."
One of the main problems growers have with looking at their product as any other business person (read hard goods manufacturer) would is the amount of time invested in each crop. Take poinsettias, which are one of the longest of the seasonal crops, as an example. If you get half way through a poinsettia crop and run into trouble, you have a huge problem. It’s too late to start new plants, you have large sums of money invested in cuttings and this might well be the only crop in your greenhouses. It’s not like making a new ball bearing, which can’t take more than a few minutes, max.
In this respect, the green industry is much different, and as Roger Styer points out in his article about getting your poinsettias off to a good start (page 12), the best thing you can do to finish a good crop is start a good crop. There are certain measures, certain procedures that growers have to take into consideration that hard goods manufacturers don’t. I guess the answer to whether producing live goods is really so different from producing hard goods is "kind of." It may not be easy to dump a crop, but it’s not always smart to keep it – the real question is deciding on the threshold between keeping and dumping.
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US President Barack Obama called British, German and Italian leaders Wednesday to press the case for Europe to come up with an "immediate plan" to resolve the widening eurozone debt crisis.
Obama, facing re-election in November and concerned that Europe's problems are dragging down the US economy, spoke of the need for action to bolster the single currency bloc and global growth.
"The leaders agreed on the importance of steps to strengthen the resilience of the eurozone and growth in Europe and globally," White House spokesman Jay Carney said of Obama's telephone calls to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti.
They "agreed to remain in contact" ahead of the June 18-19 G20 summit in Mexico, Carney added.
Earlier, Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron said Europe had to come up with an "immediate plan to tackle the crisis and to restore market confidence," a Downing Street spokeswoman said.
The exchanges came as pressure mounts on Europe's leaders to stabilise Spain's stricken banking system so as to avoid a costly bailout of the whole country and as Greece goes into June 17 polls with its eurozone future at stake.
The European Central Bank meanwhile refused to offer recession-hit eurozone economies an easy-money boost, keeping interest rates steady at 1.0 percent.
A hint of a rate cut to come, however, plus reports the US Federal Reserve might be ready for more stimulus action, buoyed stock markets, which posted strong gains, and the euro, which rose sharply against the dollar.
European leaders are under intense pressure to try to resolve the crisis at a June 28-29 EU summit as Spain struggles to keep the debt wolves at bay and Germany holds its hardline stance that reform and austerity come before growth.
Madrid is now asking for deeper eurozone integration so that European rescue funds can be directly pumped into lenders, thereby avoiding the Irish trap where saving the banks forced the country into a massive bailout.
Spanish Finance Minister Luis De Guindos said Madrid has to move quickly, making a decision within the next two weeks on how to help its lenders who are struggling to raise 80-billion euros ($100-billion) to shore up their books.
Europe "must help nations in difficulty," Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said Tuesday as he called for a list of EU reforms viewed with suspicion by Germany including deposit guarantees, a banking union and eurobonds.
The proposal gaining the most traction outside Germany is to integrate the eurozone's national banking systems, which would sever the link between banks and sovereign finances.
But powerhouse Germany resisted the pleas, saying whatever help the EU can provide to an increasingly desperate looking Madrid should come from the tools, and according to the rules, already in place.
German government spokesman Steffan Seibert said the reforms asked for by Rajoy required long-term changes beforehand, reiterating that only governments can apply for cash from the European bailout funds.
"These instruments must be applied for by governments ... whether a government wishes to apply is purely a matter for the government," Seibert said.
A leading member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition, Free Democrat Christian Lindner, sarcastically called the banking union idea "a new, admittedly creative, way to tap German solvency."
Merkel also signaled she is no mood for a quick compromise, praising the virtues of German perfectionism as a national strength.
"Because we are not easily satisfied, we have been successful in many areas," Merkel told a citizen's forum on Germany's future.
Spain has so far refused to seek financial assistance from the European Union that would come to the government with tough strings and a politically humiliating austerity programme attached.
But some kind of rescue for Spain appears to be emerging and French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici said EU partners were ready to "mobilise very rapidly" to come to Madrid's assistance.
According to the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a compromise under discussion could see European Union aid paid to the Spanish state-backed Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring (FROB).
Madrid in turn would push through mergers or closures of weakened Spanish banks, the German newspaper said Wednesday.
The report said this course would preserve Madrid's sovereignty and uphold the German position that EU funds should be paid only to public institutions.
ECB chief Mario Draghi sought Wednesday to calm fears, saying the eurozone debt crisis is "far" from as bad as the global market meltdown in the wake of the 2008 collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers
"We are rightly alarmed but I would say that we are still far away from that situation," he said.
Draghi said some of the current problems "have nothing to do with monetary policy," and urged European leaders to set out a vision for where they want eurozone to go at their summit later this month.
London stocks jumped 2.36 percent Wednesday, Frankfurt 2.09 percent, Paris 2.42 percent, Madrid 2.41 percent and Milan 3.50 percent.
Wall Street was showing gains of around 2.0 percent at 1900 GMT.
The European single currency rose sharply to $1.2553 from $1.2450 late Tuesday.
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American Hospital Association-backed legislation introduced recently would provide $75 million in grants to help integrated health systems expand access to primary and preventive services for the medically underserved. Sponsored by Reps. Michael Burgess, M.D. (R-TX) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), the Patients and Public Health Partnership Act (H.R. 5544) would provide the funding through a three-year demonstration project.
“With nearly 47 million uninsured Americans and more than 56 million Americans lacking access to primary and preventive care, it is clear that Congress needs to explore additional ways to make cost-effective primary care much more available and accessible,” AHA said in a recent letter of support to the bill’s sponsors.
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How Economic Nationalism Bites Back
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Does protectionism work? In the late 19th century, British writers were as concerned about loss of markets and jobs to Germany as many Americans are today about competition from China. The campaign against rising Germany shows that economic nationalism can have unintended consequences.
One of that campaign’s most striking failures, now largely forgotten, was recently recalled by the German weekly Die Zeit on the 125th anniversary of the notorious “Made in Germany” campaign.
Ever since Bismarck’s German coalition defeated France and established a newly unified nation, Germany had a reputation for cheap mass manufacturing and aggressive pricing. At the time, Britain was not only Germany’s biggest trading partner but, in German eyes, the superpower with which the new Reich had to achieve parity.
For all the prestige of French civilization, Britannia still ruled for many continental Europeans. The new Reich’s unofficial national anthem, “Heil dir im Siegerkranz” was set to the melody of “God Save the Queen.”
Even animal fanciers deferred. The collie, for example, was the most expensive breed of show dog in the world. The German Shepherd as we know it was deliberately created in the 1890s from many Central European herding breeds as the Reich’s answer: an animal bred not for looks, the breed’s founders asserted, but for intelligence, character, loyalty, and courage. Germans were determined not to remain the underdog.
What was intended as a stigma for knockoff products like synthetic perfumes became a badge of quality.
Britain took seriously the threat to their supremacy by a rising Germany. In 1887, Parliament tried to use mandatory labeling to stigmatize German products. The Merchandise Marks Act made misrepresenting a product’s country of origin a serious offense punishable by a fine, forfeiture of goods, and up to two years of prison at hard labor. In principle, the law applied to all misstatements regardless of nationality — manufacturers in Britain and elsewhere used deceptive marks — but it was aimed mainly at Germany, considered the most skilled and aggressive of the imitators, as China is today. It was especially aimed at misrepresenting cities or regions associated with high-quality products. A common example would be stamping inferior German-made agricultural implements as “Sheffield,” threatening the genuine British product’s reputation overseas.
But there were ways around labels, some of which are familiar today, such as importing foreign parts and assembling them domestically, or placing the labels in inaccessible spots like the bottom of the treadles of heavy sewing machines.
In 1896, Ernest Edwin Williams documented such problems in a 175-page tract, Made in Germany, that became the mother of declinist literature in the English-speaking world. The threats change but the message remains: “The industrial glory of England is departing, and England does not know it.”
Peaceful trade did little to reassure British nationalists like Williams. They pointed to a flood of cheap German-made goods competing with the renowned products of industrial centers like Birmingham and drawing on Germany’s world-leading (and rigorously cartelized) chemical industry. Britain’s role as “workshop of the world,” nationalists warned, was in danger.
Williams favored labeling but recognized that without reform of British manufacturing and marketing, it was becoming worse than useless. When British international wholesalers sold goods marked “Made in Germany,” overseas buyers would realize they could probably get a better price by purchasing directly from German sources and dividing business that had previously gone through London.
As the quality of German products improved — new German optical glass eliminated the color distortion that had plagued early compound microscopes, for example, accelerating medical research internationally — what was intended as a stigma for knockoff products like synthetic perfumes became a badge of quality.
A decade or so later, anti-German protectionism also backfired in the United States in the media revolution of the postcard. Picture postcards were the Instagram of the early 20th century, made possible by more favorable postal rates and extension of the postal service through the Rural Free Delivery program. People collected them in albums that were passed around at gatherings of family members and friends.
Postcards also became the text messages of pre-World War I America, especially after U.S. Post Office regulations allowed travelers to write short messages on half the address side of the card. Some cultural critics even feared the postcard’s abbreviated style would destroy the personal letter.
Germans were leaders in printing and graphic arts and the leading global supplier of illustrated postcards. Bismarck himself owned a paper factory that exported to England — in fact, the immigrant founder of today’s ubiquitous U. S. Hammermill brand had run a big plant popularly called the Hammermühle for the Iron Chancellor!
Picture postcards were the Instagram of the early 20th century.
German lithographers enjoyed the best of both worlds: advanced technology and relatively inexpensive labor. They were also enterprising marketers, employing salesmen to solicit orders from local druggists and other retailers who could send them photographs or negatives for reproduction.
In the middle of the postcard boom, the Payne-Aldrich Tariff of 1909, supported by U.S. publishing and printing interests, severely limited postcard imports. The approaching cutoff of European suppliers had one desired result, as many domestic printers began to enter the field.
Indeed, some excellent American manufacturers emerged; the archives of the Detroit Publishing Company in the Library of Congress are now a public-domain treasure.
But it’s worth remembering how the splendid glass plates got there: the company was in receivership by 1924 and out of business by 1932. The market after 1909 was glutted not only by the postcards offered by the new American vendors such as the Detroit Publishing Company, but by countless German cards imported in anticipation of the tariff. The glut also helped to turn fashion against the postcard, and the boom virtually collapsed.
It wasn’t wrong for the British to be concerned about the technological state and quality of their industries. But attracting key, skilled immigrants is a much more effective way of remaining competitive. Asian-born entrepreneurs are their counterparts today. Tariff-protected industries lose their incentive to compete.
If the panic of the 1880s and 1890s seems quaint today, it’s because German, British, and American history alike show how futile it was.
Edward Tenner is the author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences and Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity. He is a visiting scholar in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information and an affiliate of the Princeton Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.
FURTHER READING: Tenner also writes “An Unnatural History of the Electronic Mouse,” “Apple, Disney, and Dreams of Corporate Utopias,” and “The Fine Art of Resilience: Lessons from Stanley Meltzoff.” Mark J. Perry blogs that “Sen. Marco Rubio Explains the Twisted Political Logic of Trade Protection on CNBC” and says “Will the Senate Vote to End 200+ Years of Protectionism for the U.S. Sugar Cartel? Not Today.” Daniel Hanson discusses “The Flaws of the WTO.”
Image by Dianna Ingram / Bergman Group
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Contributor(s): Benedict Anderson, Carloyn Hamilton, Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martin Bernal, Ntongela Masilela, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Xolela Mangcu
- EAN: 9781868145324
- Publication Date: 2011
- Dimensions and Pages: 210 x 130 mm, 192 pp
- Format: Paperback
- Recommended Price:
- Buy this book
Why does it matter that nations should care for their archives, and that they should develop a sense of shared identity? And why should these processes take place in the
public domain? How can nations possibly speak about a shared sense of identity in pluralistic societies where individuals and groups have multiple identities? And how can
such conversations be given relevance in public discussions of reconciliation and development in South Africa?
These are the issues that the Public Conversations lecture series – an initiative of the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Project at Wits University – proceeded from in 2006. Five years later, cross currents in contemporary South Africa have made the resumption of a public debate to clarify the meanings of identity and citizenship even more imperative, and an understanding of ‘archive’ even more urgent.
The 2006 lectures were subsequently collected, resulting in this volume which takes its title from Weber’s point, elaborated on in the chapter by Benedict Anderson, that the
future asks us to be worthy ancestors to the yet unborn. The book, as did the lecture series, aims to reach a broad and informed reading public because the topic is still of pressing interest in contemporary public discourse. In a changed (and, some might say, degraded) environment of public dialogue, the editor hopes to inspire a re-thinking of the very essence of what it means to be a citizen of South Africa.
Becoming Worthy Ancestors aims to make accessible the theoretically informed, sometimes highly academic work of its various contributors. With chapters from high profile international and local contributors, it will be of interest to South African and international audiences. Editing for publication has further enhanced the accessibility of each speaker’s thinking without forfeiting any of its complexity, and the addition of an introductory chapter by the editor contributes to the coherence of the volume. While the target audience is the broad public, the book is based on a core of academic thinking and research.
Xolela Mangcu, previously a fellow at The Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Project, is now based at the University of Johannesburg. He is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington D.C.
Table of Contents
Preface by Xolela Mangcu
Evidentiary genocide: intersections of race, power and the archive by Xolela Mangcu
The transmission lines of the New African Movement by Ntongela Masilela
Some do contest the assertion that I am an African by Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert
Africa in Europe, Egypt in Greece by Martin Bernal
Unconquered and insubordinate: embracing black feminist intellectual activist legacies by Pumla Dineo Gqola
Identity, politics and the archive by Kwame Anthony Appiah
The goodness of nations by Benedict Anderson
Why archive matters: archive, public deliberation and citizenship by Carolyn Hamilton
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It’s Easy Being Green: Sunscreen: Friend or Foe?
SOURCE: Flickr/ RogueSun Media
Summer’s almost here, and many of us will soon begin slathering on the sunscreen to protect ourselves from harmful rays. But how effective and safe is that sunscreen from your local drugstore?
Most of us were told as children to put on sunscreen before we went outside in the summertime. But some studies question how well typical sunscreens work. An Environmental Working Group, or EWG, study in 2009 analyzed 1,796 name-brand sunscreens and found that only 7 percent block both UVA and UVB radiation, remain stable in sunlight, and contain few ingredients with known or suspected health hazards.
The study also claimed that some sunscreen ingredients are absorbed by the blood and linked to toxic effects. These ingredients could release skin-damaging free radicals in sunlight or disrupt hormone systems, and several are strongly linked to allergic reactions, while others may build up in the body or the environment. EWG also blasts the Food and Drug Administration for dragging its feet over establishing safety standards for sunscreens.
A 2006 study from the University of California-Riverside also suggested that certain sunscreen ingredients may cause more free radicals to form. Free radicals disrupt cell functioning and are believed to lead to many cancers.
Other studies look at sunscreen’s environmental effects. A 2007 study published in Environmental Health Perspectives found that at even very low levels of sunscreens can cause coral bleaching by killing zooxanthellae, the algae that form a symbiotic relationship with corals. The study’s authors calculated that close to 10 percent of the world’s reefs could be at risk from the 4,000 to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen that wash off on an annual basis.
Some organizations, however, are not as quick to sound the alarm on sunscreen. The Skin Cancer Foundation assures consumers that sunscreen products are safe and effective when used as directed. They recommend using sunscreen with a sun protection factor or SPF of 15 or higher as part of a “complete sun protection regimen” that includes seeking the shade and covering up with clothing. They are also highly critical of the Environmental Working Group study and are concerned it will scare consumers away from sunscreen.
We need to protect ourselves from the sun regardless of studies and claims. The sun’s ultraviolet radiation is clearly linked to skin cancer, and we’ve all experienced a sunburn at one time or another from heading outside with no protection. But those who wish to avoid the potentially harmful effects cited in the above studies can seek greener options that work.
Sunscreens containing zinc dioxide or titanium dioxide, for example, are alternatives to those with chemicals such as cinnamate or benzophenone, which were called out in the Environmental Health Perspectives study. Zinc and titanium are minerals that provide broad-spectrum coverage and reflect both UVA and UVB rays. Combining these with clean, nontoxic ingredients such as shea butter, beeswax, unrefined oils, green tea, and chamomile can also nourish and protect skin.
When shopping for a sunscreen also consider avoiding ones with harsher chemical preservatives such as parabens (including butylparaben and methylparaben), which have mixed health reviews. Instead, look for sun products without preservatives or those with milder preservatives such as potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate.
Finally, consider buying sun protective clothing you can wear in the water and on the beach. And seek the shade whenever possible, especially between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. You can also see your physician every year for a professional skin exam.
Summertime quickly turns into playtime, and taking precautions against the sun can ensure that a bad sunburn doesn’t spoil your fun.
To speak with our experts on this topic, please contact:
Print: Katie Peters (economy, education, health care, gun-violence prevention)
202.741.6285 or email@example.com
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202.481.7146 or firstname.lastname@example.org
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Web: Andrea Peterson
202.481.8119 or firstname.lastname@example.org
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Danny Wilcox Frazier’s dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people and resources are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America were being emptied. Frazier’s arresting photographs take us into Iowa’s abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there: young people at leisure, fishermen on the Mississippi, veterans on Memorial Day, Amish women playing cards, as well as more recent arrivals, Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews at prayer and Latinos at work in the fields. Frazier's camera finds these newcomers while it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever: harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and surviving.
Poetic and dark but illuminated with flashes of insight, this collection of photographs is a portrait of contemporary rural Iowa, but it is also more than that. It shows what is happening in many rural and out-of-the-way communities all over the United States, where people find ways to get by in the wake of closing factories and the demise of family farms. Taken by a true insider who has lived in Iowa his entire life, Frazier’s photographs are rich in emotion and give expression to the hopes and desires of the people who remain, whose needs and wants are complicated by the economic realities remaking rural America.
A freelance photographer from Iowa City, Frazier is the third recipient of the biennial Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. Robert Frank, one of America’s preeminent photographers, judged the prize, selecting Frazier’s work from over four hundred entries. Robert Frank also wrote the foreword to Frazier’s prize-winning book.
The twenty-five black-and-white gelatin silver prints in the exhibit were selected from Frazier’s book, Driftless: Photographs from Iowa, published in November 2007 by Duke University Press and CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
The exhibit photographs have been donated to the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library (RBMSCL) through the generosity of the Honickman Foundation established by Lynne Honickman. Harold Honickman sits on the board of the Honickman Foundation and is a member of the Duke University Library Advisory Board. This gift of Danny Wilcox Frazier photographs supports RBMSCL's commitment to acquiring photographic collections that have artistic merit and that reflect the visionary purposes and documentary impulses of their creators.
Reception / Artist's Talk
Nov 8, 2007, Rare Book Room, Perkins Library
Download: Listen or download through iTunes
Unless otherwise specified on this page, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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“I am sometimes just bowled over by what is happening here,” says McLaughlin, who believes the nation must finally “face up” to the scope of the problem. “I think the figures concerning the projections [for 270,000 cases by 1991] are very low.”
“I think people … better reassess their sexual habits,” warns Channel 4’s Jeanne Blake, who in four years of reporting has seen AIDS move through the drug and gay communities and now head toward the rest of the population. “There are no high-risk groups anymore.”
These reporters, and many others like them, are trying to share their fears while it still matters. In a five-day span in mid November, the Globe published two articles targeted directly at specific groups moving to the frontline in the war to control AIDS. One discussed educational outreach efforts in Boston’s minority community, where intravenous-drug abuse threatens to swell already disproportionately high AIDS rates. The other monitored AIDS awareness among young heterosexuals, a group whose traditional interest in sampling the sexual smorgasbord must now be tempered by the looming shadow of AIDS.
In its chilling November 24 cover story, Newsweek was brutally frank about the dangers that lie ahead, stating that “thousands have already died and thousands more will follow: very soon, millions of Americans will know someone who succumbed to the disease.” And Blake doubtless caused a few sleepless nights when she aired a report warning that, in terms of AIDS spread, when you have sex with someone nowadays, you’re having sex with everyone your partner slept with for the past five to seven years.
To this point, the tragedy of AIDS reporting has been it frustrating failure to douse the fire while the building was still standing. The gay community is now acutely aware of the epidemic, and there is evidence of dramatic changes in the sexual habits of its members. Lives can be saved, but great damage has already been done: some estimates hold that as many as three-quarters of the gay men in cities like San Francisco and New York are already infected. The very nature of the needle culture renders it impervious to health warnings, and there may be no way to educate and influence many intravenous-drug users, who, according to some experts, will be the primary vehicle of AIDS spread to the straight world. The big question now is how effective the media will be in reaching sexually active heterosexuals, many of whom have already concluded that AIDS is someone else’s disease.
Thus far, Kessler is not particularly optimistic. “I hear the same language from straight singles that I heard from gay singles four years ago,” he says sadly.
If that language doesn’t change soon, Schram’s version of future shock may prove prophetic.
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|MVCTC students using new credit flex program|
|Written by Editor|
|Monday, 25 October 2010 15:47|
CLAYTON - Twenty-four juniors in the Miami Valley Career Technology Center (MVCTC) Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program are taking advantage of Ohio’s new credit flex concept this fall.
Col. Dale Berger and social studies teachers Dave Gilmore, Peggy Livingston and Robin Speer cross-walked the Social Studies 3/Global Issues course of study with the Air Force Junior ROTC curriculum, and they worked out an assessment plan by which students may demonstrate mastery of the common content.
Students who earn an 80 percent or better in the Social Studies 3 portion of Col. Berger’s curriculum will earn Social Studies 3 credit in addition to their normal Air Force Junior ROTC credit. Students might use that credit towards an honors diploma, as credit redemption, or as an elective.
The 24 juniors represent the following districts: Arcanum-Butler, Bethel, Eaton, Huber Heights, Miami East, Miamisburg, Milton-Union, National Trail, Preble-Shawnee, Tipp City, Tri-County North, Twin Valley South, Vandalia-Butler, Versailles and West Carrollton.
For more information about MVCTC and the opportunities for high school and adult learners visit www.mvctc.com.
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The Township form of government is the oldest form of municipal government in New Jersey. The original act of 1798 incorporated 104 towns. Under the current township government laws, the township committee remains the backbone of the municipality's government. Voters elect the township committee's five members. The elections are partisan and the committee members serve three-year staggered terms. The Township Committee elects the mayor for a one-year term. The Mayor serves as the chair of the Township Committee and has powers vested in the mayor's office by general law.
The Township Committee is the Legislative Branch of our government and establishes policies for the administration of the various departments. The Committee appoints the Township Administrator who is responsible for carrying out those policies and overseeing the day to day operations.
Subcommittees of the Township Committee are Public Safety; Public Works; Planning, Engineering and Land Use; Parks and Recreation; General Administration and Finance. Two Members of Township Committee serve on each and provide oversight to the departments.
Township Committee meetings are held on the 2nd and 4th Thursday of each month, at 7:30 PM, at the Municipal BuiIding. Check the Township Meetings Calendar for cancellations and special meetings.
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Forensic DNA testing technologies have presented the criminal justice system with powerful and unique tools for the solution of crime. Small, often invisible, biological material can successfully be obtained from evidence items previously thought to be useless in criminal investigations. The development and use of polymerase chain reaction-based (“PCR”) techniques revolutionized the ability to exclude or include known individuals as the donors of the smallest evidentiary samples. The creation of local, state and national databases of DNA profiles of previously-convicted offenders has similarly resulted in the solution of thousands of suspectless cases. Comparison of DNA profiles obtained from biological evidence in such cases with statutorily-authorized databanks has permitted the discovery of the identity of attackers in cases otherwise not capable of resolution. Of greater importance is the now-common use of DNA typing technologies to examine older cases in which inmates have frequently served lengthy terms in prisons or penitentiaries. More than 200 inmates in the United States have been exonerated by modern DNA analysis of samples seized prior to the availability of DNA testing.
Come hear George ”Woody” Clarke talk about “DNA Testing: 21st Century Justice” in the UCSD Biomedical Library Events Room on May 1, 2008 from 12:00-1:00 p.m. Mr. Clarke will be available after the talk to sell and sign his new book, JUSTICE AND SCIENCE: TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS OF DNA EVIDENCE, recently published by Rutgers University Press, for the special price of $20.
Mr. Clarke is currently a Judge of the Superior Court for the County of San Diego. He served as a Deputy District Attorney for the County of San Diego from 1982-2003. During that time he tried numerous serious felony offenses, including capital crimes. Since 1989 he has specialized in the use and introduction in court of scientific evidence, particularly forensic DNA testing results. As a result of his expertise, he was loaned to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and presented DNA evidence to the jury in the 1995 prosecution of Orenthal James (“O.J.”) Simpson. Mr. Clarke was appointed in 1998 by the U.S. Department of Justice to the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence, and in 2002 to the U.S. Attorney General’s Initiative on DNA Laboratory Backlogs. He has published and lectured internationally in the area of forensic DNA evidence to organizations including the U.S. Department of Justice, John F. Kennedy School of Government, American Academy of Forensic Sciences, National College of District Attorneys, Harvard Law School and the armed services. He was honored in 2003 with “Prosecutor of the Year” awards by both the California District Attorneys Association and the San Diego County Deputy District Attorneys Association. He was recognized in 2000 by the San Diego County Bar Association as its “Public Lawyer of the Year,” by the San Diego County Deputy District Attorneys Association with its “Charles E. Nickel Award for Professional Excellence,” and by San Diego Magazine as one of “50 San Diegans to Watch in 2001.”
This talk is part of the Biomedical Library lunchtime lecture series, and complements the current display in the library breezeway, “Forensic Science: Where Science Meets Law.” Space is limited so please RSVP to Vicky Anderson at firstname.lastname@example.org as soon as possible to reserve a seat. Feel free to bring a discreet lunch; cookies and water will be provided.
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Business leaders from Australia and Japan urged Canberra not to overlook Tokyo while the Gillard government focuses on the Chinese economy as the world gears for the Asian century.
The call was made at the 50th yearly Australia-Japan Joint Business Conference which opened this week in Sydney. Japan used to enjoy a long and strong trade relationship with Australia. However, observers said the relationship is hindered by the slow progress on a bilateral free trade agreement apparently caused by Tokyo's being protective of its farmers while Australia keeps on pushing harder for greater access to the country's agricultural market.
In 2007, China overtook Japan as Australia's largest trading partner while the world's third-largest economy continued to be slowed down by deflation and large public debt.
Japan is Australia's second largest trading partner and accounts for over.19 per cent of all exports, mainly coal and iron ore. However, rather than just being a supplier of raw commodities to Japan, Australian could be a serious player in Asia.
"Australia needs to move quickly to take advantage and not remain fixated on China as the only game in town because I think ignoring Japan may be to our detriment," The Australian quoted Jason Hayes, head of PricewaterhouseCoopers' Japan practice.
He said Australia could take the cue from leading Japanese firms which are heading the new push in other growing trade opportunities into China, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Indonesia and Burma. By tapping into the Japanese expansion into other Asian nation, it would help Aussie firms improve their engagement in the region and would have an impact on Australia's growth.
"The penetration of Japan into Thailand, Vietnam and China is far, far deeper than Australia's has been. They might have had some difficulties, but they have had far more longevity in those markets and have a lot more experience than Australians companies do," said ANZ Japan chief Peter Davis.
"The whole focus in Australia is on investment from China, when indeed the more significant investment over the last 10 years has been from Japan, and the Japan rate of investment has been increasing rapidly in the last three years," he added.
Hugh Morgan, one of the country's leading business leaders, pushed for the free trade agreement since what is at stake goes beyond trade issues but includes the political and social relationships between the two nations.
"Time is passing and other events are happening and it's a matter of urgency for our countries to press on with (the free trade agreement) . . . . We have made great progress with other countries - there are things happening - and we haven't solidified in a formal sense anything really structural since 1957," Mr Morgan was quoted by The Australian.
To contact the editor, e-mail:
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Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) is a surgical procedure that allows doctors to see inside the chest and lungs. It is a form of 'keyhole' surgery which can be used to do a number of different surgical procedures. Note: the information below is a general guide only. The arrangements, and the way tests are performed, may vary between different hospitals. Always follow the instructions given by your doctor or local hospital.
What is video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery?
Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery, also known as VATS, is a surgical procedure used in the chest and lungs. It is a type of 'keyhole' surgery where only very small incisions (cuts) are made to the body. VATS uses a special instrument called a thoracoscope. This is a thin, tube-like instrument which has a camera built into the end. The camera feeds pictures from the chest on to a screen. This allows your surgeon to look inside the chest and lungs. VATS can be used to do a wide range of things, including take biopsies (small samples of tissue) from the lungs. These samples can then be examined in the laboratory.
How does video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery work?
The surgeon makes two or three small incisions in the chest wall near the ribs. These holes are known as ports, and are usually about two cm long. The surgeon then inserts the thoracoscope through one hole. The camera in the thoracoscope feeds video images to a computer screen, allowing the surgeon to see inside the chest. Usually he/she will also insert special surgical instruments into the other incisions. These instruments can be used to remove tissue which may have been seen on an X-ray, or fluid found in the chest. Once the surgery has finished, the instruments are removed and the incisions are closed, usually with stitches.
What is video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery used for?
VATS is used for many different procedures including:
- Taking biopsies from the lung or the lining of the chest.
- Removing lymph nodes.
- Removing lumps or growths from the lung.
- To treat various lung conditions such as pleural effusion (where fluid accumulates in the lining of the lung).
What happens during video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery?
VATS is carried out in the operating theatre. Before the procedure, a small needle will be placed in a vein to give you fluids and medications. It is usually done using a general anaesthetic which means you will be asleep for the surgery. You may also have an epidural. An epidural is a form of pain relief given through a thin tube placed into your back. Once you are asleep you may have a catheter put into your bladder. This is a thin, flexible tube that is inserted into your urethra (the hole through which you urinate) and then advanced into your bladder. This is because the epidural will make it difficult to urinate by yourself. It also allows doctors to measure how much urine you are making.
You will be placed on the operating table on your side. Your surgeon will make the incisions in your chest and insert the thoracoscope and any other instruments that are needed. After the surgeon has finished the surgery he/she will insert some small tubes into the chest. These are known as 'chest drains' and allow any fluid or air that collects to leak out. Any samples of tissue taken from your chest or lungs will be sent to the laboratory for further testing.
You will slowly be allowed to come round from the anaesthetic. Usually you are given oxygen through a mask. After a while you will be taken back to the ward to rest. The epidural usually stays in until the chest drains are taken out and you are able to take pain relief tablets.
Occasionally, although it was planned to use VATS, it is not possible to carry out your operation using keyhole surgery. This means another technique may need to be used. Your doctor should discuss this with you before the procedure.
How do I prepare for video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery?
Your doctor should discuss any specific preparations with you before the surgery. Generally, if you smoke you may be asked to stop before the surgery, as this reduces the chance of breathing problems. If you take anticoagulants ('blood thinning' medicines) you may need to stop these for a few days before the surgery. Your doctor should discuss this with you. You may also have some special tests of your lungs to see how well they are working (see separate leaflet called Spirometry' for more details). If you are to have a general anaesthetic you will be asked not to eat or drink for a certain length of time before the procedure. Your local hospital will give you information on this.
What can I expect after video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery?
You will generally stay in hospital for between 3-5 days after the surgery. However, this is a rough guide and will depend on the speed of your recovery. Your surgeon will discuss your progress with you and advise you on how long you should stay. You may be seen by the physiotherapist who may give you some breathing exercises to help prevent infection.
You should not expect to be back to full mobility immediately after the operation. Although VATS is a 'keyhole' procedure, the camera and instruments have to pass between the ribs. Sometimes they can press against the nerves which also lie here. This may cause some pain or numbness in the area of the incisions. If this does not go away you should contact your GP or specialist nurse for advice. You will usually be discharged from hospital with a supply of painkillers but it is important you contact your GP for additional supplies.
Are there any possible side-effects or complications?
It is usually easier for patients to recover from VATS compared with normal chest surgery (often called 'open' surgery) because the wounds from the incisions are much smaller. Air leaks from the lung that don't heal up quickly can keep you in the hospital a longer time and occasionally require additional treatment. A very small number of patients have significant bleeding requiring a transfusion or larger operation. It is also possible, although not common, to develop a infection of the wound site or of the lung itself.
You should contact your doctor if you become unwell after having VATS. IN particular, if you have any of the following problems: fever, chest pain, coughing up blood, shortness of breath, the wound sites become red or look to have pus draining.
|Original Author: Dr Tim Kenny||Current Version: Dr Rachel Hoad-Robson|
|Last Checked: 24/02/2010||Document ID: 12705 Version: 1||© EMIS|
Disclaimer: This article is for information only and should not be used for the diagnosis or treatment of medical conditions. EMIS has used all reasonable care in compiling the information but make no warranty as to its accuracy. Consult a doctor or other health care professional for diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. For details see our conditions.
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Wall Street Journal Europe
August 23, 2010
by Irwin Stelzer
The U.S. economy grows smartly—at an annual rate of 5.6% in the last quarter of last year—but when the final figures are in America will have recorded a growth rate of less than 2% in the most recent quarter. Meanwhile, in that recent quarter Germany grew at an annual rate of close to 9%, and powered the euro-zone annual growth rate to almost 4%. But in part because America has now slowed, the Bundesbank and other experts are forecasting much lower growth rates in the second half of the year. In short, America spurts, Europe slows, so America slows; Europe spurts, America slows, so Europe slows. Coincidence? Not likely.
It is no longer true, if ever it was, that what happens in the U.S. stays in the U.S., or indeed that what happens in the E.U. stays in the E.U. When it seemed certain that America was finally on the path to sustained growth one of the factors that rattled nerves was the financial crisis in Greece, which triggered concern about Spain, Portugal, Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Italy. American bankers took a harder look at the IOUs on their books, especially those affected either directly or indirectly by sovereign debt, and became increasingly squeamish about lending to European banks that might get caught in a series of sovereign debt defaults. The dollar rose in response to a typical flight to safety, putting something of a crimp into the prospects of American exporters and President Obama's plan to have exports create millions of jobs. All of this added to the already-unsettled case of nerves that has U.S. companies hoarding $2 trillion in cash, and contributed to a slowing of the American economy.
As it became clear last week that joblessness and a weak housing sector would hurt the important American market, European investors caught the things-can-only-get-worse fever that is gripping the American business community, as did Europe's consumers. Germans never had much taste for consumption just for the satisfying fun of it, while French consumers are made cautious by slow job growth, the possibility that their welfare state might not be so sumptuous in the future, and their government's downward revision of expected 2011 growth. And, of course, consumers in the Club Med countries and in Ireland have empty wallets—or (think Britain) wallets soon to be turned over more completely to their governments in the form of higher income, wealth and consumption taxes, with France a notable exception.
The effect of America catching cold when Europe sneezes, and vice versa—some call the disease "coupling"—is magnified by the decision of the Chinese regime to rein in growth after injecting a stimulus of approximately 14% of GDP, in the hope of preventing the country's property bubble from bursting.
The twin slowdowns in the U.S. and the euro zone explain the intense reaction to the statement by Axel Weber, president of the Bundesbank and a candidate to succeed Jean-Claude Trichet as head of the European Central Bank in October of next year when Mr. Trichet's non-renewable eight-year term expires. Mr. Weber told Bloomberg television that in his view the ECB would be well advised to meet all the loan requirements of Europe's banks into 2011, a statement that surely reflects continuing uncertainty in Germany, the euro-zone bailer-in-chief, as to the ability of many banks to raise capital at acceptable rates in the market.
When the televised musing of the head of the Bundesbank can drive the euro down a full percentage point against the dollar, and trigger a widening of the spreads over bunds that the markets are exacting from euro-zone countries in order to make funds available, it is safe to conclude that the worriers outnumber the optimists. The Economist Intelligence Unit points out in its latest survey that euro-zone and UK banks will have to refinance about £3.3 trillion of debt by 2015. It adds, "Many of the region's banks remain fragile and, to a greater extent than their US peers, vulnerable to funding constraints as a result of their dependence on the wholesale markets."
Which is only one reason German economists are predicting a slowdown in their economy and, therefore, in the euro zone as a whole. The EIU guesses that euro-zone growth will come to only 0.9% next year, and never get higher than 1.7% in the next three years. That might prove a bit optimistic. In the euro zone's future is a default (aka restructuring) by Greece, and/or riots as the unemployment rate rises to somewhere between 15% and 20%; the ripple—no, tsumani-like—effects on other countries and the world financial system of such a Greek tragedy; growth-stifling austerity everywhere; continued imbalances between Germany's export machine and the rest of the euro zone; and tight lending conditions.
Have a nice week.
Irwin Stelzer is a Senior Fellow and Director of Economic Policy Studies for the Hudson Institute. He is also the U.S. economist and political columnist for The Sunday Times (London) and The Courier Mail (Australia), a columnist for The New York Post, and an honorary fellow of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies for Wolfson College at Oxford University. He is the founder and former president of National Economic Research Associates and a consultant to several U.S. and United Kingdom industries on a variety of commercial and policy issues. He has a doctorate in economics from Cornell University and has taught at institutions such as Cornell, the University of Connecticut, New York University, and Nuffield College, Oxford.
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The jobless rate in the northwest Georgia area in February a year ago was 10.5 percent.
Metro Athens had the lowest area rate at 7.0 percent, while metro Dalton had the highest at 12.3 percent.
Meanwhile, Georgia’s February seasonally adjusted unemployment rate declined for the seventh consecutive month to 9.1 percent, the lowest rate since March of 2009, when it was also 9.1 percent. That is a decline of one-tenth of a percentage point from a revised 9.2 percent in January. The jobless rate was 9.9 percent in February a year ago.
Statewide, the rate went down because the number of jobs in February increased by 15,600 to 3,880,400, with 70 percent of the growth coming in the private sector. Also, newly revised numbers show the state gained 41,800 jobs in the past 12 months.
The employment sectors showing growth over the year were: professional and business services, 28,000; retail trade, 12,700; education and health care, 8,300; and manufacturing, 4,200.
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Black Friday, the day following Thanksgiving, has traditionally been the start of the holiday shopping season. The name originated in Philadelphia, to describe heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicular traffic, which occurred the day after Thanksgiving, when many folks took off as an extended holiday and used it to shop. That was back in the 1960’s. By the mid-70’s it spread to other large cities as a retail event. Another explanation was given the increase store traffic that particular Friday, it was the point when retailer ledger entries got made – not in red ink, representing losses – but in black ink, indicating profits. Get it? Black Friday!
But in recent years, lack of any real retail differentiation – not to mention the Internet, although we will be mentioning it later – forced retailers to do something to ensnare shoppers. In the absence of real merchandise differentiation and the presence of universal low-lower-lowest pricing strategies, retailers started to open earlier on Friday, the logic being if you got the shopper first, they wouldn’t shop someplace else. Or wouldn’t shop as much someplace else. Most opened at 8:00 AM. Some opened at 6:00 AM. But in 2008 some moved openings to 4:00 AM. Then 2:00 AM. Last year Macy’s, Target, Kohl’s, and Best Buy opened at midnight. This year Wal-Mart opened at 8:00 PM on Thursday. But most had already begun sales on Wednesday, which kind of waters down the concept. And the effect.
According to our annual Holiday Spending Survey, 27% of consumers had already shopped this month. The rest were waiting. Only 6% of consumers were waiting for the traditional Thanksgiving Black Friday. Thirty-six percent (36%) of shoppers indicated they’re waiting till December. And 9% indicated they were actually going to wait until the last 2 weeks of December to shop, figuring that by then the best deals were to be had. So much for all that early-earlier-earliest holiday advertising and store-openings!
But to quote the President, “it’s arithmetic.” The reality is there is just so much money that the consumer is going to spend for the holidays. OK, some will spend a little more, some a little less, but the survey says. . . $870.00 on average this holiday season. And while the TV and news reports play up the crowds and the earlier store openings, and consumers weathering the weather, traffic is up, but increases in sales not so much. According to the National Retail Federation, the average amount spent by a holiday shopper over the weekend was only up 6%, reflecting precisely the reported increase in total spend found in our survey.
Some 24% of consumers indicated they were going to wait till Cyber Monday to shop – although given mobile outreach today, how could you tell the difference one day to another? (BTW, the origin of “Cyber Monday” was folks returned to work after the holiday and – as they had their computers right in front of them (and the boss wasn’t looking) – did some additional shopping for the holidays online and, thus, online shopping showed a bump for that day.
Many people shopping online were looking for alternatives for those “door-buster” specials like the advertised 46” flat screen TV for $299 they missed at the 6AM store opening, having also missed the small print that advised each brick-and-mortar store only had 5 available. Today bricks-and-mortar companies use Cyber Monday to offer even more deals on their online sites.)
But there’s no denying that online shopping is on the rise. We estimate that online shopping was up 24% this weekend over last year, and will be higher after yesterday’s numbers, the “official” Cyber Monday figures, are added in.
Given the earlier advertising and store openings, and the massive shifts in technological outreach, maybe we need a new name for this shopping period. How about “Super Cyber Brick-and-Mortar Lowest Prices Shopping Month”? All reasonable suggestions considered.
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Public Policy & Legislation
The ACLU of Oklahoma believes that the best way to protect the Bill of Rights and the freedoms it guarantees is to ensure that unconstitutional bills never become law. Our legislative program reflects the commitment of our organization to protect and promote civil liberties in the challenging political climate in which we live. The ACLU of Oklahoma employs one full-time lobbyist, who is responsible for monitoring and attempting to influence a wide range of legislation affecting civil liberties in the Oklahoma State Legislature. Our legislative work includes educating legislators about ACLU positions, drafting legislation on priority issues, lobbying on bills affecting civil liberties, testifying or arranging for testimony on bills, and building coalitions to pursue or battle legislative initiatives.
Our legislative program tackles a wide range of civil liberties issues, including criminal justice, freedom of speech, voting rights, LGBT rights, reproductive freedom, privacy, racial justice, immigrants’ rights, and religious freedom.
ACLU members are a vital part of our lobbying efforts. A network of ACLU members stand ready to contact their elected officials on state legislation. If you want to affect change, your elected officials need to hear from you. Please consider joining our email alert list and becoming a volunteer.
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It was a year ago today that same sex marriage became legal in the state of Iowa. Iowa was the third state in the county to legalize gay marriage, and is currently one of five states in the nation to allow members of the same sex to marry. Marion County Recorder Karen Schwanebeck says the new marriage forms in the county have changed and include an optional gender question along with a question that allows applicants to check a box stating if they are the bride, groom or spouse. Schwanebeck says many people choose to leave these spaces blank seeing that they are optional. She adds that unless names on the forms are very gender apparent or you personally wait on the couple, it can be difficult to know if they are the same sex or not. Schwanebeck says to her recollection Marion County has had 6 same sex couples apply, 3 of which are from out of state.
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(Beyond Pesticides, July 25, 2012) A Texas border study has found that air samples in the homes of pregnant Hispanic women contain multiple household pesticides that could harm fetuses and young children. The first study of its kind conducted by the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio, finds traces of both household and agricultural pesticides that have been linked to disorders such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The researchers sampled air in 25 households, finding at least five pesticides in 60 percent of the dwellings. Nine other pesticides were identified in less than one-third of the homes. All the women were in the third trimester of pregnancy, when the fetal brain undergoes a growth spurt. Numerous studies have reported birth defects and developmental problems when fetuses and infants are exposed to pesticides, especially exposures that adversely affect mental and motor development during infancy and childhood. This new report is in the summer issue of the Texas Public Health Journal sent to members this week.
The study found 92 percent of air samples contained o-phenylphenol, which is used as a fungicide, germicide and household disinfectant, while 80 percent of samples contained chlorpyrifos, used in agriculture and to kill mosquitoes and other insects. Chlorpyrifos has been well-documented as posing risks to babies exposed in the womb to brain abnormalities after birth. Researchers asked the women questions about pesticide use and exposure, proximity to agricultural fields, the frequency of spraying operations, and the detection of pesticide odors drifting from fields. Air samples were measured for multiple pesticides used in agriculture, given the close proximity of the fields to participant homes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week announced new mitigation measures to reduce bystander exposure to chlorpyrifos drift from agricultural fields, including the use of buffer zones for residential areas, schools, hospitals etc.
Propoxur, found in such products as granular baits and pet collars, was detected in 76 percent of samples. A 2011 study published in the journal NeuroToxicology found a positive link between exposure to the pesticide propoxur and poor motor development in infants. At the age of two, children exposed to propoxur in the womb experience poor development of motor skills, according to a test of mental development. Propoxur is a carbamate insecticide that was banned in 2007 for indoor uses to which children would be exposed; however, it is still commonly used in flea and tick pet collars.
The insecticide diazinon is found in 72 percent; and the herbicide trifluralin is found in 60 percent of homes. 12 percent of homes surveyed contain traces of agricultural pesticides. The study verifies the conclusions of a larger 2007 survey that found household pesticide levels are higher than desirable in the homes of 102 pregnant minority women in New York City.
“Increasingly, pesticide exposures are being linked to neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),” said co-author Claudia S. Miller, M.D., M.S., professor in environmental and occupational medicine with the Department of Family and Community Medicine. “Planning for pregnancy today should include not only prenatal vitamins and a good diet, but also avoiding potentially hazardous pesticides. Instead, use non-toxic approaches for pest control and IPM.”
Authors of the study recommend managing household pests using integrated pest management (IPM), a low-cost strategy to replace the use of residential pesticides. IPM includes least-toxic techniques other than spraying, including sanitation, proper storage and food and water, caulking of windows and doors; installation of door and window screens; and the use of boric acid and diatomaceous earth. Beyond Pesticides’ Safer Choice brochure provides information on managing household pests with defined IPM principles.
“Once we educate our women of childbearing age about how they can safely and in a healthy manner diminish pests in their homes, they will feel empowered that they can make a difference in their family’s life,” says lead author Beatriz Tapia, M.D., M.P.H., lecturer at the UT Health Science Center — Regional Academic Health Center campus in Harlingen.
Organophosphates, like chlorpyrifos, are extremely toxic to the nervous system. They are cholinesterase inhibitors and bind irreversibly to the active site of an enzyme essential for normal nerve impulse transmission –acetylcholine esterase (AchE)– inactivating the enzyme. High concentrations of organophosphates have been found in the bodies of pregnant women and children.
Despite numerous organophosphate poisonings of farmworkers, homeowners, and children, the EPA has allowed the continued registration of these products. In some cases, such as those of chlorpyrifos and diazinon, household uses of the products have been cancelled because of the extreme health risks to children, but agricultural, golf course, and “public health” (mosquito control) uses remain on the market. Furthermore, the cancellation of household uses does not restrict the use of remaining stocks, meaning homeowners who purchased diazinon, for example, before the 2004 phase-out, may still use this product.
In order to reduce exposure to these chemicals, expectant mothers should choose organic foods. Families should also stop using pesticides in and around the home and advocate banning cosmetic pesticides in their communities. For more information on what you can do, see our materials for new parents with tips on food choices and safer pest management, specifically designed for new moms and dads.
To see more scientific research on the effects of pesticides on human health, including birth defects, see our Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database.
All unattributed positions and opinions in this piece are those of Beyond Pesticides.
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We note with concern that in Moscow on Saturday, May 28, a peaceable demonstration of Russians advocating for the rights of gays and lesbians, joined by international supporters, was forcefully disrupted by counter-protesters, and that Russian security forces then detained people from both groups, including American citizens. Some protestors were seriously injured according to media reports.
Freedom of assembly is a fundamental right all members of the OSCE committed to, including in the Moscow declaration and as recently as the Astana summit. As nationwide legislative elections approach, constraints on the ability of Russian citizens peacefully to gather and express their views will be closely watched in evaluating the integrity of the electoral process. We call on Russian authorities to work with municipal officials to find better ways to safeguard these fundamental freedoms.
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Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Need for Emotional Intelligence
From many centuries people across the world have mostly given importance to IQ (Intelligence quotient), which measures the basic intelligence of a person. Mostly, there is perception in the mind of people that a person who has more IQ will mostly become more successful in life. However, recently in studies and routine life, it is found that people also require emotional intelligence to become successful in life and leading a happy family life then only IQ. Due to this reason, it is very important for people and parents to look for ways to develop emotional intelligence also. Emotional intelligence is not a big science and it is very much possible for people to increase their levels of emotional intelligence through constant reading and expert advice. In future, we can hope that more people will understand the importance of emotional intelligence in their lives.
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Arkansas Forestry Commission Wildfire Update 6/27/12
LITTLE ROCK, ARK – Arkansas Forestry Commission suppressed wildfires in all eight fire districts yesterday. AFC Crews suppressed 20 wildfires that burned 240 acres. No homes were lost, but four homes were threatened. Two outbuildings were lost, and two outbuildings were threatened.
The AFC strongly discourages any outside burning including discharge of fireworks. Today the AFC delivered a letter to the County Judges’ Association President Preston Scroggin, encouraging all counties to be placed under burn bans that include bans on discharge of fireworks. (see attached letter) County Judges have issued burn bans in 55 of the 75 counties in Arkansas as of June 27, 2012.
With no rain in the forecast and a high fire danger risk, the Forestry Commission is recommending extreme caution to help prevent fire damage during the holiday weekend.
1) Pay attention to burn bans and fire conditions available via radio, TV or websites. While burn bans are posted at http://www.arkansasfireinfo.org, the list may not be complete. Contact your county judge’s office for specifics in your area.
2) Fire danger is rated as “High” across the state and open burning is discouraged. It is prohibited in counties with burn bans.
3) Be mindful that sparks from lawn mowers and hay baling equipment can start fires.
4) Never park vehicles where grass or other vegetation can touch the exhaust system.
5) Never discard cigarettes from vehicles.
FireWise is a nationwide program that promotes creating a defensible space around homes to help protect buildings from wildfire. Communities and fire departments can earn state and national recognition by participation in the FireWise program and fire departments can become eligible for grants. By using FireWise construction techniques and landscaping techniques, both old and new buildings can be FireWise. For tips on protecting your home from wildfire, visit http://www.arkansasfirewise.com.
To view current burn bans and wildfire danger ratings, visit http://www.arkansasforestry.org. To report a wildfire, call the Arkansas Forestry Commission Dispatch Center at 1-800-468-8834, or 911.
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Editor’s note: This is seventh in a series of posts by guest blogger Michelle Seitzer.
Series recap: We opened with an overview of the levels of senior care and housing, then continued with tips on how to initiate a conversation about options and search for the best care. Next, we focused on independent living and assisted living; dove into assisted living in greater detail; and now, we’ll answer some of the most common questions about this level of service.
Ultimately, choosing assisted living care often comes down to these basics:
How can I pay for assisted living?
Like independent living, assisted living is primarily private pay only. More states are now recognizing assisted living as part of the home and community-based services (HCBS) spectrum, which means that Medicaid may cover a portion of the cost (typically, room and board) for eligible seniors in participating states. Families may use retirement/pension funds, proceeds from a home sale, Social Security income, funds from long term care/health care insurance coverage to pay the bill. To learn more about what Medicare may, in special circumstances, cover on the home care or assisted living fronts, visit Medicare.gov/LongTermCare.
Who provides assisted living care and services?
Nurses, CNAs (certified nurses’ aides), nursing assistants, activity directors, dining staff, administrative staff, directors of nursing (DONs), executive directors, caregivers, physical therapists, social workers, and chauffeurs are among the many staff members you’ll find in assisted living communities and home care agencies. Professional background, years/type of experience, and training requirements are determined by the provider, often in accordance with state regulations.
How are assisted living communities licensed?
Assisted living communities and home care agencies are licensed by the state (generally the state department of health, aging services, or public welfare), so regulatory requirements in Alaska and Alabama are completely unique. Go to the National Center on Assisted Living’s Regulatory Review for a listing of each state’s specific guidelines.
Where can I find assisted living options?
Next post: Taking a closer look at skilled nursing and ancillary care services. Stay tuned! Here’s the Closer Look series to date:
- Week 1: Housing Choices: Find the Right Home for You or Your Loved One
- Week 2: Starting the Search for Care: When and How
- Week 3: How to Choose the Best Care and Housing Provider
- Week 4: Taking a Closer Look at Independent Living
- Week 5: A Closer Look at Assisted Living
- Week 6: A Closer Look at Assisted Living, part 2
Editor’s Notes: Michelle Seitzer has blogged for the senior living search site SeniorsforLiving.com since 2008, and is the co-moderator of #ElderCareChat, a bi-monthly Twitter-facilitated discussion group for family and professional caregivers.
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Behavioral aspects of privacy living affect the stalking victim as attempts are made to make the stalker stop stalking. This article will provide insight for those who create a new identity for privacy protection, and to eliminate harassment stalking.
Adjustments have to be made in order to avoid being stalked forever
Those who create a new identity to break the paper trail from their true name to their new identity face adjustments. Key preparation considerations include:
1. ) Relocation
2.) New personal relationships
3.) Employment changes
4.) Behavioral aspects of privacy living adjustments (general)
Relocation to a new city, state, country
It is a wise decision to place distance between yourself and your dangerous stalker. However, geographical changes alone will not keep a stalker at bay If he or she is serious. And many are serious about their prey. In order to stop stalking, your will need to do more than a “geographical”.
New personal relationships will require you to relate under a new identity
Successful privacy living is complicated, expensive, and time consuming. And it is worth every nickel and every thought and plan necessary to live under the radar, and every hour it takes to do it right. Don’t skimp on your education IF you want to play in the big leagues. There’s a lot to learn. Learning how to handle the new identity (non-official) is imperative if you want to permanently escape a stalker who has been engaged in harassment stalking for a period of time.
Front entities to hide you from the new hire data bases
Few people can be successful working for themselves. Most will have to practice traditional employment in order to make a living wage or salary. That’s okay, but you need to utilize another entity to receive payments on your behalf-just like the movie stars and others. You’ll need to know how to establish workplace privacy and you will need to know how to negotiate your way into this new employment privacy world. It can be done. I did it and so can you.
General privacy considerations for the stalking victim
Recognize that you will be living a schizophrenic life of sorts, but in a healthy way. It is absolutely necessary to create a new identity for privacy purposes in order to successfully stop stalking in the opinion of this experienced privacy expert and author.
“None of your business lies” will necessarily have to be told in order to successfully avoid harassment stalking, and defeat your stalker.
Make sure to check your jurisdiction concerning laws and the use of a new identity. Follow all laws as you practice privacy living.
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Where is Fort Myers located on the map? Find Fort Myers now!
Even if you are not planning to travel there, you can check your geography knowledge now. Fort Myers in USA is an attractive destination for holidays and weekend trips. Have you ever been to USA or even Fort Myers before? Fort Myers is in USA - but where exactly? Rather in the centre or in the west? Maybe some of your friends were already there and told you about this city.If you are planning your next weekend trip, why not choose this location?
No hint for finding Fort Myers on the map, but maybe some sightseeing or holiday tipps for you, if you ever want to travel to Fort Myers: Fort Myers, Florida, Fort Myers Miracle, Fort Myers Beach, Florida, Fort Myers Senior High School, Fort Myers Royals, Fort Myers News-Press, Fort Myers Shores, Florida, Fort Myers Sun Sox, Fort Myers Army Airfield, Fort Myers Police Department, Villa Fran
Where is Fort Myers located on this blind map? Just click on the map right at
the position where you think Fort Myers is located. The map can be zoomed and shifted - as you are used to do with Google Maps - to ensure you can find Fort Myers.
You can drag and drop the red marker or just click anywhere else
to change the location of Fort Myers.
When you are done, confirm your choice by clicking just on the red marker. You then will see, how far you missed Fort Myers on the map: the yellow marker will show you the correct position of Fort Myers.
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Many birders understand the threat that feral cats pose to wild birds, but loose dogs can be just as dangerous. According to Fairfax Media, a blue penguin colony at Cape Foulwind in New Zealand has been decimated, with at least 15 penguins killed by dogs in the past few days. Bite wounds on the birds' bodies have been confirmed to have been caused by dogs, and dog paw prints were found nearby. Under local wildlife protection laws, the owners of the dog or dogs could be fined up to $3,000, and the animals could be legally destroyed.
The area where the penguins were killed is near the proposed site of a blue penguin viewing area that would have allowed visitors to watch the birds returning to their burrows each evening, but the future of that project is now uncertain because the entire penguin colony may have been killed. Even if there are survivors, the breeding success of the colony may be in jeopardy for years.
Does your area have leash laws to protect wildlife from roaming dogs? How do you keep your dog from attacking wildlife? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Photo © Dineshraj Goomany
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A year after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, throwing world financial markets into turmoil, BusinessWeek examines the landscape for investors and Wall Street. This is the first in a series of stories.
It's been quite a year for investors, a tumultuous 12 months since the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15, 2008.
Firms like Lehman Brothers lived dangerously and paid the price. So did many individual investors saving for retirement. In turn, investors have turned away from anything remotely risky.
While some experts believe aversion to risk is a temporary response to the financial crisis, others insist it should be a permanent change. The events of the past year demonstrate, they say, that the entire investment industry has been embracing too much risk as it prepares clients for retirement. "We've been underestimating risk," says Stephen Horan, head of professional education content and private wealth at the CFA Institute. The last year, and the last decade, have shown that "bad years" are far more frequent than many believed.
A wild ride
"Our industry has been driving client portfolios at 60 to 80 miles per hour," says Paula Hogan, of Hogan Financial Management in Milwaukee. "But if they took us out to dinner they would drive at 30 to 40 miles per hour."
Those client portfolios crashed along with the market from 2007 to early 2009, with investor panic reaching its height after the Lehman collapse a year ago. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, the broad U.S. stock index, dropped 9 percent in September 2008 and another 17 percent in October 2008 as investors worried the world's financial system would stop operating. Casualties of the crisis included not just Lehman but mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, insurer American International Group, and banks Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia — all forced to either accept government takeovers or be acquired by competitors at extremely low prices.
Video: Lasting impact of Lehman’s collapse? After those events, "people understand that worst-case scenarios can be far worse than they ever imagined," says Michael Yoshikami, president and chief investment strategist at YCMNET Advisors. By March 2009, the S&P 500 had lost 57 percent from the October 2007 peak. A subsequent rebound — a 50 percent advance from March to September 2009 — has eased some nerves. But the S&P 500 would still need to gain another 50 percent to return to its all-time high.
During the most recent crisis, or any market turbulence, investors' natural psychological reaction often makes their situation worse, says professor Vickie Bajtelsmit, chair of the finance and real estate department at Colorado State University. Panicking over their losses, individual investors often sell at the bottom of the market, and then don't buy in again until investments are well on their way to recovery. They essentially lock in losses and miss out on gains, she says.
It's no wonder that many individual investors are still skittish, after the past year's steep losses not just in equities but in corporate bonds, real estate — almost every asset class except cash and government bonds. The appropriate level of equity exposure has become a particular flash point, intensifying a debate about risk among investment experts and pitting financial advisers against clients and even spouse against spouse.
Cashing out of equities
Now that stocks have recovered some losses, advisers say many clients are seizing the opportunity to cash out of equities and invest more cautiously in the future. Clients come to financial planners like Frank Boucher, based in Reston, Va., saying they want no exposure to the stock market at all. Boucher warns them that, without the chance for equity gains, they might need to work longer, save more, or spend less. "They say, 'That's fine. At least I get to sleep at night,' " Boucher says.
These risk-averse investors are often on the right track, some advisers and academics say. The investment industry has been too cavalier about the dangers of investing, too willing to emphasize the benefits of risk and ignore the potential pitfalls. "Financial planners are experiencing a tremendous backlash from their clients," says Zvi Bodie, a professor of management at Boston University and a leading advocate of a more conservative investing industry. "People are being put at risk without being told how much they're at risk," he says.
Conventional wisdom says that as long as a portfolio is well-constructed and diversified, a riskier investing strategy will tend to outperform a more conservative one. An ingredient in almost every portfolio, then, is equities — even well into retirement. Volatile and unpredictable, stocks may be the wrong place for money you need in five years, but it is the right place for retirement money you won't touch for 20 or 25 years, experts say.
Investing guidelines like these have pushed even cautious individuals into the stock market. Women, studies show, are far more risk-averse than men, but in the last 10 years they began to boost their equity exposure significantly, says Colorado State's Bajtelsmit, who has studied women's investing styles. "They did start to be convinced," Bajtelsmit says. "Now, they got burned."
TIPS winning fans
Bodie contends that equities are just too risky for most individuals. Over the long term, stocks might tend to outperform other kinds of investments. But, depending on when you start investing and when you retire, stocks can be disastrous. While wealthy investors might be O.K., most individuals can't afford to absorb the big losses that can hit the stock market from time to time. "There's a notion that somehow if you have a long time horizon you're going to outperform everything with stocks," Bodie says. "If that were true, stocks wouldn't be risky."
Moreover, Bodie argues, stocks are sold as a hedge against inflation when there is no proof to this idea. Yes, over the very long term, equities have kept pace with inflation — just as they have outperformed other investment classes. But in periods of high inflation, stocks have done poorly, as in the 1970s.
As Hogan, who has co-written articles with Bodie, puts it: "There is a belief in our industry that stock investing will get you where you want to go. And it might. But it might not."
Bodie advocates investing in Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, or TIPS, federal government bonds that guarantee to cover inflation. As long as they are well-priced, he also favors annuities, which provide investors with a guaranteed income stream in retirement.
Bodie's ideas are gaining influence among investors and their financial advisers, Horan says. Others who help individuals plan for retirement are adopting risk-management approaches used by pension funds. If a pension fund is worried about having enough cash, it must invest conservatively. But "if you have a surplus, you can take more risk," explains Horan.
Return to conservative investing
While conservative investing styles have gained attention in the past year, it remains to be seen whether the flight from risk is permanent or temporary. Financial adviser Marnie Aznar says clients now recognize the importance of a large emergency fund invested in the safest way possible. Dead and gone, she says, is the idea that "this boom in the stock market is going to take care of everything for me."
However, Aznar, who advises mostly younger, high-income clients in Morris Plains, N.J., says equities should be a part of average Americans' portfolios. Most Americans aren't saving enough to retire any other way, she says. "Unfortunately, the savings rate is incredibly low," she says. To achieve retirement goals, "you need a combination of saving more and a higher rate of return [from stocks]."
Financial advisers say the proper level of risk in a portfolio is often a very personal and individual decision. If a client enjoys skydiving in his spare time, "inherently that person's risk tolerance may be higher than other people's," says Avani Ramnani, an adviser at Eisner Retirement Solutions. But Ramnani, who has always pursued a more conservative strategy, often warns clients against taking more risk than they can afford.
If Americans remain skeptical of equities and other risky strategies, they may need new investment products better suited to a risk-averse style. For example, advisers complain of the high fees and complicated structure of many annuities. Bodie would like to see the federal government sell longer-term TIPS.
But for many, a return to conservative investing is not a new approach. "I've always subscribed to the idea that you build wealth by controlling your expenses and debt, and not by trying to jump for investment returns," Boucher says.
Fleeing from risk might be the natural response to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the bailout of many financial companies. But it also returns investors to some old-fashioned advice that has stood the test of time.
Copyright © 2012 Bloomberg L.P.All rights reserved.
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HAGAR, CONGER NEBLETT
HAGAR, CONGER NEBLETT (1886–1973). Conger (Connie) Neblett Hagar, the "Texas bird lady," daughter of Robert S. and Mattie (Yeager) Neblett, was born in Corsicana, Texas, on June 14, 1886. She graduated from Corsicana High School in 1903, studied voice and piano at Forest Park College in Saint Louis, and took postgraduate music training at the University of Chicago and the American Conservatory. Although offered employment as a professional singer, she declined, believing such a pursuit improper. After World War I she became a bird bander for the United States Biological Survey. She was married briefly to a naval officer, but the marriage was dissolved in 1921. In April 1926 she married Jack Hagar, a Bostonian who had come to Texas because of his interests in oil and real estate. The couple had no children. In 1935 the Hagars moved to Rockport.
Connie Hagar spent the rest of her life as an amateur bird-watcher in Rockport and gained the respect of professional ornithologists in Europe and the United States. She added over twenty new species to the avifauna list of the state and was the first to report numerous species of migratory birds, including several that were thought to be extinct. In addition to the snowy plover, buff-breasted sandpiper, ash-throated flycatcher, and mountain plover, she identified nine different species of hummingbird; the annual movement of these birds down the Texas coast had been unobserved until she discovered it. She reported more than 500 bird species in the Aransas Bay area, nearly three-fourths of all the bird species known between Canada and Mexico.
Throughout her life Mrs. Hagar was a conservationist, teacher, and tireless bird-watcher. She spoke to numerous schoolchildren, garden clubs, and other groups and kept detailed notebooks. Her observations were published in several ornithological journals, and her work brought amateur and professional birders to the Gulf Coast from throughout the world. Perhaps because of her diminutive size-she was under five feet tall-and the fact that she regularly wore starched linen to go birding, photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt complained that she did not look like a bird-watcher when he photographed her for Life magazine in 1956. Mrs. Hagar played the organ regularly for the Aransas Pass Christian Science Church, but she was not a member of that or any other church; she claimed to prefer nature's sermons to man's. She was a member of the Rockport Women's Club, the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, the Texas Ornithological Society, and the American Ornithologists' Union. She received a special citation in 1962 from the National Audubon Society, which convened in Corpus Christi that year largely to be near Rockport's flyways and to allow the seventy-six-year-old "bird lady" to attend. Connie Hagar died on November 24, 1973, in Corpus Christi, after two years of hospitalization and blindness. She was buried at Rockport Cemetery, in a spot overlooking the bayfront named Conger Hagar Wildlife Sanctuary.
Eleanor Anthony King, "Lady with Binoculars," Audubon, July 1947. Karen Harden McCracken, "The Bird Lady of Texas (1886–1973)," Birding, March-April 1976. Karen Harden McCracken, Connie Hagar: The Life History of a Texas Birdwatcher (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986). Edwin Way Teale, Wandering Through Winter (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966). Fred D. Thompson, "Bird Festival at Rockport," Texas Game and Fish, August 1950.
The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this article.Karen Harden McCracken, "HAGAR, CONGER NEBLETT," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fha07), accessed May 24, 2013. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
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This product has good build quality and detailed picture instructions on what to put where .
A lot of different designs are possible if only you have the time and ideas to make it happen.
It's a nice gift for your kids and friends.
- Fun DIY physics toy
- 5,000mm rails included
- Create yourself roller coster like rails with 360-degree flip overs, steep drop and climbs, sharp high-G turns, etc
- Control speed, angle, timing by arranging your own railway
- Learn physics hands on
- Steel space balls
- Elevator powered by 1*14G/R14 battery
- Endless rail design possibilities
- Total 14 piece set with English and Chinese user's manuals included
Item: Space Rail DIY Physics Space Ball Rollercoaster with Powered Elevator (5000mm Rail)
Weight: 30.76 oz
1. We accept Alipay. All major credit cards are accepted by secure payment processor ESCROW. Please contact us
for details if you have questions on payment.(Please leave your email and we will reply you at the earlist time)
2. Payment must be made within 3 days of order.
3. If you can't checkout immediately after auction close, please wait for a few minutes and retry Payments must
be completed within 3 days.
1. WORLDWIDE SHIPPING. (Except some countries and APO/FPO)
we use HK DHL agent, so it will have a new tracking number one day after we send the order,we will update
the new tracking number on aliexpress, please notice the message we leave on platform.
5. SERVICE TRANSIT TIME is provided by the carrier and excludes weekends and holidays. Transit times may
vary, particularly during the holiday season.
6. If you have not received your shipment within 30 days from payment, please contact us. We will track the
shipment and get back to you as soon as possible with a reply. Our goal is customer satisfaction.
7. Due to stock status and time differences, we will choose to ship your item from our first available warehouse
for fast delivery.
8. Delivery time depends on destination and other factors like customs declairation in desination countries. it may
takes up to 20 or more business days in some countries. The follinw table is from the post office just for your
reference for part of countries.
1.3 months Warranty. Buy with confidence!
2.If you are not satisfied when you receive your item, please return it within 14 days for a replacement or money
back. Please contact me before you return it.
3.If item is defective after 3 months, you can still send it back to us. We will send you a new one after receiving
the defective item. But you have to pay the extra shipping fee.
4. All items need be returned in their original condition, in order to quality for a refund or exchange of goods to
5. The buyer will be responsible for all shipping costs incurred.
6. We will bear all the shipping cost if the product(s) is (are) not as advertised.
7. We will refund your payment, upon receipt of the item in its original condition and packaging with all
components and accessories included, AFTER BOTH Buyer and Seller cancel the transaction from aliexpress. or,
you may choose to have a replacement.
1. We maintain high standards of excellence and strive for 100% customer satisfaction! Feedback is very
important for us.
2. If you are satisfied with the product you received, please leave us positive feedback!
3. If you are dissatisfied for any reason, please don?t be quick to leave negative/neutral feedback,we work hard
to make sure EVERY CUSTOMER 100% SATISFIED and resolve any problem for you and always leave positive
feedback to all our customers.
Chinatownmart Special Note for Wholesaler, Drop Shipper and International Traditional Trader.
1. Dear wholesaler, please if you want to place a big order and get a discount, please contact us at Aliexpress or
send us the email.
2. Dear Drop Shipper, when you place your order please leave a meassage for us and we will not leave any our
company information in the package.
3. Dear Traditional Trader, please be well noted that for OEM and ODM order, please find our Chinatownmart
colleagues on Alibaba or Global Sources, and we are here mainly in charge of the wholesale order. For MOQ1000
order, we can pass your message to our International Tradional Department to deal with you. Thanks.
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This logic is flawed, both conceptually and empirically, as I'll illustrate by discussing a well-meaning but ultimately incoherent article on the front page of today's New York Times. The article explains how climate skepticism is on the rise in Great Britain.
Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.The article explains that the rise of skepticism threatens climate policies:
Politicians and activists say such attitudes will make it harder to pass legislation like a fuel tax increase and to persuade people to make sacrifices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. . .The logic is flawed conceptually because "fervor about climate change" is far from the only reason that people support energy policies that advance decarbonization. Other reasons for public support include energy security, diversification, economic growth and jobs, replacing dirty energy with clean energy, energy reliability, costs and so on.
The lack of fervor about climate change is also true of the United States, where action on climate and emissions reduction is still very much a work in progress, and concern about global warming was never as strong as in Europe.
That the logic is flawed can be convincingly shown empirically. Consider that climate skepticism in Great Britain has been deemed to be a problem for years. For instance:
2007: "The public are far more sceptical about global warming than most politicians would have us believe, a new poll has revealed today."Yet, right in the middle of this period the UK government passed the 2008 Climate Change Act with essentially no opposition and broad public support. The Act mandates emissions reductions of 34% by 2020 and 80% by 2050, making it the most aggressive piece of national legislation anywhere. Skepticism about climate science presented no obstacle to passing this legislation.
2008: "Surprising politicians, a poll released Sunday indicates a majority of the British public does not believe human activity has caused global warming."
2009: "The British public has become more sceptical about climate change over the last five years, according to a survey."
The NYT also reports that more Americans believe that climate science has been exaggerated in public discussions:
A March Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 percent a year ago.Here is a hypothesis to consider: The public is smarter than they are often given credit for. It is possible that the public can at the same time support policies that lead to decarbonization of the economy while at the same time believing that climate science has been exaggerated.
The message from the public that many experts (including the media) have yet to comprehend is that policies which require "sacrifice" are nonstarters. It does not matter what the public believes about climate science, they are not (in general) going to sacrifice or endure hardship. This reality should be a boundary condition for policy design. With this consideration, the public has consistently supported action on climate change, notably moving to a less carbon-intensive economy. The policy challenge is thus to figure out how to design policies that meet these political realities, a challenge that policy experts have yet to tackle.
The NYT actually further politicizes climate science by implying that the battle over the integrity of climate science is one-and-the-same as the battle over climate policies:
Scientists have meanwhile awakened to the public’s misgivings and are increasingly fighting back. . . It is unclear whether such actions are enough to win back a segment of the public that has eagerly consumed a series of revelations that were published prominently in right-leaning newspapers like The Times of London and The Telegraph and then repeated around the world. . .By equating issues of science with issues of politics the NYT thus is apparently willing to minimize the issues of scientific integrity that have surfaced regarding the IPCC:
This narrative thus reinforces two sorts of policy failures:
In January, for example, The Times chastised the United Nations climate panel for an errant and unsupported projection that glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear by 2035. The United Nations ultimately apologized for including the estimate, which was mentioned in passing within a 3,000-page report in 2007.
Then came articles contending that the 2007 report was inaccurate on a host of other issues, including African drought, the portion of the Netherlands below sea level, and the economic impact of severe storms. Officials from the climate panel said the articles’ claims either were false or reflected minor errors like faulty citations that in no way diluted the evidence that climate change is real and caused by human activity.
First, it perpetuates a flawed expectation that once people only believe enough or the right things, they will then be willing to make sacrifices leading to successful climate policies. Yet, public opinion on this point has been constant for decades -- support for decarbonization policies is not about belief in science, but rather the short-term costs and benefits of proposed policy action, which has nothing to do with long-term climate change. Similarly, that the public does not want sacrifice has been a constant in public opinion.
Second, it enables the pathological politicization of science not just by equating views on science with views on policy, but also by encouraging the looking past real problems in the IPCC. The logic of this narrative holds that if climate science is in any way diminished, then support for action is necessarily reduced, so it is best to look away from problems in science, or even to minimize them. The public is no so easily fooled. However, looking at actual poll data should be enough to show that views on climate science are not tightly correlated with support for action on energy policies that accelerate decarbonization.
The NYT concludes:
The public is left to struggle with the salvos between the two sides.The public is in fact doing just fine. It is the media and other elites who continue to carry along an incoherent narrative who are doing most of the struggling. When they start listening to what the public is actually saying, rather than trying to force public opinions into a predefined but ultimately unrealistic mold, might be the time when debate over climate policy truly opens up.
You can read a more in depth treatment of this argument in my forthcoming book, The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming. Pre-order your copy today ;-)
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|
Need to have Aid With Affiliate Advertising and marketing? Take a look at These Ideas!
Once you determine to enter into affiliate marketing and advertising, you might wonder exactly where to begin, as you’ll find so many factors to consider when picking techniques that can work for the business. The suggestions in this article can provide you with what you need to know to become a productive affiliate marketer.
A terrific affiliate marketing technique will be to get your self interviewed by other marketers. People tend to assume that whoever is getting interviewed for something is an specialist in that certain realm. This is a great way to add credibility to your affiliates, that is a certain way to increase targeted traffic on your internet site.
Write articles in regards to the items or services you happen to be promoting and incorporate your affiliate links in them then create back links towards the articles. This can be a good affiliate advertising strategy because the back links will help your articles to acquire a higher ranking on search engine results pages which means you may get a lot more organic, targeted targeted traffic for your affiliate links.
Niche affiliate advertising is all about concentration. You do not wish to diversify your item or your target audience too much. You are operating really closely with the law of supply and demand inside a given demographic. Be cautious not to water down your item, service or message. Nor should you attempt to spread it too thin.
If you want to produce a profit by means of affiliate links, you must construct a decent level of traffic for your website. It really is fantastic should you can convert 10% of the readers into purchasers, but if only 100 people check out your website per day you won’t be making much of an income.
Creating a list of email addresses for prospective clients is an essential portion of any excellent affiliate marketing technique. It is not straightforward, although; web surfers are extremely leery of turning over their address. One method to assuage fears is to supply some thing of value in exchange for e-mail addresses. The reward need not be great, but it really should be genuine.
Watch for vendors offering high commissions for their items. Digital items tend to have a lot larger commissions than physical products. Your goal should be a minimum of a 40-50% commission on items that are digital downloads. If you’re operating with physical items, check into competitors to see if the commission rate getting offered is in line with similar goods.
Diversify your links without having overloading. Don’t depend on just one particular affiliate item, regardless of how nicely it does. Items can often adjust, and you need to have a lot more than a single point going. By the exact same token, though, don’t clutter your site with a dazzling array of affiliate links — remain focused and offer a nicely curated selection of links to items that complement each other in some way. Preserve your site’s message focused, and don’t dilute or disillusion your readership by throwing too several random affiliate links at them.
As you have seen, affiliate advertising and marketing has various techniques, but it all shares exactly the same target which can be to help sell your items and services. All it needs is some investigation, hard work, and simple expertise to choose what can function effectively for promoting your business to grow to be a profitable affiliate marketer.
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A comprehensive teacher handbook for developing money skills & financial literacy!
by Paul Swan and Linda Marshall
This comprehensive teacher handbook for introducing and developing money concepts begins with coin recognition, coin equivalence, and counting activities, and concludes with financial literacy concepts for older students.
Along the way, students are treated to background information on the historical basis of money, coin and currency factoids, electronic banking concepts, and much more!
By the end of the program students will have gained the skills necessary to make change, comparison-shop, calculate sales tax, and navigate comfortably in a variety of situations involving money.
Money Math Activities includes more than a dozen money games with game board and game card templates, money frames, and supporting masters, as well as teacher notes and tips.
Includes CD for IWB presentation and interactive fun.
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GREENWOOD, Miss. — If you want to know what it takes to manufacture a product in the United States these days, just ask Fred Carl.
The founder, president and CEO of Viking Range, Carl virtually invented the market for half-ton, restaurant-sized stoves in the home, launching his company in the late 1980s, just as a cooking craze swept American kitchens. The company rode a second wave of demand in the early 2000s, when the easy-money housing boom sent homebuyers, builders and remodelers on a shopping spree for $10,000 trophy stoves.
Now, with lower-cost appliance makers invading Viking’s turf, new-home construction down some 70 percent from five years ago, and recession-weary homeowners hunkered down, Viking is fighting to maintain its foothold as an American manufacturer.
“We're at war right now with the economy, and I'm not in the foxhole,” Carl said in a recent interview. “I’m out there charging across the economic terrain trying to win this war. And we will.”
Orders are running about half their levels from the company's 2007 peak, according to company executives. The privately held company does not disclose financial information.
For Carl, the battle is personal. As a native of Greenwood, Miss., (Greenwood High School Class of 1966), Carl watched helplessly as the once-booming cotton industry declined in the 1970s when American textile manufacturing became one of the first and biggest casualties of globalization.
Located halfway between Memphis, Tenn., and Jackson, Miss., on the storied “City of New Orleans” rail line, Greenwood was the world's “cotton capital” for a century. Today, once-imposing, now abandoned antebellum bank buildings attest to the money that flowed through this city of 18,000 — and then retreated.
“Cotton and agriculture was the base of the economy in the Delta,” said Bill Litton, a John Deere tractor dealer in Greenwood. “It still is a large part of the base; you’ll never take that out of it. But Viking has brought stability into our local economy."
Company lore has it that, in the early 1980s, Carl’s wife wanted a stove like the one her grandmother cooked with. A fourth-generation building contractor, Carl searched appliance manufacturers and suppliers around the country for such a stove. When he couldn’t find one, he decided to make one.
That turned out to be harder than it looked. Commercial stoves were too big for the typical residential kitchen; without bulky firewalls, venting and insulation, the high temperatures they generate could burn down a house.
Carl spent six years developing prototypes, trying to convince appliance manufacturers there was a market for 48-inch, eight-burner stoves. He tried working with contract manufacturers and wasn’t happy with the results.
So he set up shop in Greenwood — in part to try to help reverse the economic slide he saw hitting his hometown.
“It was sad, and I think to some people it was scary,” he said. “The entire Mississippi Delta was struggling. Everyone realized we're in transition here, but what are we transitioning to? Cotton was gone, and cotton had been king for generations. So now what do we do?”
His timing proved impeccable. The launch of the company coincided with the rise of “cocooning” in the 1990s, as Americans spent more time at home and the center of gravity for many families moved to the kitchen. By the middle of the next decade, the housing boom created another wave of demand from aspirational home owners who had easy access to cheap mortgages and saw top-end Viking ranges as a “must-have” piece of home décor — even if they ordered take-out every night. Real estate agents and builders of upscale homes began touting the Viking name in their listings.
“You had home buyers with $1,000 bills hanging out of their pockets and they didn’t know where to put it,” said Michael Smith, vice president of purchasing at upscale home builder Toll Bros. “So they’d customize their kitchen. And they had to have top-end appliances.”
Those boom years were good to Viking. Today, the company occupies a dozen restored buildings on the banks of the Yazoo River, in the historic "cotton row" district downtown near the Cotton Row Club, where the city's remaining cotton brokers still gather.
But keeping the home fires burning is a lot tougher with the U.S. housing market mired in its deepest downturn since the Great Depression and consumers worried about their next paycheck.
Moving production offshore might boost profits, Carl said. But he’s as committed to staying in Greenwood as he was to his eight-year odyssey bringing 18,000 Btu burners to American kitchens.
“Allegiance is a big part of that, and by golly we are going to build in America no matter what,” he said. “We are going to work our brains out to make sure that we are able to do that and stay competitive. It's just extremely important to us. This is our product. It’s made by us right here in the Mississippi Delta and we plan on keeping it that way. That's just how we feel about that.”
Devotion to domestic manufacturing and allegiance to community only go so far. To maintain an edge in an increasingly crowded market niche, Viking is relying on the manufacturing philosophy pioneered by Japanese manufacturers like Toyota. A combination of worker involvement and a relentless drive to improve manufacturing efficiency are keeping Viking competitive, said Carl.
Viking's headquarters complex includes a 13,000-square-foot "training center" that looks like the set for Food Network show, complete with a kitchen showroom full of gleaming Viking appliances. The original range that Carl’s wife so admired, a Chambers, six-burner, two-oven, white enamel gas stove (the 90-C Special Deluxe model) occupies an honored space by the main entrance.
On the outskirts of town, the company operates a 230,000-square-foot factory for making stoves, along with another 153,000-square-foot facility refrigerator plant next door, a 95,000-square-foot plant for range hoods and vents and an 80,000-square-foot distribution center.
On a recent visit, forklifts zipped and honked their way through through the plant as if it were a Home Depot on a busy Saturday morning. Workers continually restocked the production line with parts and subassemblies — a handful of which are made in Mexico, China and Germany. When the process breaks down — a part is missing or a stove isn’t ready to move to the next station — workers stop the line and music begins blaring, alerting supervisors of a problem. Each line has its own tune; on this day, Wagner’s "Flight of the Valkyries" was in heavy rotation as that line worked out the kinks on a new model.
The relentless drive to improve efficiency — by getting those kinks out of the production process — is central to Viking’s plan to avoid moving manufacturing offshore. Dennis Cheshier, a manufacturing engineer, said the trick is to imagine the production line as a river and mentally “lower the water level.”
“When you do that, you see more rocks,” he said. “Those rocks impede the flow, so you want to get rid of them.”
Carl and other Viking executives also credit the company’s ability to stay in Greenwood to a stable work force with devoted employees like Bridgette Matthews, a quality control inspector who also waitresses nights at Giardina’s, a Viking-owned restaurant in town.
“We know what we have to do in order to survive,” she said during a break on the production line. “We work hard. This is our livelihood, and we’re just not going to stand back and let it fail. We need it. And we're going to do whatever it takes to keep it right here.”
It also helps that Viking draws from a poll of workers accustomed to lower wages than in many other parts of the country. And it faces relatively little competition from other employers in the area. The median family income in Greenwood is $26,393 – a little more than half the national average, according to the latest Census data. The county's jobless rate was 12.2 percent in March, 2.5 points higher than the national average.
Still, Viking has had to lay off about a quarter of its work force since April, 2008 to a current level of about 1,000. The company looked for other places to cut: recycling paper, shrinking investment in new experimental designs and squeezing more out of every sheet of increasingly pricey stainless steel.
The recession also brought a reworked product line designed to cut production costs, along with scaled-back models at lower prices.
“(Consumers) are looking for more value for their dollar,” said Dan Lyvers, Viking’s vice president of engineering. “The idea is that we’ll provide a product that gets them started, and then as they learn and get more experienced with cooking they can grow into something more.”
Viking has also branched into the tourism business, with a multimillion-dollar renovation of The Alluvian, a 50-room luxury hotel and spa across the street from the flagship location of the company’s cooking school chain, which has 16 locations including franchises.
Mayor Carolyn MacAdams, one of Carl’s high school classmates, credits the Viking tourist attractions with helping to blunt the recession’s impact on the local economy; sales tax receipts in Greenwood didn’t fall nearly as far as in other nearby cities, she said.
“We never had to lay off (city workers),” she said. “When people did decide to quit and leave, we did not rehire and tried to do as much as we could with less people.”
By tapping into a passion for cuisine that has a long history in the Mississippi Delta region, Viking is hoping to light a fire under the widening segment of the U.S. population glued to the Food Network, snapping up shelves-full of cookbooks and cruising the Web for new recipes. Home cooking has also gathered steam as more households entertain at home and steer toward healthier family menus, according to Beth Purifoy, a chef instructor and manager at the cooking school.
“We all know if we cook at home we have more control over what goes into our food and how it’s prepared,” she said. “I think that been a great movement."
One recent cooking class featured a cocktail party menu that included chocolate-coated strawberries stuffed with amaretto-infused cream cheese. The class, which felt more like a cocktail party, consisted of couples invited by Litton, the John Deere dealer, who periodically hosts events to thank his best customers. A few years ago, someone suggested asking the wives come along.
“Even the men who were reluctant — they said, ‘I really wanted to go quail hunting’ — when it was all said and done, everyone had a tremendous time,” he said. “And the wives do play a big part with these farmers in what they do.”
Viking is also looking for growth outside Greenwood. To diversify its product line, Viking in 2001 acquired St. Charles Cabinets, which makes steel cabinets that match its shiny appliances. The company also launched its own line of smaller appliances, including toasters, blenders and food processors. Viking has also begun expanding overseas, establishing distribution channels in Europe, Mexico, South America and Asia.
“There a lot of new wealth being generated (in Asia), and U.S. products are highly valued there," said Lyvers.
But for now, the vast bulk of sales are coming from American homeowners and builders. Carl said that while he sees signs that things are picking up, it will be “a long time coming” before Viking returns to the boom years.
“So we're hunkered down and we're prepared to sustain this lower level of sales for the next two years or who knows, maybe even more,” said Carl. “I think people have been in a foxhole for 18 months now and they're not jumping out of their foxholes. They're just kind of peeping out and seeing what’s going on here, and coming out of a state of shock, to tell you the truth.”
Analysts who follow the appliance industry say that even though the market for trophy kitchen stoves has cooled, it’s not going away.
“Americans are Americans and God bless us, right or wrong, we tend to be aspirational when it comes to what we have in our house,” said Mark Delaney, who follows the appliance industry at The NPD Group, a market research firm. “This is where we’re going to live; this is where we’re going to bring up our kids or whatever the case may be. So if I’m going to spend a little bit more, I might spend a little bit more on my home first before I go back to the expensive coffee or the expensive sports car.”
© 2013 msnbc.com Reprints
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At 5pm (Italy time) the current weather condition in Rome, Italy was rain showers with a temperature of 46°F. Since voting for the new pope began on Tuesday, NBC confirms that the first two conclave votes to elect a new Pope were inconclusive, thus, not resulting in a new pope. While there are no favorites in this race, bets are being made. In Europe, they have a Sweet Sistene betting system (similar to how the college basketball Sweet Sixteen brackets work in the U.S.), for who will end up winning the papalship. Could Mother Nature have some money on this? Hear me out. Last month, when the previous pope resigned, lightning struck the Vatican. Sign from above? Probably not. Just like the Empire State Building, Sears Tower, and the Burj Khalifa alike, the Vatican is a tall building, and often gets struck by lightning. Still, some people saw this as a sign. If you were one of them, get ready for more signs.
When the Papal Conclave convened yesterday to start the voting process, thunderstorms rolled into Rome, and accorindg to Accuweather, brought several rounds of heavy rain, lightning, and even hail to the Vatican. If that wasn't enough, a waterspout was reported yesterday just off Isola del Giglio, an island off the coast north of Rome.
Coincidence or rare occurance? While I can't say it is a coincidence, it certainly is not rare for Italy to experience thunderstorms in the Spring. In fact, the weather in Rome is filled with hail, heavy rain, and lightning during the Spring months. However, some felt differently about the type of storms they were having. A tweet from Wendy Lou Who says that MSNBC's reporters mentioned that during their coverage of the conclave that there was "thunder, lightning, and Biblical rain".
Many stand at the Vatican waiting for an answer with their umbrellas in hand. More rain is expected through the evening tonight, quite heavy at times. Rain will continue Thursday as well, before finally tapering off before Friday morning. So whether or not all of this bad weather is a sign, I cannot say. What I can say is that more of it is likely.
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1 April 2002
MES: Lower risk (than ERP), higher reward
by Charles Gifford
Beware of oversimplification by vendors.
Burned by promises gone sour on how investments in enterprisewide information technology (IT) networks would bring a rapid return on investment (ROI), manufacturing companies today are turning instead to plant-side IT projects that seem certain to lower production costs.
Simply stated, IT initiatives that focus on the factory floor today are being viewed as a lower risk than open-ended, enterprise IT transformations. It's about time. A plant optimization project typically produces a <12-month ROI, which is also easier to quantify and verify to real plant problems.
While many enterprise projects were oversold during the past five years, plant-side IT solutions, also called manufacturing execution systems (MESs), have had their own shortcomings. To be successful with MES, an end user must first get past oversimplification by many industrial automation and enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors.
The MES challenge can be high risk if not properly planned. Done well, however, it can result in a high reward. The goal is to optimize manufacturing while staying flexible enough to easily incorporate, and take advantage of, new manufacturing technologies.
Although MES technology has matured significantly during the past 10 years, it is still nontrivial and is not a silver bullet in any form. It is a process, not an event, and it requires organizational change and support. This is a challenge. Long-term success requires transforming the manufacturing environment.
MES not understood
During its early industrial IT evolution, MES software was misunderstood and ill defined. This contributed to a high failure rate and slow acceptance. To reduce this fragmentation, standards organizations-including the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), ISA, the Open Applications Group, OLE for Process Control, the Institute of Printer Circuit, and the Electronics Industries Association-began work in the early 1990s to build terminology and reference models for the field of computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM).
ISA standards committees, for example, created what are now the ANSI/ISA-95.00.01-2000, Enterprise-Control System Integration and ANSI/ISA-88.01-1995, Batch Control standards sets.
Standards have matured into object models and extensible markup language schema, which vendor and user communities are now adopting. "Best practices" have matured to become the Microsoft Solution Framework and Universal Modeling Language, among others.
The Manufacturing Execution Systems Association (now MESA International), formed in 1992, helps educate businesses in MES transformation. Properly installed and maintained, these intelligent systems continually show dramatic results.
According to MESA International, industry averages show that for high-volume manufacturing, an MES will yield the following results:
- Reduce work in process by 20%
- Reduce plant efficiency/downtime by 30%
- Reduce manual data entry time by 75%
- Reduce waste by 15%
Many MES challenges are interrelated and weighted differently, based on individual circumstances. Challenges are typically 80% cultural and 20% technical.
Challenge 1: Aligning the plant and enterprise on a win-win approach.
A primary challenge of MES is to define a project that has simultaneous buy in on both the plant and the enterprise sides. The best MES application will fail if plant personnel reject its introduction and the automation transformation-or if the enterprise side does not understand or support the plant transformation.
A lesson learned the HARD WAY: You cannot force IT solutions into manufacturing plants. A Phase 1 MES project needs to solve a real plant-side problem while also fixing some enterprise data requirement in the area of capacity, capability, or order visibility for planning and scheduling applications.
The best applications usually start with a plant-side point solution that solves an immediate need such as lowering cycle time, waste, and rework or increasing yield and throughput.
Challenge 2: MES differs from vertical to vertical.
Unfortunately, the term MES is too broadly defined and simplified by analysts and standards. MES software varies significantly for each vertical industry and product line, depending on type of process, organization, and lean manufacturing practices. Batch, discrete, continuous, and hybrid MESs and their approaches differ.
For instance, in discrete electronic assembly, the solution set centers on the product genealogy of the work order, where a user can verify and archive a bill of material, route, work instructions, and quality specs. A different form is required in a high-speed consumer packages goods/food process, with the solution set aiming to improve efficiency through using equipment better, tracking waste, and reducing downtime. The MES form is supposed to control the basic intrinsic pains of each manufacturing environment.
Challenge 3: The maintenance paradox.
MES is a dynamic IT solution, where change is continually driven by product, process, and scaling of new and old products. Database applications run off a data model derived from process requirements and transaction loads. When a process or product changes, the data model has to be "migrated," which involves normalizing table structures and relationships and adding new data loads. If a user appends tables onto the old model, process performance will degrade quickly to a point where the line will slow or will not stop. Then the MES application will create bottlenecks.
Typically, applications change 30% to 50% in a five-year period. MES systems also run 7/24 across networks with multiple system and equipment interfaces that need maintenance. Bottom line, companies must have manufacturing IT specialists who have a working knowledge of process control, IT, and business system terminologies.
These professionals are hard to find. Solving the maintenance paradox requires a systematic approach to integration by establishing common language, business processes, and protocols vertically across plant and enterprise applications. To reduce the level of required IT skill set for plant-side MES, MES is breaking into two interdependent layers: a centralized Web-based layer and a plant-side optimization layer.
The centralized Web-based layer consists of finite capacity scheduling and work-in-process/ work order management elements, where no equipment or system interfaces are necessary.
Plant side consists of plant efficiency (equipment utilization, downtime, waste tracking), statistical process control, product quality, compliance, and lot/batch genealogy functions. Theses functions typically require equipment interfaces of various types.
This may assist MES to have clear lines to aggregate data through vertical and horizontal processes. As MES software moves to the Web-based architectures of Microsoft.NET and the Java J2EE standard, centralized MES will become more frequent. However, IT support will always be required on the plant side.
Challenge 4: Establishing a common language.
MES integration is not trivial. Period. The problem lies in plant and enterprise applications having differing data sets. Enterprise and MES applications require common metrics for defining standard plant-side processes to effectively process the business changes from new product and process introductions. This is part of the maintenance paradox.
Change management is the key to a successful MES life cycle, low cost of ownership, and quick ROIs. Plant-side systems deal in a language based on processes and products, which in turn break down by the MES into plant capacity and capability terms for ERP and supply chain planning and scheduling processes. So as a company optimizes and streamlines manufacturing, its corporate IT systems and business processes are more directly affected by plant-side change. To simplify interfacing, companies must agree on numerous technical details across their many plant and corporate legacy systems:
- Common networking protocols
- Common data formats
- Common event and notification models
- Common device and application interfaces
- Common application integration methodologies
- Common business-to-business message formats
The resolution to these issues would be easy if every plant used the same operating system and the same middleware. However, multiple plants typically use multiple operating systems and multiple component architectures. Fortunately, common language has finally evolved for vertical corporate and horizontal plant integration.
A set of industry standards for CIM now adequately addresses vertical data aggregation. Standards evolved from reference models into object models and now into extensible markup language (XML) schema and data models. This metamorphosis dramatically simplifies the design, maintenance, and change management of applications and interfaces. Consequently, life-cycle costs reduce, and communication is established.
Challenge 5: Establishing a common protocol.
With the new generation of application-to-framework (A2F) XML-based enterprise application interface (EAI) software, IT infrastructures can now reduce the cost of enterprise and plant interfaces by 50%. As the technology matures, the MES's cost and maintenance will go down.
Many current integration practices use application-to-application (A2A) interfaces, which use many different protocols and languages across an enterprise. As applications change, users have to keep up on the maintenance. Many companies have installed A2A EAI software to establish an interface inventory and mapping point-to-point integration. With an A2A EAI, relevant data between any two applications becomes complex when multiple applications from inside or outside the plant and enterprise come into play.
In A2F EAI software, information moves independently among many types of systems and applications, while the framework acts as interpreter and guide. In the A2F approach, companies incrementally implement new functionality. This allows the integration framework to grow and change as business dictates, with a major benefit being that it allows legacy systems to transition in a much more cost-effective manner.
Another major benefit of A2F is that it abstracts plant and business processes from application-based limitations and puts data modeling first. Companies can therefore make the best decisions for growing revenue and expanding markets without regard to the limitations of individual software modules.
Challenge 6: Effective change management.
To effectively process the many changes MES addresses, a dedicated change management system (CMS) and steering committee needs to be incorporated into the organization. The MES steering committee should make "global" decisions and meet on a regular basis to prioritize change activities.
A typical steering committee divides into two teams: a business team and a technical team. The business team, not the technical team, owns the MES and the change management process. The steering committee ensures that "legacy systems" are not a barrier to progress. A fortress paradigm is not acceptable. The committee establishes and enforces common language and process standards throughout the plant. Committee members use a CMS to log all issues, problems, and changes.
The steering committee is responsible for prioritizing and quantifying change entries and assigning them to an accountable technical team member. Maintenance and use of this one single tool controls "scope creep" and application modification/release. The CMS contains a version control system and the production release procedures that encompass the control of the MES application, databases, graphical user interface (GUI) forms, GUI executables, software versions, data link libraries, etc.
Challenge 7: Correctly assessing the pain.
For a company beginning the automation odyssey, the hardest tasks are identifying the most inefficient processes for a Phase 1 MES implementation. Typically, plant personnel know where their bottlenecks and waste are but only in an arbitrary, qualitative way. There is no hard data to justify any expenditures. In order to justify the MES project and determine the ROI, a manufacturing assessment quantitatively analyzes, benchmarks, and prioritizes the scope of the MES initiative.
One word of caution. If circumstances allow, start small. Phase 1 and 2 projects should introduce only two or three areas of automation, with little or no enterprise integration. The compromise to consider is that small projects do provide a comprehensive data model for the completed integrated system. Consequently, it may be wise to select software that includes necessary functionality for Phases 3+. Basically, if economics allow, visualize the completed system when conducting the manufacturing assessment and design requirements.
These early projects allow a company to develop the internal framework necessary to handle and maintain full-blown integrated projects.
Challenge 8: Quantifying and profiling the transaction load and data model.
Once the manufacturing assessment is complete, all have to solidify and set requirements prior to selecting software. Software selection results in the data model set down in the analysis of the database transaction and data load. The analysis outlines worst-case size, number, and type of transactions that occur simultaneously during a production run so the MES does not slow down production cycle times.
Typically, bandwidth and response problems come from a large set of parametric data, test algorithms, work instructions, and overloaded queries on a single client. Once you characterize data model and transaction profiles, select the software technology architecture that best fits those profiles. Many users skip the data modeling process and purchase software based on apparent features. This may lead to a very abnormal and sluggish database.
Within 18 months, many of these end users are redoing the application or pulling the plug. Many of the MES-like modules contained in centralized ERPs have failed due to oversimplifying the production data model and underestimating the transaction load. The value of data obtained from the MES-like module is limited with respect to productivity improvements.
Challenge 9: Overcoming the OOB silver bullet mentality.
In general, people are brainwashed by the "plug and play" or "out-of-box" (OOB) marketing approach. MES and ERP software vendors sell to this weakness with rapid deployment and OOB features. Their products are much improved, but there are no shortcuts in the transformation process. Most rapid deployments fail within 18 months, and then you have to redo them. In the past, MES products consisted of a database transaction engine with limited configuration tools for designing and maintaining the data model, which has 80% custom/20% OOB set of business rules or modules.
As object-oriented and Web technologies mature, many MES products are building a very rich set of industry-specific OOB modules to increase the configurable portion of the solution to 50%, in many cases. It is still 50% custom, with the other 50% requiring custom interfaces among ERP, supply chain, or plant systems. The process and data flows of production must map into a set of business rules and a corresponding data model before you select any software or write any code. Otherwise, you are wasting time and money.
Challenge 10: Don't forget transformation training.
Transformation training of operator and line support personnel is crucial! Approval and acceptance of automation by plant personnel determines the success or failure. If the "best" solution deploys into a plant and the operators and line managers reject it, or if it initially reduces throughput by more than 20% for more than a week, the solution will go away.
The old manufacturing environment requires mapping so operators, line manager, production scheduler, process engineers, etc., understand their new standard operating procedures and deliverables and how the old procedures and deliverables are going to be handled automatically and not compromised. As well, operators need to understand that MES data collection is not going to add work to their jobs.
The challenges of MES are similar to most challenges associated with any technology renaissance. The basic point is to get educated and involved because all MES technologies have matured into a key enabling piece for plant optimization and corporate cost savings. IC
About the author
Charles H. "Charlie" Gifford is director of business development for ASECO Integrated Systems Ltd. He is chairman of Industrial Computing's Editorial Advisory Board and was director of ISA's Computer Technology Division (1996-1998). His e-mail is firstname.lastname@example.org.
Return to Previous Page
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When Rabbi Finkelman first opened up his classroom and dining room to thousands of readers, the response was electric. His first volume of "Shabbos Stories" became a very popular best-seller. An outstanding teacher and a gifted writer, he knows how to choose a story and how to tell it. These stories are good, plentiful, and geared to the themes of the weekly parashah. Are you a teacher? An adult looking for inspirational reading? A parent seeking to enliven the Shabbos table? A youngster with a curious mind? Then this book is for you.
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The Europe Crisis from a European Perspective
[This week, we introduce a new contributing editor to PeakProsperity.com, Alasdair Macleod. He will mostly be contributing commentary focused on the situation in Europe, where he's located. The credit crisis underway there is not Europe's problem alone; it has the potential to send crippling financial shockwaves to the US and elsewhere around the world. Please join us in extending a warm CM.com welcome to Alasdair. -- Adam]
The purpose of this report is to give readers the essential background to the economic problems in Europe and to bring you up-to-date in what has become a fast-moving situation. At the time of writing, there has been a lull in the news flow, but that does not mean the problems are under control. Far from it.
Flawed from the Start
When we talk about Europe today in an economic context, we really mean the Eurozone, whose seventeen members are the core of Europe and share a common currency, the euro. The euro first came into existence thirteen years ago, on January 1, 1999, replacing national currencies for eleven states; Greece joined two years later. In theory, the idea of a common currency for European nations with common borders is logical, and it was Canadian economist Robert Mundell's work on optimum currency areas that provided much of the theoretical cover.
However, the concept was flawed from the start.
The euro would have made sense if the economies of the member states had been allowed to converge -- that is, evolve -- so that they had similar characteristics. While this was the intention from the outset, the mistake was to put convergence in the hands of politicians and their economic advisers, who (if not representing socialist parties) were and still are all interventionists. This meant that they pursued their own national agendas by intervening in their respective economies while paying lip-service to the greater European ideal. Therefore, convergence was never going to happen.
The point everyone missed is that the only way convergence could occur is if all member states relinquished government planning and control of their individual economies, so that an undistorted free market across national boundaries could have developed. Instead, central planning by individual member states was the order of the day. Control mechanisms, such as limits on government borrowing as a proportion of GDP and permitted budget deficits, were breached with impunity, and the fines that should have been imposed under the Stability and Growth Pact of 1997 were never implemented. Today all Eurozone members are in breach, with the minor exceptions of Finland, Estonia, and Luxembourg.
The naïve ambitions behind the Maastricht Treaty were only the start of the euro-fudge. The whole point of the euro, so far as France and the Mediterranean countries were concerned, was to escape the monetary straitjacket of the deutschemark, with which their individual currencies were unfavourably compared in the foreign exchange markets. The Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank, was truly independent of government, and operated with the single mandate of price stability, while the other national central banks were extensions of high-spending governments. It was to de-politicise note issuance that, based on the Bundesbank model, the European Central Bank (ECB) was created to be independent of all governments.
Looser Standards, Easier Money
However, while the Bundesbank was focused only on price stability, the ECB relies on a wide range of indicators to guide monetary policy. So where the Bundesbank was single-mindedly objective in its approach, the ECB has become variously subjective, being able to choose its statistical indicators at will. While the ECB is regarded by most commentators as following restrictive monetary policies, they are considerably more expansionary than the old Bundesbank.
Anyway, the result was that borrowing costs for France and the Mediterranean countries fell rapidly to a significantly lower margin over Germany’s, which was taken as the “risk-free” rate. European banks geared up their lending to benefit from the spread, locking in a one or two percent differential between German bond yields compared with, for example, Italian government bonds. Gearing (i.e., levering up with further debt) this differential ten or twenty times was a no-brainer, particularly when it was backed by the implicit guarantee of the whole system. This was party-time for banks, and amounted to ready finance for profligate governments, which was the underlying reason that Greece joined -- to benefit -- two years after the start of the Eurozone.
In order to be eligible for monetary union in the first place, the future Eurozone members had to put their houses in order to meet the convergence criteria. For those with unacceptable debt-to-GDP ratios, this meant shifting debt “off balance sheet,” typically by dropping nationalised industries from the national accounts. Various other fudges were devised to make appearances acceptable for the target year of proof of convergence: 1997.
This means that even today, declared government debt is only part of the whole government debt story, with government guarantees, actual and implied, giving a far greater potential problem than headline debt figures suggest.
The Party Kicks into High Gear
Greece was a special case, joining the Eurozone two years after the start. She had so mismanaged her affairs before entering the euro that membership in the Eurozone amounted to a rescue of Greece’s finances. Interest rates for government borrowing in drachmas had been over 20% for much of the 1990s. By 1999, when her plans to join the Eurozone began to be discounted, Greece's short-term government debt yields had fallen to 7.25%. By 2005 they had fallen to only 2.5%, and even 10-year government bonds yielded less than 3.5%. At the same time, Greece’s official central government debt rose from €83.22bn in 1999 to €175bn in 2006, rising further to €264bn by 2010.
Bank lending was expanding rapidly in other countries as well, particularly Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. And it wasn’t only government: The private sectors of these latter three countries experienced property bubbles on the back of easy credit that sooner or later were certain to burst.
When things are booming, politicians take the glory and revel in their supposed success. At the domestic level, they loosen constraints on spending. They delude themselves that the boom is the result of their economic policies, so they extend planning and controls over the private sector at the behest of favoured pressure groups. Most European parliaments are coalitions, whose cohesions are bought through favours and money, corrupting the whole political system. And at the pan-European level, boom-times also encouraged politicians to grab their share of glory on the bigger stage by trying to outdo each other in their support of a common European ideal. Theirs is still a world of imagined power and uncontrolled spending. The EU budget, an expense on top of national accounts, is seen as a source of funds for everyone to grab before the annual budget allocations are used up. The result is that the EU budget has been unable to pass an audit by its own auditors for the last seventeen years.
With this gravy-train in operation, it is hardly surprising that the politicians and their favoured appointees lost touch with economic reality. The extraordinary lack of humility from European leaders is evidence of this, and entirely human.
Economic conditions have now changed, with fear of deflation replacing easy money from before the credit-crunch and the Lehman crisis. From then onwards, banking changed from a world of expansion, of using all devices, including off-balance sheet vehicles, and hypothecation of collateral, to expand their lending. It was replaced with a sudden awareness of risk, of falling property prices and over-extended construction businesses.
This rude shock was a global phenomenon, affecting the US and the UK as well as mainland Europe. To stop the global banking system from going into a systemic melt-down, Sovereign states agreed to stand behind their commercial banks, guaranteeing all deposits. In effect, they were committed to underwriting balance sheets that totalled multiples of their own GDPs, turning a banking crisis into a sovereign debt crisis.
This was bad enough for countries with their own currencies, but Eurozone governments cannot support themselves with monetary printing, control of this function having been passed to the ECB (the exception is the TARGET settlement facility, which is described below). So while the US and UK were able to print dollars and sterling respectively via quantitative easing (QE), Eurozone governments were unable to do so.
The Importance of TARGET
The reason quantitative easing has been so useful to governments elsewhere is that it allows government deficits to be funded without paying interest rates demanded by bond markets. For that reason, interest rates in US dollars, pounds sterling, and Japanese yen can be held artificially low despite government guarantees to underwrite their banks’ liabilities. The further advantage of QE is that it provides commercial banks themselves with liquidity to offset contracting balance sheets. In the absence of QE, Eurozone governments cannot so easily address their immediate financial and economic obligations, and so they face the scrutiny of risk-averse bond investors.
Of course, central banks are careful to de-emphasise the reasons for QE stated above. But the publicly stated reason, which is to help kick-start an economy, is obviously relevant where economic recovery is prevented by the actions of banks worried about deposits walking out of the door. This problem and that of capital flight are generally avoided in the EU periphery countries by the smoothing operations of the national central banks, which control the cross-border settlement system known as TARGET (an acronym for the Trans-European Automated Real-time Gross-settlement Express Transfer System).
Money flowing, say, from Greece to Germany is replaced by the Bank of Greece issuing euros to leave the quantity of money in Greece unchanged, and the inflow into Germany is neutralised by the Bundesbank withdrawing euros from circulation for the same reason. Both trade imbalances and capital flight are accommodated by these means, and there is therefore no net currency issuance to accommodate them. By this mechanism, local banks facing depositor withdrawals in favour of stronger banks in other jurisdictions are kept solvent without recourse to the ECB.
If it wasn’t for TARGET, the ECB would have had to step in to stop banks in the periphery countries from collapsing. Instead, TARGET has bought time by smoothing capital imbalances and can be expected to continue to do so. The effect has been for national central banks in the periphery nations to operate their own, hidden version of QE, concealed from public scrutiny because it is offset by money being drained elsewhere from the system, mostly by the Bundesbank in Germany.
Dangerous Imbalances Are Building
In the accounts of the central banks, the withdrawal of money in Germany by the Bundesbank is balanced in this example by a loan to the Bank of Greece, and since the Bank of Greece is guaranteed by the Greek Government, this is an extra, hidden government debt of which bond markets are generally unaware. Loans under TARGET by the Bundesbank and other national central banks to the Bank of Greece at end-2011 stood at about €100bn, which is a combination of Greece’s cumulative trade balance with Eurozone partners and capital flight. To put this in context, Greece’s GDP is estimated to be about €220bn, so the other national central banks are stuck with unsecured loans on their books that amount to 45% of Greek GDP. And remember, this does not include capital flight over the last three months, which in all probability will have accelerated.
Other TARGET “assets” in the system at year-end were €195bn owed by Bank of Italy (11.7% of GDP), €170bn owed by Bank of Spain (12% of GDP), about €120bn owed by Bank of Ireland (75% of GDP), and €55bn owed by Bank of Portugal (30% of GDP). Exposures in the form of loans are over €500bn to the Bundesbank, and a further €370 to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Finland and the ECB itself.
These are serious imbalances, particularly for the smaller countries, and without them not only would their commercial banks have already folded, but asset prices would also be considerably lower. While these outcomes have been avoided so far, growing imbalances (if left unchecked) can only result in the eventual collapse of the TARGET system.
Conclusion of Part I
The above summarizes the essential background to the problems faced by the Eurozone.
In Part II: What Lies in Store for Europe, we address the logical next question: How will the tragedy play out from here?
We look at the critical roles played by Germany and the ECB, the only two entities with enough clout to determine a permanent outcome for the current Eurozone. And we examine the fast-eroding fundamentals for Spain, Italy, and France that will soon force a decision on the euro's fate.
Lastly, we recognize that the European credit crisis offers a rare opportunity for investors: a near-certain bet.
Click here to access Part II of this report (free executive summary; paid enrollment required for full access).
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True or False: More Weight Is Lost By Running on an Empty Stomach
You know that exercise is important, but there is a lot of conflicting advice out there concerning the “right” way to work out. One question that often arises is, “Will I lose more weight if I go running on an empty stomach?” Although in theory you may burn more fat this way, total calorie burn is about the same as eating a light snack before you exercise. Also, workouts on an empty stomach tend to be cut short because of hunger or lack of energy. The type of workout you do, the time of day you do it, and the length of time you spend at it are all important factors in choosing when to eat in relation to your workout.
Evidence for the Health Claim
Early-morning runners may not have time to eat before they exercise. As long as their workout is around 30 minutes long and does not include strength training, not eating beforehand could be beneficial. This is because when you wake up in the morning, your stomach is empty and your carbohydrate reserves are almost used up. Your body is thus more likely to burn calories stored as fat for energy.
A study published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine compared eight female subjects in four series of trials. In three of the trials, the subjects ate a small meal following an overnight fast, and then began exercising 30, 60, or 90 minutes after eating. In the fourth trial, the subjects did not eat before exercising. Results showed that the subjects burned more fat when they worked out on an empty stomach than when they exercised 60 or 90 minutes after eating.
A similar study found that people burned more calories from fat on the days that they did not eat breakfast before exercising than on the days that they ate a small snack before their workout. However, the difference was very small, and probably not meaningful.
Evidence Against the Health Claim
Many fitness experts do not believe that “running on empty” is the most efficient way to work out. Contrary to popular belief, working out on an empty stomach does not jumpstart your metabolism. After approximately 30 minutes of exercising without eating first, the body starts to use muscle as an energy source, which can lead to overexertion, dizziness, and dehydration. Also, exercising on an empty stomach lowers your blood sugar which leads to hunger, and people are then more likely to end up eating more after the workout than they would otherwise. Finally, weight training requires a lot of energy, and lifting weights without eating first does not work your muscles efficiently.
A study conducted by Maffucci and McCurry examined the exercise performance of eight female subjects three and six hours after eating a meal. Results showed that performance in moderate- to high-intensity workouts was improved by eating a high-carbohydrate, low-fat, low-protein meal three hours prior to exercising, as compared to performance after consuming the same meal six hours beforehand.
A study published in the 1999 Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise found that people who ate a 400 calorie meal (breakfast) three hours before they exercised, were able to bike for approximately 30 minutes longer than when they did not eat beforehand.
Similar research has shown that although more fat calories may be burned by exercising on an empty stomach, the total amount of calories burned is comparable to the same workout after eating a light snack. Most importantly, fewer calories may be burned in the long run if you don’t eat before exercising since you may have less stamina and endurance to complete a full workout.
The best snack to have before you exercise is something light (100-300 calories) containing some carbohydrates and protein, such as fruit or yogurt. The more food you eat, the longer it will take for your body to digest, and if you work out too soon after eating you may get a stomach cramp. Some fitness experts suggest eating food in liquid form (like a fruit smoothie) to reduce the risk of getting a cramp while you exercise. Waiting to exercise for at least half an hour after eating will usually accomplish the same result.
Not eating before you work out is generally not supported by the evidence. If there is any benefit, it is likely to be minor. Also, it is important for people with various health conditions, such as diabetes and low blood pressure, to eat before they exercise.
If, however, you find that your workouts are more productive on an empty stomach, there is no reason to change your normal routine. If not, eating a light snack, such as a piece of fruit, before exercising will boost your energy for your workout and allow you to exercise long and hard enough to burn just as much, if not more, calories and fat.
Maffucci DM, McMurray RG. Towards optimizing the timing of the pre-exercise meal. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab . 2000;10(2):103-13.
O’Connor A. The claim: you burn more fat by exercising on an empty stomach. Sign On San Diego website. Available at http://www.signons... . Accessed November 5, 2008.
Weil R. Exercise myths and facts. Diabetes Self Manag . 2003;20(3): 32-6,39.
Willcutts KF, Wilcox AR, Grunewald KK. Energy metabolism during exercise at different time intervals following a meal. Int J Sports Med . 1988;9(3):240-3.
Image Credit: Nucleus Communications, Inc.
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Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act Extended
As American taxpayers waited anxiously to see if Congress could come to some sort of agreement in regards to the impending fiscal cliff, real estate agents were waiting on news of the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act that was set to expire on January 1, 2013. The Act was put into place in 2007 to help consumers who had to short sale their principle residence or had received a reduction in their mortgage principle. To qualify for the debt relief the debt must have been used to buy, build, or substantially improve their principle residence AND be secured by their principle residence. The maximum amount that can be ”forgiven” is up to $2million.
In layman’s terms, if the amount owed to a lender was $300,000 and the amount the home sold for was $200,000, there is a $100,000 deficiency. Before 2007, this deficiency amount ($100,000) could be taxed by the IRS as additional income to the borrower. In most cases, this additional “income”puts a person in a higher tax bracket, thus increasing their taxes due at the end of the year. Many consumers would have to file for bankruptcy or face huge tax bills, fees, and fines, on top of the immediate implications of principle reduction or short sale. Had the Act expired, short sales would have lost their appeal to underwater home owners, thus eliminating a way of avoiding foreclosure.
So, yay! There is some good news attached to the passing of the American Tax Payer Relief Act. We have 362 more days to short sale a principle residence without IRS tax implications. Keep in mind that short sales are a long process and can take upwards of 6 months to negotiate. If you are interested in exploring this option to help avoid foreclosure, you need to contact a qualified real estate agent very soon. As the economy recovers, there is less and less of a chance that this benefit will be extended.
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Fraud is one of the fastest-growing businesses in the U.S. Identity theft, financial fraud, and credit card misuse are widespread. Businesses are just as vulnerable to abuse as individuals.
How can business owners avoid becoming victims of credit card fraud? Start by understanding the fraudsters’ methods, then learn to stay a step ahead of them. The following are commonly used methods of credit card fraud:
- Malware attacks: Malware is software that allows hackers access to the victims’ computers. Undetected access allows them to steal passwords, bank information, and credit card numbers. Frequently updated anti-virus software keeps these attackers at bay.
- Phishing and SMSishing: You’ve heard the warnings again and again: never open a file you don’t recognize. Phishers pose as genuine businesses, such as banks or social networking sites. They send official looking emails and SMS’s that prompt recipients to confirm passwords and account information. Avoid being scammed by deleting suspicious-looking emails without opening them.
- Credit card skimming: Skimmers steal credit card information from legitimate transactions. Unsuspecting customers hand their credit card to a dishonest merchant, who uses a small skimmer device to read and store the credit card’s numbers. The merchant then uses the information to purchase something, or sells the information to others. Skimming is difficult to spot and avoid, but business owners should carefully examine their monthly credit card statements for suspicious charges.
- Site cloning: Fraudsters might clone an entire website, or just the order form page of a merchant site. Victims enter all their information, including name, address, and credit card number, thinking they are making a valid purchase. They don’t realize they are directing their I.D. to a thief.
- False merchant sites: False sites easily dupe customers into providing their credit card information. They simply advertise their wares at ridiculously low prices, then request full credit card details from those who want to access the site. The take-home message? Do not freely provide your credit card number, unless you are certain you are buying something legitimate.
- Credit card generators: Using mathematical algorithms, this software imitates patterns of existing credit card numbers to create thousands of new credit card numbers. Many are actually valid numbers and expiration dates. Again, a meticulous review of credit card statements will reveal whether a generator, or anyone else, has misused your credit card number.
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Valentina Marabini, British Museum
In a previous post I described a hanging scroll that I was working on – a work of Qing Dynasty calligraphy. It is now finished. I wrote then that I would explain the process used to conserve it, so here goes.
The first thing I had to do was to assess the scroll condition. The scroll is executed on paper – zhi ben hua long-fibered, which looks almost like silk. It was carefully analysed, photographed and the treatment procedure set. We next established the proportions and design for a new scroll mount.
Unfortunately, the scroll was very creased with extensive horizontal cracks and signs of many previous repairs. However, the paint itself was stable and therefore suitable to be cleaned using a ‘wet’ treatment.
Using a broad paibi brush we carefully sprinkled water over the surface and drained it off.
When the painting was clean we could remove the old linings. A layer of dry xuan paper was placed over the face of the scroll, and the scroll and its support were loosely rolled up. The scroll was unrolled and flattened over wang wang juen (an open silk) face down and left overnight. During this time the paste and layers of backing papers became softer, making them easier to work with.
To be able to remove the backing papers we had to remove many of the scroll layers. The scroll had three layers of backing papers – (i) a layer of white xuan paper repairs, (ii) a second lining of very long fibred paper and (iii) a first lining of thin xuan paper in direct contact with the calligraphy.
We cleaned the edges of the missing areas, removing old paste residues and lightly evened their thickness with a very thin spatula. Some of the previous repairs were in good condition and were left in situ, but some had deteriorated and so were removed. The calligraphy was now ready for relining.
Layers of paper were selected and dyed with natural pigments mixed with animal glue and water to match the tone. The back of the calligraphy was pasted with thin flour paste using a paibi brush. The first lining paper (a long fibered paper) was moistened and positioned over the calligraphy and adhered with a wuzhou brush. On top of this a second lining of mian lian (thin xuan paper) was pasted; this is called jia tou meaning additional lining.
False paper margins were adhered to the edge of the calligraphy to facilitate joining to its new silk mount later on.
When the lining was complete we could check the calligraphy itself. Missing areas were repaired with new paper made of mian lian and were evened with a thin spatula. The calligraphy was then turned face up and left to dry naturally.
After sizing and drying, the calligraphy was again lightly moistened and adhered to a white xuan paper, face up on the table. We could now start retouching. This is done in natural light, and aims to match the repaired areas to the colours of the original. Ink and pigments are carefully diluted and then applied.
This process was followed by tou liao, the selection and dying of the appropriate silk to form the new mount. The silk mount was to be in two colours, a plain and a grey-blue pattern silk.
With retouching completed, the calligraphy was detached and the edges of the mount were squared. The mounting silk was cut to size and attached to the calligraphy using a technique called wa hua: a window is cut precisely in the silk and the calligraphy is inserted into it.
A final double-layered backing paper completed the lining stage and, after a period of drying, wooden fittings were attached to the top and bottom of the scroll so it was ready for hanging. I will write about that in my next post…
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Article: Santa's busy night
Even as an Apple fanboy, I’m a bit skeptical as to whether Santa uses Siri as they assert in their new holiday commercial, but if this analysis by The Atlantic is accurate then Apple might want to update the commercial and show that instead of 3.7 billion appointments, Santa has approximately 526 million children he has to visit. Given certain assumptions (one, Santa exists, obvi), The Atlantic ran a study to determine just how many kids he has to visit on Christmas night. Their chart above illustrates what Santa and his reindeers’ busy night would look like as he raced around the world.
There are just over 526,000,000 Christian kids under the age of 14 in the world who celebrate Christmas on December 25th. In other words, Santa has to deliver presents to almost 22 million kids an hour, every hour, on the night before Christmas. That’s about 365,000 kids a minute; about 6,100 a second. Totally doable.
Especially when you consider the uneven distribution of kids in the world. Santa needs to hit 22 million kids every hour. If Santa starts at the International Date Line and heads west, the first four time zones he passes barely contain that many kids waiting for presents. He’s already got three hours in the bank. Until, you know, he gets to Europe, which kind of breaks his schedule.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do I apply for financial aid?
Complete and submit a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) by mail to the federal processing agency or apply electronically at (http://www.fafsa.ed.gov).
What is the school Federal Code number?
What happens after I apply?
MCC receives your FAFSA results electronically and the Financial Aid Office determines aid eligibility for grants, scholarships, and loans.
Do I need to bring in identification to obtain information?
Yes, you must present photo identification to obtain information concerning your file. No one else may obtain information about your file without written authorization from you, the student. You may obtain an authorization to release information form in the Financial Aid Office.
How do I apply for a student loan?
A student applying for a Federal student loan should access www.studentloans.gov to complete Entrance Counseling (online) and complete a Master Promissory Note. The student should also complete a Student Loan Request Form (available under FA forms) and submit to the FA office.
What is Federal Work-Study and how do I apply?
The Federal Work-Study Program at MCC provides on campus jobs for students to earn money to help with educational expenses. In addition to completing the FAFSA, a student must complete a Federal Work-Study Application. Applications are available online (available under FA Forms).
I’m transferring to MCC, what happens to my financial aid?
Financial Aid is not transferable. A transfer student must request FAFSA information be sent to MCC by going to the FAFSA website at www.fafsa.gov and requesting our school code number which is 002615. This information will allow the office to evaluate the student for financial assistance at MCC.
Are visiting students eligible for Financial Aid?
No, Visiting students are not eligible for Financial Aid at MCC.
I completed a FAFSA but did not list MCC. How do I add MCC to my FAFSA?
Go to fafsa.gov to access your financial aid application You will need to add the federal school code for MCC which is 002615.
How do I inform the New Jersey Grants Office (NJHESAA) about my change in College choice?
You may call 1-800-792-8670 and give the State code for MCC which is 2441 or go online at www.hesaa.org to update your information. It will take a few weeks for HESAA to update the college change.
How many credits do I need to be considered for financial aid?
You must be enrolled as follows to be considered for financial aid.
All students will be considered for federal, state, and institutional grants, and scholarships. Federal loans are available to all eligible students regardless of income.
I have additional questions, how can I contact the Financial Aid Office?
How is my financial aid eligibility determined?
Federal and state aid eligibility are based on formulas that take into account: family income, family size,assets, and the number in college. Federal loans are available to all eligible students regardless of family income.
Is my financial aid limited?
Federal aid will not fund more than 30 credits of developmental courses. State aid will not fund more than four semesters of attendance at the community college level.
Are all programs at MCC eligible for financial aid?
No, Open College (OC), Non Degree (EX), Charles E Gregory (CG) and English as a Second Language (ESL) are not eligible programs.
When will financial aid be applied to my student account?
Once all required documents have been submitted to the Financial Aid Office your application will go through the review process and, if you have eligibility for any grant assistance or you have requested a student loan, you will be awarded. Once you have registered for classes, your financial aid will be applied to the account account.
How can I purchase books?
If you have money left in your student account after tuition, fees, and other charges have been paid, you may request bookstore credit to purchase books by authorizing bookstore credit on Campus Cruiser each term.
What should I do if my financial aid does not cover my bill?
If I need help completing a form, do I need an appointment?
The Financial Aid Office is open daily and appointments are not necessary.
What happens if a financial aid recipient withdraws from college?
The Financial Aid Office must recalculate the student's eligibility based upon the date of withdrawal. The student may owe a balance to the College. Please contact the Financial Aid Office if you need to withdraw. You must officially withdraw from the college at the Registrar's Office.
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AMERICA'S FAILING PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM
By Ashley Anderson, 16 years old
It's back to school time!
This is for all the parents and their children who attend public school. I attended public school all my life, until September 2002 when I began attending a private, Christian school. The differences are incredible!
Reading, writing, and arithmetic used to be what a child learned in school. Is this what you think your child is getting in school?
Throughout most of my time spent in public school, the kids in my classes only read one or two books throughout the whole year. I was identified as being smart/dumb enough to go to "Gifted and Talented" a.k.a. Advanced Placement classes. The Advanced Placement courses have now been replaced with IB classes, which are part of the International Baccalaureate Organization, UNESCO, United Nations. In this class, we were assigned numerous short stories to read, mostly about the myths of other countries, and about their religions. This class bragged it was a higher-level class, in which advanced students could "maximize" their learning capacity. I was busy learning about the religions and cultures of other countries, but never knowing such authors as Henry van Dyke, Washington Irving, O. Henry, or even Henry Wadsworth Longfellow until I attended private school. These authors and others like Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson are purely American, and the basis for all literary writings in America to date. Why were they never taught to me? Even in the so-called advanced classes we never read "Rip van Winkle." Instead, we were assigned books like "The Giver" by Lois Lowry, which gave the details of killing babies and living in a world where no one was special and a person's worth was based on his/her ability to conform to the group. Was I being conditioned?
After reading this letter in a shortened form in the newspaper last week, two public school teachers fired back with a letter of their own. They spoke about how great their school was and how their students read a book a week, not one a year. Are they really reading them, or are they "skimming" and using "study guides" to pass the test? They criticized my remarks about "The Giver" being inappropriate reading. They said,
"The Giver is certainly about much more than 'killing babies'. In fact, the reader should realize the novel is based on what would happen if our individuality, freedom and world were taken away. Its theme is similar to 'Fahrenheit 451' by Ray Bradbury and '1984' by George Orwell."
I wonder if they know that Lois Lowry's book is being read to children as young as 6 years old and sometimes younger? How can a child that young understand the significance of what's being read to them? After reading it, I was really shaken up, wondering why I was reading something like that when I was only in the seventh grade. This was in the "Advanced Placement/pre-IB" class; I was still only about 12 years old. What about the book, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou? It's a book also being assigned to black as well as white children to read. It's a story filled with disappointment, frustration, and tragedy. Why do young children need to know that the author was raped at the age of eight? This is literary significance?
Kids are told they will be writing in a "journal" and that no one will see it except the teacher, and they are free to write whatever they are feeling. They could write about parents, friends, pastor, and anyone else, and parents would never know! When I was given this assignment, I knew my privacy was being invaded, so I wrote about how ridiculous it was to write in a journal. It was really none of the school's business. Strangely, I was never reprimanded or counseled. They were profiling me and to see how and what I thought. Why else would they want to pry into my private life?
They were treating me like just another "product" of the education system, just another number. They want worker bees. Push a button. Pull a lever. Get just enough 'education' to learn how to be compliant, happy little 21st Century workers who don't ask any questions and keep their noses to the grindstone. I thought, "surely, not my school". I was wrong.
In the 8th grade, my science class spent the first six weeks learning from the end of the textbook. It was all about global warming, recycling, and population control. It made me wonder how this "control" will be accomplished. My teacher wanted to get all those things out of the way so we wouldn't have to deal with them later in the year, but why are they in the curriculum in the first place?
For one geography assignment, I was asked to list all the major appliances in my house including microwave ovens, telephones, televisions, etc. They even wanted to know what the highest level of education my parents had achieved, and a roundabout figure of how much they earned each year. It was an exercise to make me feel badly that American families have so much and the rest of the world goes needy. I began to feel sorry for people in other countries who don't have as much. I started to want everything to be fair, and for everyone to have exactly the same. The very things my parents taught me, like working hard, don't cheat anyone, and earn your own way, were changed little by little in seeing how people live in these third-world toilets. It scared me that someone could just change my ideals by playing on my emotions. They were manipulating my compassionate feelings and using them against me to make me want what they call "equality". I still wonder at how they will use the list (which was taken up) in the future.
When my mother was in school, she was taught phonics. In public school, I was taught to memorize the look of words and how they sounded. I was taught to remember the answer, not understand the question. I didn't have spelling or vocabulary words to learn past the sixth or seventh grade. Why not? In my private school, everyone has spelling and vocabulary words, in every grade, every week, to understand and learn how to use them in sentences. Words like philanthropy, misanthropic, and ameliorate were never taught to me in public school, despite the so-called "advanced" classes I was in. My mother, however, insisted on my having vocabulary words, even though it was not provided in public school.
Reliance on technology was very big in public school. I was told not to worry about spelling something correctly, because computers have spell check programs on them. Isn't school the place to learn how to spell correctly? These were English papers I was writing in middle school and I'm not supposed to be concerned with spelling?
Learning arithmetic has taken on a whole new meaning in public schools. I was told to use a calculator every chance I got, and was even reprimanded for doing the work on paper. I know how to push a button on the rectangular device, and it's not that difficult. The more advanced students are made to wait for the others to catch up, and the advanced students are given "busy" work. I reviewed daily however, when doing the math in my head or on a piece of paper. The textbook often goes unfinished, and the students are passed anyway, because they tried their best.
Grading on a curve is commonplace in public schools, so the students don't know if they're doing anything wrong. I had the same geometry teacher my older brother had when he was at that age. Mr. Smith we'll say, actually told the class: "Some of you need to miss a few questions for the team…' He was meaning of course that it would make the top grade of the 'curve' look better.
That was in the eighth grade in public school. In the ninth grade I took Algebra. When I changed to private school, I retook Algebra because my new school taught it differently, being more advanced, and with more of the textbook. This year I'm taking trig and Algebra II, both of my own choice. I know I'll be getting the most out of them because we won't be waiting for everyone to catch up like we did in public school. I can learn at my own pace.
Most kids in public schools are uncontrollable. How can any learning actually take place? Respect for authority, integrity, and honor are not virtues generally practiced by students who attend public school. If the administrators were to enforce the rules they have, they wouldn't need to make more. Total control is the only thing gained when making more rules than needed, or altering the students individually.
I see now that teachers in public school seemed to be watching for kids who were having trouble concentrating on things, or who were especially disruptive. Only later did I learn that these kids were sent home with notes from the teacher recommending the parents take them to the doctor to get medicine for their "behavior problem"; a mind-altering drug called methylphenidate, or Ritalin. Schools get extra help (money) from Uncle Sam for putting up with kids using this medication. Many parents will tell you that their children on Ritalin act like zombies; my brother did for five years, until my mother insisted on taking him off of it. Ritalin use causes shrinkage of brain tissue, according to medical sources. Does your child's school brag about being "Drug Free"?
I was amazed at how well-behaved the students at my private school were. Not only did they work hard, but were courteous, polite, and obedient. These things are a direct result of the proper atmosphere that a private school provides. Christian values are taught, along with studying the Bible, which, needless to say, is strictly taboo in a public school.
Although I had some great teachers in public school, which are extremely hard to find, they could do nothing with the curriculum they were given from their superiors, not to mention the state, and the Department of Education, which is a part of the federal government. The department itself is unconstitutional; "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The United States as is written here means the federal government, or national government. The Constitution allowed no such power to the federal government as to run a federal department of education. Therefore, it is unconstitutional. The Constitution, since 1787, is and has been the Supreme Law of the land.
I encourage all those who care about their children and grandchildren to go searching for the answer. There is a lot of information available but you may have to look no further than a book by Charlotte Iserbyt called "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America". It gives a detailed account of what really happens in public schools, why, and where the corruption comes from.
Students: no one can tell you who you are. If you don't think for yourself, someone else will. It might be a strong-willed friend, the media, or even our own government. Some people would have us believe that young people can't do anything about it, even if we wanted to try. One thing we can and should do, and that's spread the word about what is going on; but you have to learn more about it.
Even though it may be difficult to fund attending a private school or homeschooling, it is the only immediate way to stop what is being shoved down the throats of America's youth. Soon even these may be forbidden. What is the most important thing? Is it more important to play football or be a cheerleader and end up flipping hamburgers in a fast food joint, or actually learning something that will be valuable to you the rest of your life?
Defend your mind, and ask questions. Don't take anything for granted. Public school is not going to change, because it is running exactly how the government wants it to run. Follow the money.
I am grateful to those teachers who taught me to think for myself and from whom I actually learned many things. They became my friends. It's because of them that I find it easy to defend the facts and stand up for the righteous truth. They are employees of the federal government, whether they think so or not, because public school is 'public' school, if you're in Arkansas or Wyoming.
I am a Christian. Believers don't belong in Pharaoh's schools. This is not the time for us to stick our heads in the dirt and hope that everything goes all right. The remnant of Christ's followers exists today as foretold in the Bible. This is the time for all believers in Christ to rise up and defend the rights our Forefathers left to us. I will stand and fight until the end, because I owe it to my country. What will you do?
Thank you mom for caring enough about me to take me out of the public school system so that I can get a proper education. Now, I am no longer a part of the dumbed down masses.
© 2003 NewsWithViews - All Rights Reserved
Ashley Anderson is 16 year old. She writes letters to the editor on regular basis to The Sentinel Record in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Her E-Mail: email@example.com
To order The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America
700 pages pb, $47.00 including S/H Call: 1-800-955-0116
"They were treating me like
just another "product" of the education system, just another number. They
want worker bees. Push a button. Pull a lever. Get just enough 'education'
to learn how to be compliant, happy little 21st Century workers who don't
ask any questions and keep their noses to the grindstone. I thought, "surely,
not my school. I was wrong."
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Yesterday, the New York Times officially rolled out its new subscription in the United States.
According to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the launch represents a "major step forward" for the storied daily he publishes.
According to Sulzberger, "It will allow us to develop new sources of revenue to strengthen our ability to continue our journalistic mission as well as undertake digital innovations that will enable us to provide you with high-quality journalism on whatever device you choose".
The use of the word "will", of course, may be a bit too strong. The NYT's pay wall will do all of those things only if readers open up their wallets.
Given that the NYT pay wall has so many holes in it that it has been labeled a pay fence by some observers, just how much digital subscriptions will boost the NYT's top and bottom lines remains to be seen.
But in launching its pay wall, there can be no doubt: the NYT has apparently performed a miracle. As noted by Harvard's Philip Greenspun, the NYT seems to have found a way to spend a whopping $40-50m building it.
From Greenspun's blog:
Google was financed with $25m. The New York Times already had a credit card processing system for selling home delivery. It already had a database management system for keeping track of Web site registrants.
What did they spend the $40-50 million on? A monster database server to keep track of which readers downloaded how many articles?
He mentions his own experience of building a pay wall back in 1995 for MIT Press. The cost? "I can't remember exactly what I charged the Press, but it was only a few days of work and I think the invoice worked out to approximately $40m less than $40m," Greenspun writes.
Assuming that the $40-50m figure, which has been reported by multiple media outlets, is correct, it may serve as one of the most powerful highlights of the real problem newspapers like the NYT face: inherently flawed economics.
Put simply, many struggling newspapers don't just have a revenue problem, they have a spending problem.
To be sure, journalism is expensive. Newspapers can't simply fire their top reporters, or drive them away with unlivable wages.
But at a time when the cost of developing software and hosting it has generally decreased, it's difficult to fathom how the NYT could have spent anywhere close to $40m building its not-so-impenetrable pay wall, even if we try to rationalize that this might have included the implementation of a new enterprise content management system.
Again, assuming that this isn't an inaccurate rumor that spread to the mainstream media without correction by the NYT, it appears that the NYT may have a long road ahead of it even if its new pay wall generates revenue hand over fist.
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All lines had their characteristics and idiosyncrasies. The Great Western, even up to nationalization, was always rather superior in its attitude, and let you know it, although third-class passengers were latterly no longer regarded with distaste. Even a train running late always managed to look as if, by some chance, it was meant to be late. The Great Eastern excelled in its dining-car arrangements, a point admitted also about the Midland by those who otherwise made derogatory remarks about it. The London & South Western called itself the Royal Road, and the London & North Western considered it was the Premier Line, an opinion not shared by all its customers, but it was good on punctuality. The South Eastern had a reputation (not entirely deserved) for never running anything at all on time, together with trains of so many different shapes and sizes of rolling stock that -- they looked rather like the battlements of a castle. The same thing applied to the tough Highland Railway -- it had to be tough in view of the weather conditions it sometimes faced; but their late running was always the fault of the connexions with the lines from the south wheret in fact, most of the rolling stock came from. The wellknown occasion, August 7th, 1888, when the Inverness train left Perth with 37 carriages belonging to ten different companies, was not uncommon at that time of the year. The Great Central was a branch of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway. The North Eastern branch lines were known for the paucity of their passenger trains. But they were all real railways with real steam locomotives, and all photogenic. Each company had, and still has, its admirers, even those companies that might be described loosely as the comic turns. [no pagination]
Spence, Jeoffry. Victorian and Edwardian Railways from Old Photographs. London: B.T. Batsford, 1975.
Last modified 27 June 2003
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The lake-belt city, Buffalo, which has magnificent architectural heritage but has lost more than half of its population, is in the process of clearing away six decades of zoning bureacracy to move to a more sustainable and streamlined Green Code, expected to be up for adoption in 2013. Better! Cities & Towns explains this project in detail in the December 2012 issue. The city took a “tabula rasa” approach to the zoning, rewriting it from scratch. The Byzantine layers of the current code are based on old planning ideology, city planner Chris Hawley explains. Concepts like form-based codes, the Transect, the current thinking on parking regulations, and ideas dealing with sustainability are relatively new. “You can’t turn a typewriter into an iPhone,” he says of the city’s 1953 zoning ordinance, advising: “If it is broken, don’t fix it, throw it away.”
A mixed-use zone as depicted in Buffalo's Green Code, in the planning process
A sketch for a neighborhood green in Buffalo's Green Code
For more in-depth coverage:
• Subscribe to Better! Cities & Towns to read all of the articles (print+online) on implementation of greener, stronger, cities and towns.
• Get the December 2012 issue. Topics: Sprawl versus walkable: Housing study, Nashville code creates value, Wake up call from Sandy, Downtown Columbia, Smart growth at the polls, Buffalo code reform, Housing and driving costs, Comparing new urban and conventional development, NorthWest Crossing, Alexander's The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth
• Get New Urbanism: Best Practices Guide, packed with more than 800 informative photos, plans, tables, and other illustrations, this book is the best single guide to implementing better cities and towns.
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There is no advantage with using Java. Anything you can do with Java, you can do with PHP and other languages.
At one time many web gurus thought Java was going to be the dominant web programming language, but it is slow and is a resource pig.
Java works well for building internal (enterprise) corporate systems. IMHO, it is not a good choice for building web sites.
If you look into the history of Java, the language was originally developed to be used as a home controller. It was supposed to power an electronic home. It failed at that.
In the late 1990s, it was touted as the best programming language for the web. It failed at that.
It finally found a home with enterprise systems. It works well for that.
"It's inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians." -Henrik Ibsen
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The Walls Came Tumbling Down
||Garry K. Brantley, M.A., M.Div.
Jericho’s inhabitants watched the army of Israel circle their city each day for six days. On the seventh day, the Israelites marched around the city seven times. When the Israelites shouted and the priests blew their trumpets, those strong walls in which the Jerichoites placed such confidence crumbled like sand. Just as Egypt’s so-called gods were powerless against Yahweh, Jericho’s stately walls bowed before Him. Such is the biblical scenario of Jericho’s fate during the time of Joshua.
In the preliminary report of her extensive excavations at Jericho, archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon adduced a purely naturalistic explanation of the biblical story. She conjectured that, at the precise moment of Israel’s trumpet blasts and shouts, an earthquake fortuitously crumbled Jericho’s walls. In their religious naivete, the Israelites regarded this natural event as divine intervention on their behalf (Kenyon, 1957, p. 262).
Kenyon’s analyses demonstrate the status to which archaeology has been elevated in some circles. To many scholars, archaeology has become such a sophisticated scientific endeavor that they attach greater importance to archaeological interpretations than to biblical information. Accordingly, if archaeology cannot prove it, we are asked to suspend judgment on the integrity of a given biblical text.
Yet, archaeology can do only so much. Though it provides some valuable information regarding culture in biblical times, and has illuminated the biblical text in many unexpected ways, archaeology is woefully inadequate to address questions of theology. It is true that archaeological investigations often have confirmed biblical historicity. Bryant G. Wood, for example, has extensively analyzed the evidence from Jericho and concluded that the data are consistent with biblical information regarding Jericho’s destruction (see Wood, 1987; 1990). Such evidence does confirm the historical reliability of the Bible—something we would expect from a divinely inspired document. Archaeology, however, cannot determine Who caused Jericho’s walls to fall. It is by faith that we acknowledge divine causes in human history. And it is by such faith that we know that at God’s command, the walls of Jericho came tumbling down.
Kenyon, Kathleen (1957), Digging Up Jericho: The Results of the Jericho Excavations 1952-1956 (New York: Praeger).
Wood, Bryant G. (1987), “Uncovering the Truth at Jericho,” Archaeology and Biblical Research, Premiere Issue, pp. 6-16, Autumn.
Wood, Bryant G. (1990), “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?: A New Look at the Archaeological Evidence,” Biblical Archaeology Review, 16:44-58, March/April.
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Join us on Monday, February 13th at 4pm for a fun tween program that combines Black History Month and Valentine's Day. Tweens can make Valentine's Day cards and sample some pink peanut butter pie in honor of George Washington Carver who pioneered many new uses for peanuts. Tweens can hang out, make cards, learn about Carver and eat pie.
Hope to see you there!
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How big is the SEO industry on the Internet? Really big, according to a new infographic by Spanish-based SEO service provider BlueCaribu.
In fact, the infographic reveals that 3.5 people look up the term “SEO” on Google each second and 9.1 million web users are digging up information on the topic each month.
People are getting their information about search engine optimization (SEO) from a variety of ways. There are 863 million websites worldwide that mention the term “SEO” and 164,000 YouTube videos are indexed with the topic.
Los Angeles may be the number one city in the U.S. to search for SEO, but India is the top country with an interest on SEO strategy, followed by Pakistan and the Phillipines. The U.S. is ranked fourth, while Canada snagged the fifth spot.
Other fun facts about SEO is that March is the most popular month to search for the term and Thursday is the most popular day of the week to do so.
How often do you search for SEO on the Internet? What are some of your favorite resources? Let us know in the comments below.
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$150M Long Beach plan takes step forward
GalleriesSandy photos around Long Beach Aerial photos of superstorm Sandy damage LI's Sandy deaths: A look at the victims
The Army Corps has proposed to build a dune nearly 16 feet above sea level stretching the length of Long Beach's shoreline, rehabilitate the island's protective groins, and raise the island's beloved beach by as much as 5 feet.
"We're ready to move forward and make this project happen," Long Beach Public Works Commissioner Jim LaCarrubba said.
Superstorm Sandy devastated Long Beach, causing an estimated $250 million in damage. The beach lost 3 million cubic feet of sand during the storm.
Federal officials have promised 100 percent funding of a storm protection plan for Long Beach, City Manager Jack Schnirman said.
Some residents who spoke at Long Beach's City Council meeting were skeptical of the project. The City Council rejected an Army Corps beach protection plan in 2006 after many residents opposed it.
Some speakers said they feared the dune project would take up too much of the beach. Others said the city's bay side also needs protection. The city is working with federal officials to get money for the Army Corps to study the bay side, officials said.
"Everything I know and love about Long Beach would be radically changed by this plan," said Veronica Gilligan.
Hempstead Supervisor Kate Murray called the town's support of the Army Corps project "unwavering." The town board voted 6-0 for the measure. Councilman Gary Hudes was not present at the meeting.
"We believe this will protect the island barrier communities and business districts for the next 50 years," Murray said.
The local approvals are crucial to the process, Army Corps spokesman Chris Gardner said.
"Public support is critical to a project like this," Gardner said.
The new protective dune would peak at 151/2 feet above sea level, 11/2 feet lower than the expected height of Long Beach's rebuilt boardwalk, city officials said. The new boardwalk is planned as part of a different city project.
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You are hereApparitions
Built in 1977 (whilst Britain still governed Hong Kong) the Tuen Mun Road was one of Hong Kongs first high speed roads, linking Tuen Mon and Tsuen Wan. The road apparently has a high volume of accidents and has acquired a reputation of being haunted by the ghosts of those who have died on it. Read More »
On Sunday 19th June 1966 a retired couple from Canada captured an extraordinary image on camera whilst visiting the Queens House in Greenwich. They took what is arguably the best known apparent photograph of a ghost. But this photograph is not the only piece of evidence that suggests The Queens House is haunted. Read More »
This 12th century castle hotel is said to be haunted by an aparition of a Green Lady. Tulloch Castle also has an actual tunnel that runs from it's basement to Dingwall Castle on the other side of town. Parts of the tunnel have collapsed and it is no longer in use.
Two Haunted Counties - A Ghost Hunter's Companion to Bedfordshire & Hertfordshire by Tony Broughall & Paul Adams
As it says on the back cover of the book, a twelfth century Gilbertine priory, a Chrysler car factory, a de-sanctified church and a Georgian period lavatory are just a few of the haunted localities from the case files of 1970s ghost buster Tony Broughall. Read More »
Elias Owen gives the following account of a reputed haunting in his 'Welsh Folk-lore' (1887). It would be interesting to know whether any reports of an apparition are still made from this area. Read More »
Between Uniondale and Willowmore, in the semi-desert area of the Karoo there is a very well known story about a phantom hitchhiking girl called Maria. On 12th April 1968 there was a car accident on the N9 road to Willowmore, near the town of Uniondale. The car, a Volkswagen Beetle, was occupied by a young off duty Air Force Lieutenant and his fiancé who was asleep on the back seat. Read More »
In 'The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain' (1897), John Ingram gives the following account of a haunting associated with Canongate in Edinburgh. Named after the Augustine canons of Holyrood Abbey, Canongate can be found at the lower eastern part of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh and the mansion referred to is according Ingram no longer standing. Read More »
On 7th December 1941 the US Pacific Fleet was attacked in Pearl Harbour by aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy, bringing the United States of America into World War II. The attack lasted 90 minutes and resulted in the loss of 2,386 American lives and wounding a further 1,139. Read More »
The old Roman road called Chute Causeway, is said to be haunted by a pastor who abandoned the villagers of Vernham Dean to die during the Black Death in 1665. Read More »
The following article entitled ‘Yard was foreman's favourite haunt’ appeared in the Shields Gazette on Tuesday 19 June 2007 and concerns a ghost that haunted the Elswick facilities of the Vickers Armstrong Ltd a manufacturer of aircraft, artillery, ships and military vehicles.
Read More »
In the past staff of this hotel claimed to have seen a shadowy shape on the stairs. The site of the hotel used to have a house upon it, which was reputedly haunted and connected to a murder.
The Point (Canvey Point) is reputedly haunted by a phantom Viking. Raymond Lamont Brown in his 'Phantoms Legends, Customs and Superstitions Of The Sea (1972)' described the ghost as being '6 feet tall, fierce looking, with a beard and long moustaches.' He goes on to say that 'Wildfowlers and fishermen who have seen him say that he wears a horned helmet and jerkin of coarse leather. Read More »
In AD60 or 61AD the final battle between the Romans and the rebel Briton's led by Boudica (or Boudicca or Boadicea) was fought and is known as the Battle of Watling Street (or Battle of Paulerspury). No one actually knows where this battle described as being ‘being approached by a narrow defile with a wood at the back and a plain in the front ‘ by Tacitcus took place. Read More »
Walpole House on Chiswick Mall was the home of the courtesan Barbara Palmer, 1st Duchess of Cleveland, Countess of Castlemaine (Barbara Villiers) (born November 1640 – died 9 October 1709), former mistress of King Charles II (29 May 1630 – 6 February 1685). Read More »
Wanstead Park is reputedly haunted by Catherine Tylney-Long (born 2 October 1789 – died 12 September 1825) who was once the richest woman in England (excluding Royalty) and lost everything due to her husband and his excessive lifestyle. Read More »
As Wasdale had no church early in its history, the deceased had to be carried over the fells to Eskdale for internment, and this route became known as the corpse road. This is haunted by the ghost of a horse carrying the body of woman tied to it. Read More »
Washington Old Hall is a small 17th century manor owned by the National Trust and is reputedly haunted by a woman in a grey dress. Although not the original building, it is the ancestral home of George Washington's (first President of the United States) family though they then moved to Sulgrave Manor around1613. Read More »
In the 1876 book entitled ‘History of the Fylde of Lancashire’ by John Porter, reference is made to an extensive barrow or cairn near Weeton Lane Heads which was accidentally opened. This burial chamber had the reputation of being haunted by a boggart or hairy ghost. Read More »
The castle, built by the Wemyss family, is said to be haunted by the ghost of a Green Lady, whose identity is unknown. Read More »
The ghost of a Cavalier has been seen close to the West Walls early some mornings, though I am unaware of anyone seeing him recently. The West Walls are the last remaining example of Carlisle's defensive wall that encircled the early city. They served the city well especially during the Civil War when Carlisle was besieged by Cromwell's soldiers during 1644 and 1645. Read More »
A ghostly woman attired in a red dress has been seen crossing the road near here. She is allegedly the ghost of a young woman who died 2 weeks before her wedding day in 1776. She was last seen in 1943.
Directions: To the North of Lane End off the B482.
Whitby is associated with a wealth of traditions and legends. The abbey, now a guant ruin, was built in 651AD and destroyed in a Danish raid in 870AD, it was reconstructed by the Benedictines in the 11th Century. At one time crowds used to gather at the West side of Whitby churchyard, where there was clear view of the North side of the abbey and the highest window. Read More »
Whitby Abbey is one of the most atmospheric locations in England. The desolate ruins stand stark above steep cliffs overlooking the old whaling village of Whitby in North Yorkshire, a testament to the town's former religious significance. Read More »
The White Hart is said to be haunted by the ghost of a young man who was murdered while fighting off a press gang. He is thought to have died at the bottom of the stairs, where the figure of a man has been seen with a look of terror on his face.
In the years around 1830 the area surrounding the Shooters Hill and the Well Hall Road junction was said to be haunted by strange “unaccountable noises” and the apparition of a white lady. The haunting was thought be some to be connected to the skeleton of an unidentified female skeleton unearthed by a labourer on 10 June 1844. The woman had a long golden hair and a fractured skull. Read More »
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CHICAGO (AP) -- It turns out you can recycle just about anything these days -- even kidneys and other organs donated for transplant.
In Chicago recently, a transplanted kidney that was failing was removed from a patient while he was still alive, and given to someone else.
It's believed to be the first documented case of its kind in the U.S.
There have been other cases of transplant organs being used more than once, but they were rare and involved instances in which the first recipient died.
A Northwestern University transplant specialist says the need for transplanted kidneys "doesn't match our capacity." He says "people die on dialysis" while awaiting kidneys.
A research letter describing the re-transplant appears in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The patient who was initially given the kidney -- taken from his sister -- is back on dialysis. The kidney was removed from him after the same disease that ruined his own kidneys started to damage the new one. He's expected to get another transplant eventually.
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‘Malala’s Tempest Of Darkness & Light‘, released by Mira Sound Germany on Audio Single and DVD, is Michel Montecrossa’s New-Topical-Song dedicated to the Pakistani girl Malala Yousafzai who was nearly shot to death by the Taliban and her battle for her freedom to receive education, to have her future and to live in a good world.
Michel Montecrossa says about ‘Malala’s Tempest Of Darkness & Light’:
“The future is young, it is not old. Malala Yousafzai is a young girl from Pakistan fighting for her freedom to receive education, to have her future and to live in a good world. For that she was nearly shot to death by Taliban. But it is the young who are the future of us all, not the merciless old. The young are the new, the progress, the unexpected, the free. They must be protected, helped, brought to fulfillment if human civilization, humanity itself wants to survive.
Malala has become a poignant symbol for this battle of the living future against the remnants of a dying past who doesn’t want to go.
When the older generations become the killers of our own youth they must know that no power of the world can stand against the power of a young soul’s victory light of intelligence and freedom.
To this victorious light I dedicate my New-Topical-Song ‘Malala’s Tempest Of Darkness & Light’ as a prayer for her quick recovery and a happy tomorrow.”
MALALA’S TEMPEST OF DARKNESS & LIGHT
SONG FOR MALALA YOUSAFZAI FIGHTING FOR HER FUTURE
Malala Yousafzai is a young girl from Pakistan / fighting for her life and fighting for freedom of education / and for her future…
When they mistreated her light of intelligence, / mistreated the light of her soul, / when they mistreated her simple confidence, / the understanding of hope, / then, I say, they brought darkness and the fall.
When they mistreat the balance of harmony, / lead people away from the goal, / turn the simple into the blood of misery, / turn the warm into the cold, / then, I say, this is darkness of the old.
When they mistreat the cycles of life, / cheat the meaning, the true gold, / when they mistreat, the right with the wrong, / become a danger for the young, / then, I say, this is the darkness and is not at all strong.
When they sell kids to hell, / mistreat everything that helps, / lead people into unhappiness / and have no conscience at all, / then, I say, this is the darkness of the death of their soul.
When you stand upright in the light of your soul, / in the light of intelligence and truth that knows / and do the good action of love for all, / the one thing important for reaching the goal, / then, I say, this is the victory light of Malala’s soul, / the victory light, saving us all. / The victory light of Malala’s soul.
Lyrics & Music: Michel Montecrossa © Mira Sound Germany
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The situation in Syria continues to deteriorate, almost to the point that many observers are warning that the country is destined for a civil war. The divisions in the country go far beyond the political differences that have existed in Syria since the country was created after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War One. When there are significant defections from the Syrian armed forces and attacks on Syrian military installations, there is the potential for the breakdown of civil authority and the descent into a civil war between two defined groups, or a complete breakdown and the evolution of anarchy. In Syria, I suspect it will be the former. It may be the refusal of the al-Asad regime to deal with the international community that eventually leads to its demise. Every week there are reports of new defections from the Syrian armed forces to the Free Syrian Army (logo left*), the major in-country opposition group. These former Syrian military personnel have the weapons and training to create real problems for the regime.
For those of us who have lived in the country and observed it first hand, it comes as no surprise that the government and various segments of the population are so far apart. When I was assigned to the American Embassy as the air attache, it was evident that there were huge divisions between the rulers and the ruled, the exploiters and the exploited, those on the inside and the rest of the country.
In an academic paradigm, the divisions are moot points. In the reality of the current situation on the streets of Syria's cities, the divisions take on serious meanings. The willingness of an oppressed population to demonstrate against - and confront - a government that shows no remorse in using troops backed by armor and artillery only tells me that the country is indeed headed for a civil war.
One thing is clear to me: President Bashar al-Asad will not step down. No combination of western, United Nations or the imminent Arab League sanctions will convince him that a voluntary abdication is a viable course of action. If Bashar is to be removed from power, it will be after much more bloodshed and civil strife in the country. Should Bashar al-Asad be removed, it will also be the death knell for the position of his corrupt 'Alawi clans.
More important than the removal of the 'Alawi clans from power, the downfall of Bashar al-Asad will also spell the end of secular socialist Ba'th Party. The Ba'th Party has been in power for over four decades, and while almost universally regarded as nothing more than "'Alawi, Inc." or "The al-Asad Corporation," it does maintain a stance against rising Islamic fundamentalism in the country. That one fact is key to the support the al-Asad regime enjoys among a significant portion of the Sunni and Christian Arab members of the population. Many Syrians fear that the demise of the al-Asad family and the Ba'th Party will lead to an Islamic fundamentalist government in Syria. These Syrians prefer "the devil you know" to the specter of an Islamic republic.
Thus far, nothing has altered the behavior of the al-Asad regime. Sanctions imposed by the United States and European nations have had little effect. That is not surprising since Syria has been somewhat of a pariah nation for decades. The threat of Arab League sanctions carries a bit more weight, but in the end, Syria is no stranger to being estranged from its Arab brethren. In one of the longest and bloodiest wars in modern history, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, Syria alone among the Arab countries sided with Persian Iran against Arab Iraq.
While virtually all Arab states were materially, financially or morally supporting Iraq, Syria provided access to its airbases for Iranian aircraft conducting attacks against targets in Iraq. Given the fact that Syria's major trading partners are countries in the European Union and its major export to those countries is oil, I doubt the threat of sanctions from the Arab League will have any real impact on the al-Asad regime. Yes, it acts concerned about the opinions of the Arab League, but in the end will stand alone against its Arab brethren. It really has no choice.
During the initial period of the uprising, the majority of the demonstrators were civilians across the country - there was no coherent, organized opposition. Now we have the Free Syrian Army appealing to soldiers to defect to the opposition, with some effect. Outside the country, the Syrian National Council (SNC) is the leading opposition group. According to most analysts of things Syrian - including me - the SNC is basically the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yes, that is the same al-ikhwan al-muslimin that has gained the upper hand in Tunisia and Egypt, will likely be the key power broker in Libya, and is on the rise in Morocco and Algeria. North Africa is becoming a victory story for the Brotherhood, which comes as no surprise - many of the Islamists captured or killed fighting for al-Qa'idah throughout the Middle East and South Asia are from the area stretching from Morocco to Egypt.
Note also that the SNC is based in Turkey. The current Turkish government is headed by an Islamist prime minister (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) and cabinet, much to the chagrin of the generally secular Turks. The Turkish government has been the primary supporter of the SNC. Since the SNC is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, this alliance should come as no surprise, but I get the impression that not many people are connecting those dots.
Will the Turks assist the Free Syrian Army and/or the Syrian National Council with money and equipment (diplo-speak for weapons)? If the situation gets worse, I think they will. The Turks are already providing a moral and political support. However, if they move to the next level, they need to be prepared for the Syrians to renew their material and safe haven support to the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). In the past, when the Turks reduced the flow of the Euphrates River to the legal minimum, that action shut down many of the electrical generating turbines at the Tabaqah dam. The Syrians would then allow the PKK to launch cross border raids into southern Turkey.
The rise of the Free Syrian Army increases the probability of a civil war. The defectors from the Syrian army not only have access to weapons, they have inside knowledge of the regime's armed forces. That inside knowledge contributed to the group's successful ambush of a group of Syrian air force pilots on the the Homs-Palmyra road last week. The group claims that they killed eight "elite" pilots from the airbase at Tiyas; I assume they were assigned to the 819th squadron that flies the Su-24 (NATO: FENCER) fighter bomber. There is nothing else at Tiyas that could be construed as elite.
Given the refusal of the al-Asad regime to act like part of the international community of nations, and the ride of opposition groups both inside and outside the country, it appears that a civil war is almost becoming inevitable. The upside is the removal of the al-Asad regime and the Ba'th Party. The downside is the bloodshed and probable rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It's a tough call - which is better? A secular Syria allied with Iran under the Ba'th Party and President Bashar al-Asad, or Syria dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood? I guess it depends on who you ask.
* In the image of the Free Syrian Army and in the image at the top of this article, the flag (on which the logo is based) is not the current Syrian flag, although it does comprise the common Arab (and Muslim) colors of red, white, black and green. The flag dates back to 1932 and is unofficially called the "flag of independence" because it was the flag in use when Syria achieved independence from the French Mandate on April 17, 1946. It was used until 1958, making it the longest used flag in Syrian history. It is considered a symbol of protest against the Ba'th Party and the al-Asad regime.
It may be the refusal of the al-Asad regime to deal with the international community that eventually leads to its demise. Every week there are reports of new defections from the Syrian armed forces to the Free Syrian Army (logo left*), the major in-country opposition group. These former Syrian military personnel have the weapons and training to create real problems for the regime.
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Dictionary and translator for handheld
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Lettris is a curious tetris-clone game where all the bricks have the same square shape but different content. Each square carries a letter. To make squares disappear and save space for other squares you have to assemble English words (left, right, up, down) from the falling squares.
Boggle gives you 3 minutes to find as many words (3 letters or more) as you can in a grid of 16 letters. You can also try the grid of 16 letters. Letters must be adjacent and longer words score better. See if you can get into the grid Hall of Fame !
Change the target language to find translations.
Tips: browse the semantic fields (see From ideas to words) in two languages to learn more.
Kanto Auto Works
The Toyota Corolla is one of a line of subcompact and compact cars manufactured by the Japanese automaker Toyota, which has become very popular throughout the world since the nameplate was first introduced in 1966. In 1997, the Corolla became the best selling nameplate in the world, surpassing the Volkswagen Beetle. Over 39 million Corollas have been sold as of 2012. The series has undergone several major redesigns.
The name Corolla is part of Toyota's naming tradition of using the name Crown for primary models: the Corona, for example, gets its name from the Latin for crown; Corolla is Latin for small crown; and Camry is an Anglicized pronunciation of the Japanese for crown, kanmuri.
Corollas are manufactured in Japan and in Brazil (Indaiatuba, São Paulo), Canada (Cambridge, Ontario), China (Tianjin), India (Bangalore), Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, South Africa (Durban), Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Venezuela. Production has previously been made in Australia (Victoria) and the United Kingdom (Derbyshire). Production in the United States (Fremont, California) ended in March 2010.
The Corolla's chassis designation code is "E", as described in Toyota's chassis and engine codes.
Early models were mostly rear-wheel drive, later models were mostly front-wheel drive and some models were four-wheel drive. Its traditional competitor almost from the very beginning has been the Nissan Sunny also introduced the same year as the Corolla in Japan.
A slightly upmarket version called the Sprinter was sold in the Japanese home market, and sold at a different Toyota Japan dealership sales channel called in 1966 Toyota Auto. It was replaced in 2001 by the Allex, which was then replaced by the Blade in 2009. In Japan, the Corolla has always been exclusive to Japanese retail sales chain called Toyota Corolla Store, which was previously established in 1961, called Toyota Public Store, selling the Toyota Publica.
There have also been several models over the years, intcluding the Corolla Ceres (and similar Sprinter Marino) hardtop, Corolla Levin and Sprinter Trueno sports coupés and hatchbacks, and the Corolla FX hatchback, which became the Corolla RunX, while the Sprinter became the Allex with the introduction of the ZZE128 Corolla. The RunX and Allex was replaced by the Auris in 2006 (known only as Corolla in markets outside of Japan). A compact MPV named the Corolla Verso has also been released in European markets. Its Japanese counterpart is the Corolla Spacio, which has been discontinued as of the 10th generation. The Corolla Rumion is also sold in the US-market as the Scion xB.
Over many years, there have been rebadged versions of the Corolla, sold by General Motors, including the 1980s' Holden Nova of Australia, and the Sprinter-based Chevrolet Nova, Chevrolet Prizm, and Geo Prizm (in the United States). The Corolla liftback (TE72) of Toyota Australia was badged as simply the T-18. The five-door liftback was sold with the Corolla Seca name in Australia and the nameplate survived on successive five-door models.
The Daihatsu Charmant was produced with the E30 through E70 series.
The Tercel was a front wheel drive car, first introduced in 1980 and was called the Corolla Tercel then, and later given its own name in 1984. The Corolla has made crashes in the past reguarding issues.
The Tercel chassis was also used for the Corolla II hatchback in Japan.
The first Corolla generation was introduced in October 1966 with the new 1100 cc K pushrod engine. The Corolla Sprinter was introduced as the fastback version in 1968, and exclusive to a Toyota Japan dealership retail outlet called Toyota Auto Store.
In May 1970, the E20 was restyled with a more rounded body and the 1400 cc T and 1600 cc 2T OHV engines were added to the range. The now mutually exclusive Corolla and Sprinter names were used to differentiate between two slightly different treatments of sheet metal and trim. The Corolla Levin and Sprinter Trueno names were introduced as the twin-cam version of the Corolla and Sprinter respectively when a DOHC version of the 2T engine was introduced in March 1972.
April 1974 brought rounder, bigger and heavier Corollas and Sprinters. The range was rounded out with the addition of a two-door liftback. The Corollas were given E30 codes while the Sprinters were given E40 codes. A face-lift in March 1976 saw most Corolla E30 models replaced by equivalent E50 models and most Sprinter E40 models were replaced by equivalent E60 models.
A major restyle in March 1979 brought a square edged design. The Corollas had a simpler treatment of the grill, headlights and taillights while the Sprinter used a slightly more complex, sculptured treatment. The new A series engines were added to the range as a running change. This was the last model to use the K "hicam" and T series engines. The 3rd wasn't ALL THAT popular. Chinese people began selling the Toyota's to junk wreckers and getting money for it.
A sloping front bonnet and a contemporary sharp-edged, no-frills style was brought in during May 1983. The new 1839 cc 1C diesel engine was added to the range with the E80 Series. From 1985, re-badged E80 Corollas were sold in the U.S. as the fifth generation Chevrolet Nova.
Most models now used the front wheel drive layout except the AE85 and AE86, which were to be the last Corollas offered in the rear wheel drive or FR layout. The AE85 and AE86 chassis codes were also used for the Sprinter (including the Sprinter Trueno). The Sprinter was nearly identical to the Corolla, differing only by minor body styling changes such as pop-up headlights.
A somewhat more rounded and aerodynamic style was used for the E90 introduced in May 1987. Overall this generation has a more refined feel tghan older Corollas and other older subcompacts. Most models were now front wheel drive, along with a few 4WD All-Trac models. Many engines were used on a wide array of trim levels and models, ranging from the 1.3 liter 2E to the 165 horsepower (123 kW) supercharged 4A-GZE. The E90 Corolla was also rebadged and sold as the Geo Prizm (US) or Holden Nova (Australia).
In June 1991 Corollas received a redesign to be larger, heavier, and have the completely rounded, aerodynamic shape of the 1990s. The Corolla was now in the compact class, rather than subcompact, and the coupe still available known as Corolla Levin AE101.
May 1995 saw a complete redesign for the Corolla. Evolutionary technological improvements continued, however, and in 1998, for the first time, some non-Japanese Corollas received the new 1ZZ-FE engine. The new engine was the first in a Toyota to have an aluminum engine block and aluminum cylinder heads, which made this generation lighter than the E100 Corolla. The model range began to change as Toyota decided styling differences would improve sales in different markets. This generation was delayed in North America until mid 1997 (US 1998 model year), where it had unique front and rear styling. Europe and Australasia received versions of their own as well.
In November 2000, the ninth-generation Corolla was introduced in Japan, with edgier styling and more technology to bring the nameplate into the 21st century. It is also called the Corolla Altis in the ASEAN region. The station wagon model is called the Corolla Fielder in Japan. The North American release was delayed until March 2002 (2003 MY).
The tenth generation of the Corolla was introduced in October 2006. Japanese markets called it the Corolla Axio, with the ASEAN markets retaining the Corolla Altis branding. The station wagon retains the Corolla Fielder name. The Corolla Altis and Corolla Axio have a different appearance. The North American release was delayed until January 2008 (2009 MY).
The eleventh generation of the Corolla went on sale in Japan in May 2012. The sedan is named the Corolla Axio while the wagon is called the Corolla Fielder. In Japan, both are made by a Toyota subsidiary, Central Motors, in Miyagi prefecture, Japan. The redesigned model has slightly smaller exterior dimensions and is easier to drive in narrow alleys and parking lots for the targeted elderly consumers.
The new Corolla Axio is available with either a 1.3-liter 1NR-FE or 1.5-liter 1NZ-FE four cylinder engines; front or all-wheel drive. Both 5-speed manual and CVT transmissions are offered. The 1.3-liter engine and all-wheel drive variants are available only with the CVT transmission. The Corolla Fielder is available with 1.5-liter 1NZ-FE or 1.8-liter 2ZR-FAE four cylinder engines mated with a CVT transmission. The 1.5-liter is available with front and all-wheel drive, the 1.8-liter is offered only in front-wheel drive.
In Australia, Corolla models built between 1986 and 2006 were assessed in the Used Car Safety Ratings 2008:
The US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety rated the 1998-2002 models as "Acceptable" in their 40 mph (64 km/h) frontal offset crash test. Initial 2003 models had an overall "Good" rating, but received a "Marginal" on left foot injury protection. A rebuild beginning December 2002, which continues through to the 2008 model, gives the Corolla a "Good" rating in all aspects of the test. Corolla models from model year 2005 to 2008 with optional side curtain air bags received an "Acceptable" rating in the side impact crash test, largely due to a "Marginal" rating in structure/safety cage design. Otherwise, injury protection ratings for driver and rear passenger were all good except for driver pelvis/leg injury protection, which was "Acceptable". The Corolla from model year 2009 to present with standard side curtain air bags received a "Good" rating in both the frontal offset and side impact crash test.
Euro NCAP ratings are as follows:
|Euro NCAP test results|
|E150 4-door sedan (1998)|
|Euro NCAP test results|
|ZZE120 1.4 5-door hatchback RHD (2002)|
|Euro NCAP test results|
|E150 4-door sedan (2007)|
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Toyota Corolla|
|Awards and achievements|
Mitsubishi Lancer Evo V
Rally Car Of The Year
Ford Focus WRC
|« previous — Toyota road car timeline, North American market, 1980s–present|
|Starlet||Corolla FX||Prius c|
|Cressida||Cressida||Cressida||Cressida||Camry Solara||Camry Solara|
|Sport compact||Corolla GT-S|
|Sports||Celica Supra||Celica Supra||Supra||Supra|
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Holiday in UK shows Peak Oil decline is well on its way
Holidaying in Britain, the country of my birth from which I emigrated nearly 30 years ago, thoughts of sustainable planet were giving way to visits to the pub, fish and chips and long walks in the countryside. Not for long. Wherever I look I see Britain is about to enter a period of deep crisis the root of the problem soaring oil prices as production has peaked.
Maybe it’s because I have been writing about the crisis of sustainability for over five years, maybe it’s because I see this country of my birth with other eyes having lived away so long. But I am in a country sliding into the downturn of the industrial age. All the signs are plain to see. So plain, in fact that the newspaper reports over the space of three days are sufficient to chronicle the start of the inevitable slide into irrecoverable erosion of way of life for Brits and others around the planet.
THE TIMES Monday July 19 2008
Farmers ready to cash in on soaring land prices
The gist: Farm land prices have gone from Per hectare price of 6828 pounds per hectare in late 2005 to currently 12,965. Farmers are more than willing to sell as they are feeling the squeeze from rising costs of fuel and fertiliser.
Also from the same newspaper:
Hungry miners reap rich harvest from potash - the latest must have mineral
The gist: Potash, the potassium containing mineral, has risen from under 100 hundred usd in 1993 to nearly 700 USD/ton this year. Potassium is an essential component of fertiliser. Prices can only rise and push food prices further up.
Cheap flights boom runs out of runway
The gist: the age of budget flights is coming to an end.
Developments are about to price more than five million Brits out of the budget holiday market fares going to go up and will do so for the foreseeable future.
Analysts expect some airlines to be pushed into bankruptcy or be bought by larger rivals.
THE TIMES Monday 25th July 2008
Energy Firms 'conspire to raise prices'
The gist: a report claims that minimum of competition has kept prices too high over the last few years, and that the rise in wholesale price of energy will result in millions of Brits unable to pay their energy bill.
Prices of energy paid by industry is above European levels already and is putting thousands of jobs in manufacturing at a risk.
Energy suppliers are signaling further price rises which is fuelling inflation and creating real concerns of the negative impact on the economy starting a vicious downward spiral in the economy.
THE TIMES Wednesday July 30 2008
Mortgage market paralysis will last for at least three years says Crosby.
The gist A report for the government by Sir James Crosby on the mortgage situation highlights how banks are unwilling to give mortgage loans for house purchase, and this is crippling the housing market as well.
The crunch in credit will give rise to defaults on repossessions.
The level of July is 70% lower than the equivalent period in the previous year.
Comment: TV commentators cite the report as evidence that the mortgage system is broken. If that's broken the engine that pumps money into the economy is too. Goodbye business as usual.
Retail sales slide at their worst rate for 25 years.
The gist; Sales during July are at their worst for 25 years. They believe consumers are reining in their spending in the face of seriously squeezed purchasing power.
THE TIMES Thursday July 31 20008
Millions face 100 pound a month fuel bills
The gist: coming hike of 35% on gas and 9% on electricity will put millions more into fuel poverty - over 5 million.
THE TIMES Thursday July 31
Work until you are 70.
The gist: 100 years after the introduction of state pensions, Britain is facing a crisis. With rising prices, longer lifespan and smaller percentage of the population working, the size of pension money is going to shrink, leaving many of the aged living in poverty and retirement age rising to 70.
THE TIMES Wednesday August 6 2008
Double decline in services and industry puts Britain on the brink of recession
The gist: Economists report the economy is grinding to a halt based on official figures showing manufacturing output fell for the fourth quarter in a row, and overall output fell in services for the third month in a row.
Other signs: wherever we go we see ”For Sale” signs outside houses. And my brother in law just came back form meeting an old friend, a building contractor. After 19 years he is forced to close the business down. There is just not the work for him or his employees.
So there it is, the whole drama of the counter-sustainable rut the nation is in, and the impending long emergency they all teeter on, is being played out, in news reports in the press and in front of me. There was even a TV drama ” Burn Up” about Peak Oil.
Unable to fuel the lifestyle that has grown up post-war with cheap energy, and with the money printing machine of home loans broken, the country is staring economic recession in the face.
This is not just a dip in a normal economic cycle, it is the signs that the country is in such serious difficulty that radical changes are called for before it gets worse.
Britain has enjoyed a long period of economic prosperity, partly endowed by the gift of North Sea oil and gas. Even during this period poverty, homelessness and were not addressed. Admittedly the Labour government addressed fairness issues, but if they were unable to succeed as government coffers were filed with tax income who can they be expected to succeed now. Now the situation is getting acute as millions face poverty.
They are now alone. I fear the same events are playing out in my new home, Sweden.
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Homeopathy in Bangladesh
Since the British period homeopathy has been spread in the Indian sub-continent. For about 100 years homeopathy is existing in this sub-continent. Bangladesh became independent in 1971. Since then an undertermined number of homeopathic doctors are rendering homeopathic treatment dedicating themselves to service of patients. Homeopathy act was passed before the liberation of Bangladesh and Homeopathy ordinance was passed in 1983. In 1972 Homeopathy Board was established. More than 41 Homeopathic Medical College in Bangladesh. Since then taking DHMS and BHMS degree every year a lot of homeopathic doctors are being engaged in this profession. About 30/40 percent people in the developing countries like Bangladesh take homeopathic treatment.
Narayanganj is called the Dandy of the East. Tanzim Homeopathy Medical College was established here in 1960. To the establishment of this medical college the vast experienced homeopathic doctors who contributed the most among them late Dr. Sadeque Hossain, Late Dr. Ehsanul Huque, Late Dr. Rezaur Rahman, Late Dr. Abul Hossain Laskar played the vital role.
I, Dr. Ashrafur Rahman, have been teaching in Tanzim Homeopathy Medical College since 1989 as a professor. At present besides teaching here I have been associating as an honorary being a founder member in the managing Committee. Being encouraged and inspired by my father famous homeopathic doctor Late Dr. Md. Rezaur Rahman I have been rendering treatment to the patient in my own organization Shahin Homeo Hall, established in 1956. Here patients treated with sincere care and poor patients are treated at free of cost.
Dr. Mohammed Ashrafur Rahman
Dr. Rezaur Rahman Homeopathic Foundation (DRRHF)
14, K.B. Saha Road, Kalirbazar
Narayanganj- 1400, Bangladesh.
Tel: +88-02-7644799 (c)
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Flex is a programming language developed on adobe technology to enhance the users capability in building rich internet applications. This latest adobe technology possesses all flash features. Flex is embedded with two languages MXML and Action Script respectively. Among all known scripting languages Action Script is one of them that comes along with Flex. Adobe Flex uses Sun’s Java Environment for developing Rich Internet applications (RIA’s). Flex coding is done with an XML based language known as MXML and like Flash applications, Flex codes too are compiled into a file having SWF format called ShockWave Flash files. These SWF files are executed with stand-alone Adobe’s Flash Players, and can also be directly executed in browsers that have Adobe Flash Player Plug-in installed.
For developing Flex applications, Adobe has launched Flex builder that works in Eclipse environment. Flex 3 builder is the latest and can be freely downloaded from Adobe’s official website. But building Flex applications on Flex builder in eclipse environment is a cumbersome job to perform, one reason is that eclipse is too slow that makes computers run slow, also lot of time is been taken in compilation. To get rid of this problem there is another way to compile Flex application which works on Apache Ant technology. Apache’s this technology is used to make a build.xml file that will be used later to call the flex compiler in deploying the flex application. You will get more to know after going through the tutorials presented below.
Flex coding involves two different languages MXML and ActionScript respectively.
MXML is an extended form of XML and therefore it is called an XML-based markup language. Program files coded with mxml language possess ‘.mxml’ extensions. MXML used along with ActionScript provide tags to devise GUI (graphical user interface) component and is also used to get access to data on servers. MXML facilitates its users with its data binding services. HTML and MXML both provide tags but the difference is that MXML consists of several new tags like TabNavigators and Accordions and many more that also enable users to get any web service connection. A MXML file is converted into a SWF file that runs on a Flash Player or on a browser which has Adobe Flash Player Plug-in installed in it.
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"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" goes the old saying. What looks great to me, might not be very appealing to you.
Most GNU/Linux distributions pick default images that are bland, inoffensive, and boring, all of which have their place, but we can do better. This article will look at making your GNU/Linux machine look beautiful.
Note: this article only covers KDE.
Screen wallpaper is one of those things we tend not to think about; the screen which gets quickly hidden with the "real" stuff: the web browsers, word processors and other actual applications. Improving it will really improve our computer image.
Wallpaper is a place where we can easily let our digital images shine. Alternatively this is a place where we can raid sources that are normally useless to GNU/Linux users, like some Microsoft Windows or Macintosh oriented websites. When it comes to images all our GNU/Linux machines care about is that we offer a .jpg.
While there are some great Microsoft Windows wallpaper sites, unfortunately some of the "free" image sites require you run Windows software. If a wallpaper website offers just a .jpg image file that look great to you, then grab the image and enjoy. If you find you are asked to download an .exe, or a .com file, then it is time to look elsewhere. Some wallpaper websites by default just show a little thumbnail image, that will look rotten when enlarged to full size, and you may need to hunt a bit for the full size version of the image.
If you do find an image on a wallpaper website that you want to use for background, it is easy to turn it into wallpaper. Put the mouse pointer over the image you want, click the left button on your mouse, and select "Save Image As...". You may have to note where the image is being saved to and under what name, as some websites default to some fairly odd names, and some browsers pick odd places to store images by default. You then will want to move the image to the folder
While KDE desktop can scale images up or down to match the current screen resolution, a 640 x 480 image typically doesn't look very good enlarged to 1600 x 1200.
Going the other way, a 1600 x1200 image wastes a lot of disk space if you’re only going to use it at 640 x 480. So when possible you want a screen image the same size as your current screen size. Several programs can change image size, GIMP being the best known, but if all you're interested in doing is changing scale, the much simpler KolourPaint is a better choice.
Things get a little more complex if you want to use your own digital pictures and have a wide screen display. Most digital cameras have the same screen ratio as a regular TV, which is different from a widescreen monitor. You can let KDE stretch the image into shape, but the results can be very ugly. To keep things looking good the trick is to scale the your image to the width you plan use, then crop from the top and or bottom of the image. My widescreen monitor is 1680x1050, so I would scale the image to 1680 pixels wide and the crop a 1050 pixel high section.
It’s time to turn your image into wallpaper. Start by saving the image or images into the directory. Next click on Control Center in the KDE main menu, and select Appearance & Themes. Click on Background. Now you can have some fun: for example you can put different images on each screen, or set-up a slide show (the background image will change). Here is where it is fun to start playing: the worst that could happen is you end up with some ugly looking wallpaper! You can play with these settings, but they do not become permanent until you click on "Apply".
Just after you log in to your computer, but before you get the KDE main desktop screen you will see for a few moments what is known as the splash screen. Some splash screens give information that GNU/Linux experts can use to help diagnose problems, but the main job of the splash screen is to tell people to wait.
You can download splash screens from sites like www.kde-look.org or pick one included with your distribution. Click on "Control Center" in the KDE main menu, and select Appearance & Themes. Click on Splash Screen and choose a splash screen.
One problem with CRT monitors is phosphor burn-in, where even after you turn off the monitor you can still see a ghost like image on the display. This normally happens when the display has been set to one image for a very long time. This normally happens with computers in commercial settings, like bank machines. Once a screen has phosphor burn there is not a lot that can be done, so the goal has to be to avoid burn in. While this is typically not a big issue in a home setting, no harm in being a bit cautious. The easy route to avoid burn in is to make sure the screen turns off after the computer has not been used for a while. The route to go is from the Control Center, click on Peripherals→Display→Power Control and Enable display power Management.
The second best route is to make sure that if you're not using the computer the display is regularly changing. For that you want Control Center_Appearance & Themes→Screen Saver: select something that appeals to you. Do click on "Test" to check the perspective screen saver as a few do leave some parts of the screen the same, which you don't want.
Shortly after you start your computer you will get a screen that asks you to enter a user name and password; this is the login screen, and is controlled by a display program. There are several display programs available. The best one for KDE users is
kdm, which is often not installed by default, but can easily be installed with most distributions.
Changing the login screen is slightly more complex than changing the wallpaper screen. The login box will appear over the login screen image you decide. The login screen image or images can, if you want, be the same as the screen wallpaper. The images for use with the login screen by default are stored in the same directory.
To set this up you need to click on Control Center in the KDE main menu, select System Administration→Login Manager. KDE gets a little security-conscious here compared to changing wallpaper: before you can alter anything here you will have to click on "Administrator Mode" and enter the root password.
Under "Appearance", the "Position" option decides where the login box will show up, with X controlling right/left and Y controlling up/down. So, if you wanted the login box to appear near the right bottom corner you might put in X : 10 Y: 80. For the left top corner try X: 80 Y: 10 .
As before none of these changes will stick until you click "Apply".
This is just a quick introduction, there are a lot of ways KDE can be made pretty, so try things!
There are many websites that carry attractive images. Among my favorite are:
http://www.kde-look.org/—This is where some versions of KDE go by default when asked to "Get New Wallpaper". There are thousands of KDE related wallpapers, screen savers, splash screens and other things on this site. Some of the images promote specific GNU/Linux distributions and/or GNU/Linux related companies. While most of the material on this site is suitable for all ages, be warned there is a small amount of adult only material here.
http://www.gnome-look.org/—This site, while oriented to the Gnome window manager has many great wallpaper images. As with the above, a small percentage of images are in questionable taste.
http://wallpaper.deviantart.com/—Another sometimes interesting general wallpaper website. As with kde-look, some of the images are not fit for polite company.
http://www.digitalblasphemy.com/—A wallpaper website, which always has some fascinating free samples, suitable for any sort of company. But the site's primary role is to promote Brian Bliss's CD-ROM sales and paid members only website.
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Storage media techniques have been revolutionized in recent decade. Storage is a process of getting backups of files and documents for future usage. Document storage is generally referred as document management, which is a process wherein we collect and save data in form of information for future reference. Information could be of any form which can be processed. Documents are formatted in form of records for immediate retrieval and then stored in a medium which could be a physical or digital in nature.
Physical Storage Medium
In early day’s document were preserved through physical formats. Data and information where developed and written manually on papers assembling in form of records with unique record names. This then placed in stacks with their reference name on top of the each stacks. In an order, when a file or record has to be retrieved, it is searched with its first file name referring to the header placed on each stack.
In organizations and bank’s data were recorded on ledgers and account books manually which sometime takes hours to find particular information. If there is around 10 million of information to be stored, 10 million of data entry has to be made manually on papers and books. This becomes a tedious process to access and search. If there’s any natural disaster at work place then we could loss our valuable data. Duplicating it as a backup to protect loss of data is another tough task in physical storage medium. So it was resulted as a failure technique and digital document storage was developed by mid 1980’s.
Limitation of Physical Storage Medium
Physical storage technique cannot guarantee security of access. One can easily get into physical records without any authorization. Photocopies and phone calls are required to exchange information and analyze a data. Papers and notes are the only method where information can be printed. Efficiency is totally low when compared to digital storage medium. There is no security on record access in physical format. Data cannot be replicated or sent through online. Sharing of data through internet is not possible.
Digital Storage Medium
Limitations in physical storage medium have overcome in digital medium technique. In digital storage technique data and information are stored in digital methods using binary digits on storage devices like floppy’s, Magnetic drums, Magnetic strips, DVD’s, CD’s, Tape backup and Hard disks. In digital medium technique we need very less manual power as the performance is done through electronic devices, most commonly used is a personal computer. Information can be written on a document and saved it on a desired location in digital forms. These data can be replicated, mirrored and stored on clouds which make it easier to access on move.
Search task on a physical medium mostly results in failure where as in digital medium we have built-in search task manager which finds the particular information in a record. Digital data can be replicated unlimited no of times and can be shared to unlimited number of users. Whereas replication and sharing of physical stored data is impossible. Digital files can be shared on internet and mount on cloud for easy retrieval and access on move with security. We can easily avail programs and software’s to write data on storage disks and store on server or cloud.
Document storage is the most valuable asset of any organization or company. Unauthorized use in any form can lead to a big issue. In physical format document storage, anyone can access your sheets easily without any authentication. But in digital document storage technique we can secure our data by providing password and selecting authorized users. You can secure your most sensitive documents to certain individuals who have access to it. You can protect and limit users to edit your document.
Physical VS Digital Document Storage technique
If your company still has heaps of physical documents and is in the process of transition to digital data storage, why not use an off-site document storage company which can safely store all your files and documents until you are ready to switch to digital.
Advantages of digital over physical
- Fast document retrieval in digital method whereas physical takes longer time
- Efficiency in digital is very high compared to physical
- Notifications of task can be managed in digital whereas there is no such option in physical
- Stock and profit management easily done in digital
- Analysis of data is computerized in digital but in physical its manual process
- Security is very high in digital
- Digital medium secures from unauthorized users wherein physical couldn’t trace unauthorized users
- Editing can be protected in digital but in physical anyone can edit easily
- Data sharing can be done in digital but not in physical
Which method you are using for storing data?
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Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the founding of the world’s largest private army: China’s. The biggest misconception about China’s military is that it belongs to China. Yes, the Chinese state pays for the People’s Liberation Army, but the PLA reports to—and pledges to defend—the Communist Party. On this Army Day, Beijing’s propaganda saluted (as it always does) the army’s 2.3 million members in their capacity as employees and defenders of China’s leading political organization.
This year’s ritualistic expressions of mutual party-army appreciation seem more numerous and passionate than on past anniversaries. President Hu Jintao mentioned the party’s total control over the military at least 15 times in his Army Day speech. Some foreign observers speculate that the excessive declarations are meant to cover up rifts in the military’s leadership or the failure of Hu—who is also the party’s general secretary—to consolidate control over his generals and admirals. (Others say that he is already in charge.)
Here’s a shortcut for those who do not want to devote their lives to studying this impenetrable issue: Beijing operates an abnormal political system and maintains an abnormal relationship with its armed forces. And here’s something else: because the party controls the army (or at least tries to do so), our attempts to establish military-to-military ties are bound to end in failure. It is not just that the Chinese generally believe in secrecy as a powerful military tool (though they do): secrecy lies at the heart of China’s political system, and of its peculiar government-military relationship.
The Bush White House should know this by now. It has done all it can to try to build functional military-to-military relations with China, but has not succeeded. The Chinese continue to ask for assistance—their more recent requests included the arresting gear of aircraft carriers and the training of carrier crews—but they are not willing to reciprocate. We let them tour our navy’s most important base—in Norfolk, VA—in April of this year, but they were not willing to let our Chief of Naval Operations, Mike Mullen, make a visit to a comparable Chinese naval facility. (In response, Mullen, departing from the Bush administration’s renewed emphasis on military ties with China, canceled his planned trip to Beijing.)
On this anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army let’s send the Chinese our birthday greetings—but let’s stop making gifts of our know-how and technology.
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Artwork on display at Cresskill Library
CresskillArtwork of local resident on display at library this month
The artwork of local resident Stephanie Cortazzo is on display for the month of January at Cresskill Library.
Cortazzo is studying photography as an undergraduate student at the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on the parallel between imagination and the world in which we live. She experiments with light and space and often depicts her subject matter using a deadpan aesthetic. Her most recent work is an ongoing series in which she captures the destruction and aftermath of Hurricane Sandy through several affected locations such as Monmouth Beach, Sea Bright, Avon, and Manasquan New Jersey.
If you are interested in displaying your art work, please contact the library at 201-567-3521.
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of Boiling Spring Lakes, NC
Sometimes the smallest thing
can make the biggest impact. Take for instance the Red-cockaded
Woodpecker. It is no bigger than the North Carolina Cardinal and
rarely does anything to get in the way, yet for the property owners
Boiling Spring Lakes, these little birds have become a real
hassle for their personal choice of living conditions.
These black and white stripped
birds with white cheeks earned their names from the red markings
hidden on the side of the male woodpecker’s neck. There are usually
about 3-4 birds living in one family, with several families living
together in a “cluster.” Each cluster has a breeding female that
lays 3-4 eggs, and the youngest males of the group will help to
incubate and care for the eggs. The younger females fly off to start
their own families in other clusters.
The Red-cockaded Woodpecker
earned its way to the endangered species list during the early
1970’s. A consensus done in March of 2007 showed that there is an
estimated 15,000 individual birds left scattered throughout the
southeastern portion of the United States. To give you an idea of
these figures, in 2005, there were 89,162 people living in Brunswick
One of the many reasons for
their great demise is for their sophisticated taste of housing
location. They are non-migratory, so they aren’t flying any further
south for the winter. They prefer to build there nests in the
matured, burned out long-needled pines, much like the ones that
dominate the Boiling Spring Lakes area. As they have no plans on
packing up and leaving, it usually takes Red-cockaded Woodpeckers
several years to build their nest, which they tend to pass down to
In an attempt to save the
RCW’s natural habitat, scientists from the North Carolina Ecological
Field Office conferred with city officials at the end of 2005 to
express their concerns over the development properties of Boiling
Spring Lakes. By the beginning of 2006, a major RCW recovery
operation was underway with the help of the
United States Fish and Wildlife Services.
Federal regulations were set
up to urge property owners against the clearing of protected nests.
As the Endangered Species Act Section 9 decrees, “it is unlawful to
“take” actions that harm, harass, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, trap,
capture, collect, or kill a species.” It is also unlawful to modify
a habitat in a way that would lead to death or injury of a listed
species, which is where the Red-cockaded Woodpeckers of Boiling
Spring Lakes fell.
In order to clear a lot (if it
fell under the RCW inhabited area), the property owner must first
apply for an incident take permit, which can take as long as a year
to be accepted and add additional cost too. Many weren’t too eager
to pay an additional fee for another permit, but the alternative for
failing to comply with the mandate is a $100,000 fine.
Town official understand the
headaches of the property owners, so they are in the process of
trying to apply for one incident take permit for the town of Boiling
Spring Lakes as a whole, saving the individual property owners from
having to handle it themselves.
The Nature Conservancy has stepped
up to the plate as well. Having acquired 6,500 acres around the
Boiling Spring Lakes community, they are in the process of making a
nature preserve that can one day support the disappearing species.
2007. All Rights Reserved.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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|
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| 0.944111
| 792
| 3.171875
| 3
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Before long, though, Roberts steered away from nostalgic reverie and into constitutional controversy. He maintained his relaxed and conversational cadence, but his words reflected a sharply partisan world view. “When Justice Rehnquist came onto the Court, I think it’s fair to say that the practice of constitutional law—how constitutional law was made—was more fluid and wide-ranging than it is today, more in the realm of political science,” Roberts said. “Now, over Justice Rehnquist’s time on the Court, the method of analysis and argument shifted to the more solid grounds of legal arguments—what are the texts of the statutes involved, what precedents control. Rehnquist, a student both of political science and the law, was significantly responsible for that seismic shift.” Rehnquist joined the Court toward the end of its liberal heyday—the era when the Justices expanded civil-rights protections for minorities, established new barriers between church and state, and, most famously, recognized a constitutional right to abortion for women. This period, in Roberts’s telling, was the bad old days.
These sentiments reflect a common view for conservatives like Roberts. “There really was a sense at the time among the lawyers in his Administration that Reagan had a mandate for comprehensive change in the nature of government,” Teles said. “They thought a lot of what the liberals had done in creating, say, affirmative action was simply interest-group politics and not really ‘law’ at all, and it was their job to restore professionalism to the legal profession in government.”
“I heard about John, and I immediately tried to hire him,” Charles Fried, the Harvard law professor who was Reagan’s second Solicitor General, said. Kenneth Starr, who was chief of staff to William French Smith, Reagan’s Attorney General, had hired Roberts as a special assistant to Smith. Roberts then went to work at the White House, as an associate counsel.
All the lawyers who worked for Reagan were, in some general sense, conservative, but there is a difference between those, like Roberts, who came of age during Reagan’s first term in office and those who prospered in his second. “The Department of Justice in the first term was full of serious, principled people,” Teles said. “They didn’t see themselves as part of the Christian right, or even necessarily part of a larger political movement, but they did think of themselves as real lawyers who were reacting to what they thought of as the excesses of liberalism.” They believed, Teles said, “in what they called judicial restraint and strict constructionism. Roberts comes out of this world.” Liberal critics, in turn, regard this view as unduly deferential to the status quo and thus a kind of abdication of the judicial role.
The legal philosophy of Edwin Meese III, which promoted an “originalist” view of the Constitution, dominated Reagan’s second term. Originalists, whose ranks now include Scalia and Thomas, believe that the Constitution should be interpreted in line with the intentions and beliefs of its framers. “John was not part of the Meese crowd,” one lawyer who worked with Roberts in the Reagan years said. “They cared more about a strict separation of powers, and even some limitations on executive and government power.”
Originalists and judicial-restraint conservatives generally reach similar conclusions on legal issues, but their reasoning differs. Both, for example, believe that the Constitution does not protect a woman’s right to abortion. “An originalist on abortion would say that at the time of the Constitution, or of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, abortion was prohibited, and that’s it,” Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School, said. “A conservative like Roberts, on the other hand, wouldn’t look immediately at the question of whether all abortions should be outlawed, but examine the specific restriction on abortion rights at issue in the case and probably uphold it. He’d avoid the culture-war rhetoric and gradually begin cutting back on abortion rights without making lots of noise about getting rid of it altogether.” In 2007, Roberts joined Kennedy’s opinion that followed this approach in upholding a federal anti-abortion law. The Court’s two originalists, Scalia and Thomas, wrote a separate concurring opinion in that case, urging, as they had before, that Roe v. Wade be overturned once and for all.
In documents from the Reagan era that were made public during Roberts’s confirmation hearing, the young lawyer emerges as a loyal (and low-level) foot soldier in the Reagan revolution. On issues where there was disagreement within the Administration, Roberts’s memos generally show him supporting the more conservative position, especially on matters of race and civil rights. Roberts said that affirmative action required the “recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates,” and sought a narrow scope for Title IX, the law that mandates equal rights for men and women in educational settings. In 1981, Roberts wrote that a revision of the Voting Rights Act would “establish essentially a quota system for electoral politics by creating a right to proportional racial representation.” (Reagan signed the revision anyway.)
Roberts’s reputation soared in his White House years. “He was already on that superstar trajectory,” said Henny Wright, a lawyer, now living in Dallas, who became friends with Roberts in Washington at the time. “He was pretty much like he is today, except without the bald spot. Extremely attractive, in every sense of the word. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s gregarious, he’s good-looking. In those days, he was never too busy to play a round of golf. He’s not a very good golfer, but, unlike a lot of golfers, he doesn’t let that ruin his day or your day.” Roberts’s wit even came through in the usually stultifying format of the interoffice memo. In 1983, Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, asked Roberts to evaluate a proposal then in circulation to create a kind of super appeals court to assist the Supreme Court with its ostensibly pressing workload. In response, Roberts noted, “While some of the tales of woe emanating from the court are enough to bring tears to the eyes, it is true that only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off.”
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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|
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| 0.974132
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|
GB consult on RIDDOR
Published: 03 Aug 2012
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has opened a 12-week consultation on proposals to simplify and clarify how businesses comply with the requirements under the Reporting of Injuries, Disease and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations SI 1995/3163 (as amended).
The review is part of HSE's work to make it easier for businesses and other users to understand what they need to do to comply with health and safety law, following recommendations made in Professor Löfstedt's "Reclaiming health and safety for all: An independent review of health and safety legislation."
The proposals also seek to implement the changes recommended in the 2010 Government Report, "Common Sense, Common Safety", by re-examining whether RIDDOR is the best approach to providing an accurate national picture of workplace accidents.
For more information, see the:
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|
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| 0.936649
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| 1.648438
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|
Webworm - web worm Hyphantria cunea (Drury) Worms
in Pecan Trees
The webworm, Hyphantria cunea (Drury), is a common pest of
trees. It attacks more than 88 different kinds of plants, including
many fruit, nut and ornamental trees and shrubs. It does not
attack conifers (pines and other needle-bearing trees).
Webworms are known for the large, unsightly webs they produce.
Heavy infestations are rarely fatal, but if they occur repeatedly
over several years they can stress trees and make them more
susceptible to drought, disease or other insect pests which
can be fatal.
The feeding preferences of webworms vary from one place to another.
In west Texas, mulberry, poplar and willow are preferred; oak,
hickory and pecan are most often attacked in east Texas. While
Pecans are favored in the Texas Hill Country.
The webworm moth is white and has a wing span of 1 to 11/2 inches.
Sometimes there are small, dark spots on the forewings. Full-grown
larvae are approximately 1 inch long, pale green or yellow,
and covered with tufts of long, white and black hairs. There
are two distinct races of the fall webworm, which can only be
identified during the larval stage. Larvae in the orange race
have orange heads and orange tubercles, while members of the
black race have black heads and tubercles.
Webworms often cover entire branches with their webs. In extreme
infestations whole trees may be covered. Larvae feed within
the web, eating the tender parts of leaves and leave the larger
veins and midrib.
There are two to four generations of webworms each year in Texas.
Four generations occur in southern portions of the state, while
two to three generations occur in the northern areas. The first
generation occurs as early as April in south Texas and as late
as June around Lubbock and Amarillo. The last generation of
the year, which occurs in the fall, is usually the most damaging
and gives the insect its name.
Webworms overwinter as pupae on the ground or on rough tree
bark. The moths emerge from silken cocoons in the spring to
disperse and mate. Female moths deposit hair-covered egg masses
on the undersides of the leaves of their food plants. An egg
mass may be deposited in either a single or double layer and
can contain up to 600 eggs. Each female moth will deposit only
one egg mass. Egg masses of the walnut caterpillar, another
common pest on pecans, are not covered with hairs.
Soon after webworm eggs hatch the larvae begin to build a silk
web. As larvae consume leaves within the web, they expand the
web to take in more foliage. All larvae within a web are the
offspring of a single egg mass. Larvae will molt six or seven
times before leaving the webbing to pupate. The life cycle from
egg to adult requires approximately 50 days.
Control of Webworms in Pecan Trees
Webworms can often be controlled without insecticides by removing
and destroying any leaves that contain egg masses. Larvae may
be knocked out of low-hanging webs, with a stick or broom, and
into a box or garbage bag for disposal. Or, webs can be pruned
from smaller branches. Many beneficial insects attack the egg
and larval stages of fall webworm. You can help these predators
and parasites get to their fall webworm prey by tearing open
the webs. If webs are too numerous or too high in a tree to
deal with individually, insecticides can be used to prevent
damage. Hose-end sprayers or commercial high-pressure sprayers
are best for reaching upper portions of tall trees. Because
webworm larvae remain inside their webbing, insecticide sprays
must penetrate the web to be effective. For best control, apply
insecticides after eggs hatch and before larvae develop dense
webs. Insecticides containing acephate (Orthene®), Bacillus
thuringiensis (B.t.), carbaryl (Sevin®), chlorpyrifos (Dursban®,
Lorsban®), diazinon, malathion, and tebufenozide (Confirm®
2F) are effective. Insecticides containing B.T. and tebufenozide
are selective for caterpillars and do not harm beneficial insects;
however, they must be applied when caterpillars are small for
effective control. Insecticide label clearances are subject
to change and changes may have occurred since this publication
was printed. The pesticide user is always responsible for the
effects of pesticides on his or her own property, as well as
problems caused by drift to other properties. Not all insecticides
are registered for fall webworm on all sites and commodities.
It is up to the user to read the label to make sure the insecticide
is cleared for the site and commodity. Always read and follow
carefully the instructions on the pesticide label.
This pesticide application is best left to a professional.
|
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|
en
| 0.915221
| 1,118
| 3.484375
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Sure, some cities have bus rapid transit (BRT) corridors where buses can reach up to 30 MPH, but in general, buses move pretty slowly. Never has the lowly bus looked so sexy as with this Dutch "Superbus" that can hit 155 MPH.
The electric bus, created by Wubbo Ockels (the Netherlands’ first astronaut, according to the BBC), carries 23 passengers and cost nearly $17 million to develop. The fiberglass and carbon vehicle recently debuted in Dubai.
It’s hard to imagine that any city would actually buy a fleet of these buses; just because a bus can go up to 155 MPH doesn’t mean it will ever get the chance. So most of us will never ride the Superbus. At the very least, its existence proves that buses can be exciting.
|
<urn:uuid:a9c7afdc-6595-4d3a-ad9a-c2c413d49e2c>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679820/no-more-slow-commuting-this-superbus-goes-155-mph
|
s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.970333
| 170
| 2.328125
| 2
|
General Goals and Objectives
The overall goal of the Swiss Society of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology (SSTMP) is to represent the integrating basis for the common interests of all people in Switzerland working in the fields of tropical medicine and parasitology.
- The SSTMP is open for all activities in basic and applied research in parasitology as well as in tropical medicine. The activities within these three domains represent the driving force of the SSTMP.
- The committee of the SSTMP encourages and coordinates if necessary individual initiatives and activities within and interactions between these domains.
- The annual assembly and the annual scientific meeting form the integrating forum where the emphasis is laid on the interdisciplinary aspects of and the critical dialog between the three domains.
- The SSTMP represents the interests of its members towards other scientific societies, political and educational institutions.
- The committee coordinates all activities of the SSTMP and its commissions.
- It organizes the annual assembly and the annual scientific meeting of the SSTMP.
- It plans the budget.
- It is responsible for the information exchange between the members and the commissions as well as with institutions outside the SSTMP.
- It is the focal point for all administrative matters concerning the SSTMP as well as the commissions.
- The working groups help the SSTMP in representing its interests, especially by preparing working documents and propositions to be used for further discussions.
|
<urn:uuid:5bdf58a7-ea80-4d30-a4b9-57dd9eeda714>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.sstmp.ch/index.php?m=1&s=1
|
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|
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| 0.948045
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| 1.601563
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|
From Ohio History Central
The Memorial Tournament is an annual PGA Tour event held at the Muirfield Village Golf Club, in Dublin, Ohio.
In 1967, Jack Nicklaus began to purchase land north of Dublin, Ohio, with the dream of opening a golf course. Due to financing difficulties, construction did not begin on the course until July 1972. Rain slowed construction, with the builders finishing the course in October 1973. The course is named Muirfield Village Golf Club.
In May 1976, the first PGA Tour event was staged at the course. Named the Memorial Tournament, event directors honor a different golfer each year for contributions to the game of golf. Since 2002, the tournament has honored both a male and a female golfer each year. Roger Maltbie won the first tournament in 1976, with course designer Jack Nicklaus winning the tournament in 1977. The Memorial Tournament has taken place every year since 1976, and it commonly attracts golf's biggest stars.
|
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|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
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|
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|
en
| 0.961652
| 196
| 2.234375
| 2
|
Structural racking performs extremely well in refrigerated and freezer applications, as well as other environments. Because of their ability to handle high capacities, these racks are well suited for heavy traffic systems. These racks can safely handle loads of up to 50,000 pounds per day!
Structural racking can also help to reduce impact damage from fork-lifts even in ambient temperature conditions as it is far more abuse-resistant. The heavy construction means the upfront cost is more than roll-formed racking but it does not need continual repair so the cost is actually less in the long run.
Advantages of structural pallet racking:
Structural racking is constructed with thicker steel allowing more abuse before becoming permanently deformed.
Worker safety is increased due to a reduction in capacity loss when damaged, as well as beam-to-frame connections beign safer due to bolting.
Repairs can sometimes be made in place without replacement of upright frames.
Structural racking is a more efficient and economical design as heights increase.
|
<urn:uuid:6b825136-a16d-466e-a23c-36bc52519923>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.hbindustrial.ca/pallet-racking/structural-racking
|
s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.9614
| 213
| 1.9375
| 2
|
|Type||Public (LSE: TATE)|
|Founded||Merger of Henry Tate & Sons and Abram Lyle & Sons in 1921|
|Headquarters||London, England, UK|
|Key people||Sir Peter Gershon, Chairman
Javed Ahmed, CEO
High Fructose Corn Syrup
|Revenue||£3,424 million (2008)|
|Operating income||£215 million (2008)|
|Net income||£187 million (2008)|
The company was formed in 1921 from a merger of two rival sugar refiners, Henry Tate & Sons and Abram Lyle & Sons.
Henry Tate established his business in 1869 in Liverpool, later expanding to Silvertown, London: he used his industrial fortune to found the Tate Gallery in London in 1897. Abram Lyle, a cooper and shipowner, acquired an interest in sugar refining in 1865 in Greenock, western Scotland and then in Plaistow, London. The two companies had large factories nearby each other - Henry Tate in Silvertown and Abram Lyle in Plaistow so prompting the merger. The Liverpool plant closed in 1981. The Greenock plant closed during the 1990s.
In 1949 the Company introduced its "Mr Cube" brand, as part of a marketing campaign to help it fight a proposed nationalization by the Labour government. In 1976 the Company acquired a 33% stake (increased to 63% in 1988) in Amylum, a European starch-based manufacturing business.
In October 2007 five plants involved with production of starch and alcohol were sold to Syral, a subsidiary of French sugar company Tereos. Syral has since closed the Greenwich plant, which is currently being demolished.
Javed Ahmed became CEO on October 1, 2009, replacing Iain Ferguson. In the presentation of half-year results to analysts on November 6, 2009, just five weeks after taking office, Ahmed said that his priorities for the company would be to reduce capital expenditures, optimize working capital, and reduce costs.
The Company operates over 50 production facilities and is organised as follows:
The company is renowned for its refined sugar cane products, especially Lyle's Golden Syrup, its brand of partially inverted refiners syrup. The Lyle's Golden Syrup trademark (also used on other products) depicts a lion and a swarm of bees, as well as a partial quotation from the Bible. In the Book of Judges, Chapter 14, Samson was travelling to the land of the Philistines in search of a wife. During the journey he killed a lion, and on his return past the same spot he noticed that a swarm of bees had formed a comb of honey in the carcass. Samson later turned this into a riddle at a wedding: "Out of the eater came forth meat and out of the strong came forth sweetness." The last seven words still appear on tins of Golden Syrup. Abraham Lyle was a deeply religious man and may have intended to refer to the strength of the company or to the strength of the tin.
According to a news report, the Guinness Book of Records has concluded that the design of the tin, which has remained almost unchanged since 1885, forms Britain's oldest brand. In the red tin is the Partner of Golden Syrup - Black Treacle (dark molasses).
In 2005, The U.S. sugar industry claimed against Tate & Lyle that the advertising of Splenda was deceptive and filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. Taking issue with Splenda's advertising slogan “made from sugar so it tastes like sugar,” the Sugar Association stated that: "Splenda was not a natural product. It is not cultivated or grown and it does not occur in nature." McNeil Nutritionals, the manufacturer of Splenda responded that its "advertising represents the products in an accurate and informative manner and complies with applicable advertising rules in the countries where Splenda brand products are marketed." The consumer advocacy group Citizens for Health also filed a petition with the FDA. They have asked the FDA to withdraw its approval of Splenda pending additional investigation of claimed side effects such as stomach pain and other digestion problems.
|
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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|
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|
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| 0.960854
| 853
| 1.53125
| 2
|
Why Iceland’s Minor Volcano Is Causing Major Disruptions
By-Bryan Walsh | 25 April 2010
As volcanoes go, the eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull on April 13, won't make the science books. Though scientists haven't yet been able to gather enough information on the eruption to give it a score on the Volcanic Explosivity Index — which ranks volcanic events on a 1-to-8 scale — it's unlikely to score very high. Eyjafjallajokull barely compares to major eruptions like Mount St. Helens in 1980, which released 1.5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, or the catastrophe of Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883, which killed more than 40,000 people and was felt around the world. During Eyjafjallajokull, by contrast, there have been no deaths, and just 800 people living near the volcano had to be evacuated.
But Eyjafjallajokull's eruption has still had a major impact on the world, as its 7-mile-high plume of volcanic gases and silicate ash has spread across much of Europe, bringing air travel across the continent to a near standstill. Delays and cancellations hit airports from Toronto to Tokyo, and the problems have cost the global air-travel industry an estimated $200 million a day. Not bad for a distinctly minor-league eruption.
Still, the havoc caused by Eyjafjallajokull is a reminder that in our globalized, interconnected world, it's less the sheer power of a natural disaster than where and when it happens — and how prepared we are to respond. Eyjafjallajokull was at the right place at the right time to wreak maximum havoc on air travel. (Even relatively small amounts of volcanic ash high in the air can clog sensitive jet engines, shutting down ventilation and causing the machinery to melt down and fail.) If the volcano had erupted in the years before air travel became common, it wouldn't have caused trouble for anyone but the people of Iceland.
The same goes for other kinds of natural disasters. The earthquake that hit Haiti in January killed some 230,000 people, yet the temblor registered only a 7.0 on the Richter scale — bad, but not that bad. In fact, the quake barely compared to the 8.8 temblor that hit Chile a little more than a month later, killing fewer than 500 people. What's the difference? Population density — the Haiti quake struck the country's dense capital of Port-au-Prince, while the Chile one missed big cities like Santiago — and preparation. Chile is a relatively well-off South American nation with a long history of earthquakes, so its buildings are designed to resist seismic waves, and the government and people know how to respond to a disaster. Impoverished Haiti, by contrast, was helpless, and its people paid the price.
As global populations have grown and people have crowded into risk zones — like earthquake areas and flood plains — the toll of natural disasters has grown as well. According to the Center for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters, the number of catastrophic events has more than doubled since the 1980s, and the Red Cross estimates that the economic damage from disasters rose fivefold, to $629 billion, from 1985 to 2005. That doesn't necessarily mean that volcanoes and quakes are getting worse — but rather that there are more of us living in areas where we might be affected by a disaster, and we have more to lose.
Fortunately, global wealth and technology allow us to better prepare for and respond to natural disasters. In the case of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption, European air-traffic controllers already had plans in place to deal with ash clouds. Shutting down the continent's airspace and grounding thousands of flights was expensive and inconvenient, but it was far preferable to having planes fall out of the sky. And while the economic toll of such disasters may be rising, huge death tolls are far less common. In 1783, the volcano Laki in Iceland erupted on a massive scale, throwing so much ash and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that it led to a famine that killed half of Iceland's livestock and 25% of its population. An eruption of that size today likely wouldn't cause nearly as dramatic a death toll — though it might well interrupt flyers for weeks or even months.
Authorities hope Eyjafjallajokull will quiet down in the days to come and the ash cloud will disperse, allowing European air travel to return to normal — although its last eruption, in 1821, went on for two years. Yet the volcano's worldwide impact should not have come as a surprise, considering the fallout from Iceland's economic collapse in 2008, which affected borrowers across Europe. In natural disasters as well as the financial system, what happens in Iceland doesn't always stay in Iceland.
TIME magazine (abridged)
|
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|
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|
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|
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| 0.962276
| 1,027
| 3.25
| 3
|
- Joe Varghese
According to the evolution theory, if humans evolved from apes? Are there still apes in the wild, which are turning humans?
I have always been baffled with this question. I do think it could be my minimal knowledge about the evolution theory, or my way of understanding it. However, I always wanted someone to correct me on this.
|
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|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
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|
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| 0.960858
| 74
| 1.523438
| 2
|
...are the LUUUUCKIEST people. Oh. Sorry. Got carried away. That happens sometimes when you're a natalfascist who wants to enforce the six-child rule on the enslaved women of AmeriKKKa.
The reality of the coming demographic collapse of the major developed economies is a settled issue. And this isn't just about whites. India and most of South America are now where the US was thirty years ago. Very soon they will be below replacement as well. I could slather the blog with seven paragraphs of total fertility rates and negative rates of natural increase, but there's not a lot to be gained, because the people who are still insisting that there is a global overpopulation problem are immune to facts.
The issue of per capita resource use (I guess it's trendy to call it footprint now?) is just another diversion. Suppose you'd told a resident of New York City circa 1880 that in 100 years his city would hold about four times more people than it did currently. He probably would have wondered how on earth the resource base could bear such a load. Where they would put all the horse manure and how on earth they could build enough five-story buildings to hold all those people? Is there any reason to believe we're any more prescient about the future than the poor schlub who couldn't foresee the internal combustion engine and the hydraulic passenger elevator?
Liberals used to be optimistic about the future and conservatives used to be the fuddy-duddies who moaned about the good old days and couldn't adapt to change. Now it's the people like me who see every new human as a new creative force, born into the world with two hands and a brain, and people like Tlaloc who look at a new human as just another mouth, if not actually a useless eater.
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<urn:uuid:a49b5105-98bc-45d8-96f6-208e39d04d3a>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://reformclub.blogspot.com/2005/07/people-people-who-breed-people.html?showComment=1120702680000
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.973192
| 374
| 1.539063
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While on campus or at any school sponsored events, students shall not be dressed or groomed in a manner which adversely affects the instructional program or violates reasonably acceptable standards of cleanliness, safety, or decency as determined by the principal or designee. Footwear must be worn at all times. No attire may be worn that signifies membership in a gang, including, but not limited to, plain white t-shirts, long shorts, and high socks above the knee. Students may be sent home to change, asked to change into their PE uniform, or provided with a change of clothes for inappropriate attire. Clothing and jewelry should not promote racism, sexism, ethnic or religious bigotry, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, violence, graffiti, or other illegal activities. Students who repeatedly violate this policy will be given consequences for defiance. The District’s Dress Code will be enforced. LOS COYOTES MIDDLE SCHOOL UNIFORM STATEMENT OF POLICY, RULES, AND REGULATIONS
Dress Code Consequences
- WHITE SHIRTS, BLOUSES, AND TOPS: Shirts or tops must be hemmed and properly buttoned. Specifically not allowed are tank tops worn alone, extra long shirts (untucked not to exceed 2” below bottom), spaghetti straps (straps need to be at least 2 finger widths wide), strapless, backless or halter tops, low necklines, cleavage, bare midriffs when arms are raised, tube tops, fish net or ventilated type fabrics, prison camp shirts, and tattered looking shirts. Please note…undergarments are not to be visible at any time.
- DARK BLUE PANTS, SHORTS, SKIRTS, DRESSES, AND JUMPERS: Shorts are permitted. Shorts must have a 4" inseam. Skirts and dresses are to be no shorter than fingertip length when arms are straight to the side. Pants must not be more than 2” larger in the waist, thigh, and mid-calf. Pants must not sag down past the top of the bottom and undergarments are not to be visible at any time. Pants, shorts, skirts, and dresses are to be of proper length and hemmed (no cut-offs, draggers, flooders, baggy pants, or pants with slits).
- SOCKS, SHOES, AND BOOTS: It is recommended that students wear protective footwear on campus at all times. Open-toed shoes are not recommended. However, students may wear sandals and flip-flops if they wear them responsibly and have a pair of tennis shoes for PE. Specifically not allowed are steel-toed shoes and slippers.
- HATS, BEANIES, AND HOODS: Students, regardless of gender are not permitted to wear hats, hoods, or beanies indoors. Students are required to remove headwear upon entering any room on campus. When wearing a hat, the bill of the hat must face forward. Hoods are only to be worn during inclement weather; otherwise hoods are not to be worn on the head.
- JACKETS AND OUTERWEAR: Jackets are recommended to be of solid color and without graphics. Hoods may not be worn in the classroom. Specifically not allowed are trench coats.
- BELTS: Belts must be properly threaded inside belt loops. Specifically not allowed are motorcycle/bike chains, choke chains, studded belts, and wallet chains.
- MAKEUP: Very light makeup which enhances a positive self-image is permissible. Excessive makeup or extreme lipstick or lip liner colors are not allowed.
- HAIR: Hair should be neat and clean at all times. Excessive hair color and/or hairstyles are not recommended because they tend to disrupt the learning process. Hair color should stay within the natural color shades.
- JEWELRY: Jewelry should complement a student’s appearance and should not be distracting or unsafe. It is recommended that students do not wear expensive jewelry, watches, or gold chains at school. Specifically not allowed are nose or brow earrings, large hoop or extended length earrings, spiked or sharp jewelry, heavy rings, brass knuckles, sunglasses inside the classroom (unless medically prescribed), jewelry that promotes racism, sexism, ethnic or religious bigotry, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, violence, graffiti, or other illegal activities.
1st OFFENSE: Student must change into P.E. clothes, loan clothes, or remove the inappropriate item. Note sent home to parent. Student may pick up clothes when loaners have been returned.
2nd OFFENSE: Student must change into P.E. clothes, loan clothes, or remove the inappropriate item. Parent will be notified and parent must pick up clothing after loaners have been returned. Student contract developed. Daily check-in with homeroom teacher.
3rd OFFENSE: In-house suspension until parent brings in appropriate change of clothes. Student must dress according to their contract. Daily check-in at the office each morning.
4th OFFENSE: Suspension from school. Parent conference. Review student dress contract.
Please Note: The dress code is in effect at all school functions, on the first day of school, and on every day through the last day of school. Students may be required to change their clothes, not be allowed to participate, or their parent called to take them home if they are out of dress code at any school related activity.
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<urn:uuid:adfdef2f-b8b6-463d-8059-c9baa3e7d7c6>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.nlmusd.k12.ca.us/domain/1862
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|
en
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If businesses in different industries are looking for examples of how water consumption can be significantly reduced, they need look no further than professional conveyor-style carwashes. Historically, carwashes are highly visible users of thousands of gallons of water. So whenever there is a community water shortage, carwashes are among the first to face pressure to reduce water consumption or, in extreme situations, cease business operations altogether.
This is exactly what happened just a few years ago. In 2007, in the midst of a severe drought, North Carolina and other communities in the southeastern portion of the U.S. ordered carwashes to close entirely or meet specific water-conservation targets, many of which were not possible at the time. Eventually, some carwashes managed to reopen, but at a great expense. They imported water by way of tanker trucks from other parts of the country.
After this experience, the North Carolina Professional Car Wash Association, working with the International Carwash Association and other related groups around the country, actively sought ways to help their members conserve water. As you can imagine, they viewed this as a "do-or-die" situation. With experts predicting more frequent and severe water shortages in years to come, significant changes to how carwashes operate and use water had to be developed and put into use.
And these changes have been successful. Further, some of what they accomplished can be replicated in other industries. But possibly the most important thing the carwash industry has to share with others can be summed up in the old cliché: Where there is a will, there is a way.
"Because water is such a key part of our businesses, taking steps to reduce water consumption is now [one of our primary] concerns," says Chuck Howard, owner, president and chief executive officer of AutoBell Car Wash, with 63 locations throughout the southeastern portion of the U.S. "And, today we are definitely using less water than just a few years ago."
So how did they do it? According to Howard, these are some of the steps taken that may also apply to other businesses wishing to reduce water consumption:
When it comes to how carwash owners managed to find and install new systems and technologies to help reduce water consumption, another cliché is appropriate: Seek and you shall find. Once they looked for new technologies to reduce water consumption and reclaim water, they found and employed such systems.
This also applies to "in-house" areas, such as restrooms. Carwash owners in-stalled water conserving restroom fixtures, including no-water urinal systems. Waterless urinals alone can save as much as 40,000 gallons of water annually per unit. Today, water use for washing cars at Howard's locations has been reduced so dramatically that "fresh water is only needed to replenish water that has evaporated."
Based on the water reduction measures the carwash industry has implemented, what steps can other industries take to use water more efficiently and effectively? One of the most important is to find ways to reclaim water from one area to reuse in another. Reclaimed water can often be used for landscape irrigation, agricultural applications and even such things as decorative water fountains.
In addition, although not necessarily applicable to carwashes, reclaimed and recycled water can be used for another important purpose: Cooling equipment and machinery in industrial applications. This represents one of the largest uses of water in the U.S. and one that can be easily satisfied with reclaimed/recycled water. This water can also be used to replenish water used in cooling towers.
Monitoring of water consumption, which played a significant role in water reduction in carwashes, can be expanded in many other industries. According to Stephen Ashkin, CEO with Sustainable Dashboard Tools, metering systems and "dashboard" systems that track water consumption can help make building owners, managers and employees much more aware of their own water use in the facility.
"Dashboards have become increasingly popular as more companies have started taking steps to reduce their environmental footprint, decrease consumption of natural resources and improve overall sustainability," he says.
One of the key benefits of a dashboard system is that it can quickly identify changes in water use, which can prove to be a cost savings. "For instance, if consumption suddenly increases due to a possible problem, the situation can likely be rectified before it results in water waste as well as higher water and sewer charges, which for an industrial location can be significant."
This last point, cost savings, needs to be highlighted. American business owners must realize that water has historically been inexpensive in the U.S. — in fact, in most of North America. Canada and the U.S. are two of the biggest water users — and water wasters — in the world, most likely because water is so inexpensive.
That era is passing. Water charges are escalating and will continue to do so. Part of this is because water infrastructure in the U.S. is faltering and needs repair. But even more, it is the result of simple supply and demand. Demand is increasing, the country's population is growing and this will make water all the more precious and costly in the future, making this a worthy time to emulate successful water conservation efforts.
Klaus Reichardt is founder and CEO of Waterless Co. Inc. in Vista, Calif. Reichardt founded the company in 1991 with the goal to establish a new market segment in the plumbing fixture industry with water conservation in mind. The company's key product, the Waterless No-Flush urinal, works completely without water and was invented by Reichardt. He is a member of U.S. Green Building Council since 1999 and joined the University of California Santa Barbara EcoEntrepreneur Advisory Board in 2008. He may be reached at Klaus@waterless.com.
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<urn:uuid:5a2d5944-3536-4ac2-b7dc-2703b4f6ebce>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.carwash.com/articles/print/85952-learning-water-conservation-from-others
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.96793
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The sexual revolution of post-World War II America changed sexual and gender roles profoundly.
With reports from hundreds of sub-Saharan African locales of male-male sexual relations and from about fifty of female-female sexual relations, it is clear that same-sex sexual relations existed in traditional African societies, though varying in forms and in the degree of public acceptance
In British law, Section 28 of the Local Government Act, enforced from 1988 until 2003, prohibited the promotion of homosexuality and teaching the acceptability of homosexuality as a "pretended family relationship".
The Hijras--men who dress and act like women--have been a presence in India for generations, maintaining a third-gender role that has become institutionalized through tradition.
The dominant ideology among politicized lesbians during the 1970s and 1980s, Lesbian Feminism was based on the premise that lesbianism and feminism were inextricably linked.
Harvey Milk, among the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States, was assassinated in San Francisco's City Hall, making him the American gay liberation movement's most visible martyr.
By the early twentieth-century, YMCAs had become popular havens for men who sought sex with other men.
Compulsory heterosexuality is the assumption that women and men are innately attracted to each other emotionally and sexually and that heterosexuality is universal, a view that leads to an institutional inequality of power that privileges heterosexual males and denigrates women, especially lesbians.
Jim Nabors (left) with spouse Stan Cadwallader.
Actor Jim Nabors, whose homosexuality has been an open secret for decades, has finally come out publicly by marrying his long-time partner. On January 29, 2013, Hawaii News Now reported that Nabors and his partner of 38 years, former fire fighter Stan Cadwallader, wed in Seattle at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel on January 15. Nabors told a reporter that while he had not previously discussed his sexuality publicly, he was always open about it to friends and colleagues in the entertainment industry.
The Alabama native first came to prominence in 1962 when he appeared as a big-hearted but dim-witted gas station attendant on the Andy Griffith Show. The character was so popular that what was intended as a one-time appearance was expanded into a regular role on the Griffith show and then spun off into Gomer Pyle, USMC, which ran from 1964 to 1969.
In the 1970s, Nabors became known as a singer, particularly of gospel and country songs, and a comedy star, appearing on his own variety show but also on The Carol Burnett Show and The Muppet Show.
In the 1980s, Nabors appeared in three feature movies--The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), Stroker Ace (1983), and Cannonball Run II (1984)--and the television reunion movie, Return to Mayberry (1986).
Nabors's career was adversely affected in the 1970s when a rumor circulated that Nabors had married his friend Rock Hudson. Perhaps because his fan base was heavily rural and Southern, the rumor, apparently without any basis in fact, affected Nabors more than it did Hudson.
That experience may have prompted Nabors to refuse to discuss his private life even as his homosexuality became increasingly well-known in glbtq and entertainment circles.
According to Keoki Kerr of Honolulu's Hawaii News Now, Nabors, 82, and Cadwallader, 64, were married in a private ceremony performed by a judge. Close friends of theirs from Hawaii, where Nabors and Cadwallader reside, travelled with them to Seattle and served as their witnesses.
In a telephone interview, Nabors said that before they married he and Cadwallader "had no rights as a couple." He added, "when you've been together 38 years, I think something's got to happen there, you've got to solidify something. And at my age, it's probably the best thing to do."
Nabors said that when he worked full-time in Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s, he was open about his homosexuality to co-workers and friends but never acknowledged it to the media until now.
He said that he had never "made a public spectacle of it," that he has known that he was gay since he was a child. "I've known since I was a child, so, come on. It's not that kind of a thing. I've never made a huge secret of it at all," Nabors said."
He added that he and Cadwallader had made their vows 38 years ago. "It was to each other, but nevertheless, we were a couple."
He disavowed any plans of becoming an activist and said he was not qualified to offer advice to young people.
Below is the report from Hawaii News Now.
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<urn:uuid:b4f6ef6a-d50e-4316-bb04-72325098be67>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.glbtq.com/blogs/jim_nabors_belated_coming_out.html
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.985418
| 992
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JERUSALEM — How many times a day do you flush the toilet? How often do you get your car washed? Do you turn the faucet off when you soap up your hands? For most people in Western countries these things are part of daily life, and usually little thought is given to the amount of water wasted when doing them.
While on the one hand water could be the point of contention — which at the moment it is — I would rather see the glass half full, so to speak, and see it as the issue which unites the region. Instead of politicians grappling over the issue, academics, researchers and environmentalists need to come together to find a solution for everyone’s benefit.
So far that scenario seems far from reality. Despite a few academic conferences and dialogue among environmentalists, everybody is mostly fending for themselves.
Though Palestinian and Israeli experts say their society is careful of its water consumption, on the grass-roots level both Palestinians and Israelis tend to wash their floors by the flooding method, which involves throwing copious amounts of water on the tiled floors and squeegeeing the water out through a drainage hole. Both Israelis and Palestinians want to drive in spotlessly clean cars, and in the summer months some people admit to taking two showers daily. Israeli pools are full and some cities even have European-style fountains.
We all need to take shorter showers, let our cars stay dirtier for a while longer and learn how to generally become more efficient in our water usage.
As Maria Khoury, the wife of one of the owners of the Taybeh Brewery told a group of visitors recently: Even a glass of drinking water left by her children goes to good use. Instead of throwng it down the drain, she uses it to water her plants.
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<urn:uuid:469c8800-d03f-4e95-8031-943cc84d3c49>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://cnsblog.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/glass-half-full-could-holy-land-water-crisis-unify/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=019c5482d9
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.967709
| 367
| 2.640625
| 3
|
Iowa’s 2nd Breeding Bird Atlas is a five-year project (2008 - 2012), where professionals and volunteers are collecting information on the current ranges of Iowa’s breeding birds. The intention is to enhance our understanding of these species, their breeding range, and their habitat selection, in order to better inform future management decisions. Numerous changes to Iowa’s landscape in the 17 years since the first atlas project was completed in 1990 (e.g., widespread wetland restorations and the CRP program) suggest that a second atlas project will reveal many changes.
Around the state, there are 791 BBA search blocks, to be visited and completed by the end of 2012. To be successful, this project will require many hours of volunteer help from birders statewide. Atlasing is a fun way to bird during summer and a great way to explore new areas, so we’re hoping IOU members will lend their full support to this important project!
For more information check out the website (http://bba.iowabirds.org/) or contact the BBA Coordinator (firstname.lastname@example.org or (515) 432-2823 ext. 117.
The BBA is sponsored by the Iowa Ornithologists Union and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
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<urn:uuid:2f3b5c43-432a-405f-bc75-44f9074fcb23>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.iowadnr.gov/Environment/WildlifeStewardship/NonGameWildlife/DiversityProjects/BreedingBirdAtlas.aspx
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.923925
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Our Vision, Mission, Goals, and Values
To work together to create cultures of caring, respect, and safety for everyone, everywhere.
To teach people of all ages and abilities how to use their power to stay safe, act wisely, and believe in themselves.
- To develop and offer a wide range of high quality, upbeat, and effective personal safety, self-protection, and confidence-building programs – locally and around the world.
- To create an international community of leaders who are dedicated to establishing a long-lasting organization that can sustain this work.
- To provide extensive resources in teaching child protection education and personal safety skills for all ages and abilities.
At Kidpower, we do our best to be:
- Honest. Kidpower is committed to creating an honest community where people can and will speak up about even the most difficult issues. We have a deep commitment to ethical practices in all we do.
- Evolving. We are always looking for ways to improve and are open to new ideas.
- Fair. We develop clear win-win agreements and uphold high standards. We are committed to applying them equally and fairly to people at all levels of involvement with our organization.
- Supportive. We encourage people to take good care of their well-being and to make their health and their loved ones their top priorities.
- Productive. We will be effective and efficient in how we use our own time and the time of others.
- Safe. We are committed to ensuring the physical and emotional safety of everyone involved with Kidpower.
- Collaborative. We will work as a team with each other, with our supporters, and with our students to bring the best services possible to the most people possible.
- Pro-Active. We don’t sit back and wait for someone else to do what needs to be done – we anticipate new challenges and address problems quickly.
- Courageous. Kidpower stands up for its beliefs. We don’t let fear, embarrassment, or discomfort prevent us from working towards our goals and upholding our values.
- Joyful. We will act enthusiastic, hopeful, and positive in all our communications with others, even when we need to set boundaries or refuse someone’s request.
- Appreciative. We honor everyone’s contributions and acknowledge people for what they do.
- Inclusive. We welcome people of any age, culture, religion, race, gender, political belief, nationality, sexual orientation or gender identity, marital status, any kind of disability, or level of income who share our commitment to integrity and safety for everyone and who can join us in upholding our values.
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<urn:uuid:b587c852-4601-4e51-8213-e246a7a1388d>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.kidpower.org/about-us/mission-values/
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.940521
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- Map of Elmer's Island (PDF - 1259kb)
Elmer's Island open to public
Published: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 at 10:02 p.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 at 10:02 p.m.
A section of Elmer’s Island that has been closed since Hurricane Isaac is now open, the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries announced this week.
The beach was closed as the storm approached and remained closed after Isaac exposed tar from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, said Julia Lightner of the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
The open section includes the area at the end of the access road continuing half a mile east. The remaining closed area is the eastern portion and is marked.
Nighttime access and fishing and on the beach remain closed, but daytime recreational fishing is allowed. Camping is prohibited. Road access to the beach will open 30 minutes before sunrise and close 30 minutes after sunset.
The island continues to experience oiling and is still being cleaned up.
The beach is being opened for access for a probationary period of 10 days. State officials will continue to monitor the shoreline for new oiling.
Any sightings of oil should be reported to Wildlife and Fisheries at 800-442-2511 and the National Response Center at 800-424-8802.
Officials also ask visitors not to cross areas covered with water as Isaac created washovers that can be covered during high tide.
Fourchon Beach to the west of the island remains closed as it has been since the spill.
Amanda Phillips, interim secretary treasurer for the Wisner Foundation, said the beach is still seeing heavy cleanup following Isaac.
Workers have been auguring the beach, searching for new tar mats and removing others, Phillips said. The foundation owns most of the beach at Fourchon. The Caillouet Land Corp. also owns part of the land.
“There is still oil all over the place,” Phillips said.
Tar balls are still a common find in the beach’s sands, and workers recently began searching the shallow waters off the beach for oil, Phillips said.
Lafourche Parish government is trying to obtain the beach for public access.
The Parish Council recently appropriated $275,000 to the South Lafourche Beachfront Development Commission to offer to Caillouet for a 10-acre tract that would be open to the public.
Commission Director Rickey Cheramie said his group will likely make the offer in March. Caillouet has repeatedly said it disagrees with the value of the land.
When the offer is rejected, Cheramie has said the parish will move to expropriate the property.
All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.
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<urn:uuid:0707d07b-f751-4855-aef1-c37603df9350>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20130220/ARTICLES/130229951/0/news03
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en
| 0.963795
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Date of this Version
In the past, the assessment of families’ satisfaction with the quality of their partnerships with the professionals who serve their children has been restricted to specific programs or age groups, precluding investigation of the relationship between parents’ perspectives on satisfaction and the importance of partnership components for children at different ages. Differences in policies, service models, and family needs at different life-cycle stages suggest a need to understand how satisfaction might differ among parents of children of different ages. In this study, 147 parents completed the Beach Center Family-Professional Partnership Scale to describe the perceived importance of and satisfaction with 18 aspects of their child and family’s relationships with their primary service provider. No differences in importance ratings among parents of children ages birth to 3 years, 3 to 5 years, and 6 to 12 years emerged, but there were differences among satisfaction ratings, with parents of older children reporting lower satisfaction. Exploratory analyses relating satisfaction levels across other demographic variables also took place. Implications of these findings for future research and application are discussed.
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<urn:uuid:7664813a-9edd-4698-8e4d-dc39f2e31130>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/psychfacpub/440/
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.96114
| 210
| 1.898438
| 2
|
(KCEN) -- And the battle rages on over how to handle gun violence across the nation.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, many are calling for stricter gun laws.
Lawmakers in the Senate are expected to answer that call by introducing a bill to ban assault weapons.
But not everyone in Washington is on the same page.
Arizona Senator John McCain says, "I think we need to look at it in its entirety. I think all of us should have this conversation. I applaud the conversation. We need to have it stopped but to somehow believe that just by taking guns away from people is the answer. I don't think history shows that's the right way to do it."
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut says, "The NRA is going to use all of the resources to try to stop this thing. But, ultimately, the people of this country have been transformed, and these assault weapons, and they know it, these are not used by sportsmen. You don't need an assault weapon to kill a deer."
A task force led by Vice President Joe Biden is expected to give President Obama recommendations on their plan to curb gun violence in the coming week.
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<urn:uuid:93501687-48b1-4710-bd91-5ae5e95cc1df>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.kcentv.com/story/20575502/lawmakers
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.977187
| 243
| 1.742188
| 2
|
Women who are obese during early pregnancy have a nearly doubled risk of their child dying in the womb or soon after birth compared with non-obese women, according to a new study.
Obese women have, on average, 16 fetal deaths for every 1,000 births, compared with non-obese women who have nine fetal deaths for every 1,000 births, the study found.
However, it's important to note that fetal death is extremely rare, even among children of obese women, said study researcher Dr. Ruth Bell, clinical senior lecturer at the Institute of Health and Society at Newcastle University in England.
"The risk [of fetal death] was nearly doubled for obese women, but still quite low at 1.6 percent," Bell told MyHealthNewsDaily. Most women will give birth to a, live, healthy baby, regardless of their weight in early pregnancy, she said.
The study was published today (April 5) in the journal Human Reproduction.
Examining the risk of weight
Bell and her colleagues looked at 40,932 pregnancies that occurred between 2003 and 2005 in northern England, to see if maternal underweight (having a body mass index, or BMI, of less than 18.5), overweight (BMI of 25 to 29.9) or obesity (BMI greater than 30) increased fetal or infant death risk compared with maternal recommended weight (BMI between 18.5 and 24.9). BMI is a measure of height and weight.
Researchers found that the risk of dying in the womb or dying before a first birthday was doubled in women who were obese during pregnancy, compared with non-obese women, the study said.
However, no association between fetal or infant death was found for women who were underweight or overweight during pregnancy, the study said.
Why is obesity so dangerous?
Researchers aren't completely sure why obesity seems to be associated with an increased risk of fetal and infant death. But one possible reason is because obese women tend to have an increased risk of preeclampsia during pregnancy, which is marked by excess protein in the urine, Bell said.
Preeclampsia can stunt blood flow to the placenta, which could result in slowed growth, low birth weight and breathing problems in the baby, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Women who are obese seem to be prone to fat disturbances in the blood that could spur preeclampsia, Bell said. Obese women also tend to start pregnancy with a higher blood pressure than non-obese women, which predisposes them to preeclampsia, she added.
Therefore, it's important for obese women who are considering becoming pregnant to talk to their doctor about managing their weight, Bell said.
It's also important that pregnant women focus more on maintaining a healthy lifestyle than on losing weight during pregnancy, she said.
"The most important thing during pregnancy is to have a good quality diet to ensure both mom and baby get the nutrients they need," Bell said. "I would be concerned that a pregnant woman who tries to lose weight without proper dietary advice may be at risk of not having a healthy balanced diet."
Pass it on: Obesity during early pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of infant and fetal death, though the overall risk of the deaths is still considered extremely low.
Follow MyHealthNewsDaily staff writer Amanda Chan on Twitter @AmandaLChan.
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No other ladder compares. The Little Giant is a revolutionary ladder system. And because it does so much, so well for so long, the Little Giant is completely cost-effective.
Satisfied customers have told us again and again that against other ladders: "Overall, the Little Ladders are far superior to other is design and construction."
Customers also commented on the Little Giant's cost efficiency: "The ladders are of sufficient structural quality to reduce inventory turnover to less than 10%." They went on to say: "Lost time due to inappropriate ladder selection at job sites was reduced 54%, where the Little Giant was used rather than conventional ladders."
The Little Giant is no slouch when it comes to reducing equipment expenditures. The fact that it replaces eight pieces of equipment is testament to that. In monetary terms it would take nearly £600 to replace the capabilities of the Little Giant (excluding accessories). Even then you would still lack the versatility, durability and storage benefits.
Countless man-hours are wasted due to incomplete equipment inventory. Hours are lost due to improper job site application and selection. Think how much time is lost when a worker continually returns to his van or stores in search of the ladders that would always be at hand if he was using a Little Giant.
Perhaps the primary reason for the Little Giant's cost efficiency is its strength.
Independent tests have proved this extraordinary point: The Little Giant ladder system is four to five times more durable than typical ladders. Here's why: The Little Giant is made of heavy-wall aluminium. While the Little Giant ladders system possesses a workload capacity of 150kg, it has been tested to withstand four times that amount, without structural failure.
Bottom line - it's the safest portable ladder available, regardless of cost.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.little-giant.co.uk/
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Street View Car
When we first started Street View as an experimental project, we packed several computers into the back of an SUV, stuck cameras, lasers, and a GPS device on top, and drove around collecting our first imagery. Since Street View launched for five U.S. cities in May 2007, we've expanded our 360-degree panoramic views to include locations on all seven continents.
We then moved to a van for a brief period, before switching to a fleet of cars that would allow us to scale the project throughout the US and around the world. We went from a rack of computers to one small computer per car, and then set to work refining our camera system to capture higher-resolution panoramic views.
After several iterations of the car and camera technology, the latest car has 15 lenses taking 360 degrees of photos. It also has motion sensors to track its position, a hard drive to store data, a small computer running the system, and lasers to capture 3D data to determine distances within the Street View imagery.
Street View Trike
While we’ve been able to visit some beautiful places around the world with the Street View car, some of the most interesting and fun places aren’t accessible by car. One day while mountain biking, Mechanical Engineer Dan Ratner realized he could combine his favorite hobby with Street View to explore new places, and set to work building a bicycle-based camera system. As a result, we’ve been able to take the Trike to parks and trails, university campuses, and even sports stadiums.
Street View Trolley
When a group of art-loving Googlers wanted to take Street View technology to museums around the world, we needed to develop a system that could easily fit through museum doorways and navigate around sculptures. We worked to fit all of the equipment on an even smaller frame, a push-cart lovingly dubbed Trolley, and gathered the imagery for you to explore in Google Maps.
Street View Snowmobile
Once we were able to take the Trike to all of these interesting places, we got to thinking about where else we could go and had the idea of putting our Street View equipment on a snowmobile. In typical Google fashion, we were able to put this together over the course of a few weekends using some 2x4s, duct tape, and extra hard drives wrapped in ski jackets to last through the freezing conditions. Fortunately the folks at Whistler Blackcomb were just as enthusiastic, so now you can explore Whistler in Street View.
The Trekker enables Street View to feature more places around the world - places no car, trike, trolley or snowmobile can access. This wearable backpack is outfitted with a camera system on top, and its portability enables us to gather images while maneuvering through tight, narrow spaces or locations only accessible by foot. The Trekker is operated by an Android device and consists of 15 lenses angled in a different direction so the images can be stitched together into 360-degree panoramic views. As the operator walks, photos are taken roughly every 2.5 seconds. Our first collection using this camera technology was taken along the rough, rocky terrain of Arizona’s Grand Canyon, and like our other Street View platforms, the Trekker proudly features the Google Maps logo.
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<urn:uuid:dafdf2a0-7b32-4cd8-a51f-4bf0ab97335a>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://books.google.com/help/maps/streetview/learn/cars-trikes-and-more.html
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Sunday, January 20, 2013
By: PAUL MALEY
THE number of Australians to have had their passports cancelled on national security grounds has plummeted, possibly because the security agencies have successfully targeted many of the potential threats.
The sharp drop in security-related passport cancellations comes despite an overall increase in the number of people travelling to foreign hotspots such as Syria to participate in the conflict.
Passport cancellations have been used to great effect by security agencies to ground so-called terror tourists -- Australian citizens travelling to conflict zones such as Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan or Somalia to train or fight with insurgents.
But in the past two years the number of Australians whose passports have been cancelled on national security grounds has fallen sharply.
In 2008-09, 19 Australians lost their passports on suspicion that they had done, or would commit, a serious foreign offence overseas.
That figure leapt to a high of 51 in 2009-10, partly due to a change in the way the process was conducted, which cleared a backlog.
But in 2010-11 the figure fell to nine, before falling to three in 2011-12. Since then, there have been none.
Among those subject to cancellation were Australians on the run after being accused of serious crimes in foreign jurisdictions and whose passports had been cancelled at the request of local authorities.
A spokesman for Foreign Minister Bob Carr said there was no definitive explanation for the decline, but he suggested it may be because most potential trouble-makers had already been targeted.
"It has been suggested that the reason for the decline is that the previous successful actions have reduced the pool of candidates for whom passport cancellation may be required under the act," the spokesman said.
"It takes time for the pool to replenish. There are only so many Australians for whom the intent or actuality of committing a serious foreign offence may apply."
As reported by The Australian, security agencies believe more than 100 dual citizens may be participating in the Syrian conflict. At least three have been killed and another three detained by Bashar al-Assad's regime.
Australia National University professor Clive Williams said the emergence of new threats and theatres of conflict may be another reason why fewer Australians were having their passports cancelled.
He said ASIO's intelligence on individuals aiming to travel to relatively new conflict fronts, such as Syria or Somalia, may not be as good as on traditional threat areas, such as Afghanistan.
"Maybe the Syrian conflict has appealed to a broader number of people in the Muslim community, in which case ASIO might not have such good intelligence," Professor Williams said.
"I suspect most of their intelligence is focused on a small number of people in the Lebanese Muslim community."
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Sorry, no definitions found.
“Fri 11/13/09 8: 11 PM was that really necessary carlie? really? really?”
“I got a labtop so i can use it to see all things twilight, and the best part is i named the computer carlie”
“March 12, 2005 00: 01 carlie: sounds great guys! ahh i jus saw their -- you hear it first -- tonight. .wish i'd known about 'em sooner. looking forward to hearing more of yall”
“I'm a curious cankered carlie, my name is Willie Stroth”
“Ay, have I," says the carlie, curlin 'up his lips gey snappish-like;”
“He's a gey breezie carlie when he's awa 'frae hame, an' his dickie on!”
“Thinks I, my carlie, her nabs 'ill lat you hear something the nicht that'll garr the lugs o' ye dirl.”
“There was a gey pompis-like carlie cam 'an' tried to birz Sandy an 'me up the seat; but Sandy sune made a job o' him.”
“If I had a grip o 'Saunders, I'll tak' mair than the fairntickles aff him," says he; an 'faigs, mind you, there's nae sayin' but he may do't; he's a spunky carlie Sandy, when he's raised.”
“An 'he is but a fusionless carlie, O. [pithless old fellow]”
These user-created lists contain the word ‘carlie’.
Unflattering Scots terms and nicknames for people and their perceived or imagined foibles, follies, and failings. Gleaned from Dr. Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary and Supplement, 1841.
Looking for tweets for carlie.
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<urn:uuid:845a7333-3ccf-4c10-a67c-411f4143afef>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.wordnik.com/words/carlie
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.9216
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Dealing with chronic pain
Dr. Nadezda Djurovic
Pain can be classified as either acute or chronic.
Acute pain is often the result of surgery or a trauma, such as a fracture, and can last up to three months. Pain medication effectively manages acute pain over a short time. When pain endures for three months to a year, it is considered to be chronic. Chronic pain can be complex.
Dr. Nadezda Djurovic’s specialty is to help patients live with chronic pain effectively
Chronic pain is often caused by a medical condition that may never go away completely, such as fibromyalgia, cystitis, or arthritis. The first step toward living with it is to accept that it will likely be a constant presence.
“Patients must also understand the medical condition that is causing the pain,” said Dr. Djurovic, an internal medicine physician with Methodist Hospitals’ Methodist Physician Group. “Patients must first understand what’s going on in their body to manage these conditions and gain some control.”
Developing a good, trusting relationship with a doctor is a must. A doctor who knows and understands a patient can provide needed guidance, and not merely prescribe pain medication. Managing chronic pain involves much more than medication. The solution often lies within the patients themselves, and is attainable through mind-body medicine.
Mind-body medicine has existed for centuries. Over the past 50 years, scientists have proven its effectiveness.
“It is the most effective approach for treating patients with chronic pain,” Dr. Djurovic said. “The body is not just a pedestal for the head. Whatever happens in the mind will happen in the body.”
Establishing mind-body awareness in patients is an involved, time-consuming process. For this reason, Dr. Djurovic leads group sessions, held for 90 minutes each week, over eight weeks.
In these sessions, she prompts the patients’ memories of when they were doing well. Dr. Djurovic also incorporates elements such as relaxation response, nutrition, sleep, exercise, positive thinking and spirituality.
To effectively function with pain, patients must also be aware of their response to stress and how long they allow it to persist.
“It’s a vicious circle,” Dr. Djurovic said. “Pain can cause stress and stress can cause pain. Ideally, the body’s response to stress is a short cycle followed by the return to a normal state. Otherwise, the person will manage everything in his or her life, large or small, through a stress response.”
When a body is continually under stress, it changes the balance of the mind and the chemicals in the body. Pain will continue to grow and other conditions such as chronic fatigue, hypertension and obesity may develop on top of the initial illness.
From the beginning of treatment, the goal is to improve the function of the patient. By harnessing the power of our thoughts and emotions, you can achieve the best possible outcomes in living with chronic pain.
Dr. Djurovic is currently forming new Mind-Body Awareness Groups to begin in January. For more information, or to register, call (888) 909-3627.
Provided by Methodist Hospitals
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://specialsections.suntimes.com/yourregion/nwindiana/17247535-555/dealing-with-chronic-pain.html
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Top White Papers
Boston Globe: IBM gets extremeAug 14, 2000, 16:39 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Hiawatha Bray)
[ Thanks to Jonathan M. Prigot for this link. ]
"I've worked for three start-ups," Shankar says, "and none of them were as interesting as this is." He's talking about his work on Sash, a piece of Linux software that'll help amateur programmers easily produce complex and sophisticated programs. Shankar and a team of bright undergraduates have spent the summer grinding out the code that'll make it work. IBM provides a salary, room and board, and the best laptop and desktop computers that money can buy."
"We're treated like mature developers," says Shankar's colleague, Andrew Wu, a junior at the University of Illinois. In exchange, IBM gets relatively cheap labor from a band of absolutely brilliant youngsters. IBM calls the program Extreme Blue, and the company values it not only for the work the students do but also because it gives IBM first crack at the world's best computer students."
"The seeds of the program were planted in 1995. John Patrick, IBM's vice president for Internet technology, was working on projects to build large heavy-duty Web sites to provide the public with information on major sporting events, such as the Olympic Games in Atlanta. During the summer months, Patrick began hiring bright college students to work on his projects."
0 Talkback[s] (click to add your comment)
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2000081400806NWSW
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After launch from Kourou, SMART-1 was placed in its initial Earth orbit. This was followed by the commissioning of the spacecraft, including the ion engine. With the engine fully prepared for nominal operations, SMART-1's orbit was boosted by firings of the engine during the thrust arcs.
SMART-1 Earth Bound
Over the next 13 months, the ion engine's cumulative thrust resulted in an outward spiralling orbit, continuously raising the perigee and apogee altitude, bringing the spacecraft ever closer to the first Lagrange point of the Earth-Moon system. After crossing this point, SMART-1 left its Earth bound orbit and entered lunar orbit. This page lists the key events during the Earth bound orbit.
29 September 2003 - Early commissioning of spacecraft
Status report: No. 1 - Initial Spacecraft Operations
30 September 2003 - First firing of ion engine
6 October 2003 - Ion engine fully tuned
Status Report: No. 2 - Early Ion Drive Performance
6 January 2004 - Spiralling out of radiation belts
Status Report: No. 14 - SMART-1 Escapes the Radiation Belts
February 2004 - Instrument commissioning, first images
From 30 January to 24 February 2004 the ion engine was inactive for a period of just over three weeks. The resulting stable platform conditions allowed the commissioning of the scientific instruments.
Status Report: No. 17 - Ion Engine Switched Off, Commissioning Begins
April 2004 - Insights from ion engine operations
A lot is learned from SMART-1's ion engine operations and performance in the vacuum of space. The gathered information provides new insights that are of great importance for any future mission that will use an electric propulsion system.
Status Report: No. 21 - SMART-1 as a Bench Test for Electric Propulsion
August-November 2004 - Lunar Resonances
Over the period mid August to mid November, SMART-1's orbit was altered at regular intervals (27.4 days) by a lunar resonance which occurred while SMART-1 was at apogee. This was in addition to the orbit boosts induced by the ongoing firings of the ion engine.
11 November 2004 - Crossing the first Lagrange point of the Earth-Moon system
On 11 November 2004 at 10:30 UTC, close to the 331st Earth apogee, SMART-1 was at the first Lagrange point of the Earth-Moon system, where the orbit is neither Earth, nor Moon bound. SMART-1 then crossed over to the region where the Moon's gravitational pull on the spacecraft is stronger than that of the Earth and was on its way to lunar capture.
Status report: No. 31 - SMART-1 from Earth-bound to Moon-bound
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Linux Foundation Sounds Off on UEFI
The Linux Foundation officially jumped in to the Unified Extensible Framework Interface (UEFI) boot controversy by releasing a document entitled “Making UEFI Secure Boot Work with Open Platforms.” The document is intended to provide PC hardware manufacturers with guidelines for how to implement the UEFI framework without preventing the owner from installing Linux or another non-Windows OS onto a UEFI Secure-Boot-compliant computer.
A few weeks ago, Red Hat engineer Matthew Garrett made news with a blog post indicating the possibility of a Linux lock-out with the new UEFI secure boot feature. According to Garrett, the new specification, which is designed to prevent so-called "bootkits" and other forms of BIOS-bolluxing malware, associates the firmware with a signing key, which prohibits the user from installing a new operating system. (The majority of Linux desktop systems are installed over a previous OEM version of Windows.)
When the announcement appeared at SlashDot and other open source news sources, the Linux community immediately raised the alarm, challenging this as yet another unfair business practice designed to restrict user choice in favor of proprietary software. Microsoft soon stepped in to say that, if such a lock-out occurs, it will be because of the OEMs, not Microsoft.
These new guidelines from the Linux Foundation describe steps that an OEM should take to ensure that the owner of the system will be free to install a different operating system on the computer. The document includes the following summary of recommendations:
- All platforms that enable UEFI secure boot should ship in setup mode, where the owner has control over which platform key (PK) is installed. It should also be possible for the owner to return a system to setup mode in the future if needed.
- The initial bootstrap of an operating system should detect a platform in setup mode, install its own key-exchange key (KEK), and install a platform key to enable secure boot.
- A firmware-based mechanism should be established to allow a platform owner to add new key-exchange keys to a system running in secure boot mode so that dual-boot mode systems can be set up.
- A firmware-based mechanism should be created to support easy booting of removable media.
- At some future time, an operating-system-neutral and vendor-neutral certificate authority should be established to issue KEKs for third-party hardware and software vendors.
The guidelines will also assist system administrators and PC consumers with choosing systems that do not lock the user in with original operating system. If you are purchasing a computer that advertises support for the UEFI “Secure Boot” feature, and you want to ensure that you have the freedom to change to a different operating system later, refer to the Linux Foundation guidelines.
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<urn:uuid:a7e288ee-cd88-452e-bd9f-56b40de0dc19>
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http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/News/Linux-Foundation-Sounds-Off-on-UEFI
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National Alliance on Mental Illness
page printed from http://www.nami.org/
(800) 950-NAMI; firstname.lastname@example.org
Help Push for Improvements to Gun Reporting Law!
June 15th, 2007
On June 13th, the US House passed a bill to provide more funding and incentives to states to report people to the National Instant Background Check System. NAMI supports the goal of keeping guns out of the hands of criminals; however, the bill does nothing to correct the vague and stigmatizing language around mental illness that makes it unclear who should be included in the background check system. Moreover, there is no time limit on how long someone stays in the system after an involuntary commitment. Finally, there need to be clearer protections to keep private the medical records of people with mental illness. For more information on the bill, click here.
Please contact your Senators and urge them to correct the oversights in the House bill! The Senate needs to make sure that there are clear guidelines, based on science, about who should be included in the background check system; that there are limits on how long someone is included in the system after an involuntary commitment; and that the private medical records of people with mental illness are protected. It is important for all people with serious mental illness that our leaders know that mental illness is not a proxy for violence!
Contact your Senators using NAMI's Legislative Action Center.
For a summary of HR 2640, the “NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007”, click here.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
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|
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