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Movement 1: Poco allegro
Movement 2: Adagio assai
Movement 3: Presto
The slow movement of H50—and similar movements with notated dynamic contrasts—raises the question of the instrument for which Bach’s sonatas were intended. Clearly, much of his work at Frederick’s court involved harpsichord-playing, but the harpsichord could only effect quick dynamic contrasts through the use of a double manual. On the clavichord—an instrument Bach loved and which he used throughout his life—the player could create dynamic changes by variations in finger pressure, but the overall range was restricted to piano or softer. By the late 1740s, however, Frederick had still another keyboard instrument at his court: the fortepiano (a fact made particularly famous by JS Bach’s visit in 1747, on which occasion he improvised a fugue on one of these instruments using a theme provided by Frederick). Therefore, performance of these works by Emanuel Bach himself on the piano is not only possible, but even likely.
from notes by Leta Miller © 2010 | <urn:uuid:ae348e3b-c23c-454d-9484-fd2959e21cd3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/tw.asp?w=W12951&t=GBAJY1078614&al=CDA67786&vw=dc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966096 | 234 | 2.984375 | 3 |
If you’ve spent any amount of time on this site up until now you should realise that it’s not really your total cholesterol level that you should focus on, more the amount of good cholesterol vs bad cholesterol coursing through your body.
Nevertheless you’ll still be at high risk of stroke, heart attack and other associated problems if you have elevated cholesterol levels as these will cause a narrowing or a furring of the arteries, which increases blood pressure and possibly fully blocked arteries which stops the flow of blood to certain parts of the heart which in effect can kill off those affected areas.
Experts in cardiovascular diseases recommend that everyone above 20 years of age should check their total cholesterol level once in each period of five years. For Men at age 35 above and women above 45, have your total cholesterol level tested yearly for a lipid profile test to watch out for signs that may lead to heart diseases and other related illnesses on major parts of our body.
Go here to read more – total cholesterol level | <urn:uuid:4ff9f3a2-5b9d-4dd1-99c1-ab088b8623d2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.whatisgoodcholesterol.com/tag/blood-pressure/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933446 | 204 | 2.21875 | 2 |
All About Blood
provides the body with many of the vital elements needed to sustain life.
Platelets are the part of the blood that stops a person from bleeding. Platelets are the blood cells that help blood clot. Several of our donor centers have Apheresis machines where you can donate a concentrated donation of platelets.
Plasma is the liquid portion of blood and contains all of the substances necessary for normal blood clotting. Several of our donor centers have Apheresis machines where you can donate a concentrated donation of plasma.
Alyx is an automation technology that collects double the amount of red blood cells versus a whole blood donation. Several of our donor centers as well as some blood drives have Alyx machines.
What happens to my whole blood donations?
- First, your blood is sent to the lab to determine blood type and to check for viral diseases.
- Next it is sent to the blood component lab to be divided up into plasma, platelets and red blood cells.
- Then it goes to hospital services to be distributed to the Hospital blood bank.
- Finally it goes to a thankful recipient. | <urn:uuid:089587ef-0ae8-4f9f-9266-d781c2a9ad2b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thebloodcenter.org/Donor/AllAboutBlood.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.900942 | 232 | 2.859375 | 3 |
The metaphors sometimes get delightfully mixed. The puns are often too well intended. The turn of phrase too sudden. But there can be little doubt that M.J. Akbar is a master wordsmith.
In today’s Deccan Herald, the veteran editor and author weighs in on the war of stereotypes over the proposal to build a mosque at the site of the World Trade Center towers in New York City:
“Can there be any rational reason for such subliminal fear of a house without a door?
“A mosque has no door; it is always open to anyone. Submission is the guiding force of its spirit and simplicity is its objective. There is equality in the lines of prayer. Servant stands beside master to bow, at the same moment, before the Lord. Divisions and pretensions dissipate.
“The whole world, as the great Indian theologian and mass leader Maulana Abul Kalam Azad used to say, is god’s mosque. Nations may claim to act in the name of god, but god does not need nations. A mosque is neither factory nor fortress: why should it arouse either envy or fear?
“Whatever else Islam might be it cannot be fascist. True, there are some Muslims who are fascist, but why blame Islam for the tyranny of despots? No one blames the Roman Catholic Church for Mussolini. Terrorists conspire. A conspiracy is hatched behind closed doors. A mosque has no door.”
Read the full article: A mosque has no door | <urn:uuid:572915ca-a1e1-4454-8a9e-c0721cbbf81d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://churumuri.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/can-a-plot-be-hatched-in-a-house-without-a-door/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935215 | 321 | 1.96875 | 2 |
The recent leaked emails from East Anglia University in the UK came as no surprise to me or many others who chose to question Global Warming myths and pseudo science. I have a math/science background and possibly more importantly, I am from NC and many of us have built in BS detectors. When confronted with numbers and theories that appeared absurd, I did some real research and reported on this blog. Watch the following video from a real scientist and then visit or revisit articles presented here going back to February of 2008.
“Climategate: Dr. Tim Ball on the hacked CRU emails”
Frem a speech given by Keith O. Rattie, Chairman, President and CEO of Questar Corporation, on April 2, 2009, at the 22nd Annual UVU Symposium on Environmental Ethics, held at Utah Valley University.
Reported here, May 15, 2009
“My perspective on global warming changed when I began to understand the limitations of the computer models that scientists have built to predict future warming. If the only variable driving the earth‟s climate were manmade CO2 then there‟d be no debate – global average temperatures would increase by a harmless one degree over the next 100 years. But the earth‟s climate is what engineers call a “non-linear, dynamic system”. The models have dozens of inputs. Many are little more than the opinion of the scientist – in some cases, just a guess.”
“Another example, water vapor is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. [The media now calls CO2 a “pollutant”. If CO2 is a “pollutant” then water vapor is also a “pollutant” – that‟s absurd, but I digress]. Some scientists believe clouds amplify human CO2 forcing, others believe precipitation acts as the earth‟s thermostat. But scientists do not agree on how to model clouds, precipitation, and evaporation, thus there‟s no consensus on this fundamental issue.”
“But the reality for American consumers is that whether you buy that the science is settled or not, the political science is settled. With the media cheering them on, Congress has promised to “do something”. CO2 regulation is coming, whether it will do any good or not. Indeed, President Obama‟s hope of shrinking the now the massive federal budget deficit depends on vast new revenues from a tax on carbon energy – so called “cap and trade”. Harry Reid has promised cap and trade legislation by August.”
Cap and trade, Global warming, Fact vs Fiction
From the Citizen Wells blog, March 10, 2008
“So, what is hampering our oil production. Environmental wackos. Let’s take Alaska for example. Of course, they always bring up environmental impact. But they also bring up animals like polar bears and whales. They use pseudo science of global warming and terms like may and could cause. They consistently use false data and science. I hear talk of polar bears becoming extinct almost every day when in fact their numbers have increased. Alleged receding ice will fundamentally have no impact on their numbers.”
Always follow the money
From the Citizen Wells blog, March 10, 2008
“Weather Channel founder John Coleman is calling global warming a fraud and says the station he founded needs to stop telling people what to think about climate change.”
“One of it’s meteorologists suggested two years ago that weathercasters who have doubts about global warming should lose their certification. Coleman advocates suing people who sell carbon credits — including Al Gore — because the attention in the courts could, in his words, “put some light on the fraud of global warming.””
John Coleman on Al Gore Global Warming lies
From the Citizen Wells blog, February 28, 2008
“Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.”
“In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.”
“Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting regional and local climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.”
R.A. Pielke Sr. provides a balanced view of climate science
Common sense goes a long way where I come from and the numbers and peudo science from the likes of Al Gore never made sense. I also checked some real data from time to time like summer temperatures in Antarctica.
Here is one of the better sources for information on climate change and earth facts. | <urn:uuid:581da1ad-0f21-4c93-8574-057dc647b84b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://citizenwells.wordpress.com/tag/dr-tim-ball/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937177 | 1,052 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Cicoil's flexible, flat silicone cables are designed for use on autonomous subsea vehicles that require absolute reliability in mission-critical applications. Ideal in AUVs, RMVs, ROVs and underwater drones, these halogen-free and flame resistant (UL 94 V-0) cables provide an alternative to PVC, neoprene and polyurethane cables, the company says.
Cicoil utilizes a process of encasing individual components (power conductors, signal pairs, coax, Cat 5e, tubing) in a shock absorbing silicone jacket that renders them unaffected by repeated exposure to severe vibration, salt water, sea ice, arctic conditions, high heat, coarse sand, weld spark, physical shock, operational stress, chemicals, tidal currents and the rigors of rough seas.
The silicone is tear-resistant and will not deform or wear during a lifetime of more than 10 million cycles, even under tight bending radius and high-speed flexing conditions, the company says. The highly durable silicone is "self-healing" from small punctures, and cable jacket damage can be repaired in the field.
Standard single-conductor, multi-conductor and hybrid cables are available from stock in continuous lengths, cut to order, or as assemblies with connectors. In addition, Cicoil offers anti-friction coating options, custom shapes and fan-out cables by request.
For more information, visit Cicoil.
Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website. | <urn:uuid:d4ae6006-c457-4300-abeb-a5e156ff2d26> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.deskeng.com/articles/aabhsm.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.909803 | 314 | 1.820313 | 2 |
When some talk about “moral equivalence” or “disproportionate force,” they miss the very essence of what is deemed a “fair fight.” For those of you who need a reminder of how it really is, I offer you this:
When I was in the Navy, I once witnessed a bar fight in downtown Olongapo (Philippines) that still haunts my dreams. The fight was between a big oafish Marine and a rather soft-spoken, medium-sized Latino sailor from my ship.
All evening the Marine had been trying to pick a fight with one of us and had finally set his sights on this diminutive shipmate of mine… figuring him for a safe target. When my friend refused to be goaded into a fight, the Marine sucker-punched him from behind on the side of the head so hard that blood instantly started to pour from this poor man’s mutilated ear.
Everyone present was horrified and was prepared to absolutely murder this Marine, but my shipmate quickly turned on him and began to single-handedly back him towards a corner with a series of stinging jabs and upper cuts that gave more than a hint to a youth spent boxing in a small gym in the Bronx.
Each punch opened a cut on the Marine’s startled face and by the time he had been backed completely into the corner he was blubbering for someone to stop the fight. He invoked his split lips and chipped teeth as reasons to stop the fight. He begged us to stop the fight because he could barely see through the river of blood that was pouring out of his split and swollen brows.
Nobody moved. Not one person.
The only sound in the bar was the sickening staccato sound of this sailor’s lightning fast fists making contact with new areas of the Marine’s head. The only sound I have heard since that was remotely similar was from the first Rocky film when Sylvester Stallone was punching sides of beef in the meat locker.
Finally the Marine’s pleading turned to screams…. a high, almost womanly shriek. And still the punches continued relentlessly.
Several people in the bar took a few tentative steps as though they wanted to try to break it up at that point, but hands reached out from the crowd and held them tight. I’m not ashamed to say that mine were two of the hands that held someone back.
You see, in between each blow the sailor had begun chanting a soft cadence: “Say [punch] you [punch] give [punch] up [punch]… say [punch] you [punch] were [punch] wrong [punch].”
He had been repeating it to the Marine almost from the start but we only became aware of it when the typical barroom cheers had died down and we began to be sickened by the sight and sound of the carnage.
This Marine stood there shrieking in the corner of the bar trying futilely to block the carefully-timed punches that were cutting his head to tatters… right down to the skull in places. But he refused to say that he gave up… or that he was wrong.
Even in the delirium of his beating he believed in his heart that someone would stop the fight before he had to admit defeat. I’m sure this strategy had served him well in the past and had allowed him to continue on his career as a barroom bully.
Finally, in a wail of agony the Marine shrieked “I give up,” and we gently backed the sailor away from him.
I’m sure you can guess why I have shared this story today.
I’m not particularly proud to have been witness to such a bloody spectacle, and the sound of that Marine’s woman-like shrieks will haunt me to my grave. But I learned something that evening that Israel had better learn for itself if it is to finally be rid of at least one of its tormentors:
This is one time an Arab aggressor must be allowed to be beaten so badly that every civilized nation will stand in horror, wanting desperately to step in and stop the carnage… but knowing that the fight will only truly be over when one side gives up and finally admits defeat.
Just as every person who had ever rescued that bully from admitting defeat helped create the cowardly brute I saw that evening in the bar, every well-intentioned power that has ever stepped in and negotiated a cease-fire for an Arab aggressor has helped create the monsters we see around us today.
President Lahoud of Lebanon, a big Hezbollah supporter and a close ally of Syria, has been shrieking non-stop to the UN Security Council for the past two days to get them to force Israel into a cease fire.
Clearly he has been reading his autographed copy of ‘Military Success for Dummies: Arab Despots’ by the late Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Ever since Nasser accidentally discovered the trick in ’56, every subsequent Arab leader has stuck to his tried and true formula for military success:
Instigate a war.
Once the war is well underway and you are in the process of having your ass handed to you… get a few world powers to force your western opponent into a cease-fire.
Whatever you do, don’t surrender or submit to any terms dictated by your enemy. That would ruin everything! All you have to do is wait it out and eventually the world will become sickened at what is being done to your soldiers and civilian population… and will force a truce.
Once a truce has been called, you can resume your intransigence (which probably caused the conflict in the first place), and even declare victory as your opponent leaves the field of battle.
This tactic has never failed. Not once.
In fact it worked so well for the Egyptians in 1973, that to this day they celebrate the Yom Kippur War – a crushing defeat at the hands of Israel – as a military victory! No kidding… it’s a national holiday over there!
President Lahoud has already begun to shriek like a school girl to the UN Security Council to “Stop the violence and arrange a cease-fire, and then after that we’ll be ready to discuss all matters.”
Uh huh. Forgive me if I find that a tad hard to swallow. He allowed Hezbollah to take over his country. He allowed the regular Lebanese army to provide radar-targeting data for the Hezbollah missile that struck the Israeli destroyer. He has turned a blind eye while Iranian and Syrian weapons, advisers and money have poured into his country.
And now that his country is in ruins he wants to call it a draw.
As much as it may sicken the world to stand by and watch it happen, strong hands need to hold back the weak-hearted and let the fight continue until one side finally admits unambiguous defeat.
Here’s the original link to Bogner’s post – rather brilliant, I must say. And thanks go to this person for sharing this with me and my friends:
Ch., Lt Col Brett C. Oxman
Staff Chaplain, Personnel and Budget
Office of the AF Chief of Chaplains
DSN 297-1485, Civ (202) 767-1485
Seen at Treppenwitz (thank you, sir, for the clarity).
Cross-posted to Expose the Left. | <urn:uuid:36fa02b8-d509-408d-b17c-b3f05d9c2ffd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.msunderestimated.com/2006/07/a-difficult-lesson-by-david-bogner/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979866 | 1,569 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Beaufort, a name that bears the meaning ‘the beautiful fort’ in old French, sits pretty at the southwest region of Sabah. This quiet provincial town is situated less than 2 hours away, roughly 97 kilometers away from Kota Kinabalu.
A sister to the Beaufort town in North Carolina, Beaufort is mainly inhabited by the Bisaya, Brunei, Murut, and Chinese denizens. The Beaufort tamu (weekly market) is held every Friday and Saturday. It is famous for its local produce especially the fresh selections of local tropical fruits. When in Beaufort, don’t miss the chance to sample the scrumptiously well-known Beaufort Mee—a noodle dish served either dry or with soup. | <urn:uuid:b757701d-ebf4-4f76-b861-e4d343dcb2e7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sabahtourism.com/sabah-malaysian-borneo/en/destination/district/10-beaufort/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944872 | 157 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Decade's Worth of Vehicle Fatalities Mapped
Approximately 38.2 million Americans will take to the roads this Thanksgiving holiday weekend, according to AAA. That’s the first significant increase (about 4%) in any holiday traffic this year.
With so many people out on the road, it’s important to remember the risks that driving can bring.
The worst possible outcome is starkly illustrated by this interactive map by ITO World. Using National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data, the map shows every U.S. road fatality from the past decade. All in all, some 369,629 people lost their lives to the road in the time frame.
Continue below for the full interactive map, and be safe out there. | <urn:uuid:8857c7a2-fdf7-4ded-9ee4-f82c64f12752> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2011/11/decades-worth-of-vehicle-fatalities-mapped.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911484 | 152 | 2.421875 | 2 |
An expedition, followed up by some computer hunting on Google Earth, has discovered large remnants of old growth forest, including thriving bird communities, in the mountains of Angola. The Namba Mountains in Angola were expected to contain around 100 hectares of forest, but an on-the-ground survey, coupled with online research, has discovered numerous forest fragments totaling around 590 hectares in the remote mountains, boosting the chances for many rare species.
“Afromontane forest is the most localized and threatened habitat type in Angola. For the past 40 years the estimate of the area covered by this habitat in Angola has been circa 200 hectares,” the scientists write in a new paper in Bird Conservation International, but the new discovery nearly quadruples the amount of mountain forest left in Angola to 700 hectares.
Over four days surveying an 100-hectare forest in the Namba Mountains, the researchers recorded 89 bird species, and even more importantly sighted all 20 species that are generally associated with dwindling Angolan mountain forests. The scientists even found an abundant population of Swierstra’s francolin (Pternistis swierstrai), which is listed as Endangered by the IUCN Red List and is only found in Angola. The scientists also recorded the Angola cave chat (Xenocopsychus ansorgei), listed as Near Threatened.
“This makes the Nambas the most important site for Afromontane forest bird conservation in Angola. The Nambas deserve national and international recognition for their conservation importance, and along with [Mount Moco]] are among the highest priorities for the establishment of new conservation areas in Angola,” the researchers write. Mount Moco contains around 85 hectares of forest, thought to be the largest such forest in Angola until this new discovery of larger and, the scientists report, more intact forests.
The researchers recommend that officials quickly list the Nambas Mountains’ as an Important Bird Area (IBA) due to the presence of endangered species as well as a number of species with restricted habitat.
“Further field surveys are required to establish the population sizes of key bird taxa, especially for Swierstra’s Francolin, and the overall bird diversity, and to determine the importance of the area for the conservation of other taxonomic groups,” the researchers conclude. | <urn:uuid:7ffd141d-ec13-40bf-b65e-471792c5fd84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://animalconnectionac.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/researchers-discover-unknown-forests-in-angola-filled-with-rare-birds/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927108 | 480 | 3.5 | 4 |
Tropical Storm Henri forms
The tropics spawned another October surprise today, when Tropical Storm Henri formed in the face of adverse levels of wind shear. Henri is under about 20 - 25 knots of wind shear, which ordinarily prevents rapid development like we witnessed this afternoon. However, the environment is quite moist, and Henri is over warm waters, 29°C. An ASCAT pass from 11:37am EDT showed Henri had winds of 40 mph. Satellite loops show that Henri has managed to rapidly develop a large area of intense thunderstorms with cold cloud tops in just a few hours, though the high shear is keeping any thunderstorms from developing on the west side of the center. Water vapor satellite images show that there is some dry air to Henri's northwest, and this dry air will act to slow Henri's growth some. The dry air is creating strong downdrafts that are apparent on visible satellite images as arcs of cumulus clouds spreading out from where the downdraft hits the ocean surface, along the northwest side of Henri's center.
None of the reliable global computer models showed Henri would develop, and the models all favor weakening and dissipation of Henri by Thursday, due to high wind shear of 20 - 25 knots. The official NHC forecast goes along with this scenario, but think there is a medium (30 - 50% chance) that Henri will not dissipate. By Friday, wind shear in the vicinity of Henri (or its remains) is predicted to fall to the low to moderate range. Even if Henri has dissipated by that point, regeneration into a tropical storm may occur. The track of Henri after Friday is problematic, as the storm will be in an area of weak steering currents. Several of the models favor a track to the west-southwest into the Caribbean, across Hispaniola. Residents of the Dominican Republic and Haiti should anticipate that Henri or its remains may bring flooding rains to Hispaniola by Saturday. It is also possible that Henri will get pulled northwards and recurved out to sea, and not affect the Caribbean at all, though.
Figure 1. Latest satellite image of Henri.
A little tropical weather for England
The remnant circulation of Tropical Storm Grace is currently making landfall in Southwest England. Grace's remains brought sustained winds of tropical storm force--41 mph--to one buoy off the coast last hour, and 38 mph to the Sevenstones Lightship buoy. you can track the progress of Grace via our wundermap for the region.
Figure 2. The remnant circulation of Tropical Storm Grace scoots by to the south of Ireland in this visible satellite image taken at 1pm EDT 10/06/09. Image credit: UK Met Office. | <urn:uuid:c1507b60-cdb8-47b2-a4ee-f2bd99dcc271> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://french.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1342&page=5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943948 | 550 | 2.5625 | 3 |
It’s been a banner couple of weeks for exploits on the web. At the end of March it was reported that mysql.com was exploited by a blind sql injection. The results of that attack included the revelation that the dude at mysql in charge of product development for mysql’s WordPress account used a four digit number for this password. And these are the people who should know better. Speaking of WordPress, there was a very large DDoS attack against wordpress.com at the beginning of March. The speculation is that the attack originated in China and was politically motivated. On the heels of that, Matt Mullenweg reported on his blog a couple of days ago that Auttomatic’s servers had been exploited at root, and sensitive code liberated.
Those are high profile attacks, rooted in a variety of motivations. Beyond that, there are so many day-to-day exploits that occur. It’s very hard for the development communities of tools we like to use to keep ahead of the exploiters. If the experts at places like Auttomatic and mysql.com can get owned, what does it mean for the rest of us… who aren’t experts? At the beginning of this month, I discovered that my own wordpress installation was exploited by some criminals running phishing schemes to get peoples bank info. It makes me feel sick to my stomach knowing that my server was aiding inadvertently in that kind of activity. How did it happen? As best I can tell, the site was exploited via a third party plugin that allowed image uploading. But, there are apparently many ways that a wordpress installation can get exploited. In my case, it seems the code was injected many months ago, and only recently turned on, as it were. This makes for a problematic situation in re-building from backups, many of which are themselves compromised. Furthermore, I learned from a computer forensics grad student who contacted me, that her program at UAB identifies many thousands of sites a month that have been compromised for phishing.
So, what to do? We are very close to the end of the semester, and because I use these sites to run my classes, I’m faced with some long nights of rebuilding sites from scratch and the like. I love wordpress, have loved using it in the classroom. But, now I’m wondering if its worth it. I won’t be moving back to Blackboard, that’s for sure. But, my university’s OIT will not provide support for professors to do anything on their servers except roll a very simple UNIX account, use Blackboard, or maybe get someone to make a Sharepoint application (groan).
In thinking about the situation over recent days, I’m wondering what I really need for myself and for my classes. Much of the functionality of wordpress comes at a price — 1. third party plugins are inherently less safe than core features; 2. core features aren’t necessarily enough to do some of the nifty things I like doing (see, for example, feedwordpress); 3. dynamic sites are resource intensive, and require much more RAM server side; 4. it’s hard to imagine sql ever being safe; 5. I’m not sure how much my students really enjoy the spiffier side of things on my sites; 6. As this twitter status states so clearly, PHP is essentially a domain specific language for remote exploits.
A short list would include at least the following:
1. An attractive, well designed layout for each class, where page appearance is thematically consistent, but not identical to my main site/page.
2. The ability to distinguish between pages and posts.
3. The ability to feed student posts onto the site in some manner or form.
4. The ability to distribute readings- preferably with some password protection.
5. The ability to show video from lectures or in support of lectures.
6. The ability to show an updated calendar (something I don’t actually do right now, but would like to).
8. A minimal need for distributing any of these services.
My instinct right now is to move to a dynamically-generated static content site, where the site would be dynamically generated on my own machine as a set of static html pages that would then pushed via source control to a repository on the server. Flat files are fast, and the source control side of things is really attractive. There are a few different systems out there that offer this now– but require the effort of importing my old site in and making sure that url redirects and the like work. I’m looking into jekyll and hyde, which are ruby and python implementations respectively. There are a number of other options as well (nanoc, middleman, chisel, webgen, and aym-cms among many).
Another idea would be to run a wordpress install on localhost and produce static files from that using a tool like this one, use disqus for the comment system, and then using source control to push to the server.
Security issues are a real concern for the DIY professoriate. I’m wondering what others of you think. | <urn:uuid:606dbf98-3068-45dc-8ae5-de29cfbc8271> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://parezcoydigo.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/rolling-your-own-and-getting-pwned/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955682 | 1,076 | 1.921875 | 2 |
Banks, meet the new "cop on the beat."
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has outlined its plan to supervise the nation's large banks and other depository institutions.
Elizabeth Warren, special adviser to the secretary of the Treasury on the CFPB, said in a statement that the consumer agency is "here to make sure that markets work for American families" and that the bank supervision program is "a big part of that."
"Starting on July 21," she said, "we will be a cop on the beat -- examining banks and protecting consumers."
The agency plans to conduct examinations to help ensure that large banks' consumer financial practices conform with legal requirements. The program will oversee 111 depository institutions that have total assets of more than $10 billion, plus subsidiaries and affiliates of these institutions. Collectively, these institutions hold more than 80 percent of the banking industry’s assets, according to a CFPB statement.
Examiners in satellite offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., will "form the front line" in the supervisory efforts, each office being the nexus for supervision in its respective area of the country, the CFPB said. The agency expects to eventually have several hundred examiners, with more than 100 staff members transferring from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve System, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Office of Thrift Supervision.
Most institutions will be examined only periodically, but the largest and most complex banks will be subject to a year-round supervision program.
Examiners will look at products and services with a focus on risk to consumers. Compliance with requirements during the entire life cycle will be reviewed, including how a product is developed, marketed, sold and managed. Fair lending reviews will be conducted to detect and address potential discriminatory practices, and policies and practices will be evaluated to ensure compliance with consumer financial protection laws and regulations.
If a bank isn't compliant, the CFPB will seek corrective actions, including strengthening programs and processes to ensure violations don't recur and remedies are instituted. When necessary, examiners will coordinate with CFPB enforcement staff to address harm to consumers.
Follow me on Twitter: @marciegeff | <urn:uuid:1ee2ba05-a792-499d-861c-4b3e0f370599> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bankrate.com/financing/banking/new-cop-to-examine-banks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941038 | 464 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Curator Michael Gregg, of the Maritime History department of the Western Australian Museum in Fremantle, recently visited the Scienceworks collection store to take highly specialised photographs of a model ship in our Transport Collection.
Michael Gregg with the model of pearling lugger Mary.
Source: Museum Victoria
The model is an exact replica of the pearling lugger Mary that operated out of Broome and Darwin in the 1920s and 30s. It was commissioned and partly constructed by Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Ingleton RAN in the 1930s to document a uniquely Australian type of vessel that was rapidly disappearing.
In 1913, the pearling industry was worth a fortune to Western Australia in exports. As Michael puts it, "Australia didn't ride on sheep's back, it was on the pearl oyster's back." In one year alone, 300 new luggers were registered. "At one stage, the guy who built this boat was turning out a new lugger every 14 days."
Michael is interested in the model because it captures details of design and construction that have been lost with the demise of the pearling lugger. "There are no Fremantle-built pearling luggers still in existence in their original form," explains Michael. This is in part due to mechanisation; the original Mary was herself fitted with an engine by the 1930s. But more significant was the illegal rebuilding of luggers and recycling of registration numbers by unscrupulous operators. World War II took a toll on the lugger fleet also, as boats were requisitioned by the Navy or destroyed ahead of a feared Japanese invasion..
"There were all sorts of shenanigans that went on with the pearling industry," Michael says. "The best way to run the industry economically was to import Malay and Japanese labour. Come the early 1900s, the White Australia Policy meant you could bring in indentured seamen to work on ships for up to two years but they were only allowed to work as crew, not boatbuilders." Pearling masters got around this technicality by signing up imported labour as crew, but quietly issuing them boatbuilding tasks as 'maintenance'.
There were three distinct types of pearling lugger built to cope with the different conditions in Broome, the Torres Strait and Shark Bay. The nature of these vessels – rapidly built to a standard pattern and considered reasonably expendable – means they were rarely preserved in model form. It was only Ingleton's interest in recording history that inspired the construction of this model, and it's being used now exactly as Ingleton intended.
Detail of the Mary model showing its beautifully detailed rigging and fittings.
Source: Museum Victoria
"We were just gobsmacked when we discovered this model because we thought we knew of all the significant lugger material in Australia," says Michael. "We regularly trawl the net looking for references to pearling luggers. Because there was sufficient information in your Collections Online and it's searchable, it popped up in Google." One of the most exciting prospects for the model, and the reason for Michael's visit, is that he's using it to help develop photogrammetric software and techniques that will conserve Australia's maritime technology.
Michael Gregg at work taking photos of the pearling lugger model in the Scienceworks collection store, experimenting with a 3D camera.
Source: Museum Victoria
Photogrammetry uses a series of photos analysed by a computer to build a 3D virtual model of an object. According to Michael, it's commonly used by police to help reconstruct road crashes. "It's great for working out the distance between two points in space, but we're really pushing the boundaries of what it can do." While the process will be most useful in recording full-sized ships, the Mary model invites some experimentation; he was using a 3D camera see if it would help simplify the laborious process of matching target points between different photographs. "It's much easier to work on a full-sized boat because you can stick targets all over it and nobody minds. With a museum-quality model, we can't do that. This is the first time I've recorded rigging simultaneously, too."
Michael sees photogrammetry as an incredibly useful tool for museums and more. Ultimately he hopes the software and techniques he and his colleagues are developing can do something absolutely extraordinary: use historical photographs to create something you can hold in your hand. The craze for stereoscopic photographs around the turn of the century produced countless images of one view from two slightly different angles, and these might one day allow 3D recreations of long-gone ships, buildings, artefacts and more. "It's very, very exciting."
Western Australian Museum - Maritime
Pearl lugger Mary on Collections Online | <urn:uuid:735aad1d-f1fb-45cc-a0f9-8d0d269854b3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://museumvictoria.com.au/about/mv-blog/feb-2012/pearling-lugger-photogrammetry/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970588 | 966 | 3.21875 | 3 |
|This article does not cite any references or sources. (October 2008)|
Linear inequalities in real numbers
When the two expressions are connected by 'greater than' or 'less than' sign, we get an inequality.
When operating in terms of real numbers, linear inequalities are the ones written in the forms
- or ,
where is a linear functional in real numbers and b is a constant real number. Alternatively, these may be viewed as
- or ,
where is an affine function.
The above are commonly written out as
Sometimes they may be written out in the forms
Here are called the unknowns, are called the coefficients, and is the constant term.
A linear inequality looks exactly like a linear equation, with the inequality sign replacing the equality sign.
A system of linear inequalities is a set of linear inequalities in the same variables:
Here are the unknowns, are the coefficients of the system, and are the constant terms.
This can be concisely written as the matrix inequality:
where A is an m×n matrix, x is an n×1 column vector of variables, and b is an m×1 column vector of constants.
In the above systems both strict and non-strict inequalities may be used.
Not all systems of linear inequalities have solutions.
Interpretations and applications
The set of solutions of a real linear inequality constitutes a half-space of the n-dimensional real space, one of the two defined by the corresponding linear equation.
The set of solutions of a system of linear inequalities corresponds to the intersection of the half-planes defined by individual inequalities. It is a convex set, since the half-planes are convex sets, and the intersection of a set of convex sets is also convex. In the non-degenerate cases this convex set is a convex polyhedron (possibly unbounded, e.g., a half-space, a slab between two parallel half-spaces or a polyhedral cone). It may also be empty or a convex polyhedron of lower dimension confined to an affine subspace of the n-dimensional space Rn.
Sets of linear inequalities (called constraints) are used in the definition of linear programming.
Linear inequalities in terms of other mathematical objects
When you are about to graph a linear inequality, it will be on one side of a line. Also, when you mark points where the line crosses where the x and y axis cross each other you can make the rise over run, which will help you find slope. If slope is denoted by m and y-intercept by b, you can find m = and b = , so long as . Such line is described by the equation .
The above definition requires well-defined operations of addition, multiplication and comparison, therefore the notion of a linear inequality may be extended to ordered rings, in, particular, to ordered fields. | <urn:uuid:fb4e8f16-ddb0-4b00-94f6-71af918722bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_linear_inequalities | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927229 | 608 | 3.921875 | 4 |
"I call it a white book of a thousand pages --- and hidden in those pages are a few haiku, written, perhaps, in invisible ink."
Babylon 5 Dark Genesis: The Birth of the Psi Corps
Iim sure you did the same thing...
When Mac OS X was released in March, I wondered if I would see any Apple commercials soon thereafter:
The TV screen is filled with a close-up of the OS X desktop. As some techno song plays in the background, a cursor flies across the desktop, moving over the Dock; it then clicks on the Finder icon, opening a Finder window, moving and playing with the interface elements therein. We are treated to shots of the Aqua interface. The commercial ends with shots of iTunes burning a CD, iMovie editing a movie...
The screen goes black, upon which we see the following words: "OS X. The worldis most advanced operating system. Think Different."
We gave Apple the benefit of the doubt. After all, OS X, admittedly, wasnit ready for prime time. When version 10.1 ships, we thought, THATis when the rubes will be treated to ubiquitous commercials showing OS X in all itis glory.
But that didnit happen either.
So now, weire scratching our collective heads. Why, oh why, isnit Apple hyping the you-know-what out of OS X? Sure, sure, there are positive OS X reviews in nearly every PC publication around. Apple couldnit buy better reviews. But whereis Appleis ads? Whereis Appleis ad company, and why isnit that ad company advertising the spit out of OS X? What up witi dat?
Iim sure there are good reasons why Apple isnit advertising OS X. Hereis three theories that I came up with:
The Far-Fetched idea Theory -- Apple will never advertise OS X. Suppose that Apple doesnit feel that the OS is the reality. Suppose that Apple intends to focus on the hardware -- after all, the company is a hardware company.
Suppose that Apple wants to make OS X the best operating system it can be, but, suppose that Apple wants to make it a transparent OS. Suppose Apple plans to let the OS speak for itself. Suppose that Apple will never draw attention to OS X through advertising, because it already has the computing worldis attention and any more would be redundant (you must admit that OS X gets as much media face time as Windows).
Maybe Appleis not advertising OS X is making a statement, a statement in contradistinction to Microsoftis plan to make the world nauseous with Windows overkill. Hey, Iid buy that.
This would be Appleis way of staying above the fray, lumping OS advertising with "Megahertz madness."
I told you it was far fetched.
The Logical Theory -- Apple doesnit think itis the right time to advertise OS X. Maybe Apple doesnit want OS X to be lost in Microsoftis marketing orgy. Apple is waiting a) for Windows XP to have its day in the sun and b) for OS X to develop a little bit more.
On the surface, this would be a good idea. But I donit buy my own theory after the first sentence. It makes no sense for Apple not to advertising OS X, now that version 10.1 is on the streets. OS X is bigger and more landmarking than any hardware product heretofore. Yet, Apple is focusing none of its advertising dollars on the central (software) component included in each of its hardware products, iPod notwithstanding.
The Paranoid Theory Apple made a deal with Microsoft. In order to be allowed continued existence (Office for the Mac, Internet Explorer, Outlook for Exchange Server, etc.), Apple promised back in 1997 that the company would not go head to head with Microsoft Windows. Hence, no advertising.
I know, I know. Never smoke crack before writing.
All that said, I have no idea why Apple isnit advertising OS X. Okay, I can almost buy the argument that a mere Operating System isnit synonymous with "sexy advertising." But if Apple doesnit advertising OS X, then what a waste, I say.
It is really odd and disappointing that Mac OS X isnit being plastered around the world on billboards and magazine- and newspaper ads, because, contrary to our incestuous Mac media and community, very comparatively few people know that Apple has a new Operating System. And that is pathetic. The computing world needs an OS X ad blitz that would show people that Apple is alive and well in the OS business (and advertising would finally convince white people to relax around me, since they would then know that my wearing a T-shirt with a blue X on it doesnit mean that Iim a Louis Farrakhan follower paying homage to Malcolm X, but, instead, I am a computer geek showing my OS partisanship).
Appleis OS X packaging calls it the "worldis most advanced operating system." Therefore, Apple should either advertise OS X like it is the "most advanced operating system," or remove that cover copy.
Why be the best if you donit let everyone know. Being humble isnit kosher behavior for a company trying to increase its market share from five to ten.
Rodney O. Lain thinks Apple should make a "Whassup!" commercial. When he isnit trying to convince everyone with that advertising idea, he is a regular contributor to The Mac Observer with his "iBrotha" column. | <urn:uuid:5d96a628-fccc-4968-80c9-7d91d118be42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Will_Apple_Ever_Advertise_Mac_OS_X | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939991 | 1,139 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Work begins on Mount Rushmore, Sputnik is launched into space, the pope visits America for the first time, Janis Joplin is found dead of an overdose, all on this day.
1535: The first complete English-language Bible (the Coverdale Bible) is printed, with translations by William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale.
1582: Pope Gregory XIII implements the Gregorian Calendar. In Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain, Oct. 4 of this year is followed directly by Oct. 15.
1669: Painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history, dies in Amsterdam at the age of 63. He's seen here in his 1659 self-portrait.
1822: Rutherford B. Hayes, who would go on to become the 19th president of the United States, is born in Delaware, Ohio.
1883: The Orient Express, a long-distance train service connecting Paris, France, to Constantinople, Turkey, runs for the first time.
1895: The first U.S. Open Men's Golf Championship administered by the United States Golf Association is played on the nine-hole course at the Newport Country Club in Newport, R.I. Horace Rawlins, a 21-year-old English assistant at the host club, wins the 36-hole, one-day tournament. Rawlins would also finish second at the 1896 U.S. Open.
1895: Comedian Buster Keaton, who would become known for his silent films featuring physical comedy, is born in Piqua, Kansas. Some of his best-known films include "The General," "Our Hospitality," "Sherlock, Jr." and "The Navigator."
1904: Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the French sculptor who designed the Statue of Liberty, dies of tuberculosis in Paris at the age of 70.
1918: An explosion kills more than 100 and destroys the T.A. Gillespie Company Shell Loading Plant in Sayreville, N.J. Fires and explosions continue for three days, forcing massive evacuations and spreading ordnance over a wide area, pieces of which have been found as late as 2007.
1923: Actor Charlton Heston, who would become known for his heroic roles in films such as "The Ten Commandments," "Ben-Hur" (for which he won a Best Actor Oscar), "El Cid" and "Planet of the Apes," and for his political activism, is born north of Chicago.
1927: Sculptor Gutzon Borglum begins work on Mount Rushmore. Between then and Oct. 31, 1941, Borglum and 400 workers sculpted the colossal 60-feet-tall carvings of U.S. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. When Borglum dies from an embolism in March 1941, his son, Lincoln Borglum, takes over the project through its completion.
1931: The comic strip "Dick Tracy" makes its debut in the Detroit Daily Mirror. The strip was created by Chester Gould, who would write and draw the strip until 1977, when others took over production of the still-running strip.
1933: The men's magazine Esquire is published for the first time.
1937: Author Jackie Collins, whose 28 novels have sold more than 400 million copies, is born in London, England.
1941: Norman Rockwell's fictional World War II private, Willie Gillis, debuts on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Gillis, a fictional everyman whose career was tracked on the cover of the Post from induction through discharge without being depicted in battle, contributed to the success of the wartime bond sales efforts.
1941: Author Anne Rice, best known for her popular series of novels, "The Vampire Chronicles," including 1976's "Interview with the Vampire," revolving around the central character of the vampire Lestat, is born in New Orleans, La.
1944: Baseball manager Tony La Russa, who managed teams to six league championships and three World Series titles, most recently in 2011 with the St. Louis Cardinals, and who ranks third in all-time major league wins by a manager, is born in Tampa, Fla.
1946: Actress Susan Sarandon, who won a Best Actress Oscar for 1995's "Dead Man Walking" and is also known for such movies as "Atlantic City," "Bull Durham," "Thelma & Louise" and "The Client," is born in New York City.
1955: The Brooklyn Dodgers capture their only World Series title, beating the New York Yankees in seven games. The Dodgers would move to Los Angeles following the 1957 season.
1957: Russia's Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, is launched. The satellite would set off the Cold War-era "Space Race" between America and Russia.
1957: Jimmy Hoffa is elected president of the Teamsters at the union's convention in Miami Beach, Fla.
1957: The sitcom "Leave It To Beaver," starring Jerry Mathers as the title character, Theodore "The Beaver" Cleaver, premieres on television. The show, which also starred Barbara Billingsley and Hugh Beaumont as Beaver's parents, June and Ward Cleaver, and Tony Dow as Beaver's brother Wally, would run for six seasons and eventually attain iconic status.
1957: Russell Simmons, the business magnate who co-founded the pioneering hip-hop label Def Jam, is born in Queens, N.Y. He also created the clothing fashion lines Phat Farm, Argyleculture and American Classics.
1962: The World War II movie "The Longest Day," featuring a large ensemble cast including Kenneth More, Richard Todd, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, Henry Fonda, Red Buttons, Peter Lawford and John Wayne, premieres in the United States. The movie, about World War II's D-Day on June 6, 1944, would be nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but win only Best Cinematography and Best Special Effects.
1963: Hurricane Flora kills 6,000 in Cuba and Haiti. Flash floods from the hurricane wash out large sections of several towns, while mudslides bury some entire towns, resulting in many of the deaths.
1965: Becoming the first pope to ever visit the United States and the Western hemisphere, Pope Paul VI arrives in New York. The pope meets with President Lyndon B. Johnson, addresses the United Nations General Assembly, celebrates Mass at Yankee Stadium, and visits the New York World's Fair while in New York City.
1970: Singer-songwriter Janis Joplin is found dead of a heroin overdose in a Hollywood hotel at the age of 27. She had just finished recording her second solo album, "Pearl," which went to No. 1 upon its posthumous release in 1971 and featured her biggest hit single, a cover of Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee."
1976: The U.S. Supreme Court lifts the 1972 ban on the death penalty for convicted murderers. A 1972 ruling by the court had voided states' death penalty statutes because they could result in arbitrary sentencing, making them "cruel and unusual" punishment. After states passed new laws to deal with the issue, through bifurcated trials featuring separate deliberations for the guilt and penalty phases as well as other changes, the Supreme Court ruled that the new laws weren't unconstitutional.
1976: Actress Alicia Silverstone, best known for her roles in "Clueless," "The Crush" and "Batman & Robin," is born in San Francisco, Calif.
1983: Richard Noble sets a new land speed record of 633.468 mph, driving Thrust2 at the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. In 1997, Thrust2's record would be broken by Noble's follow up car, ThrustSSC, driven by Royal Air Force fighter pilot Wing Commander Andy Green.
1989: Secretariat, the racehorse that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown champion in 25 years and is considered to be one of the greatest Thoroughbreds of all time, is euthanized at the age of 19 after a month of treatment fails to cure laminitis, a painful and often incurable hoof condition.
1993: During Russia's Constitutional Crisis, tanks bombard the Moscow government building housing the Russian parliament, while demonstrators against President Boris Yeltsin rally outside. Vice President Alexander Rutskoy, who had assumed the powers of acting president after Yeltsin's earlier decree to dissolve parliament was declared unconstitutional, and his supporters, including parliament chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, are arrested and charged with organization of mass disturbances.
2001: Rickey Henderson of the San Diego Padres hits a home run to score his 2,246th career run and break Ty Cobb's major league record. Before retiring in 2003, he would add 49 more runs for a career total of 2,295, a record he still holds today.
2002: John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," is sentenced to 20 years in prison by a federal judge in Alexandria, Va. Lindh was a United States citizen who was captured as an enemy combatant during the United States' 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.
2002: Richard Reid pleads guilty in a federal court to eight criminal counts in connection to trying to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight with explosives hidden in his shoes.
2004: SpaceShipOne wins the Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight, by being the first private craft to fly into space months earlier. The stubby, short-winged craft was carried to 47,000 feet on a jet-powered mother ship dubbed "White Knight" and then ignited its rocket, carrying it to a height of 328,491 feet, past the boundary of space.
2011: Apple Inc. announces the release of its much-anticipated iPhone 4S. The phone retains the exterior design of its predecessor, the iPhone 4, but adds a voice recognition system known as Siri, a cloud storage service named iCloud and other improved hardware specifications and software updates.
Sign up for Breaking News, Daily Headlines, Severe Weather Alerts & more! | <urn:uuid:411baa65-6823-42ea-bf2a-fcce4a3ade3e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kjct8.com/news/-/163152/16691916/-/lu2oi0/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964376 | 2,152 | 1.960938 | 2 |
Insulated Shipping Containers
As discussed in the article about intermodal containers, there are several types of insulated shipping containers that serve the purpose of storing and transporting various goods. The nature of the cargo dictates the choice of what kind of container one should use.
Therefore, for products that are sensitive to temperature (food, chemical substances and pharmaceuticals) insulated shipping containers are recommended. Maintaining freshness and the efficacy of the stored products is their main purpose.
The material used to build such containers results from combining the following elements:
- a vacuum recipient (with similar properties as those of a thermos)- liners (fabricated thermal layers)- styrofoam (molded expanded polysterene foam that acts as a cooler)- polyurethane- polyethylene- thin sheets - covers of foamed plastics- reflective materials (metalized films that disperse light thus diminishing the heating process),- bubble wrap or other panels filled with air,- other packaging materials and structures.
While some insulated containers can be used just once, others are reusable. Once the goods are unloaded, the containers are dismantled and sent to the shipper, who re-assembles and uses them again.
The disassembling facilitates the return of the containers.
Insulated shipping containers are integrated in a more extensive, all-encompassing system that aims at monitoring and manipulating temperature of the freight during the complete distribution circuit. Within the insulated container, a refrigerant or coolant is used that varies from:
- simple dry ice,
- gel packs with specific formulas corresponding to particular temperatures that help distribute heat in order to reach the appropriate temperature.
This type of container has to be equipped with a temperature data logger. It indicates time and temperature, surveying it for the entire cargo.
Here are the issues that need to be considered when using an insulated container: to what temperature values is the product sensitive, the expected time and temperatures during shipping, the regulatory requirements, the particular components of the container that best fit the type of product.
When evaluating what elements need to be used in assembling the container, two important characteristics have to be met: the insulation properties of the materials (named K Value) and the their thickness. Depending on these attributes, the functionality of the components is ensured.
One should also consider to what extent is the container prone to latent heat after being assembled. In some cases, although each component was assessed and passed the test of insulation, it may be possible that the container, as a whole, to be a source of heating itself. Therefore, the container must undergo a test to make sure the heat produced by the functioning components does not affect the freight.
For a thorough verification, the help of specialists is recommended and sometimes, explicitly required. Some of the tests conducted in laboratories include ASTM D3103-07, Standard Test Method for Thermal Insulation Performance of Packages, ISTA Guide 5B.
More about insulated shipping containers | <urn:uuid:9ef6aa5a-01dc-4c19-85de-49039f335d2b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.shipping-container-housing.com/insulated-shipping-containers.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921222 | 605 | 2.84375 | 3 |
Posted: Jan 30, 2013 4:35 AM by Associated Press
ST. LOUIS (AP) - The Army Corps of Engineers has cleared tons of rock from one section of the middle Mississippi River and is now moving work slightly upstream.
The drought has caused the river to be so low between St. Louis and Cairo, Ill., that barge traffic is endangered. To keep the channel open, the corps used dredging barges and explosives to remove rock pinnacles in the river near Thebes, Ill.
Now, the corps plans to do similar work about 31 miles north of Thebes near Grand Tower, Ill. The work will require midnight-to-noon closure of the channel for about 10 days.
Heavy rain fell in parts of the mid-Mississippi River valley on Tuesday, which could boost river levels. | <urn:uuid:b5233ba4-eec3-4493-9b2e-1dcf5a806366> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.komu.com/news/river-rock-removal-effort-moves-to-new-spot/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946649 | 171 | 2.25 | 2 |
Or the Koran, etc. etc.
My choices would be,
1. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the looking glass and what alice found there. By Lewis Carroll
2. The Complete Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy, by Douglas Adams.
3. Cats Cradle, By Vonnegut Jr. (Or almost anything by him, also particularly Sirens of the Titans)
What about you? What book or narative do you think presents a better understanding of Morality/reality/sexuality/ and/or spirituality, then the trash presented by the pig religions?
I was fortunate to be brought up in an atheist family and yet develop enough morality to be able to enjoy life without doing so ostensibly at other people's expense.
As children, our mother read us Hilair Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children and Aesop's fables. Aesop's fables all contain animals so that also provided a play outlet with toy animals that substituted for Noah's Ark. The Cautionary tales are in rhyme which was huge fun- my favorites were Matilda, and Jim. If you haven't read them, there is a full copy on line of the original illustrated stories/rhymes that google will take you to. We also read Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll's Alice tales.
To better understand the concept of divinity, we had anthologies of diverse mythologies, which probably helped us to conclude that tales of gods were fictional. I suspect my delight at Fantasy and Sci_fi stories in later life stemmed from here.
Going to early teen/mid teen years, a book called "The Little Red Schoolbook" was clandestinely circulated amongst the students. This dealt with teen sexuality, relationships and stuff like that, with very helpful diagrams. The fact (or maybe pretense) that this book was somehow illicit, made it that much more desirable to read.
Sex education was taught in Biology, and always seemed to begin with "When a man and a woman love each other very much..." and rather quickly after that, "the penis is inserted into the vagina and fertilisation occurs". Not really very helpful, especially when the Little Red Schoolbook was so much more explicit.
Our Religious Education classes at school taught us about the major religions and what was believed by each. The variety presented, without indoctrination, allowed us to learn about other cultures but the diversity also helped to highlight that adopting a religion was a choice, not an obligation.
I don't believe that one single book can be a guide to life, but for adulthood, the most all-encompassing single tome I have read is Bill Bryson's fairly recent book "A Short History of Nearly Everything". The caveat to this book being adopted as core reading would have to be that it be periodically updated to keep abreast of scientific discovery and development.
The Little Red School Book was great.
The Kama Sutra.
I think I would choose "1984" by George Orwell or the graphic novel "V for Vendetta"
I think I like your mind set, Brave new world would be good too. I also love a clock work orange, It's the best thing I've ever read about the nature of morality.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a very good choice as well as Aesop Fables ..
Now that's a practical suggestion!
Atlas Shrugged. For the morality (what else is there?). As with most things, read in context-as a product of it's author; her experiences and the times (1950's).
I suspect the more vocal detractors haven't read the book, and are only familiar with the authors more scandalous and somewhat crazy later years.
What would you replace the bible with if you could?
A fucking lecture book about physics. | <urn:uuid:7b82ae71-afe6-442d-8489-79bd799dbaa8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thinkatheist.com/forum/topics/what-would-you-replace-the-bible-with-if-you-could?commentId=1982180%3AComment%3A1193363 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966499 | 791 | 2.171875 | 2 |
As a partial explanation of my absence from the blog for several days, I'll offer this photoessay showing the outburst of growth in the woods behind our home. This past winter was unusually prolonged, so when non-Arctic temperatures finally arrived, most people in this part of the country rushed outdoors. I headed to the woods behind our house. (The photos should enlarge with a click)
This tree arches over the entry to the woods; this past winter we had several dead and undesirable trees taken out and failed to realize that this tree was leaning on one of those. When its support was removed it bent to the extent that the top branches now touch the ground. Not sure if they will collect enough light there for the tree to thrive, but for now it creates a living gateway.
In the Upper Midwest of the U.S., the primary choices for foliage plants in shaded woodlands are hostas. This cluster at the base of the arching tree was one of the first I planted perhaps 10 years ago. It will fill out to cover the entire mulched area before midsummer. All except one of the clusters have had Repellex tablets placed in the root zone in an effort to dissuade rabbits from enjoying lunch here; one plant serves as a control. We'll see what happens.
An even more striking foliage plant in my view is Pulmonaria spp. I think we planted just a few; now they have proliferated in scattered locations in the woods. I love the leaf patterns; the flowers are a bonus in the early spring but don't last long.
These Lilies of the Valley came to us in an exchange with a neighbor to whom we donated some of the pulmonaria. The other flowers in bloom this week include the bleeding hearts (photo at the top of this post), phlox, trillium, bluebells, dandelions, wild geraniums and violets.
Last fall I spent uncounted hours laying down landscape fabric and then dragging tarps full of hardwood mulch to the woods to create walking paths. There's still lots of work to do to finish the paths (I'm laying down logs from the cut trees and partially embedding them on the sides of the paths to keep the mulch from spreading. The paths give me a more secure footing for walking and also subdivide the garden into areas where we can experiment with different botanical combinations.
This hosta was the first one I planted in the woods after I spent the better part of probably two summers grubbing out the buckthorn and honeysuckle underbrush by the roots. The soil back here is black loam several inches deep, and the other plants love it once you remove the invasives that steal all the water and light. This fellow will be huge by the end of the summer; I probably should subdivide him.
We've added bluebells; these are not the English bluebells that you see in immense masses in the forests of the National Trust in Britain. I put chicken wire around this cluster this week to keep the rabbits at bay, because we want to harvest the seeds to scatter in other areas of the woods. Last summer the rabbits nibbled these down to the ground.
It makes sense to incorporate some landscape features into the planting scheme (and it makes way more sense than trying to move them). Here three varieties of hosta cluster around a set of large boulders.
Some phlox was initially planted in the center of this area; it has now spread up and down the hillside. The ferns are escaping from their bed and may have to be restrained because they will shade out everything else, and they are aggressive spreaders in soil like this.
A felicitous combination of plants - Jacks in the Pulpit at the far left just getting started, a variegated hosta, a Pulmonaria cluster, and at the far right some native violets.
Both the white trillium and the yellow ones need some protection from rabbits until they manage to spread to some distant locations. The chicken wire is unattractive and "unnatural,", but is a temporary means to an end.
I really enjoy having Jacks-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) in the woods. Never had to plant them; the year after I got out all the invasive underbrush, a couple Jacks emerged. Now there are hundreds of them; the largest/oldest ones in the woods get as high as my thigh.
Last fall I wrote a post for this blog about propagating Jacks; I heard recently from my friend that her transplants have emerged and appear healthy.
I'll be back out in the woods and yard in the days to come. Also facing the annual monster chore of Cleaning The Garage. And hobby and family stuff is accelerating - and the Monarchs will be arriving within a week or so. So the blog posts will be fewer for the next several weeks. | <urn:uuid:2620d05b-df2f-4a3b-a766-7d4b274dab4c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962374 | 1,031 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Inventor of the Week Archive
for a different Invention or Inventor
MARION DONOVAN (1917-1998)
Like many famous inventors, Marion Donovan was originally mocked for her most significant invention; but she helped revolutionize the infant care industry by inventing the prototype of the disposable diaper.
Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1917, Marion O'Brien grew up surrounded by machinery and invention. Her father and uncle invented the "South Bend lathe," used for grinding automobile gears; after her mother died when she was seven, Marion spent most of her free time in their factory.
O'Brien moved East to attend Rosemont College in the suburbs of Philadelphia. After graduating in 1939 with a BA in English Literature, she took a job as Assistant Beauty Editor at Voguemagazine in New York. Soon she married James Donovan, a leather importer, resigned from her position, started a family, and moved to Westport, Connecticut.
Motherhood gave Donovan good reason to revive the innovative instincts of her own childhood. Like all mothers, Donovan struggled with her babies' exasperating habit of nearly instantaneously wetting her diapers as soon as they were changed --- which at that time meant soiled sheets as well. Donovan's first breakthrough, in 1946, was to design a waterproof diaper cover. Steadily working her way through a series of shower curtains, Donovan designed and perfected, on her sewing machine, a reusable, leakproof diaper cover that did not, like the rubber baby pants of the time, create diaper rash. Donovan called her diaper the "Boater," because it helped babies "stay afloat." The final product was actually made of nylon parachute cloth, and featured an additional innovation: Donovan had replaced safety pins with metal and plastic snaps.
The diaper covers' debut came at New York's Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949, where they were, unsurprisingly, an instant success. Donovan's patent was granted in 1951. By that time, Donovan had begun an even more essential innovation: the disposable paper diaper. This was not as easy to create as it may sound, since in order to prevent a rash, a diaper's material must "wick" the moisture away from the baby's skin, rather than absorbing the moisture and retaining it inertly. After much experimentation, Donovan designed a composition of sturdy, absorbent paper that did the job well.
Surprisingly, Donovan did not have instant success with this idea. She toured the major US paper companies, and was roundly laughed at for proposing such an unnecessary and impractical item. It took nearly ten years for someone to capitalize on Donovan's idea: namely, Victor Mills, creator of Pampers®.
Meanwhile, Donovan had returned to school: she earned a degree in Architecture at Yale University in 1958. She eventually designed her own house in Greenwich, Connecticut (1980); but by that time she had invented numerous practical solutions to problems around the home. For example, Donovan invented a 30-garment compact hanger (the "Big Hangup"); a soap dish that drained into the sink; and the "Zippity-Do," an elastic cord that connected over the shoulder to the zipper on the back of a dress, eliminating the contortionism previously required to put on most women's dress clothes.
Donovan earned over a dozen patents in all. For many years,
she also worked as a product development consultant. When
she died last year, she finally received some of the attention
she deserves --- although some reports paid as much attention
to the fact that Donovan's son James grew up to be a urologist
as they did to the mother's career as an inventor. Marion
Donovan is still not a household name; but new parents everywhere
have a great deal to thank her for. | <urn:uuid:0d99282e-b3bd-4af9-a03b-b363109930dd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/donovan.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976421 | 774 | 2.78125 | 3 |
In the Garden:
Northern California Coastal & Inland Valleys
Arundo donax, not to be confused with bamboo, is used to make reeds for wind instruments. The music you love begins here!
Bamboozled in the Delta
Vacation is my favorite part about working. We loaded up our boat, the Dancing Dragon, with all the goodies we could possibly think of, for a week away from civilization.
After leaving our slip in South San Francisco, we had a wonderful sail across San Francisco, San Pablo, and Susuin Bays, winding our way under bridges into the fresh water of the San Joaquin River. This section of the Delta is both my summer home away from home and my personal concept of paradise. We drop the stern anchor into deep water, then nose up to the shore and tie a line around a tree. I am content to sit and read and swim for as long as the ice lasts. Then, it's into the dinghy for a Mr. Toad's wild ride into a nearby marina for supplies.
Since we were going to be in the area, a musician friend of mine who plays the saxophone asked me to look for "that plant that grows in the Delta that they make musical instrument reeds out of." I had no idea what he was referring to, but he had the name and so I dutifully did the research. I thought the plant would be a small, insignificant water weed or something. I was flabbergasted when I learned that Arundo Donax is the bamboo-like plant he was taking about. It's growing all over the Delta along the levees and tule berms, common as mud.
Music Begins Here
The word "Arundo" is Latin for "a reed," and it's often mistaken for bamboo. The length of the plant's "internodes" is what differentiates Arundo Donax from bamboo. The common bond between the two plants is that they are both grasses.
Arundo Donax is native to southern Europe and was introduced into cultivation in 1648. It was brought to the United States by French immigrants in the 1850s to be used for windbreaks. During World War II, the plant was again imported, this time to the San Fernando Valley, to replenish supplies and insure the future of the species that was being depleted by the bombing in Europe. (More recently it's been planted for bank stabilization, although its propensity for vigorous spreading has made it difficult to control.)
All musical instruments that have a vibrating reed use Arundo Donax. They include oboes, bassoons, English horns, clarinets, and saxophones. According to the experts, the best Arundo comes from the south of France. The canes increase in girth as the plant advances in age. The larger-sized segments are more suitable for the big wind instruments, such as bassoons. The narrow tops of the canes are then used for the smaller instruments, such as oboes, and mid sections are perfect for the clarinets.
The plant must be cut green and then aged to produce a reed that has proper tone and will have the durability to withstand a symphony performance. Musicians will pay a fortune for aged Arundo from the south of France.
Musicians buy the aged pieces that are either gouged or prepared. If you like to make your own reeds, you would buy the gouged wood. I know that oboists go through reeds like a teenager goes through popcorn at the movies, so for the sake of economy oboists must make their own, and plenty of them.
Now, if only I could figure out a marketing plan for seducing musicians into preferring the local Delta variety of Arundo Donax, I could stay on vacation forever!
Next time you are traveling in the Delta waterways, take a moment and consider the history of this commonly mistaken plant. The music you love begins here.
Care to share your gardening thoughts, insights, triumphs, or disappointments with your fellow gardening enthusiasts? Join the lively discussions on our FaceBook page and receive free daily tips! | <urn:uuid:3238d21a-7da7-479d-9994-37bff503c6f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.garden.org/regional/report/arch/inmygarden/1175 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970914 | 871 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Items we throw away such as bed, television, clothes, furniture, printer, toys, sofa and computer can pass to someone in your community.
Recycling is an effective way to cut down on the use of these limited resources as well as promoting community involvement in the process.
If you haven't heard yet, there is wonderful organization called Free Give Group ( freegive.co.uk ). Free Give Group connects people who are giving and getting unwanted items for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills and, at the same time, helping someone in your community by gifting them the item you no longer need. Another benefit of using Freegive is that it encourages poeple to get rid of junk that we no longer need and promote community involvement in the process. By using Freegive, not only are you able to get rid of your item with the minimum of fuss; you will also be doing your part in stopping another reusable item ending up in a landfill. It's completely free to join and everything posted must be free.
Last edited by Jaidynsmum on 17 Jun 2010 07:06, edited 3 times in total.
Hi this sounds like a great idea, but when i looked and joined there was nothing at all listed for my area or surrounding area? Just wondered if it was a new site that your trying to get up and running as usually freecycle which is a site along the same lines is fairly busy for this area. | <urn:uuid:d66f527c-5bc9-4d31-87d5-f3b15d5ecd9a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thebabywebsite.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=25134 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972299 | 307 | 1.914063 | 2 |
Our mission and core values.
Develop youth and conserve natural resources for a strong, sustainable community.
We achieve our mission by:
- Providing a diverse group of youth and young adults with opportunities to transform their lives through education, employability, civic engagement, and leadership.
- Caring for our environment by conserving and restoring natural resources, and by improving recreational and public areas.
- Creating the environmental leaders of the future by teaching environmental ethics and behaviors to children, teens and adults.
- Making communities safer by reducing hazards and by responding to public emergencies and disasters.
Core Values / Guiding Principles
Empowerment - We value and enthusiastically support the potential of young people to live productive lives of learning, working and serving. We are corpsmember-focused and diligent in our efforts to support them as they develop their own capacity, self-worth and leadership ability. . We look for the potential in all young people to become future leaders.
Environmental Stewardship - We restore and protect natural resources and public spaces for the community. We are viewed as leaders in the community and teach sustainable best practices to protect the Earth now and for future generations.
Education and Learning - We put education at the forefront of our programs. We use the outdoors as a dynamic classroom. We help youth see education as an integral part of their lives.
Personal investment and responsibility - We hold each other accountable in constructive ways and practice personal responsibility in carrying out our commitments. We are passionate about what we do.
High quality and standards - We hold ourselves to standards of excellence. We incorporate best practices and continually assess and strengthen the quality of our work. We live a culture of trust, fairness and leading by example.
Innovative Leadership - We lead with an entrepreneurial spirit. We actively collaborate with our partners to develop creative solutions.
Safety - We create a trusting, supportive and safe environment, and we proactively implement high-quality, consistent training to achieve this. Physical safety practices are a priority in our work environments. | <urn:uuid:72988389-be95-4ecd-a925-daeb9ce5cc87> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://conservationcorpsnorthbay.org/f/wwa_ourmission | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940289 | 412 | 2.265625 | 2 |
CALEDONIA, Miss. (WCBI) -The month of January is not usually an active one for tornadoes One town’s high school found out different and now share their progress five years later.
“It was like classic, what you would hear a train wreck going through and I said oh God this is the real thing and all of a sudden I got really really scared because I was thinking just what if I was over in the other building,” said Health Science teacher Ann White.
That was just after 1 pm five years ago. What was a routine January day in Caledonia was ripped apart in just seconds when the F-3 twister tore through town and the Caledonia high campus. The most visible image left in the storms wake, a school bus perched on top the the vocational building.
You probably remember the bus on top of the building five years ago when a tornado hit Caledonia High School. Now a new building stands after the devastation.
“I was horrified, absolutely horrified to see that bus of top of that building and to think that could have been me or some of the students,” adds Mrs. White.
English Teacher Sandra Wilkerson took her students away from the windows and told them to duck under their desk. She tell us how terrifying it was when she finally saw the damage.
“When they moved us from the room, the building because of a gas leak to the gym and I looked to the left and saw the destruction that when it just, it was overwhelming,” said English Teacher Sandra Wilkerson.
Principal Randy Barentt was assistant principal at the time and says he remembers that day, those hours like it was yesterday.
“On edge, uneasy, constant communication between student and staff. If it’s been 50 yards further north, it would have been through this building and not just those,” said Principal Randy Barnett.
And now five years later and a new hall added to the main building; faculty and staff are making sure their students take severe weather drills more seriously.
“Certainly the cooperation we had that day from our staff and our students, the way they responded without question made it the success that it was,” adds Principal Barnett.
The baseball field and football field were also rebuilt after the tornado. | <urn:uuid:7eefbfc9-2e6a-4b7f-b4de-861fc3368952> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wcbi.com/wordpress/video-5th-year-anniversary-of-a-tornado-at-caledonia-high | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983701 | 485 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Posts tagged ‘Senate’
by Lewis D. Eigen
Bobby Jindal and Mary Landrieu may be Louisiana politicians of opposing political parties, but they have become stuck together by the thick oil produced by their current villain–BP. The oil has so affected them that they squawk in raucous unison exhibiting the logic and intelligence often more typical of the intellectual capability of the Louisiana State Bird, the Brown Pelican. (more…)
Historical Facts About the Filibuster.
An innovative solution to the problem of almost constant Senate filibustering by the minority. A solution that preserves the right of all senators to say what they wish, but allows the Senate to move forward. it is to handle filibusters like the Senate did in the old days when there was the right to filibuster but that right was exercised rarely compared to today. | <urn:uuid:af1204ba-d52c-4d17-aa9e-b8ef214065ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://scriptamus.wordpress.com/tag/senate/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962721 | 173 | 2.015625 | 2 |
CLS Newsletter Issue 1
The Chicago Longitudinal Study is a federally-funded investigation of the effects of an early and extensive childhood intervention in central-city Chicago called the Child-Parent Center (CPC) Program. The study began in 1986 to investigate the effects of government-funded kindergarten programs for 1,539 children in the Chicago Public Schools.
The study is in its 13th year of operation. Besides investigating the short- and long-term effects of early childhood intervention, the study traces the scholastic and social development of participating children and the contributions of family and school practices to children's behavior. The CPC program provides educational and family support services to children from preschool to third grade. It is funded by Title I and has operated in the Chicago Public Schools since 1967.
The Chicago Longitudinal Study has four main objectives:
- To evaluate comprehensively the impact of the CPC program on child and family development.
- To identify and better understand the pathways (child, family, and school-related) through which the effects of program participation are manifested, and more generally, through which scholastic and behavioral development proceeds.
- To document and describe children's patterns of school and social competence over time, including their school achievement, academic progress, and expectations for the future.
- To determine the effects of family, school, neighborhood, and child-specific factors and practices on social competence broadly defined, especially those can be altered to promote positive development and to prevent problematic outcomes.
Copyright © 1998-2004 [Chicago Longitudinal Study].
All rights reserved.
Revised: August 09, 2004. | <urn:uuid:29f4ae5d-7e7b-4687-ba5d-e645e3721132> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/cls/chicago.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939822 | 328 | 2.6875 | 3 |
February 20, 2012
By John Rubino
The US government’s obliteration of the Bill of Rights via the Patriot Act, the recent defense bill that allows the military to detain citizens indefinitely without trial, the health care law that forces citizens to buy insurance, and the attempted takeover of the Internet through SOPA and PIPA has gotten a lot of attention lately, and in a few rare cases has generated some effective push-back.
But according to an article in this month’s Harper’s Magazine (Killing the competition: How the new monopolies are destroying open markets, by Barry C. Lynn), US corporations are evolving into forms that are more threatening to their victims than anything emanating from Washington. As the author characterizes it, a new generation of monopolists are imposing their own private governments on their industries — and not always the industries one would expect. This long, detailed article should be read by anyone with a desire to understand how the US is evolving. Here I’ll highlight a few excerpts to summarize the major plot points:
Just a few years ago a software engineer’s talents were almost completely portable, allowing a programmer to move effortlessly between tech companies. In other words, there was a functioning market for talent in which the individual had power and choice vis-à-vis local employers. Then a handful of companies began to accumulate near-monopoly control over their product lines — and their workers.
But perhaps the best way to understand the true structure of America’s political economy in the twenty-first century is to talk to some of the people who publish, edit, and write books in America. These days, most articles on the book industry focus on technology. The recent death of the retailer Borders is depicted as a victory of Internet sales over brick-and-mortar stores, the e-book market as a battle between the Kindle e-reader and the iPad. But if we look behind the glib narrative of digitization, we find that a parallel revolution has taken place, one that has resulted in a dramatic concentration of power over individuals who work in this essential, surprisingly fragile industry.
A generation ago, America’s book market was entirely open and very vibrant. According to some estimates, the five largest publishers in the mid-1970s controlled only about 30 percent of trade book sales, and the biggest fifty publishers controlled only 75 percent. The retail business was even more dispersed, with the top four chains accounting for little more than 10 percent of sales. Today, a single company—Amazon—accounts for more than 20 percent of the domestic book market. And even this statistic fails to convey the company’s enormous reach. In many key categories, it sells more than half the books purchased in the United States. And according to the company’s estimates, its share of the e-book market, the fastest-growing segment of the industry, was between 70 and 80 percent in 2010. (Its share of the online sale of physical books is roughly the same.)
Not surprisingly, then, we find the same sort of fear among our book publishers as we do among the chicken farmers of the Sweedlin Valley. I recently sat down with the CEO of one of the biggest publishing houses in America. In his corner office overlooking a busy Manhattan street, he explained that Amazon was once a “wonderful customer with whom to do business.” As Jeff Bezos’s company became more powerful, however, it changed. “The question is, do you wear your power lightly?” My host paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “Mr. Bezos has not. He is reckless. He is dangerous.”
Later that same day, I spoke with the head of one of the few remaining small publishers in America, in a tattered conference room in a squat Midtown office building. “Amazon is a bully. Jeff Bezos is a bully,” he said, his voice rising, his cheeks flushing. “Anyone who gets that powerful can push people around, and Amazon pushes people around. They do not exercise their power responsibly.” Neither man allowed me to use his name. Amazon, they made clear, had long since accumulated sufficient influence over their business to ensure that even these most dedicated defenders of the book—and of the First Amendment—dare not speak openly of the company’s predations.
If a single event best illustrates our confusion as to what makes an open market—and the role such markets play in protecting our liberties—it was our failure to respond to Amazon’s decision in early 2010 to cut off one of our biggest publishers from its readers. At the time, Amazon and Macmillan were scrapping over which firm would set the price for Macmillan’s ebooks. Amazon wanted to price every Macmillan e-book, and indeed every e-book of every publisher, at $9.99 or less. This scorched-earth tactic, which guaranteed that Amazon lost money on many of the e-books it sold, was designed to cement the online retailer’s dominance in the nascent market. It also had the effect of persuading customers that this deeply discounted price, which publishers considered ruinously low, was the “natural” one for an e-book.
In January 2010, Macmillan at last claimed the right to set the price for each of its own products as it alone saw fit. Amazon resisted this arrangement, known in publishing as the “agency model.” When the two companies deadlocked, Amazon simply turned off the buttons that allowed customers to order Macmillan titles, in both their print and their e-book versions….
In 1978, 43 firms made and sold beer in the US, with the biggest controlling less than a quarter of the market. Today, more than 1,750 companies make beer in this country but Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors control 90% of the market. Harper’s asserts that this gives them the ability to decide which small brewers survive, and quotes a microbrewer: “When I want to get my beer on a store shelf, I don’t call the retailer. I have to beg Anheuser-Busch.”
In the 1980s, there were more than a dozen large ad agencies and scores of smaller ones on Madison Avenue. Today four—WPP, Interpublic, Omnicom, and Publicis—control almost the entire industry. “WPP alone controls more than 300 ad agencies, including such once iconic shops as the Grey Group, Ogilvy & Mather, and Hill & Knowlton. And the four giants vigorously shore up this power with strict non-compete employment contracts.”
Musicians are being squeezed by Live Nation, doctors by hospital management corporations. Retailing is concentrating into a few mega-box chains. The list just keeps going. | <urn:uuid:d8ae5009-05b2-4ef9-a20b-7af58f42ac7a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ktradionetwork.com/tag/sweedlin-valley/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967809 | 1,431 | 1.898438 | 2 |
Pets: Lure coursing provides sighthounds with exercise and fulfilment
Photo courtesy of Shot-on-Site
The Ann Arbor Animal Hospital has an ongoing series on our website about some of our patients who are also working animals. We’ve covered the dogs from Detroit Metro Airport and the Ann Arbor Police Department, therapy dogs (Alpine and Belle), and a dog involved in charity fundraising.
In a bit of a change, in this edition we’re going to be covering the “work” done by sighthounds — dog breeds that hunt by using their speed and sharp eyesight.
When we talk about a “working” animal, we mean an animal doing what it was bred to do. In the case of the sighthounds discussed in the following Q&A, working means running after a lure, which simulates chasing live game, which is what these dogs were bred to do, and they love doing it.
Many thanks to Bradley Nelson for answering our questions!
What breeds of dog are used?
For AKC coursing, all AKC recognized sight hounds plus Rhodesian Ridgebacks can run, and now this year they have introduced CAT (Coursing Ability Test). Any AKC breed can do this. The breeds eligible for ASFA (American Sighthound Field Association) coursing are Afghan Hound, Azawakh, Basenji, Borzoi, Cirneco dell’Etna, Greyhound, Ibizan Hound, Irish Wolfhound, Italian Greyhound, Pharaoh Hound, Rhodesian Ridgeback, Saluki, Scottish Deerhound, Sloughi and Whippet.
Is one sex preferred over the other?
No, but females in season are not allowed to run.
How do you find or recruit dogs for your program, i.e., where do they come from?
It is a field event and people who want to put field titles on their dogs run them. Just like people who want to put show titles on their dogs show them. My dog Balor is both a show and a field champion. He has one show title and two field titles.
Are the dogs' temperament tested before allowing them to proceed to the training or competition phase?
Dogs must prove that they can run safely with other dogs before they are allowed to compete. They must pass a test run with an already-qualified dog.
Do you buy trained adult dogs or young dogs that you train?
There is not a lot of training. Chasing things that run is hard-wired in sighthounds — it should be, anyway. There are a few things that you can do to encourage your dogs to run. Something called a lunge whip is used for puppies. A lunge whip is a toy that consists of a whip with a plastic bag tied on the end. White plastic bags are used for lures in the actual trial, too. Coursing is meant to simulate the running down and capturing of live game.
Are you required to re-certify your dogs? If yes, how often?
Only if they get disqualified for bad behavior. If that happens, they must re-qualify.
How do you stay abreast of new dangers or changes in their environment and how does that translate to new and different training?
All sorts of thing can happen, and you have to play it by ear. Sometimes if a dog gets run into, he will become afraid of running with others. Running him alone for a bit may cure this. Owners know their dog best and what works for them, though. There are no set answers. Asking for advice from others that are more experienced is the best thing to do if problems arise.
What medical conditions, injuries or on-the-job hazards do these dogs develop or encounter?
Despite the great speeds attained and collisions that occur, injuries are less common than you might think. Scuffed pad, broken claws, broken toes are the most common injuries. More serious injuries like broken legs do happen but only very rarely.
For this strenuous activity, what do you feed your dogs? Do they get any special treats?
Raw diet is getting more popular all the time. Mine get raw chicken necks in the morning. I look for a high protein content premium kibble for my guys. I am also concerned about disorders like bloat, so I mix in a baked kibble and canned food, though I don’t want to advertise any particular brand here.
Where do the dogs stay when they aren’t working?
In my back yard with access to my garage to get out of the elements. They come inside the house with me in the evening.
Photo courtesy of Bradley Nelson
Owners handle their own dogs if they are physically able.
How often does a dog work?
It’s a seasonal sport. Spring and fall are busiest.
How do you determine if a dog is successful and do you track “success statistics”?
There is a scoring system that the two organizations (AKC & ASFA) adhere to. Once they reach a certain number of points and victories, they are awarded a title.
How many years can a dog continue to participate?
That varies a lot. As long as they can still run safely.
What happens to them when it is time to retire?
They sleep on the couch a lot.
Are there any funny stories can you share with us about your working dog?
Lots of funny things can happen once dogs learn the game and start “cheating.” Some dogs will just run out to the center of the field and take stabs at the lure when it comes near and then sprint into the end of the course for a big finish. I once saw a borzoi find the line that the lure travels on and just lie down with her mouth open like an alligator and wait for the lure to come to her.
Are there volunteer opportunities or events people can take advantage of who want to get involved with these particular types of working animals?
Sure, just come to a trial and ask to help out. We will put you to work doing something.
For competitive working animals, as opposed to those who have a working vocation, are there beginner or novice events?
We do sometimes hold practices after the trial is over or we have even scheduled full day practices.
What websites or other resources exist for people who want more information?
What else would you like readers to know?
We do this for the dogs. They love it.
David Caddell is the hospital director of the Ann Arbor Animal Hospital, a locally owned and operated Companion Animal Hospital. David can be reached at 734-662-4474 or dcaddell@AnnArborAnimalHospital.com. | <urn:uuid:e1dbba02-8828-4ea5-9aea-f89745fd6d59> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://annarbor.com/pets/lure-coursing-provides-sighthounds-with-exercise-and-fulfilment/?cmpid=mlive-@mlive-living-a2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956428 | 1,407 | 1.875 | 2 |
This excerpt is from a new checklist for journalists designed to bring the error-reducing advantages of checklists to the newsroom.
Only one-quarter of Americans say news outlets get the facts right, according to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. That’s a new low since 1985, when Pew first asked the question.
Two-thirds say stories are often inaccurate, a new high. This gap is a troublesome one for a democracy that relies on the free flow of accurate information for decision-making.
In my experience as an editor, I found journalists want to get the story right. They know that without credibility, a news organization offers very little of value to its audience or advertisers. And dealing with unhappy people about errors in stories is about the least fun aspect of any journalist’s day.
But sometimes, journalists aren’t quite sure how to check their work. The checklist is a proven way to reduce errors in other fields; it just hasn’t caught on yet in newsrooms, despite some notable efforts at the Detroit Free Press (PDF) and the San Jose Mercury News (scroll down the PDF).
Others, including Craig Silverman and Steve Buttry, have developed accuracy checklists for journalists, and I consulted them as I set out to combine the best of their and others’ ideas into a new accuracy checklist for journalists.
Silverman, author of the Poynter.org “Regret The Error” blog, has written for Columbia Journalism Review about the efficacy of checklists:
“Checklists have been proven to work for pilots, doctors, nurses, and even people
working at a nuclear power station. For example, the use of a World Health
Organization surgical-safety checklist helped reduce inpatient deaths (PDF) following
operations by 40 percent, according to a study published in the New England
Journal of Medicine.
“Checklists also work for journalists. We just don’t use them.”
The San Jose Mercury News found 10 percent fewer errors in a group of its journalists who used a checklist (PDF) for eight months in 1999-2000 compared to a similar group who did not, as part of the American Society of Newspaper (now News) Editors’ credibility project.
Please take the accuracy-checklist challenge, and see whether you get results. Try using my list for a month and see if it saves you from any errors. I’d love to hear about your experiences. Please comment below, or email me. Thanks for giving my checklist a test-drive! | <urn:uuid:597d0875-8ec3-4030-9faa-a1e3dc0a19dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://businessjournalism.org/author/lindaaustin/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933671 | 540 | 2.15625 | 2 |
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(adj.) beautiful, pretty, nice looking
Examples I think Sarah’s boyfriend is really attractive. He’s tall and his eyes are really nice.
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what do you think of it ?
07:58 AM Nov 02 2012 |
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02:04 AM Nov 02 2012 |
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08:45 AM Mar 20 2012 |
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For information on products for educational institutions, please visit Versation. | <urn:uuid:ca365a37-8f29-4ce8-8cc7-69a498d07401> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.englishbaby.com/vocab/word/4533/attractive | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930479 | 224 | 1.625 | 2 |
Evita Peron finally fits the bill as Argentina's first lady of note
BEFORE SHE died from cancer at the age of 33, Argentina’s first lady Eva Perón supposedly uttered the phrase: “I will return and I will be millions.”
Now the woman known simply as Evita, whose life has already been commemorated in a West End musical, has become the first woman to appear on an Argentinian banknote after President Cristina Kirchner unveiled a new 100-peso note (€18) featuring the iconic leader on the eve of the 60th anniversary of her death.
“This is a historic work which consecrates a woman who marked not only the lives of Argentinians but [who is] a landmark in world history,” said President Kirchner at Wednesday’s ceremony in the Casa Rosada.
Herself a Peronist, Mrs Kirchner has in recent years overseen a revival in the cult of Evita, the second wife of the movement’s founder, Juan Domingo Perón.
The image of Evita is based on a sketch drawn up for a note planned after her death in 1952 but which was hidden following the military coup which overthrew her husband in 1955.
The new note unveiled by the president is a commemorative issue, but at the ceremony she said she wants it to replace the existing 100-peso note, which bears the image of Julio Argentino Roca, who twice served as the country’s president in the late 19th century.
Roca’s reputation has been attacked in recent years by historians and intellectuals close to Mrs Kirchner because of his leading role in the Conquest of the Desert, the military campaign that secured the fertile pampa region from Indian attacks and conquered large swathes of Patagonia. Once a national hero, Roca is now considered by revisionist historians to have committed genocide against the native peoples he encountered a campaign he promised would “extinguish, subdue or expel” any Indians encountered.
But though Mrs Kirchner has revived the cult of Evita in recent years, even mounting a huge mural of her on a ministerial building overlooking Buenos Aires’ main avenue, the former first lady remains a divisive figure.
Peronists like to recall her charitable work for the country’s poor but critics dismiss her as a populist demagogue who asked supporters, “Shall we burn down Barrio Norte?”, referring to a wealthy Buenos Aires neighbourhood.
Controversy has also surrounded the issuing of Argentina’s currency. At the new note’s unveiling, President Kirchner said it would be printed by the Money House, the state body responsible for new banknotes. Her vice-president, Amado Boudou, who attended Wednesday’s ceremony, has been caught up in a corruption scandal after he was accused of awarding a contract to print currency to a private firm when he headed the economy ministry.
The controversy broke after the former wife of an executive in the company that won the contract claimed Boudou was a secret partner in the firm. The vice-president has denied the claim. | <urn:uuid:984fb7d1-4177-4a79-bdca-77a3cf223b0c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.irishtimes.com/news/evita-peron-finally-fits-the-bill-as-argentina-s-first-lady-of-note-1.543519?via=rel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96547 | 661 | 1.875 | 2 |
The Town of Dover
The town of Dover is a port on the English Channel coast in southeast England immediately opposite the coast of France, some 21 miles away. It is in the local government district of Dover in the county of Kent, formed in 1974 by the merger of the municipal boroughs of Dover, Deal and Sandwich and adjoining rural districts. The town of Dover has a population of about 30,000, whereas the district, covering a much wider area, has a population of some 100,000.
The Jewish Community
The Jewish community in Dover dates from the mid-eighteenth century. Also, from the early nineteenth century, there were a number of Jews living in the town of Deal, some eight miles to the north-east, although they do not appear to have established a formal congregation.
Only one Jewish congregation, known as the Dover Synagogue, is known to have existed in Dover.
Reference to the Dover Jewish Community in the Press (extracted by Harold Pollins):
Jewish Population Data
Other Dover Jewish Information
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Take a subject you’re familiar with and imagine it as three photos in a sequence. Tackle the subject by describing those three shots.
Ok. Interesting. And perhaps a chance for me to talk about something I’ve not really talked about here before - my OCD.
So photograph 1 – it’s a dishcloth. It hasn’t been wrung out properly. It’s sitting on the draining board and it’s sopping wet. There are also some crumbs on it. It makes me feel sick to look at this photo. I feel sick describing it. It needs to be rinsed clean, wrung out, put in the washing machine or thrown in the bin. Photograph 1 isn’t about OCD per se- it’s about cleanliness generally. For some people that sopping dishcloth is not that big of a problem. They’d ignore it, use it, whatever. Others would be as horrified as me. Some would do as I described- rinse it clean, wring it out, put it in the washing machine or dump it. But most would stop at that. OCD never stops at that.
Photograph 2 – a light switch with the number 16 on top. The light switch is clean- perfectly clean- not one bit of dust or smudge in sight. But it’s just as horrifying to me. Because there could be dust. How can I tell? The dust particles might be so small they’re invisible to the naked eye. But they’re still there. Just waiting to slip down into the gap either side of the switch. And then they’ll be inside – in amongst all the wirings, switches and gubbins that sit inside a switch. And what could dust do to those gubbins? There could be a fire. The house could burn down. And all because I was careless- I looked at that light switch and thought it was clean. I took my eye off the ball. But there’s that number 16. That number exists only in my head of course (my house isn’t full of light switches with numbers on top like some scene out of Sesame Street). But the number 16 in my mind - it reminds me of what I need to do. It directs my eye back to the ball. But what does it mean? Well if you’re me that number is obvious- that’s the number of times you must dust the top of the light switch- 4 strokes one way, four strokes the other, another four strokes the first way, the final four strokes the other way. 16. And why 16? Because 4 X 4 is a good solid pattern- no surprises with a 4 X 4 (note to self: good tagline for a four wheeled drive ad). And 4 X 4 is safe – because it means you’re the other side of 13. And we all want to be the other side of 13 don’t we? Don’t we? No one rests easy when the number 13 is around. And randomly, carelessly, dusting a light switch might mean you accidentally dust it 13 times or, slightly less serious but still not good, you dust it an odd number of times. So you need to be focused. All you might want to do is turn the light switch on or off of course. But the minute you look at it & that question of dust and electrics and fire comes into your head you know the ritual must begin. And you must be focused. If you lose count you need to start again. No matter how tired you are. Because if you don’t & you hit an odd number or a 13 then…then…
Photograph 3- it’s a photo of a collage. (Is that cheating?) In the collage planes fall from the sky, houses are aflame, people are stabbed, children are killed. The very worst things you can imagine in the darkest parts of your mind are there before you- happening to your family, your friends and to people you’ve never met. And the worst part of all – the very worst part of all- is that you are responsible for this. Every time you dusted 13 times not 16, every time you failed to touch wood for luck, every time you were too tired to repeat a certain thought in your head the correct way – you did it. Every time you did not wash your hands thoroughly after touching a speck of dust, every time you failed to square off the edges of your papers & instead lazily left them all skewiff and untidy, every time you had an awful awful terrible thought in your head – you did this. You are responsible for it all because you did not follow the laws of the ritual. You’ve created a hell on earth by not adhering to the rules of your own personal hell. Shame on you.
And that is my OCD. | <urn:uuid:9f2b06a3-0e10-4ac3-a1eb-7012dba3cbab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bravetank.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/hell-on-earth/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954721 | 1,028 | 1.75 | 2 |
July 15, 2006 – 19 Tammuz 5766
Annual: Numbers 25:10 – 30:1 (Etz Hayim, p. 918; Hertz p. 686)
Triennial: Numbers 26:52 – 28:15 (Etz Hayim, p. 924; Hertz p. 690)
Haftarah: Jeremiah 1:1 – 2:3 (Etz Hayim, p. 968; Hertz p. 710)
Prepared by Rabbi Michael Gold
Congregation Beth Torah, Tamarac, FL
Department of Congregational Services
Rabbi Paul Drazen, Director
At the end of Hukkat, the previous parashah, we read how Pinchas, in a moment of zealous outrage, slew the ring leaders of a sexual orgy involving Moabite and Midianite women and Israelite men. His actions put a stop to a plague. God rewards Pinchas with a covenant of peace. God tells Moses to assail the Midianites and defeat them because of the actions of their women. This leads to some of the most difficult chapters in the Torah for moderns to understand, the leading of a war of revenge against the nation of Midian.
The Israelites take a second census of the people age twenty and up now that nearly forty years have passed since the first census. The count is taken by clans of each of the twelve tribes. The final number is 601,730, slightly fewer than the first census. As before, a census is taken of the tribe of Levi. Every one of the Israelite adults who left Egypt would die in the desert except Caleb and Joshua.
The five daughters of Zelophehad approach Moses and tell him that their father had died and left no sons. Since only men could inherit, their family allotment would be lost. Moses brings the case before the Lord. God adjusts the laws of inheritance – if a man dies leaving no sons, daughters inherit. If he has no children, his brothers inherit. Next come his father’s brothers followed by and other nearby relatives of the clan. God allows Moses to see the land, and tells him to appoint a successor to go before the people. Joshua the son of Nun is chosen.
The portion ends with a detailed list of the various offerings daily, on the Sabbath, on the New Moon, and on each day of the cycle of festivals. This portion is the most read section of the Torah, chanted throughout the year as the maftir aliya on the various festivals and rosh hodesh. These offerings are to be given at the stated times, together with any free will offerings. These are the laws that God commanded Moses.
Issue #1 - Controlling Lust
"Pinchas son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned back My wrath from the Israelites by displaying among them his passion for me." (Numbers 25:10)
- In last week’s Torah Sparks, we reviewed questions concerning controlling anger and greed. We identified both of these with the yetzer hara, the evil inclination. “Ben Zoma taught, Who is strong? Whoever can control his inclination.” (Avot 4:1) The story of Pinchas speaks to questions of lust, the sexual drive out of control. In Jewish tradition, the evil inclination, appetites out of control, is most frequently identified with sexual activity. Pinchas acted when Israelite men were tempted by the Midianites and forgot about the sexual morality which was central to the Torah’s vision.
- Is the sexual drive out of control in our community? Is recreational sex, informal sex or ‘hook-up’ sex, that is casual recreational sexual activity outside of any long term, monogamous relationships creating many of our social problems? As society has allowed the sexual drive to be answered without concern for relationship, how has that impacted breakdown of family? Has freer sexuality, without considering results and impacts of that activity, contributed to more transmitted diseases, teenage pregnancy, high rates of abortion? As a society, can we put that genie back in the battle and create a new, modern sexual ethic?
- Jewish tradition does not see the sexual drive as inherently evil. On the contrary, sex in the right circumstances, with the right partner, with the right attitude, is a mitzvah, something God wants us to do. In fact it is not only good but holy. Judaism always saw a lifetime of celibacy as sad and a healthy sexual life as important for human well-being. How do we make sex holy once again?
Issue #2 – The Self: Me or I
"Take the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, from twenty years old and upward, by their fathers’ houses, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel." (Numbers 26:2)
- In this week's portion, God ordered a second census taken of the Israelite people. Every male from age twenty and up was to be counted, obviously in preparation for a military conquest. The count was made by tribe and by family. People were defined by the tribe they are born into and by the parents who gave birth to them, not by who they really are.
- Albert Camus' novel The Stranger is the story of a man who passively lives his life in reaction to other people. His boss wants him to move from his home in Algiers to Paris, and he replies that it doesn’t matter whether he moves or not. His girlfriend wants to marry him, and he also tells her that it doesn't matter. He always chooses the easiest path. He is like the ball in a pinball machine, bouncing this way and that way with no volition of his own - until he murders a man on an Algiers beach.
- How often do we human beings live lives of passivity, simply reacting to others? How often do we find ourselves defined by other people? How often do we live our lives according to other people's expectations? How often do we choose the path of least resistance? How often are we objects of other people's lives, rather than subjects of our own lives?
- Sociologist George Herbert Mead, when speaking of the self, makes a distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘me.' We are each uniquely an ‘I’ and each uniquely a ‘me.’ Our ‘me’ is our socially created self, the product of social positions, social influences and our own past choices. In each moment, however, our ‘I’ always transcends our ‘me.’ We are also an ‘I,’ that is, we create ourselves. How can we be the subject of our own lives?
- The Torah teaches that when God created us, God said, "Let us make man in our image according to our likeness." Why the plural? Perhaps the answer is that God did not create us as a finished product. We also must take responsibility to create ourselves. | <urn:uuid:79d4035c-aa7a-4125-b79e-e6a05186d339> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://uscj.org/JewishLivingandLearning/WeeklyParashah/TorahSparks/Archive/_5766TorahSparks/Pinchas5766.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96336 | 1,471 | 2.296875 | 2 |
This week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he would invest $30 million from his own pocket to uplift the young black and Latino men who are most excluded from New York’s civic, educational and economic life. While this proposal is generous, it fails to address the fact that the Bloomberg administration has supported policies that have led to staggering racial disparities in New York’s corrections system. While funding job recruitment and education programs is indeed important, there’s a critical missing piece in this grand plan: ending NYPD’s widespread aggressive stop and frisk policies that target communities of color at skyrocketing rates and contribute markedly to the marginalization of the very same communities Bloomberg now aims to help.
In 1990, the NYPD stopped and frisked 41,438 people. In 2009, that number ballooned to 576,394. In fact, over the 3 1/2 years leading up to 2009, the NYPD initiated over 1.6 million stops of New Yorkers. Communities of color have had to bear the brunt of this intrusive and often humiliating police practice — in particular, the same young men the Bloomberg administration’s new plan seeks to assist. Of the stop-and-frisks that the police carried out last year, 84 percent were of African-Americans and Latinos. Eighty-five percent of blacks and Latinos who were stopped were also frisked, compared to 8 percent of white people. And most of these stops were of innocent people — from 2005 through the first half of 2008, only 4 to 6 percent of all NYPD-initiated stops resulted in arrest.
Not coincidentally, the percentage of African-Americans and Latinos who are stopped and frisked by the NYPD mirrors the racial disparities of our city’s jails. According to data from the Bloomberg administration, 84 percent of the people held in the city’s detention facilities are African-American or Latino, even though the populations of young white, black and Latino men in New York are roughly equal.
In addition to stopping tens of thousands of innocent people of color, the city spent over $75 million last year to arrest and charge over 50,000 people for possession of low-level marijuana — 86 percent of whom are black or Latino. Indeed, more people were arrested for marijuana possession in New York than in any other city in the world. Compare this to 1991, when the number of misdemeanor marijuana arrests stood at just 774. Bloomberg’s pledge to contribute to new programs aimed at helping minority youth is generous, but until NYPD’s counterproductive policies are addressed, taxpayers will continue to make their own hefty contribution to police practices that harm the communities that most need support.
If Bloomberg’s program is truly “intended to prevent young men from entering or returning to the criminal justice system,” it should end its out of control stop-and-frisk policy of young men of color, and cease wasting the city’s precious resources on non-criminal behavior. Bloomberg is allegedly “especially surprised and unsettled” by the high rates of recidivism among young black and Latino men. He could help ease his anxiety by addressing the city’s own policies that unnecessarily act as an entry point into the criminal justice system for young men of color and unfairly subject entire communities to unnecessary police contact. | <urn:uuid:194542b3-4160-43fa-88aa-fdd2503e2ad8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aclu.org/print/blog/criminal-law-reform-racial-justice/bloomberg-gives-one-hand-takes-other | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954003 | 684 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Despite the state attorney’s attitude, however, Stith stood on solid legal ground. The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) specifically prohibits discriminatory policies—by both public and private entities—that could be used to screen out prospective parents based on their HIV status. ADA regulations define HIV as a “physical impairment” whether “symptomatic or non-symptomatic.”
Furthermore, the idea that HIV-positive people should be ruled ineligible to adopt children because of the possibility of a shortened lifespan, as the state attorney hinted to Stith, is illegal and subject to legal sanctions under the act’s provisions. Individuals who feel they have been discriminated against by a public adoption agency can file a complaint with the Department of Justice and/or file a private lawsuit. When private agencies discriminate, either an individual or the Department of Justice may file a lawsuit. (If won, Department of Justice suits may impose civil penalties of up to $50,000 on an agency for a first violation and up to $100,000 for any subsequent violation.)
Zavos suggests that HIV-positive prospective parents can minimize adoption problems by, first and foremost, knowing their civil rights. “HIV status may not be used to bar adoptions,” Zavos stresses. “But adoption will not be granted if a person is very ill and unable to care for a child.
“Prospective parents must almost always go through a home-study process that will, among other things, expose any medical issues that may interfere with their ability to parent,” Zavos adds. The process includes a series of extensive medical and psychological parental tests.
But another important point, Zavos indicates, is that HIV-positive people trying to adopt should know that they aren’t legally required to reveal their status. Although they can’t lie about it, they only need to disclose their physical issues. “If Ricky Stith had not revealed his status—which he did thinking it was the right thing to do—he would have had a much easier time,” Zavos says.
She also recommends that HIV-positive people educate themselves about their state’s adoption laws and work with an adoption agency that has experience in handling special needs cases.
While there are no absolute statistics available about how many HIV-positive people (singles or couples) have adopted children, perhaps some parallels can be drawn by looking at another minority group. Statistics from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law indicated that as of 2005 more than 270,000 children were living with same-sex couples in the United States—about 65,000 of them were adopted.
Despite the lack of data on HIV-positive people, it’s a reality that they adopt children. It’s also a reality that many of them are routinely discriminated against by decisionmakers involved in the adoption process. “Stigma, racism, discrimination and sexism exist in society, and they also exist in adoption,” says Devon Brooks, a senior research fellow at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a New York City–based think tank. “Adoption is a human services institution [and subject to human biases]. But discrimination based on race, gender and ability status are against the law. All civil rights laws applied to [Stith’s] situation.”
Nevertheless, because of human biases, laws and practices still discriminate or give preference to certain adoptive parents based on their health history, sexual orientation and marital status, Brooks says.
Zavos agrees. “Adoption agencies have their own internal policies, which may grant privilege to straight, married couples,” she says. “I’ve also had clients go to other lawyers or adoption agencies and be told that they could not adopt because of their HIV status.”
In Stith’s case, he had the full support of the adoption agency he selected. In addition, Brooks says, Stith benefited from civil rights and child welfare laws that prevented the biased state attorney from stopping Stith’s adoption of Keon.
Many experts on adoption issues contend that diseases such as HIV and other successfully treated illnesses should not prevent or deter someone from adopting a child. “Many people who have chronic diseases maintain their state of health and are certainly capable of raising a child,” says Nancy Hemenway, executive director of the InterNational Council on Infertility Information Dissemination (INCIID) in Arlington, Virginia.
Stith’s personal experiences with HIV—and, in turn, with health and medical issues—helped prepare him to raise his adopted son, who also had health issues. Under Stith’s care, Keon eventually was able to stop taking all meds for his severe asthma, and his kidney condition greatly improved. “Today, he is a healthy child in the first grade,” Stith says. “He holds a red belt in tae kwon do and is in training for his brown belt. He also takes weekly swimming lessons. Anyone looking at Keon can tell that he’s loved.”
Adds Stith: “I wanted to make a difference in a child’s life. My son gives me a reason for living. Whenever I do pass away, I want Keon to say without a doubt that ‘My daddy loved me.’” | <urn:uuid:6a473f4a-97ba-4931-8630-0cd834ed5de5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.poz.com/articles/hiv_adoption_issues_2427_17795_2_of_3.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970407 | 1,132 | 2.3125 | 2 |
6 Cautionary Tales That Terrified Kids of Yesteryear
Long before Edward Gorey offed children alphabetically, writers sought to instill good manners and exemplary behavior through strange, scary cautionary tales. Some stories were so bizarre it's a wonder the kids that read them turned out okay. Here are a few of our favorites.
1. “The Story of Little Suck-A-Thumb”
Der Struwwelpeter, penned by German psychiatrist Heinrich Hoffmann and released in Germany in 1845, is full of tales of children misbehaving—and the awful, bizarre fates they suffered for doing so. Augustus doesn’t eat his soup, and so he wastes away and dies. Harriet plays with matches and sets herself on fire. But none is stranger or more terrifying than the tale of poor Conrad, also known as Suck-a-Thumb:
One day, Mamma said: "Conrad dear,
I must go out and leave you here.
But mind now, Conrad, what I say,
Don't suck your thumb while I'm away.
The great tall tailor always comes
To little boys that suck their thumbs,
And ere they dream what he's about.
He takes his great sharp scissors out
And cuts their thumbs clean off, and then,
You know, they never grow again."
When Conrad sucks his thumb again, he is visited by the tailor, who chases the boy with a giant pair of scissors and cuts off both of his thumbs. Gruesome—and, if Der Struwwelpeter’s sales are any indication, perhaps an effective teaching tool for parents: By 1876, over 100 editions had been printed.
2. “The Cry Baby”
Image courtesy The Haunted Closet.
This story is another Hoffmann specialty, from the book Slovenly Betsy, which was published in 1911 specifically for American audiences. A mother cautions her daughter not to cry so much, but the girl doesn’t listen—and eventually, she cries her eyes out:
And now the poor creature is cautiously crawling
And feeling her way all around;
And now from their sockets her eyeballs are falling;
See, there they are down on the ground.
My children, from such an example take warning,
And happily live while you may;
And say to yourselves, when you rise in the morning,
"I'll try to be cheerful today."
That’s not the only horrifying tale in Slovenly Betsy, which will be re-released this July. There’s also the story about Polly, who plays with the boys even after she’s told not to—so of course her leg is severed while roughhousing. And proud Phoebe Ann holds her head up so high that her neck stretches freakishly, and she has to cart her noggin around on a wagon.
3. “The Tom-Boy Who Was Changed Into A Real Boy.”
The title of this story—from the book Little Miss Consequence, published in 1880—is self-explanatory: A little girl (the daughter of an Earl) loves playing with the boys so much that, eventually, she becomes a boy.
At last she grew so coarse,
E’en her voice was rough and hoarse,
And her attitudes became so like a boy’s, boy’s, boy’s,
That they thought it only right,
On a certain Summer’s night,
To change her sex completely, without noise, noise, noise.
After her transformation, the unfortunate girl is literally shipped off—a boat's captain is paid to take her on as a sailor. “And a caution may it prove to you and me, me, me!”
4. “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” (“Little Red Riding Hood”)
In later versions of French writer Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood”—published in 1697 as part of his book, Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals. Tales of Mother Goose—Little Red and her grandmother are rescued from the belly of the wolf by a woodcutter. Not so in the original, where the wolf devours them both, permanently. “Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf,” Perrault writes. “I say ‘wolf,’ but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.”
5. “Max and Moritz”
The seven tales of these badly behaved boys, written and illustrated by German Wilhelm Busch in 1865, begin with the duo tying bread crusts together with thread and laying a trap for a widow’s chickens. When the birds eat the crusts and swallow the intertwined strings, they panic and eventually become fatally entangled. The widow cooks the chickens, but Max and Moritz steal them with a fishing pole. They similarly terrorize a tailor, a teacher, their uncle, a baker, and farmer Bauer Mecke. When Mecke notices that the boys have slit open his bags of grain, he puts the boys in the bags instead, and sends the bag through a mill, grinding them to bits. “Here you see the bits post mortem/Just as Fate was please to sort ‘em,” Busch writes. Their bits are eaten by ducks, and no one is sorry to see the boys go.
6. “Rebecca, Who Slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably.”
Published in 1907, Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children: Designed for the Admonition of Children between the ages of eight and fourteen years is technically a parody of 19th century cautionary tales. Satire or not, it’s still full of stories that should give naughty children pause—including “Rebecca,” who Belloc writes “was not really bad at heart, but only rude and wild: she was an aggravating child …” One day, to frighten her uncle, Rebecca slammed a door that had a marble bust above it; the bust fell, and “laid her out.” Her funeral sermon “showed the dreadful end of one who goes and slams the door for Fun.”
There’s also “Jim: Who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion,” "Henry King: Who chewed bits of string, and was early cut off in Dreadful agonies,” and “Matilda: Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death." | <urn:uuid:02ff5aad-294a-4507-9a0d-fbf0db6f831e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mentalfloss.com/article/33492/6-cautionary-tales-terrified-kids-yesteryear | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962412 | 1,471 | 2.078125 | 2 |
eight, if someone believes in a cause but will not serve in that cause...what does that sa about their belief?
Quoteeight, if someone believes in a cause but will not serve in that cause...what does that sa about their belief?It says they have other issues in their life. It says they may choose to not join the military because it is not a financially stable environment to take care of their family. It says they may have a different life-calling that doesn't deter from their natural decision to choose to support something. It says there are so many extenuating circumstances that may prevent them from being able to serve our country.I used to think that one year military service commitments should be required of everyone after high school. I believed they could avoid this commitment by taking a two semester military education course. I thought this way because I wanted people to be more informed of our military and the sacrifices the military members make for our freedom. I have since changed my views on this. I have learned that I don't need everyone to understand because I do not do this for the individuals in our nation; I do this for the nation itself. I don't need for them to die for something they don't believe in because it increases the chance they could cause someone who does believe in their service to die as well; I will die for this country because I do believe in it.I do not want Michael Moore getting people to enlist into our military who truly do not want to. The military means something dear to me; however, I know that isn't the case for everyone.
it is amazing how the biggest chicken hawks (not includingsect 8 or ahongus) are always the first to say they have knee problems or asthma, or are to old or this or that but want the US to send SOMEONE ELSE. bottom line is that if this were a real war with real motivations everyone and their momma would be signing up to go to the military to fight in iraq...look at WWII
I think alot of people DO see it that way dude. We have two choices right now, rule the world, or retire from it. I personally would have us retire from it, but if we are going to stay engaged, we need to make sure that things go well.
Quote from: Aonghus on August 16, 2004, 09:39:07 PMI think alot of people DO see it that way dude. We have two choices right now, rule the world, or retire from it. I personally would have us retire from it, but if we are going to stay engaged, we need to make sure that things go well. Option 3 - American hegemony through soft power and institutional means. Along the lines of Wilsonianism. See Joseph Nye's works as an example.
if someone believes in a cause but will not serve in that cause...what does that sa about their belief?
if people have other priorities than fighting for their war then THEY CANT JUSTIFY SOMEONE DYING IN THAT WAR.the poeple that created vietnam werent the ones that made sacrifices in it.people will swear up and down that the war was IMMEDIATELY NECESSARY, but they arent willing to do it. to me, that means that it is NOT THAT NECESSSARY because if it was they would be the first to go.if the US is to maintain its integrity (you military people know the meaning of that word) and core values it must ONLY wage war as a LAST resort.
The military isn't for everyone. I thought a lot of aspects of the military were great others not so much, but even people who are really supportive of the military I think would do poorly in a military situation. Moving on to the specifics thoughQuoteif someone believes in a cause but will not serve in that cause...what does that sa about their belief?That's not really a fair statement though is it? I think more should be done to help the poor but is my belief less valid since instead of donating money to a worthy cause to help those in need I decide to buy a new (and perhaps not necessary) TV? Look at John Kerry. He combined with his wife has a net worth in the hundreds of millions if not billions. Is his rhetoric and belief about helping others invalidated because he has so much personal wealth which does not go to more philanthropic causes? These are examples are just situations where the level of hardship required is fairly minmal let alone that which is required by the military. If I believe crime needs to be fought and think that police must stop bank robbers is my belief weak since I am not joining the police? Also for many, what would joining the military really add to "the cause"? Most folks would get stuck at some desk job which while important would exactly be contributing that much to the belief in the war in Iraq one way or the other. Serving in Guam for instance while a valuable service wouldn't really validate one's belief in the Iraq war would it?
If you feel the war is just and it should be fought and fought by us, why are you going to law school and not into the military?
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Last year Arizona experienced their largest wildfire in the state’s history deemed the Wallow Fire. This year forest officials are gearing up for in hopes to prevent another disaster from happening for the 2012 fire season.
“In Arizona we always have the potential for large fires, it is a fire state” said Cliff Pearlburg, Fire Information Officer for the Arizona State Forestry Division. According to Pearlburg, Arizona is “unique” in that every ecosystem is represented in the state. This makes it difficult to assess the possible severity of the annual wildfire season.
“What determines what’s going to happen during fire season is weather. What we’re looking at is very little rain and very little snow this past year, so drought is returning to Arizona,” he said.
Annual preparations are underway throughout the state’s five fire districts. Bruce Banke, representative of the Flagstaff department, is on high alert after the Wallow Fire in June of last year, occurring in his district in the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest. The fire burned over a half-million acres, according to Banke.
Compared to other states that dedicate their own team to statewide wildfire efforts, Arizona’s fight starts from within these districts.
“The fire districts and city fire departments are responsible for fire within their districts, he said. “In the state of Arizona, we utilize all fire departments and personnel as our fire-fighting resources.”
These processes involve classroom and field training to ensure successes among wildfire crews. According to Pearlburg, each wild-land firefighter is required to go though annual refresher training and fitness tests.
However, Pearlburg highlights the successes of community education through the Firewise Communities Program. Under the National Fire Protection Association, the program is designed to teach citizens how to take part in wildfire prevention within their community.
“Underpowered communities do nothing to mitigate wildfire hazards…and with this program it’s teaching them that there are things to be done to protect homes so that they can withstand a wildfire if it hits,” he said.
An essential part of the program is pushing homeowners to create a perimeter around their homes free of grass, shrubbery and leaves or “fuel” for a potential wildfire.
“We always recommend creating defensible space around houses, along the principles preached in the Firewise Communities,” said Russ Shumate of the Prescott district.
This year, Pearlburg hopes to not to use up the state’s suppression fund of around a million dollars in efforts to contain wildfires.
“Some years we can get up to one to two million in what we call pre-severity money,” he said. “What it’s tied to is our anticipation for wildfire season.” | <urn:uuid:ae7d52a2-2831-4e02-ae26-67768a894274> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://arizonasonoranewsservice.com/stories/34-stories/232-az-prepares-for-2012-wildfire-season- | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948185 | 584 | 2.65625 | 3 |
View: Amphibians | Birds | Fish | Invertebrates | Mammals | Reptiles | Basic Animal Groups
The different types of mammals are classified into 21 groups including aardvarks, anteaters, bats, carnivores, cetaceans, elephants, marsupials, monotremes, primates, rodents, treeshrews and many others. This article explores mammal classification in order to better understand their diversity and common characteristics.
Photo © GlobalP / iStockphoto.
The aardvark is a burrowing, nocturnal placental mammal and is the only living species in its group. The aardvark has a long snout, arched back and coarse fur. Their diet consists of primarily ants and termites, which it procures by tearing open the insects' nests with its long claws. Aardvarks inhabit savannas, woodlands and grasslands in sub-Saharan Africa, a range that extends from southern Egypt to the Cape of Good Hope. The closest living relatives to the aardvark includes cetaceans and the even-toed hoofed mammals.
Photo © Focus on Nature / iStockphoto.
Anteaters and their relatives are a group of placental mammals that includes anteaters, armadillos and sloths. Anteaters are native to South America and one species, the armadillo, inhabits the southern United States. There are about 29 species of anteaters and their relatives alive today. Anteaters and their relatives are diverse in form. They are notable for the unique joints in their backbone which provide them with the strength and support they need to dig and burrow. The closest living relatives to the anteaters and their relatives are the pangolins.
Bats are the only group of mammals that have wings. Although some other groups of mammals, such as flying lemurs, are able to glide using skin membranes, only bats are capable of true flight. There are 997 species of bats alive today. Bats include two basic groups, the megabats and microbats. There is some controversy over just how closely the megabats and microbats are related, with some scientists arguing that the two groups are differ markedly in brain structure. The closest living relatives to bats are colugos, followed by tree shrews and primates.
Carnivores are a group of mammals that consists of about 250 species. Carnivores first appeared during the Cenozoic, after the decline of the dinosaurs. The earliest carnivores were weasel-like creatures. During the Palaeocene, carnivores diverged into two lineages, feliforms and caniformes. Feliforms include cat-like carnivores such as hyenas, cats, civets, linsangs, mongooses and the fossa. Caniforms include dog-like carnivores such as dogs, red pandas, wolves, foxes, coyotes, bears, racoons, mustelids, aardwolves and wolverines.
Cetaeans are marine mammals that include toothed whales and toothless, filter-feeding baleen whales. There are about 88 species of cetaceans. Toothed whales are the more diverse of the two groups of cetaceans, with about 73 species. Toothed whales include dolphins, porpoises, sperm whales, beaked whales and killer whales. Baleen whales include about 15 species such as right whales, bowhead whales and rorquals. Cetaceans are highly-specialized mammals with sparsely-haired bodies, flipper-like forelimbs and reduced back limbs located within the body wall.
Colugos, also known as flying lemurs, are large, tree-dwelling placental mammals that glide using a flap of skin that forms a sail-like surface between their outstretched legs. Only two species of colugos remain today, the Philippine flying lemur and the Sunda flying lemur. Colugos are nocturnal herbivores that feed on leaves, shoots, flowers and fruits. Colugos inhabit the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia. Despite being placental mammals, colugos give birth to their young when they are quite undeveloped and in this respect the resemble marsupials.
Photo © Joey Makalintal / Wikipedia.
Elephant shrews are small, long-nosed insect-eating mammals native to Africa. There are about 12 species of elephant shrews alive today including the golden-rumped elephant shrew, checkered elephant shrew, four-toed elephant shrew, short-eared elephant shrew, dusky elephant shrew and several others. The classification of elephant shrews has often been a matter of debate. In the past, elephant shrews have been classified as close relatives of hoofed mammals, hares and rabbits, insectivores, and treeshrews.
Elephants include two groups, African elephants and Asian elephants. There are two species of African elephants, the forest elephant and the savanna elephant. There is only one species of Asian elephant. The most notable characteristics of elephants include their large size, massive skull and long muscular trunk. Elephants first arose during the Eocene. They diversified into as many as 150 different species that inhabited Africa, Europe and the Americas. The closest living relatives to the elephants are the sirenians.
Hares, pikas and rabbit are small terrestrial mammals that can be found in a diverse range of habitats on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Lagomorphs have short tails, large ears, eyes that are positioned high on each side of the head, and narrow, slitlike nostriles that they are able to close completely.
Even-toed hoofed mammals includes pigs, hippopotamuses, pronghorn, deer, camels, giraffe, okapi and cattle. There are 225 species of even-toed hoofed mammals alive today. The articles listed below provide information about the characteristics, classification and evolution of even-toed hoofed mammals. | <urn:uuid:ad3b09e4-2f5e-4106-ad0c-9d27e9661334> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://animals.about.com/od/mammals/tp/mammalgroups.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940863 | 1,266 | 3.703125 | 4 |
This article about the Supreme Court's review of an Arizona tax-credit program to assist private schools contained a description of the program that could be misleading. As the story said, student tuition organizations are allowed to give scholarships exclusively to private religious schools if they wish. But student tuition organizations can also be established to benefit secular private schools.
Justices debate whether tax law that benefits private schools violates clause
Wednesday, November 3, 2010; 9:50 PM
Deciphering the Constitution's command that government "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" is almost always a guarantee of a divided Supreme Court.
And so it was again Wednesday as the justices reviewed an Arizona program that lets taxpayers send part of their state taxes to organizations that provide millions of dollars in scholarships to private religious schools.
The court's liberal members sharply questioned whether the program is just a way for the state to provide tax money to religious schools and noted that it almost certainly would be unconstitutional if the contributions came directly from the state.
Conservatives indicated that the program offers just a different version of the widely accepted practice of providing tax breaks for people who make charitable contributions.
The Obama administration weighed in on the side of Arizona, and argued that the taxpayers challenging the program do not even have the right to bring the lawsuit. So absolute was the government about the latter point that it seemed to take the nation's former top appellate lawyer - now Justice Elena Kagan - by surprise.
Kagan told her former deputy, Acting Solicitor General Neal K. Katyal, that he was advancing a "silly and fictional" interpretation of the court's past decisions on what taxpayers must prove before they can challenge a government spending decision.
For 13 years, Arizona has allowed a resident to send up to $500 of the money he owes the state in income taxes - $1,000 for a married couple - to a private "student tuition organization." In other words, if a couple owed the state $2,000, they could send half the money to the state treasury and half to one of the tuition organizations.
The organizations, which receive about $55 million a year, provide scholarships to private schools. Although they are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of "race, color, handicap, familial status or national origin," the organizations are allowed to provide scholarships only to private religious schools. The largest one benefits Catholic schools in the Phoenix area.
Some taxpayers sued, saying the structure effectively forces parents who want the scholarships to send their children to religious schools.
Katyal told the justices that lower courts should not have let the taxpayer suit go forward. Because they did not participate in the program, he said, "not a cent, not a fraction of a cent" of their money went into any religious school's coffers.
Taxpayers generally are not allowed to sue over government spending decisions. But the court in Flast v. Cohen in 1968 made an exception for spending alleged to violate the Establishment Clause.
"Isn't the underlying premise of Flast v. Cohen that the Establishment Clause will be unenforceable unless we recognize taxpayer standing?" Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked. | <urn:uuid:0f5b4d42-1773-4c09-8d2e-dbb776a5202b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/03/AR2010110308559.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96035 | 642 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Kathleen Wynne has become the first female premier of Ontario, beating out her rival and front-runner Sandra Pupatello. Wynne is also the first openly gay premier. She joins five other women who are currently serving as premier of provinces or territories. This brings the male to female ratio in provincial leadership to 50:50 for the first time in Canadian history — now 75 per cent of Canadians are being governed by a female premier.
Although the media coverage mentions that Wynne will be the first female and openly gay premier of Ontario, there seems to be more concern about the struggles she will face as an interim Liberal Party leader, and how she will have to chart her own course separate from the legacy of the Dalton McGuinty. Wynne will most likely face a general election very soon, at which time she will either maintain her leadership or be history like Kim Campbell, former prime minister of Canada who remained in power for a mere four months.
Politics is one of the most visible places that lacks gender balance and diversity, but in the past three or four years, voters have been paying attention to the best ideas instead of the gender, race or sexual orientation of the candidates. People can see that these differences are becoming less of a barrier to having their voices heard. This can only be a good thing.
Having more women in prominent leadership positions means that the idea of a female leader will become normalized.
The fact that Wynne is also openly gay is another huge step for diversity representation. Recognizing that a person’s sexual orientation doesn’t affect what kind of leader they are is a great step for Canadian society.
There is still work to do in terms of overall political parity. Seventy-six women were elected to the House of Commons in the last federal election, out of 308 seats. This represents 25 per cent of the House. There are 38 women senators out of 104 seats — one is currently vacant — which is 37 per cent of the Senate. There are still gains to be made, but the trend seems to be that more women are running for office and winning.
One obstacle to political equality between the sexes is that political parties have a hard time finding women to run. Women under 40 are especially under-represented, especially when compared to the number of men under 40 who are elected. Some barriers for women include the lack of civility in the House of Commons and an excessive focus on female parlimentarians’ appearance instead of their skills and ideas.
The 1921 federal election was the first time women were allowed to vote. The Famous Five from Alberta won the Persons Case in October 18, 1929 which allowed women to become senators and be recognized as persons. In almost 100 years, women have made significant gains, but still more progress is needed.
Canadian society benefits when different viewpoints are heard. Having diverse points of view in governance allows a problem to be looked at from a multitude of angles.
Having more female leaders will reduce how certain female issues are latched onto during campaigns in the media. We should never be asking how much a woman politician’s wardrobe costs if we don’t care how much a man’s does. Female politicians have also been criticized for being too pretty or not good-looking enough. Having more examples of female leaders who are in politics to create policy instead of an image will reduce the idea that women in the media need to look a certain way.
The more women there are in politics, the more the attitudes surrounding them will change. Progress is being made even though the progress can be painfully slow. | <urn:uuid:e1604d0f-a53e-4f60-800e-b441fad64ccf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thegauntlet.ca/story/women-top | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974398 | 725 | 2.859375 | 3 |
History of the Japanese Tea Ceremony:
The Japanese tea ceremony is highly ritualistic. The first records mentioning a tea ceremony was in the eighth century, though it probably did not look like the modern-day tea ceremony. Buddhist monks came out with a book called Cha Ching in order to teach how to properly prepare the tea and use the tea vessels correctly. Today, it is thought that this book helped shape the tea ceremony we now know.
Tea was not readily available to all, being mainly a medicinal drink that later evolved into a drink for the noblemen. Because of the rarity of the beverage, rules and regulations were set on how to drink the tea. In 1187 Myoan Eisai, a Japanese priest, traveled to China to study philosophy and religion. When he came back, he founded Zen Buddhism and built the first temple of the Rinzai sect. Some think that he was the first to start cultivating tea for religious reasons rather than medicinal. He suggested grinding the tea leaves before adding them into the boiling water, known as matcha tea.
The monk met with hostility with the new religion he was introducing, putting him and the tea ceremony at risk. However, he was able to gain protection from the newly converted Kamakura shogunate and was able to keep writing about the tea ceremony. He wrote a book called Kissa Yojoki (“Tea Drinking Is Good for Health”), in which he cites various health reasons to drink tea, including curing loss of appetite, paralysis, boils and sickness from tainted water. Tea popularity grew as more people heard about its amazing properties. The samurai class specifically loved the tea ceremony and spread the popularity further.
When the Kamakura shogunate in 1333, a new class of people came about called the Gekokujou. These noblemen were also enraptured by the idea of tea ceremonies and decided to turn it into a type of game with their friends. The game Toucha challenges drinkers to distinguish between genuine teas and other lower quality teas. People would place bets and the winners would get expensive prices, adding to the excitement of the tea party.
At first, each person was provided a tea-cup. Soon, the tea ceremony parties grew from twenty to thirty to even one hundred people at a time. It would be impossible to provide each person a tea-cup, so attendees would either drink from the same tea-cup and pass it to their neighbor, or they would pass a tea bowl. This also helps to reaffirm the close ties that attendees have with one another.
Tea ceremonies were scaled down again to be for smaller, more lavish groups in a more simplified setting. Zen priest Murata Shukou dedicated his life to the Zen-like tea ceremony and offered instruction to those who wished to learn more. He wanted to serve the tea to his guests, rather than have another, creating an intimate bond with his guests. Simplicity, sober-looking colors, intimacy and types of utensils were all important to Shukou. He became the first chanoyusha, a professional teacher of the tea ceremony.
A wabi-suki is also a teacher of the tea ceremony but he also focuses on faith in the performance of the tea, an ability to act with decorum and excellent practical skills. A meijin has the qualities of a wabi-suki but is also a collector of fine Chinese tea utensils.
The tea ceremony is kept Zen-like and low-key as it was originally designed. Highly ritualistic, the tea ceremony is both complicated, yet simple.
Conducting a Japanese Tea Ceremony:
In order to conduct a Japanese tea ceremony, one needs to concentrate on steps that are simple in their ideas, yet complicated in their execution. You will need:
A tea kettle
Tea cups (if serving the tea in cups, rather than a tea bowl)
A tea bowl (if serving the tea in a communal bowl)
A tea bowl containing the unprepared matcha tea
A tea scoop to scoop the matcha tea
Bamboo ladle for the water
Bamboo whisk to mix the tea
Bamboo rest for the tea kettle lid
Cleaning basin for guests
A wooden stand
Tatami mats (straw mats)
A fine silk cloth the cleanse the tea bowl
A tea cloth to clean the items
Decorations for the room (flowers, candles, paintings, etc)
Sweets to munch on
- Be sure to aspire to a proper tea ceremony. If you do decide to conduct one, make sure that you are dedicated to doing so. You will need to prepare everything ahead of time, display any flowers in a way that they compliments nature, evoke warmth during the winter or coolness during the summer, prepare for any rain if you have it outdoors, make an inviting bowl of tea for your guests and attend to them. Your guests are highly important and should feel as such.
- There are four principles of a tea ceremony that you should try to meet. The wa (harmony), kei (respect), sei (cleanliness of soul and body), and jaku (tranquility) should be on your mind the entire time.
- It is recommended to cure the tea pots and the tea cup that you will be using. Place loose tea into the tea-pot with boiling water and let it sit for the day. To cure the tea cups, put boiling tea into a large bowl and put the tea cups into it for a day. This allows the tea oils to fill the tea cups and tea-pot. However, a typical tea ceremony is with a tea bowl instead. We will be discussing how to conduct a ceremony using a tea bowl, rather than individual cups.
- Find a nice, quiet room to have your tea party. If you can, have it outside in a garden. The Zen nature of the garden will compliment the ceremony.
- While tea ceremony rooms are typically decorated in a certain way, the main idea is to create a warm, welcoming environment for your tea ceremony. Candles and flowers can add a touch of peace to the room. Just be sure to keep everything simple. Your guests will be kneeling, so a tatami mat is encouraged.
- Prepare the tea room before your guests come in. You should bring in your tea set, tea pot, a stone basin for guests to cleanse themselves, a wooden stand to hold everything, your sweets you plan to serve, a bowl to hold the matcha, a portable hearth to keep the tea pot warm and a silk cover for the bowl holding the tea.
- Invite your guests to the tea room by ringing a gong during the day, or a bell during the night.
- Have your guests wash their hands and mouth using the fresh water in the basin. Guide them to the mat after they are cleaned.
- Bring in the tea bowl with the matcha. You should have the tea scoop resting across the bowl. Also bring in the tea whisk and tea cloth. Offer your guests some sweets to munch on while they talk.
- Bring in the waste water bowl, the bamboo ladle and the bamboo rest for the kettle lid. Offer your guests more sweets.
- Use the silk cloth to cleanse the tea container and the tea scoop.
- Ladle some hot water into the tea pot and clean the whisk. When you are finished with the process, empty the tea bowl and wipe it with the tea cloth.
- Place three scoops of tea per guest into the tea bowl using the scoop. Be sure to lift both the scoop and tea container while doing this.
- Ladle hot water from the kettle into the tea bowl. There should be enough water to create a thick liquid with the whisk.
- Return unused water to the kettle using the ladle.
- Pass the bowl to your first guest. The guest should bow when receiving the tea. Rotating the bowl is a sign that the guests are admiring the bowl. Finally, the guest should drink from the bowl, clean the rim and pass it to the next guest.
- After all guests have had some tea, take the bowl and rinse the tea scoop and whisk. Finally, clean the tea container and offer it to the guests to admire. | <urn:uuid:36a48337-aa8f-4570-803a-395228c2477c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cafelegi.wordpress.com/tag/kamakura-shogunate/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963653 | 1,710 | 3.59375 | 4 |
Politics Across the Border
Teleconference lets Mexican presidential candidate spread message to students.
This article was first published in the Daily Bruin.
Adam Foxman, Daily Bruin staff
The video feed was jerky and the sound was sometimes low, but for Luisa Martínez, it was an experience to be remembered.
Martínez, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student, was one of about 15 members of the UCLA Community who came to the Anderson School of Management Friday to participate in a video conference with Felipe Calderón, a Mexican politician who recently won a primary election to be a candidate in Mexico's 2006 presidential election in July.
"It's incredible, not even students from Mexico have this opportunity," said Martínez, who grew up and completed high school in Mexico.
Calderón is a member of Mexico's National Action Party, or PAN. PAN is also the party of current Mexican president Vicente Fox, who will not run in the 2006 election.
Responding to questions from both a Mexican audience and the participants of the UCLA event, which was sponsored by the UCLA International Institute and the Latin American Center, Calderón spent part of the meeting outlining how he would deal with challenges such as the possibility of ruling with a legislative minority and Mexico's high crime rate if he is elected. But he also touched on issues that resonate north of the border, such as violence against women, immigration and drug trafficking.
Violence against women is widespread in Mexico: in 2003, 10,949 women died in Mexico as a result of violence, according to a Nov. 25 article in the La Opinion, a Los Angeles-based Spanish-language newspaper.
And more than 400 women have been murdered in the cities of Juarez and Chihuahua since 1993, according to Amnesty International USA.
Speaking in Spanish, Calderón said he would combat domestic violence by working to change the perception that violence in the home is outside the reach of government.
Noting that one in five Mexican women is abused at least once in her life, Calderón said if he is elected his administration would work to "eradicate" what he sees as "tolerant attitudes" toward domestic violence.
Calderón also called for cooperation from United States security agencies such as the FBI to deal with issues of frontier security and crime, such as the murders of women that have plagued the city of Juarez, which lies across the border from El Paso, Texas.
"We need, we urge, and we demand higher responsibility on the part of the authorities from the United States" to do their part in stopping crime on the frontiers, Calderón said.
The border is also a site of interest in the debate over illegal immigration into the United States, and its deserts claim hundreds of lives each year as people try to cross illegally from Mexico to the United States.
Calderón said legal opportunities for Mexican laborers to work in the United States – at least seasonally – could reduce the number of Mexican lives lost in attempted border crossings.
He also said he would push for gradual agreements that would improve conditions for Mexican workers in the United States, pointing toward proposals by senators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., which would give workers visas for up to six years, after which they would either have to leave the country or be in the process of getting a green card.
When speaking about specifically Mexican issues, Calderón distanced himself from Fox by proposing a way to avoid the pitfalls of his compatriot's administration such as attempting to rule with a legislative minority.
When Fox was elected in 2000, his party did not win a majority in the Mexican Congress, and his administration was often stalled as a result, said Ruben Hernandez-Leon, a UCLA professor of sociology who served as moderator for the UCLA portion of the conference.
Calderón said he hopes to be elected and have a legislative majority, but he would consider forming a coalition government if he is elected but his party has a minority in the Mexican Congress.
"If the majority doesn't come from the (voting) urns, I will form a coalition government," he said, noting that the details of such a novel arrangement would have to be worked out if it is necessary.
Calderón promised that, if he is elected, his administration would improve Mexico's security at many levels. He said he would "purify" the nation's police forces "from top to bottom," create a single service to keep track of criminal information and form a single federal police force in order to make his nation safer.
"The fight against delinquency ... is a war, and you win wars with strategy, with resources and with technology," he said, adding that information is an essential resource.
Another important part of the fight against crime is getting citizens to participate in the process and share the information that they have about criminals, and in order to facilitate this confidence, the perception of the government and its efficiency must also be improved, Calderón added.
After the hour-long discussion, some UCLA audience members said they were impressed by Calderón's candor.
"This was a great opportunity to see what he had to say on the various issues," said Hernandez-Leon. "He provided a very interesting response in terms of modernizing."
Martínez expressed a similar sentiment.
She supported Calderón before the event, and afterwards she said her ideas about the candidate were confirmed.
"He went to the point," she said. "That's what I like about this candidate."
Published: Monday, December 05, 2005 | <urn:uuid:2fba384c-82df-48f7-9cae-d0a7a996af69> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.international.ucla.edu/news/article.asp?parentid=34913 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982175 | 1,154 | 2.046875 | 2 |
It's that time of year again, when the major camera manufacturers rush to release their new digital cameras just in time for the holiday shopping rush. Digital camera buyers continue to demand smaller cameras, more megapixels, and longer zooms - so it really isn't too surprising that quite a few of the newest point and shoot digital cameras are smaller, feature higher resolution sensors, and have more reach. This may be the year of the mini-megazoom.
Typically, Point and Shoot digital cameras generate high-quality pictures in good (read: outdoor) light, but they don't perform nearly as well in dim/low-light situations. Once the sun goes down, in dull weather, and indoors - most compact digicams produce noisy images with flat contrast, poor dynamic range, and dull colors.
These inherent faults have been exacerbated by the Lemming-like rush of the major camera manufacturers to continually reduce camera size, crowd More Megapixels onto tiny sensors, and add longer and longer zooms. Generally, smaller electro-mechanical devices are more complex than larger electro-mechanical devices of the same type. It is a simple law of physics that as complexity increases the limitations of the technology are magnified exponentially.
One of the more interesting new units now starting to hit store shelves is the Fujifilm FinePix F70EXR. The F70 is a fairly compact Point and Shoot featuring a 10 megapixel sensor, a 10x (27mm-270mm) Fujinon optical zoom with Super EBC Coating (to reduce ghosting and flare), a 2.7 inch High Contrast LCD with a 160 degree viewing angle (vertically and horizontally), Dual Image Stabilization, color saturation choices based on well known Fuji 35mm slide films like Velvia, Provia, and Astia, and a full manual exposure mode.
The F70's Super CCD EXR imaging sensor incorporates larger pixels and a novel new layout that (according to Fuji) permits the sensor to capture more light over a shorter period of time than standard sensor arrays. This new EXR sensor functions either automatically or in one of three user-selected modes: High Resolution, Wide Dynamic Range, or High Sensitivity/Low Noise. The F70's EXR Auto mode automatically selects one of those three modes (depending on conditions) and automatically shifts (based on what's in front of the lens) between Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Backlit Portrait, Night, and Night Portrait scene modes to select the best EXR mode and the optimum scene mode for the lighting and subject.
How well does all this nifty stuff work? Can the FinePix F70EXR really compete with Canon's PowerShot G11 and entry-level DSLRs in the image quality department? Does the F70EXR expand on the promise of the very popular F200EXR? Check back soon for our full review and we'll try and answer some of these questions.
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All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2000 - 2013, TechTarget | Read our Privacy Statement | <urn:uuid:ad5a6802-c6b4-4a4e-94b4-feed01731064> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.digitalcamerareview.com/default.asp?newsID=4151 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.906951 | 663 | 2.015625 | 2 |
From Ohio History Central
File:James W Shocknessy Ohio Turnpike.html|
James W. Shocknessy Ohio Turnpike
By the 1950s, roadways in Ohio primarily consisted of two lane roads, which became easily congested and did not allow for fast travel between cities. Adding to travel difficulties, most American families owned at least one car, dramatically increasing the amount of traffic on the roads. Automobiles also were much safer and capable of traveling at much faster speeds than earlier cars, enhancing Ohioans' desire for better roads.
Many Ohio cities had begun to plan for wider roads, with several additional lanes, to help speed travel. Realizing the need for better roadways, in 1949, the Ohio government established the Ohio Turnpike Commission. This office was to finance and construct a turnpike that crossed northern Ohio. It connected with the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the East and with another highway in Indiana in the West. James W. Shocknessey, chairperson of the Ohio Turnpike Commission, financed the roadway's construction with state bonds.
Construction began on October 27, 1952. At the peak of construction, more than ten thousand workers, using more than 2,300 construction vehicles, were building the roadway. The workers completed the Ohio Turnpike, later known as the James W. Shocknessey Turnpike, on October 1, 1955. The turnpike was 241 miles in length, and construction cost 325 million dollars. The turnpike, itself, did not pass through any of Ohio's major cities. The roadway's primary purpose was to speed thru traffic across the state.
Providing a fast and safe route across the northern part of Ohio, the roadway became an instant success, as thousands of people utilized it. On the first day alone, forty-four thousand cars traveled on the turnpike. By 2000, more than forty-five million cars used the James W. Shocknessey Ohio Turnpike every year. | <urn:uuid:be988f29-7055-4f28-958f-4d1854c7de45> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/James_W._Shocknessey_Ohio_Turnpike?rec=1711&nm=James-W-Shocknessey-Ohio-Turnpike | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974497 | 406 | 4.03125 | 4 |
Plant fibres are used to make a wide variety of objects, including jewellery. They can be obtained from plant stems, leaves, or even seed hairs such as cotton. Fibre can be used to produce practical items such as clothing, paper and rope, or for more decorative purposes like jewellery. Kew’s Collection illustrates how fibres are used to create a whole piece of jewellery or to produce twine to bind and secure other elements, as in the Dugong bone necklace.
Leaves are not often used to produce jewellery as they can be fragile, although woven or plaited palms and grasses can be made into attractive and strong pieces. An example of this is the bracelet made from screw pine leaf.
Trees often have strong cultural or religious significance, such as the birch tree in Russian culture. In folklore, jewellery made from the bark of birch is thought to relieve headaches and stress. The birch has become a symbol of Russia and benches are placed under birch trees for people to sit and talk to the tree. | <urn:uuid:a946cd19-442d-4bd1-bc13-a6ec22fc9f8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kew.org/collections/ecbot/collections/topic/botanical-jewellery/fibre-bark-and-leaves/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971928 | 219 | 3.09375 | 3 |
'Have you quantified that?' Answering 'no' to this question will usually trigger a collective humph from the crowd at a scientific meeting. We don't want to know that there's more or less of some biological activity unless you can say exactly how much different it is from normal.
Now Ron Milo, Paul Jorgensen and Mike Springer at the Systems Biology department in Harvard have attempted to sate this appetite for numbers with a new site called BioNumbers, which contains referenced entries for numbers like the total nasal epithelial cell surface area in a mouse nose (about 300 square millimeters in case you didn't know).
And the Top Ten Bionumbers are?! drumroll...
1. Rate of ribosome translation in E. coli = 12-21 amino acids per second
2. Doubling time of cell lines in humans (check database)
3. Number of ribosomes/cell in E. coli = 6,800-72,000
4. Absolute abundance of tumor protein p53 in humans = 160,000
5. Number of mRNA/cell in E. coli = 1,380
6. Average number of neurons in the mouse brain = 75,000,000
7. Average number of neurons in the human brain = 100,000,000,000
8. Number of synapses for a 'typical' human neuron = 1,000-10,000
9. Concentration of ATP in rat neuron = 2.59 mM
10. Ribosome + RNAn --> Ribosome·RNAn+1 in E. coli = 100 base pairs/sec
I know what you're thinking.. How many BioNumbers are currently known?
..1718 and climbing. | <urn:uuid:d050035c-aaf2-4af1-bc5f-b09f877a25ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blogland/2008/jun/30/one-two-skip-a-few/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.900543 | 356 | 2.125 | 2 |
Drink and drug driving
Thousands of people are tested for drink and drug driving across the Thames Valley and Hampshire throughout the year.
Thames Valley Police and Hampshire Constabulary will be pouring time and resources into drink-drive operations in a bid to slash alcohol-related driving incidents on our roads.
You can do your bit by remembering this number, 101 and calling it if you suspect anyone of drink-driving. You could save someone's life.
For our part, during the Christmas period we'll be running operations day and night taking every opportunity to breathalyse individuals where possible.
Our ‘Don’t get smashed, grab a cab’ campaign will be running on Twitter and Facebook to keep you updated, so follow us @ThamesVP or find us on Facebook.
If you drink alcohol or take drugs and drive, you put yourself, your loved ones and other road users at risk, don’t take a chance, it isn’t worth it.
Drink and drug driving is totally unacceptable and is a serious crime. Thames Valley Police and Hampshire Constabulary works to tackle drink and drug driving all year round.
Supt Chris Brown, for Thames Valley and Hampshire, said: “Drinking and driving wrecks lives, most obviously the hundreds of victims and their loved ones who are killed each year.
“But it also changes the lives of the people who are selfish or stupid enough to drive when they are not fit to do so.”
- 1/6 of deaths on Hampshire and Thames Valley roads are caused by drink drivers
- 78% of persons killed or seriously injured through drink driving were men and 22% were women
- 30% rise in arrests of women drivers last year (2011) compared with 2010
- 1 in 11 people tested failed the breath test
- 60,000 people are breath tested every year in Hampshire and Thames Valley (on average)
You cannot calculate your alcohol limit, so do not try – it depends on the amount and type of drink, your weight, sex, age, and metabolism.
Drinking any alcohol – even a small drink – makes you a worse driver because you do not judge speed and distance as well and you do not react as quickly. The only safe way is to not drink alcohol at all.
If you are convicted for a drink or drug drive offence, you:
- Will lose your licence for a minimum of one year.
- Will have a criminal record.
- May go to prison for up to six months.
- May have to pay a fine of up to £5,000.
- May lose your job (15 per cent of those convicted do).
- Face very high insurance costs once you get your licence back.
- Will have difficulty hiring a car within ten years of your conviction.
Supt Brown said: “How will you live your life having killed your girlfriend or somebody else’s loved one?
Supt Brown said: “How will you cope with a lengthy spell in prison? And even if you don’t have a crash and we catch you driving when you are over the limit, you will find yourself in a cell with enough time to contemplate the next 12 months without your driving licence.”
If you don’t want to take our word for it, listen to our podcasts (opens new window) to find out how people in the Thames Valley have been directly affected by drink and drug driving.
Please take note of the following advice:
- If you are planning a night out, think about how you are going to get home.
- Do not drive to the venue – you may be tempted to drive home after drinking.
- Drink soft drinks until you get home.
- Book a taxi to take you home – if you believe that you can’t afford to do this, think about whether you can afford to kill yourself, an innocent person or lose your driving licence.
- Use public transport to get home, or stay overnight.
- Never offer an alcoholic drink to someone who you know is driving. | <urn:uuid:f6395f87-145e-4640-a3c2-508956e1c0a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thamesvalley.police.uk/rdsafe-roadincidents-drink | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954447 | 844 | 1.828125 | 2 |
The Awards for “Failure”!
As we celebrate the awards for excellence, we must not forget awards for “failure” also!
The much publicised award for poverty alleviation bestowed on the J & K State by a media channel makes one think about the definition of poverty taken as the bench mark for the award. After 1947 Kashmir has not been poor in the real sense of the word. Sheikh Abdullah’s revolutionary measure of land to the tiller completely changed the scenario. Whenever one speaks about poverty, the picture of people living in some parts of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, Assam, Rajasthan, and the Adivasis come to mind. Those are the people really living in poverty or rather below poverty line and cannot afford a daily square meal, not to speak of other amenities! Poverty is a relative term in regard to other people living in the area. In that sense, we cannot say that the bulk of Kashmiris are poor! The valley of Kashmir where cars worth rupees five hundred crore are purchased every year cannot be called poor! In fact, Kashmiris have stopped working manually. Most of these chores are done by Biharis and Bengalis whose population in the valley has now gone beyond half a million. So which poverty has the J & K Government alleviated? Apart from thousands of crores pumped in by Government of India over last 65 years, Kashmir had abundant flow of money from Islamabad. All this money did not necessarily get utilised for the purpose for which it was meant. This money has created a class of nouveau riche that not only flaunts this money but has totally destroyed social and ethical values. Above all else, Kashmir has these days the most corrupt and incompetent administrative set up.
Another amusing award was for the best healthcare. The fact that the healthcare in the state is in shambles has been brought out by the media repeatedly. Getting an award for excellence in healthcare makes one think that the status in some other parts of the country must be something similar to what the people in the dark jungles of Africa used to have in the past! A state where 900 infants died due to the callousness of authorities hardly deserves an award. They should have been facing the criminal courts and paying massive compensation if it was a western country or even some countries of the Middle East like Saudi Arabia.
The first award for failure was announced by the Transparency International when they declared Jammu & Kashmir to be the second most corrupt state in India. By now it must have taken the top slot among the corrupt states? Corruption has been fully legitimatised at all levels. No one feels any compunction in taking or giving a bribe. Ministers with proven charges of corruption continue to be part of the ruling elite with pride and dare anyone to change them! Accountability and Vigilance Commissions are in doldrums. Quite often corruption allegations are probed by commissions of inquiry which most of the time give a clean chit to the accused.
Another field in which the state deserves an award is the environment and ecology. The sad story of the water bodies has been widely circulated. The Dal Lake is in the throes of death in spite of hundreds of crores pumped in to save it. Well, in this case the State is not the only culprit. The people in general and our so called popular leaders are equally guilty. The material greed has made people eat away the Dal Lake slowly over last few decades. The Wullar Lake once claimed to be one of the largest sweet water lakes in Asia is in a sad state, almost getting reduced to a pond due to encroachments and willow cultivation. The condition of Jhelum once proudly called the lifeline of Kashmir is like that of a large sewer. The Green Gold or the lush green forests have been mercilessly cut by the timber smugglers in connivance with the officials and the security agencies. About Mountain Ecology, the less said, the better! The uncontrolled and unregulated pilgrimage to the holy cave of Amarnath has turned this once famous track into a garbage trail and the Supreme Court of India instead of hauling up the State Government for destroying the Mountain Ecology, is directing them to do something more to finish the job of its total destruction.
By the way the City of Srinagar, the famous City of the Sun having a history of over 2,000 years is one of the dirtiest cities in the world. It surely deserves an award! Not only is it often strewn with stinking garbage, facing traffic jams in spite of numerous traffic lights, some working, and some not working but also plagued by the menace of the hordes of stray dogs. One wonders how the Tourism Department welcomes tourists to the so called “Paradise” through this God forsaken city. Dug up roads, incomplete drains, foot-path sellers, encroached roads, and mushroom growth of shopping complexes, total disregard of land use and building bye laws makes it a free for all city. Surely it deserves the award for how things should not be done!
The most important award is for our power system. One of the world’s most potential hydro-power generating areas is suffering from a perennial power famine. Thanks to our rulers they have mortgaged the resources for all future generation not to talk of the present generation! The resources have not only been usurped by the country which holds us as its integral part but to the neighbouring country which claims to be a staunch supporter of our basic rights. It is a pity that our so called leaders did not even protest on the signing of the infamous treaty of Indus Waters but meekly allowed these resources to be exploited at our cost. Thirst for power and material greed had completely blinded them.
It may not be fair to put all these failures on Omar Abdullah as he did not create these but inherited the most of these from his predecessors. However, he could have taken these head on and mitigated the sufferings of the common people. Unfortunately, he seems to be engrossed in the glamour of Tourism and is obsessed with the revocation of AFSPA. It is difficult to understand why our leaders want to improve all the luxurious recreational facilities for the tourists at the cost of providing the basic facilities to the local population? As regards AFSPA it is not going sooner as has been made evident by the Army which refuses to budge. So it would be sensible to at least take the discrepancies in the day to day living of the people head on and give them some visible relief urgently sought by one and all!
(Comments at email@example.com)
Lastupdate on : Thu, 3 Jan 2013 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Thu, 3 Jan 2013 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Fri, 4 Jan 2013 00:00:00 IST
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Srinagar, Jan 3: Disapproving of government’s “tardy approach” of making placement against the post of Director Health Services Kashmir on substantive basis, Jammu and Kashmir High Court has granted three More
Tangmarg, Jan 3: Many villages receiving electricity from Kunzar-grid here in north Kashmir are facing acute power shortage due to deterioration of the transmission infrastructure. Residents of Bongam More | <urn:uuid:d7dc7256-12ee-46ac-82b3-fa97c97143d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2013/Jan/4/the-awards-for-failure--14.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956508 | 1,720 | 2.234375 | 2 |
Category: Social Renewal
For any organization, whether a corporation or non profit, the board of directors plays a fundamental role in ensuring effective leadership. An effective board will govern and lead an organization in efficient and productive practices.
Whether it is youth development, environmental awareness, religious endeavors, artistic development, health care, or any other charitable endeavor, in order to function successfully, nonprofit organizations must be able create a work environment that results in completed projects that impact society in a positive way.
For a nonprofit organization to achieve success, they require strong and effective leadership. Effective leaders will have the experience, skills, and education to manage the day to day operations of the organization, build and lead a strong team, lead and work with other officers and directors in such areas as finance, marketing, communication, as well as lead projects in a productive manner that result in a positive outcome.
Who has the time to serve on the board of directors of a nonprofit organization?
With the never-ending (and seemingly thankless) tasks of paying the bills, keeping a steady job, providing for loved ones, and numerous other responsibilities, adding another duty to an already long list can seem like only something a masochist would desire. | <urn:uuid:646a7d43-3da7-4428-840e-06a31011371d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.litkos.com/?cat=77 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943349 | 247 | 2.375 | 2 |
Called Gifu, the lamps comprise wooden batons joined with wing nuts so they can be collapsed and the legs can be moved into different poses.
A naked bulb hangs from a flex that's threaded though each 'neck'.
Here are some more details from Velasco and Stephens:
The family of lamps GIFU, designed by María del Pilar Velasco and Pau Stephens, shown at the Milan Furniture Fair 2012.
The lamps are made of wood and inspired by the fauna from the Savannah.Their designers ,who work in Madrid, will be presenting them at the stand of IED at Salone Satellite.
Like a family in which a mother cares for her children, family GIFU is integrated by several lamps of different sizes, the users can create their own clan.Each lamp is made of 5 pieces of beech wood of two sizes, forming the four legs and long neck. GIFU is an articulated lamp, that allows it to be placed in different positions and be foldable.
About the designers
The designers Maria del Pilar Velasco (Ecuador) and Pau Stephens (Mexico) meet each other in the mayor of product design at IED Madrid, which becomes the nexus between these two points of view of the design. Together they made a number of projects in which the Selfproduction and traditional crafts become extremely important. | <urn:uuid:d8b1a532-e402-4081-a453-a8fd2e8dc7bd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dezeen.com/2012/04/17/gifu-by-maria-del-pilar-velasco-and-pau-stephens/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951234 | 279 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Mostly Good News in Report on Children's Health
The adolescent birth rate has reached another record low. Children are less likely to die in the first four years of life. And, elementary-school-age children are scoring better in math. Those are among the main findings of the just-released report, "America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2005 " — which was compiled by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics.
Schmalfeldt: There was a lot of good news to be found in a recently released report called "America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2005 " as we hear from Dr. Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Alexander: This year's findings highlight the facts that the adolescent birth rate has reached another record low, the death rate for children between ages one and four is the lowest ever, and young children are more likely to receive recommended immunizations, and fourth graders are scoring a little bit better in math.
Schmalfeldt: The report is the government's 9th annual monitoring of the well-being of the nation's children and youth. It was compiled by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Services, and presents a comprehensive look at critical areas of child well-being, including health status, behavior and social environment, economic security, and education. And although there was much good news in the report, Dr. Alexander said some areas still have room for improvement.
Alexander: Some of the things we're concerned about include the fact that the proportion of children who are living in poverty has increased slightly. That's something that we have very great difficulty in controlling. But also, concern that we have not made more progress, really, in the proportion of kids who are engaging in what we might call unhealthy health behaviors. These are the kids who are drinking alcohol, using illicit drugs, smoking cigarettes. The lack of much progress in these areas in this particular year, although there's an overall downward trend for some of these, is cause for concern because much effort has been directed towards these in trying to reduce these levels, and these health behaviors portend adverse consequences for children through the long term of their adult life.
About This Audio Report
Reporter: Bill Schmalfeldt
Sound Bite: Dr. Duane Alexander
Topic: Children's Health | <urn:uuid:6213b99f-34b7-47c2-8881-1aa9ece2f59b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nih.gov/news/radio/jul2005/07252005goodnews.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965158 | 496 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Love & Authority in Argentina (19th c)
Benjamín Montes with Bourgan, Funge, and Company [Labor Contract]
Since 1810, social critics in Buenos Aires had long been concerned about young people from the lower classes—especially young men—exercising greater independence within the home. With the decline of parental authority, they were alarmed at the sight of growing numbers of young people as a potential source of disorder, and they looked to the state for solutions. As a result, the police were granted broad authority to place youngsters into jobs that would keep them off of the streets and supply businesses and homes with badly needed laborers.
In 1841, Benjamín Montes, a minor, signed a contract with Bourgan, Funge, and Company, a hat factory in Buenos Aires, to work for three years as an apprentice. At first glance, the terms of the contract seem harsh. It limited Montes's mobility, governed his behavior in and out of the factory, and the work was probably very grueling. However, this type of arrangement was also illustrative of the weakening of parental authority in favor of state authority. Montes's mother, Juana María Olivera, clearly transferred power over her son to the company (mothers could sign contracts if male heads of households were unavailable). These kinds of jobs provided greater opportunities for young people, like Benjamín, to gain enough income to make a life of their own when they reached adulthood.
Archivo General de la Nación, X-31-9-5, Policía, 1823–50. Reprinted in Szuchman, Mark D. Order, Family, and Community in Buenos Aires, 1810-1860. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Annotated by Jesse Hingson.
Primary Source Text
LONG LIVE THE FEDERATION!
General Department of Police
Buenos Aires, March 1841
Year 32 of Liberty, 25 of Independence,
and 12 of the Argentine Confederation
We, the undersigned, in accordance with the Law of November 17, 1821, agree upon the following articles:
Art. 1. We, the principals of Bourgan, Funge, and Co., declare that, in accordance with the proposal made to us by Doña Juana María Olivera to accept her son, Benjamín Montes, as apprentice in our factory, and receiving her promises of his good conduct, have agreed to do so for a term of three years, beginning at such time as we commence his training in the making of plush and silk hats at the level of perfections at which they are currently produced.
Art. 2. We commit ourselves to his maintenance and to give him shelter and thirty-five pesos monthly during the agreed-upon term of three years.
Art. 3. Benjamín Montes commits himself to perform all duties customary in the factory on Sundays and holidays, as required of him. He will maintain his cleanliness, he will be punctual in his working hours, and with his obligations away from the factory during such days when there is no work, and he will comply with his religious obligations.
Art. 4. Benjamín Montes, apprentice, will be obligated to maintain good order and harmony with the other members of the house during the agreed-upon term of three years, and to obey without hesitation whatever we or the foreman may ask of him (which will be only those things related to the factory or to its good order), and in the event that Benjamín should flee from the factory, it is the obligation of his mother to find him and to bring him back, and two days will be added to the contracted period of service for every day that he remains a fugitive.
Art. 5. I, Benjamín Montes, fully cognizant of everything contained in the previous four articles, and with the approval of My Lady Mother, declare that from this day forth I enter into apprenticeship for the agreed upon term of three years in the hat factory of Messrs. Bourgan Bunge (sic) and Co. under the conditions and obligations herein expressed, and as proof or our [agreement] they add their signatures to the one of My Lady Mother…and to the same effect it is all hereby authorized by the Chief of Police.
How to Cite This Source
"Love & Authority in Argentina (19th c)," in Children and Youth in History, Item #60, http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/teaching-modules/60 (accessed May 23, 2013).
- Primary Sources
- School Population in Buenos Aires, Argentina [Quantitative Evidence]
- Benjamín Montes with Bourgan, Funge, and Company [Labor Contract]
- Handwriting Assignment, San Telmo Parish [School Assignment]
- Don Eduardo Brown v. Don Leonardo Brown [Lawsuit]
- Ignacia Funes and Teresa Bulnes to Manuel López [Letter]
- Manuelita [Painting]
- Petition for Permission to Marry by José Antonio Juárez (May 15th, 1830) [Petition]
- Camila O'Gorman [Painting]
- Adolfo O'Gorman to Juan Manuel de Rosas [Letter]
- "To the Spirits of Camila O'Gorman" [Poem]
- Ferreyra Sons v. Pedro Sueldo [Civil Lawsuit] | <urn:uuid:e18170ea-0788-46fc-ae91-e79c16440fa4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/teaching-modules/60?section=primarysources&source=62&output=rss2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953064 | 1,135 | 3.1875 | 3 |
To say that pro-ana blogs and websites — an online community for those with eating disorders — are controversial is an understatement. While some say they exist as a non-judgmental space for anorexics to seek support for their mental illness, others sites make the highly disturbing claim that anorexia is not an illness but rather a “lifestyle” choice. So how can a new study in the journal Health Communication say, in contrast to media reports and other research about the pro-ana community, that there are benefits to the pro-ana sites?
33 bloggers from seven different countries were interviewed by researchers from Indiana University. (300 bloggers had been contacted and the ten percent response is statistically significant.) Both male and female bloggers were contacted but only women responded. Most of those who responded were in high school or college; aged 15 to 33, two-thirds were from the US.
Anorexia nervosa is a psychiatric disorder in which individuals lose between 15 and 60 percent of their body weight and are susceptible to osteoporosis and cardiac ailments which can lead to death. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, anorexia affected more than 11 million people in the US in 2010. Of any mental illness, eating disorders have the highest mortality rate, while the mortality rate associated with anorexia is twelve times higher than the death rate for all causes of death for 15-24 year old females.
Anorexics, Stigma and Social Media
The study differed from earlier ones in that researchers actually interviewed pro-ana bloggers, while previous studies have focused on analyzing the admittedly troubling content of pro-ana sites. Indeed, some pro-ana sites have been shut down by internet providers after complaints from eating disorder support groups.
Daphna Yeshua-Katz, a doctoral student in telecommunications in the IU College of Arts and Sciences and the study’s lead author, researches how marginalized individuals use social media to mediate their stigma. Citing studies showing that anorexics and bulimics often feel stigmatized, Yeshua-Katz notes that the blogs are used “to look for support and understanding, but at the same time, the content that they display is something for us — people who are not sick — very disturbing.” Bloggers find the sites “a place to vent out and express themselves without judgment of others,” of parents, therapists and friends friends whose well-intentioned urgings to eat and “get well” may only leave those with eating disorders defiant.
Other studies have said that pro-ana sites promote and maintain anorexia. But only five of the bloggers in the study said they had created their sites to share weight-lost tips; the researchers found that most bloggers “did actively engage in ways to warn their audience about the content and ignored or blocked requests for tips and tricks from what they nicknamed ‘wannarexics’ — young teenagers who want to become anorexic.”
Image by olgaberries
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may
not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers. | <urn:uuid:c919c660-881e-477d-a95e-2c7e0f4f7305> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.care2.com/causes/pro-ana-sites-have-benefits-says-new-study.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959715 | 655 | 2.484375 | 2 |
FDA to Investigate Safety of Inhalable Caffeine
(WASHINGTON) -- The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will launch a safety investigation of a new product that allows consumers to inhale caffeine through a lipstick-sized portable device, rather than drinking it.
AeroShot delivers 100 milligrams of caffeine per use, and comes in bright colored packages that describe it as “pure energy,” and “breathable energy anytime, anyplace.”
The manufacturer, Breathable Foods Inc., put it on the market in New York, Massachusetts, and in France late last month.
“You could easily overdose or succumb to toxicity associated with the caffeine ingestion,” Dr. Bruce Goldberger told ABC News. “You could mix it with alcohol in a social setting and also I’m troubled by its availability, potentially at home where young children can get a hold of it.”
Sen. Charles Schumer of New York said he shares those concerns.
“A new product like AeroShot raises questions that need to be answered before allowing consumers, especially teens and kids, to use and abuse it,” he said. “The AeroShot caffeine-inhaler is being marketed as a party enhancer; it can facilitate excessive drinking and its effects have never been examined by independent regulators to determine their impact on the human body and in combination with alcohol, especially for adolescents.”
The inventor of AeroShot, Harvard biomedical professor David Edwards, says his product is as safe as a cup of coffee, which provides roughly the equivalent dose of caffeine.
“I think that we are absolutely welcoming a dialogue with the FDA,” he said. “As I say, this is a new way of delivering food in your mouth, and we’re confident that as they look at the product that they will confirm what we hold, that the product is both safe and follows FDA regulations.”
Edwards was able to bring Aeroshot to the market without an FDA review being required because it is sold as a dietary supplement. ABC News asked Edwards if he or his company had done any studies of the health effects of AeroShot on children or teenagers.
“The answer is no, we did not do tests on children,” he said, explaining that children and teenagers are not part of his target market. “We need to be really clear what a company responsibly does to test the safety of their product, and we’ve followed those safety regulations.”
Edwards says his product delivers a lower dose of caffeine than many energy drinks or caffeine pills currently on the market, and says it comes in a controlled, smaller dose of caffeine.
Edwards says demand for the product is eclipsing anything he could have ever anticipated, and increasing.
ABC News found the product on store shelves throughout New York and around college campuses. We visited three delis near Columbia University — two sold us their shelf stock, while the third store was already sold out.
“I would try it during something like finals week,” said Thalia Dergham, a Columbia University student. Dergham said, though, that she would likely not be a regular consumer of the product outside of high stress times.
Other students were not so willing.
“It looks intense,” said Kristin Simmons, a Columbia University art history and visual arts major. “It looks like one of those monster Red Bull drinks.”
After announcing its review, the FDA is now likely to examine the health effects of inhaling the caffeine on at-risk populations, along with looking into the potential health effects of use when combined with alcohol.
“FDA will review information brought to the agency’s attention about this product,” the agency said in a statement. “As with any complaint or concern we receive about FDA-regulated products, we will consider whether a violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act has occurred and, if so, whether regulatory action is warranted in light of FDA’s enforcement priorities and resources.”
The product’s manufacturer has come under fire for a round of advertisements that seem to show its use by younger men and women who are out at nightclubs, where alcohol may be present.
ABC News asked the inventor of the product about those ads. Edwards said the product itself is safe and fundamentally sound, but there is ongoing discussion within his company about how to market it and where to sell it.
“Speaking as an innovator, you’re not developing a product thinking of targeting people that it’s going to hurt. And so on the contrary, the motivation of this product was to actually create a healthier and more accessible way of having caffeine, when you need it, as opposed to overdoing yourself often when you don’t need it.”
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio | <urn:uuid:b1916b5b-0b80-46f3-b99c-67d4618948d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eastidahonews.com/2012/02/fda-to-investigate-safety-of-inhalable-caffeine/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967994 | 1,020 | 1.953125 | 2 |
Four hours ago, I walked up to a big pad of paper and started mind mapping all the types of interruptions we might face while trying to get our work done.
- While I was working, Tonianne, who was on Skype, wanted to do a microphone test.
- Then I received an e-mail for a meeting request from a client.
- While responding to that, I received a lunch request from a colleague.
- While responding to that, e-mail arrived from another client with documents needed for our meeting. So I accepted those Google docs and scanned them.
- While responding to that, my bladder told me that I should rush off for a bio break.
- After that, I rushed to the board and started writing furiously about things that might interrupt us.
- Then Tonianne wanted to discuss some work that was coming up.
- Then I had my meeting.
And now, 3.5 hours later, I am finally writing this blog post.
My goal is to get this done by my call at 1 pm.
How do we limit our work-in-progress in a world of constant interruptions?
Interruptions are more common in knowledge work than work, it seems. They are little things, one minute, five minutes, ten minutes. Happening here and there.
What is an Interruption?
The Free Dictionary defines Interruption as:
v. in·ter·rupt·ed, in·ter·rupt·ing, in·ter·rupts
1. To break the continuity or uniformity of: Rain interrupted our baseball game.
2. To hinder or stop the action or discourse of (someone) by breaking in on: The baby interrupted me while I was on the phone.
3. To break in on an action or discourse.
All three of these are important to us at work. While we are working, we are achieving (hopefully) a state of flow. Both in the psychological and the mechanical sense of the word, we are actively focusing, working, and completing the task at hand.
An interruption is anything that breaks that flow-state. <The phone just rang. On call for 2m13s.>
When we break that flow state, just like that side comment about my own interruption broke up the flow of this post, we have several states we transition through:
- Initial shock (Oh my god, I’m being Interrupted!)
- Adjustment (Context switch into new context)
- Existence (Live in new context)
- Closure (Close off new context)
- Return (Return to previous context)
Depending on the detail needed by the interruption, these states can take take minutes, tens of minutes, or more. Luckily for me, my interruption was minor and rather fun, so leaving the blog post and coming back was relatively easy.
Interruptions and You
Since most interruptions are small, routine, and often important, we tend not to notice them. When interruptions are annoying, we do notice them. Then, when we are late in finishing something, we will blame our lateness on the annoying interruption and conveniently forget all the other ones.
The fact is that interruptions are part of knowledge work. We seldom do it alone, which means we have colleagues. Colleagues require information. Information requires communication. Communication requires attention.
We are also social animals. So, if I come into your office and say, “Hey, I need to talk to you about the Amalgamated Salamander contract,” you are likely going to say, “Okay,” and we’ll talk. Even if you say “No,” you are unlikely to simply say “No,” and ignore me from then on, because that’s rude. And if you are truly rude, you will not stop at “No,” you’ll tell me exactly why you don’t have time for me which is still an interruption.
We cannot declare interruptions as waste, either. Knowledge work and personal work is fraught with rapid changes in context. Micropriorities that never existed on your project plan crop up every day. Like “Hey, Barb’s out sick, you still want to have that meeting?” Or “I just got this fax from the FDA and they are claiming that epoxy isn’t a food and we have to pull our Gluey-Chooies off the market.” Things like that.
So, we need to understand what our interruptions really are, before we decide that we want to eliminate them.
There are many systems out there to help you isolate yourself from interruptions, but completely closing yourself off from change – in an environment with high degrees of change – doesn’t make a lot of sense.
In order to know a thing, you must become a thing. So, you must first go out and interrupt as many people as you can.
No … scratch that.
In order to understand interruptions, a good place to start is to (surprise) visualize them. Here are some suggested ways in increasing levels of complexity.
Write Them Down: That’s simple enough. Keep a pad of paper nearby and when you are interrupted by ANYTHING write it down. Even if you are interrupted by daydreaming about how awesome lunch is going to taste.
Add Them to Your Kanban: Get a special shaped sticky notes, like maybe ones shaped like the human cochlea (or something) and add substantial interruptions to your board. This way you can track them and see them mixed with your other work.
Record Severity: Create a table on a sheet of paper. 8 rows for the hours of the day, and 12 boxes for five minute increments. Then color in the boxes during which you were interrupted from your primary task.
Now that you’ve recorded them. Ask some key questions:
- Are these interruptions necessary?
- Did I provide or receive value while involved in this interruption?
- Does this interruption happen frequently?
- Can I schedule this interruption, making it a planned event?
- Did I have the time and mental capacity to help with this interruption?
Again, the goal is not to eradicate interruptions. The goal is to understand them and work with them. Some will be waste and you can remove them. Some will be part of your job and you must find elegant ways to work with them.
Limiting Work in Progress
After you understand the nature of your interruptions, you can build much more resilient strategies for limiting work-in-progress. We can limit unnecessary interruptions, understand when it is appropriate for us to sequester ourselves in a Pomodoro, and structure our work to allow us to stay as much within our WIP limits as possible.
Photo: “Dorrie Interrupts Sissy Bathing” by Paul Schultz. | <urn:uuid:b0249b6e-84ff-44b9-9c93-9006a8d37625> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/blog/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954284 | 1,454 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Enterprise Captain James T. Kirk was awarded the Palm Leaf of Axanar Peace Mission early in his career. It was among his many commendations cited by the computer during Kirk's court martial in 2267. (TOS: "Court Martial")
- One can assume the peace mission was a success since it is doubtful an award would have been handed out if it had failed. Furthermore, a palm leaf generally represents triumph and victory, so the peace mission was likely successful. | <urn:uuid:93514e0b-ea0d-418d-b586-a0936e5274a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Palm_Leaf_of_Axanar_Peace_Mission?oldid=993439 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.99211 | 97 | 2.203125 | 2 |
- SUBJECT: Form Access
Q: I have to fill out a registration page every time I need to access the ICJ Word/PDF Template forms. Why do I have to do this now, and is there a way around this?
A: The reason web surfers must fill out a registration page when they access the Word Template forms is because of concern over unauthorized use and download of the ICJ forms by offenders and their families. This registration is to prevent juvenile delinquents or family members from submitting unauthorized forms to ICJ offices. This is not as annoying as it first seems. To keep from filling out the form every time you need to access the Word Template forms, all you need to do is save the Word Template page as a 'favorite bookmark' in your internet browser.
- SUBJECT: Data Entry
Q: When I download a form in Word Template, grey boxes appear on the form. What are these?
A: To prevent unauthorized editing of the ICJ forms, the instructional text within each form is "locked." The grey boxes are text fields that allow the user to enter text or check off certain parts of the form. | <urn:uuid:b9dbe200-f787-40f7-8c0f-c719afe05259> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.juvenilecompact.org/Forms/Overview.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931636 | 235 | 1.757813 | 2 |
The keg was tapped on the 172nd Oktoberfest beer party on Saturday, which is expected to draw some 6 million people to the fairgrounds in the southern German city of Munich during its two-week run.
One day before Germany went to the polls, Munich Mayor Christian Ude, a Social Democrat, cracked open the first barrel at the stroke of noon with the cry "O'zapft is!" (the keg is tapped) and presented a giant glass to State premier Edmund Stoiber, a member of the conservative Christian Social Union.
Thousands of revelers gathered in the Schottenhamel tent -- one of 14 on the fairgrounds -- cheered despite a steady drizzle.
"We want two weeks of beautiful weather and a peaceful festival, without violence, and everyone to have a great time," Ude said.
Bavarians donned their traditional Tracht (national dress) -- Lederhosen (leather pants) and embroidered braces for the men, long pleated smocks and low-cut blouses for the women -- as tourists from around the world came to glimpse a peculiar slice of German culture.
"I love the outfits, the costumes, and I especially the size of the beers," said Jonah Hartley, a 24-year-old builder from Cambridge, England.
Despite the general election yesterday, 1 million people are expected during the first weekend of the festival alone, consuming beer and sausage served up in giant tents to the oom-pah-pah of brass bands.
Each visitor drinks around one liter of beer on average, organizers said.
Bavaria, a conservative state, was expecting to toast the victory of Christian Democrat candidate Angela Merkel over Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder at the event last night.
Stoiber, respecting the Oktoberfest's long tradition of not mixing beer and politics, said only that he was "satisfied" with the conservatives' chances in the election.
The first Oktoberfest was held in 1810 to celebrate the marriage of the prince of Bavaria, the future King Ludwig I, to Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen for whom the park grounds are named. It has been cancelled only 24 times, for outbreaks of war or cholera.
For the 172nd year of the Oktoberfest, restrictions on the volume of music have been imposed until 6pm, although at its newly-set level of 85 decibels it is still as loud as an articulated truck.
The Oktoberfest format has been exported to the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur and the Taiwanese capital Taipei, and Bavarian authorities have struck an agreement with the southern Chinese industrial province of Guangzhou to hold one there. | <urn:uuid:eb92240b-6ab0-4b49-a6cf-36d8cfb5dff4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/09/19/2003272326 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943502 | 562 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Alopecia Areata Areota
Alopecia areata areota is an autoimmune condition that causes hair loss, most often in coin-sized patches along the scalp. Although there is no cure for it, alopecia areata vitamins can help your skin and hair follicles stay healthy and increase your chances for hair regrowth.
When you have alopecia areata, your immune system sends an incorrect message to your hair follicles, telling them to suppress growth. The good news is that your hair follicles aren't dead--just dormant for as long as that miscommunication is happening.
More good news is that, while some hair loss can be a symptom of a more serious medical condition, if your hair loss is alopecia areata, it is not medically harmful.
Alopecia Areata Areota Is A Genetic Condition
if you have the markers for it in your genes, you will have a greater chance of manifesting the symptoms. If you have a close relative with alopecia areata, you have a greater chance of developing the condition yourself. Recent research has identified 8 genes where the markers for alopecia areata reside.
There is a genetic test that identifies whether or not you have these markers, but most people first discover they have alopecia areata (areota) when they experience the symptoms of it.
Most cases of alopecia areata areota are mild to moderate--one or more coin-sized patches of hair loss along your scalp, and in rarer cases on men, your beard. Some more severe cases can lead to losing all the hair on your scalp (alopecia areata totalis), and the most severe can lead to loss of all the hair on your body (alopecia areata universalis).
Regardless of the severity of the cases, alopecia areata areota conditions usually appear suddenly, and vanish just as suddenly. While researchers have identified the genetic cause of the condition, they haven't yet been able to pinpoint what triggers it, or what stops the trigger.
Are There Alopecia Areata Areota Vitamins I Can Take?
In dealing with this condition, alopecia areata vitamins can act as boosters to your hair follicles' natural strength. Most treatments for alopecia areata involve stimulating hair growth enough to override your immune system's incorrect messages that suppress it.
Vitamins Used For Alopecia Areata Areota
Aloe vera is one such vitamin treatment. When used as a topical treatment on the condition site, aloe vera reduces inflammation of the hair follicles, opening them up for hair regrowth. In addition to the anti-inflammatory properties, aloe vera has also been shown to both stimulate and suppress the immune system.
Since your immune system is sending out incorrect messages to your hair follicles, the suppression properties of aloe vera may help to override these incorrect messages and allow your hair follicles to return to normal operation. Aloe vera has been used in clinical trials for related skin conditions. Some of its chemical components are known to be effective hair growth stimulants as well.
Vitamin E is another vitamin treatment that may encourage hair growth. Vitamin E has a regulatory effect on the immune system, and is available as topical treatment and as an oral supplement. Vitamins are important elements in encouraging hair growth, but you can also easily overdose on them, giving you the opposite effect.
Zinc supplements have been tested in Europe. European studies have found a zinc deficiency in sufferers of alopecia areata. You can overdose on zinc supplements, so use care and check with your doctor.
Zinc is believed to modulate and balance your immune system, which can help correct the suppression messages sent to your hair follicles. Alopecia areata vitamin supplements may help mitigate the symptoms of alopecia areata areota. But there is currently no cure or 100% effective treatment, and many of the treatments that have met with some success work best on mild cases. | <urn:uuid:d9c15510-38f5-4dad-8ba2-247b375623d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.beauty-and-the-bath.com/alopecia-areata-areota.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925014 | 852 | 2.375 | 2 |
Understanding parallelism-inhibiting dependences in sequential Java programs
Many existing sequential components, libraries, and applications will need to be re-engineered for parallelism. This work proposes a dynamic analysis of sequential Java programs that helps a programmer to understand bottlenecks for parallelism. The analysis measures the parallelism available in the program by considering a hypothetical parallel execution in which the code within a method executes sequentially, but each caller will execute in parallel with its callees. A best-case scenario is assumed: every statement executes as early as possible, as long as all dependences from the sequential program are satisfied. The idealized speedup under this model is a measure of the method-level parallelism inherent in the program, independent of hardware and JVMs. The analysis employs bytecode instrumentation and an online algorithm which tracks the reads and writes of relevant memory locations during a run of the sequential program. If the best-case parallelism is low, this likely means that the program cannot be easily re-engineered into a scalable parallel version. In experiments with 26 Java programs, we observed this situation for most programs. This problem is sometimes due to programmer decisions that were perfectly reasonable for a sequential program but would be detrimental to the performance of any parallel version. To pinpoint such decisions, we propose an approach that employs the dynamic analysis to automatically find memory locations whose read and write operations decrease the available parallelism. In three case studies, we demonstrate how these bottlenecks can be identified and eliminated using the proposed approach. | <urn:uuid:502053e9-3e89-457e-9d9c-6e61000ed0c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.citeulike.org/user/yeminjiao/article/9009150 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936889 | 312 | 1.757813 | 2 |
World first as British scientists harness drizzle power
The rest of the world may be moving towards greater use of solar power or wind power, but renewable energy generation that taps into specific local atmospheric conditions in the UK has leapt forward with a Manchester project that uses drizzle to power street lights.
Technical advances in British solutions to the global energy crisis will be driven by the UK’s unique micro-climates, says Professor Tom Choularton of University of Manchester’s School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences.
He explained: ‘Drizzle, which occurs nowhere else in such natural abundance, gives us three ways to generate power. First, it is a relentless source of downwardly vertical hydro energy to drive small turbines.
‘At the same time, the spent drizzle provides a penetrating chill for heat-exchange units. Finally, the small amount of electricity that remains in drizzle droplets from the positively-charged source clouds is farmed and channelled into AA batteries that are then sold at car boot sales.
‘In Manchester, we are fitting lamp-posts and dozens of other outdoor freestanding structures with the tiny but complex drizzle power units that will keep our streets illuminated, day and night.
‘We will soon have enough gloom power for all the city’s street lights, with enough to spare to sell to other European cities that have no natural gloom, like Barcelona and Rome.’
In a parallel project based in the city centre, sonic capture is being used to see if sound waves from traffic noise and the population’s constant whining and bragging can be converted into another source of energy.
A trial of the sound abstraction system at a derby match between City and United at Old Trafford had to be abandoned after an announcement that both Liverpool and Arsenal were winning away caused a sonic power surge that blew all the floodlights.Click to send this story to a friend | <urn:uuid:d40b024a-fd30-45b8-b8bc-9afe73f0732f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2009/09/05/world-first-as-british-scientists-harness-drizzle-power/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937762 | 394 | 3.0625 | 3 |
One more time major botnets are using social networking websites to spread spam.
Symantec’s MessageLabs warned lately that DonBot are started a new massive spamming message, the Lab detected from 18 November 4% of global Spam traffic.
The spam message includes an offer to work from home with a 100-200 dollars daily salary and to be considered for this opportunity the victim should send an initial payment and wait for the golden ticket.
The message also includes an image with link to redirect victim to twitter page and gives hackers a way to hijack Twitter accounts and spam other users.
This shows that more http links in instant messaging conversations are making a way to “instant malware.”
If you are receiving a message on Twitter try to not click directly on the short link and to check the original URL. By checking on LongURL.org which can helps in expanding the URL and avoid phishing, malware, and viruses by examining short URLs before visiting them and Find out where links really take you.
You can also use on Mozilla firefox Tamper Data plugin that helps to test web application security and track request and responses from the URL Link.
make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed! | <urn:uuid:440f96cf-7a66-4727-8802-f69b49e63380> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sectechno.com/2009/11/21/donbot-leads-a-way-to-twitter-spam/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907497 | 251 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Walima (Arabic: وليمة walīmah), or the marriage banquet, is the second of the two traditional parts of an Islamic wedding. The walima is performed after the nikah, (Arabic: نكاح) or marriage ceremony. The word walima is derived from awlam, meaning to gather or assemble. It designates a feast in Arabic . Walima is used as a symbol to show domestic felicity in the household post-marriage. While walima is often used to describe a celebration of marriage, it is also held to celebrate the birth of a newborn and the purchase of a new home.
Debate: The Time of Walima
Scholars have different views on what the correct time of walima is. The timing varies by culture and opinion; for example some believe it should take place:
- at the time of the wedding contract (nikah)
- after nikah and prior to consummation (but this is not a certainty)
- at the time of the wedding procession (Ibn Hajar, Fath al-Bari, 9/287)
- after consummation.
Other uses of Walima
Walima in literal translation means "to assemble" and is used to describe an assembly or party celebrating major life events. Walima is essentially interchangeable with American and English terms such as: wedding reception or celebration (when held to celebrate a marriage), birthday party (when held to celebrate the birth of a newborn), or housewarming party (when held to celebrate the purchase of a new home). Similarly, walima is generally interchangeable with other languages/cultures terms that essentially mean to assemble for the purposes of celebrating a marriage, newborn, or new home. While it is an Arabic term, it is not necessarily a term reserved for Muslims per se, as the word simply describes the event that is to be celebrated.
See also
External links
- ^ World faiths, Teach yourself - Islam. By Ruqaiyyah Maqsood. ISBN 0-340-60901-X. Page 179/180. | <urn:uuid:df403545-514c-47cc-8886-e1fc8cbf4ae8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walima | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911205 | 440 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Comment posted Tourism industry says ‘Protect marine wildlife to protect our livelihoods’ by Scots Renewables.
‘One drunk driver’???
Three large fish factories and 27 skippers pled guilty to schemes to breach EU fishing quotas.
They landed 170,000 tonnes above their EU quota of mackerel and herring between 2002 and 2005.
One drunk driver?
The Loch Torridon creel fishery lost its MCS accreditation because it was unable (or unwilling) to control the number of extra boats attracted to the area. This is no reflection on the fishing method. Responsibly practised creel fishing causes less damage to the marine environment than (eg) trawling or dredging.
And perhaps you could consider posting a little less agressively – you seem to think that my criticisms of the fishing industry are directed personally at you. Guilty conscience?
Scots Renewables also commented
- I am sorry, but do not believe for a single moment that underwater power generation will not have an effect on any creatures living there. How many whales, porpoises, seals and dolphins may be killed by equipment
You are obviously someone who makes their mind up on an issue with no evidence whatsoever and refuses to listen to those who actually know something about it. I am sorry, but it is not a question of belief, it is a question of facts.
The scale of commercial deployment of wave and tide devices is glacial and any issues that have not been uncovered in the long pre-commercial testing of these devices will become apparent long before widespread deployment on the scale you seem to be imagining occurs.
Dr. McKenzie has already pointed out that these are slow-moving devices and there is no reason to suspect they present any special hazard to marine life. Meanwhile, any site is subject to meticulous scoping and environmental investigation.
Why not worry about something real, like the increasing acidification of the oceans, about overfishing, about coral bleaching, about the effect of propellor noise on marine mammals?
These are all real, but instead you prefer to manufacture a technological demon and ignore the real problems our seas are facing.
- What is a ‘wavetide’ generator? Really, do you understand anythiong at all about the mechanics of tidal or wave power generation (two very different technologies).
Are you aware that Marine Current Turbines have operated a full scale (1.2MW) tidal generator in Strangford narrows for four years now with no apparent adverse effects on the marine environment? SeaGen has been licensed to operate over a period of 5 years, during which a comprehensive environmental monitoring program to determine the precise impact on the marine environment is running.
Meanwhile at EMEC in Orkney many different types of tidaland wave generator have been running for years. The technology is being thoroughly assessed and the environmental effects monitored.
As for offshore wind – there are thousands of offshore wind turbines operating round the world, and not a hint of any damage to the marine environment.
No marine energy technologies can be deployed without a thorough environmental assessment, usually runnign to years and more comprehensive than any similar assessment ever carried out on previous technologies.
You have created a bogeyman in your mind. There are plenty of genuine threats to the ocean, including overfishing, chemical pollution, plastic litter, acidification, temperature rise, accoustic pollution from shipping – to name just a few.
Marine energy generation devices however have so far been demonstrated to be an almost completely benign technology. They are part of the solution, not part of the problem.
I most emphatically do NOT stereotype all fishermen. As I already said, I have no problem at all with the local creel fishery,and know several people who work in it. I also realise that very recently the industry has taken some large steps towards greater sustainability.
Demonising any particular industry is futile and counterproductive. It is essential that fishermen have an input and a stake in the establishment of MCZs – but for this to happen it has to be acknowledged that sometimes fishing is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Bottom trawling and dredging are still damaging large swathes of seabed in some areas.
- Was what quoted?
A lot of nonsense was spoken about nuclear power, including ‘too cheap to meter’.
Practical research on the effects of a nuclear generation programme – particularly in the days before computer modelling – was practically impossible, so if people did say any such thing then they were speaking rubbish.
Putting a single mechanical device or a small group of such devices in the water and observing the effects on the marine environment is childs play by comparison. I will be surprised if there are any surprises.
- The fishing industry has been forced to adopt more sustainable practices. However, it has fought tooth and nail against their introduction – against the quota system, changes in net size or indeed anything else that might reduce its profits.
Sadly practices such as bottom trawling and scallop dredging are still reducing large areas of seabed to a lifeless desert.
Public pressure from media figures such as Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearley Whittingstall have now resulted in such public disquiet over the current (ludicrous) discard system – so much so that it may now be on the way out – but like other changes in industry practice this will largely have been achieved in spite of the fishing industry rather than because of it.
I do realise that there are exceptions. Indeed, most of the fishing here on Seil is creel fishing, a sustainable and environmentally friendly method. However, with a few exceptions I am afraid that I do not by and large see fishermen as environmental champions. The recent exposure of the massive Peterhead ‘black fish’ scam rather tends to back this negative view.
Recent comments by Scots Renewables
- Russell admits vehicle element of former Dunoon ferry was indeed publicly funded
A threnody is a song, hymn or poem of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person.
Quite appropriate. The promise that was the original ForArgyll is indeed quite dead.
I think I will stick to the Cowal Courier from now on. That’s a proper news site that seems to have your measure.
- Russell admits vehicle element of former Dunoon ferry was indeed publicly funded
Oh do cheer up Newsroom! The hybrid ferries are non-military ships being built on the Clyde. Surely something to cheer about?
Re. your concerns about staff training – I think you will find that staff require retraining whenever a new vessel is brought into service . . . each boat is different.
And please do stop all this ‘we hear rumours’ rubbish. No-one believes you. Come up with facts and their sources like a real journalist or stop smearing doom and gloom. Less fuel is less fuel. And the new ferries are also designed to have lower maintenance costs.
Now, here’s some more potential good news on the ship technology front for Scotland . . . CMAL has been commissioned to carry out a feasibility study for Scottish Enterprise to evaluate the technical and commercial possibilities of using hydrogen fuel cells to power zero emission ferries. If this goes ahead it could put Scotland at the forefront of another new technology, with the consequent design, development and manufacturing of hybrid engines being located here. Great news – though I expect ForArgyll will want to talk it down.
- New Mobile Theme for ForArgyll.com
The mobile version isn’t triggered by my iPad, which is a good thing – but it does come up in an iPhone emulator I tried.
Strangely enough specific mobile versions of websites (as opposed to apps – which are here to stay) may be a relatively short-lived phenomenon. As bandwidth on phones increases dramatically and most displays become HD 1024 pixels wide or more so standard websites become more and more useable. I don’t come across many that don’t display well on the iPad.
A mobile version was far more essential on older 320 pixel devices like Nokias, but these will die out. The non-mobile version of this site (for example) is quite useable on a new smartphone once it is rotated horizontally.
Apps that do specific things on mobile devices are another matter – they are definitly here to stay. And for blog sites like this the mobile version definitley increases useability (but see below).
Some feedback – I couldn’t view the comments on the mobile version, but I was using an emulator rather than an actual smartphone. Can other people view and post comments OK on the new mobile site using an iPhone or Andriod phone?
- Clyde shipyards at risk – news by year end
Just testing the comments function on the mobile version of the site.
(Using an online iPhone emulator)
- Scottish Conservatives underline common ownership of Saltire
It is Scottish Labour that really needs to up its game dramatically if it wants to keep a credible presense in Holyrood in the 2016 election. What Ruthie and the Scottish Conservative Party do is of little relevance.
According to Newsnet Scotland a recent poll shows Westminster voting intentions in Scotland as:
If this doesn’t ring alarm bells for Labour nothing will.
powered by SEO Super Comments | <urn:uuid:681ba174-f035-40f3-88bd-413e40188355> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forargyll.com/sitemap/?cid=1057736 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954041 | 1,931 | 1.921875 | 2 |
This recent MO question, answered now several times over, inquired whether an infinite group can contain every finite group as a subgroup. The answer is yes by a variety of means.
So let us raise the stakes: Is there a countable group containing (a copy of) every countable group as a subgroup?
The countable random graph, after all, which inspired the original question, contains copies of all countable graphs, not merely all finite graphs. Is this possible with groups? What seems to be needed is a highly saturated countable group.
An easier requirement would insist that the group contains merely all finitely generated groups as subgroups, or merely all countable abelian groups. (Reducing to a countable family, however, trivializes the question via the direct sum.)
A harder requirement would find the subgroups in particularly nice ways: as direct summands or as normal subgroups.
Another strengthened requirement would insist on an amalgamation property: whenever $H_0\lt H_1$ are finitely generated, then every copy of $H_0$ in the universal group $G$ extends to a copy of $H_1$ in $G$. This property implies that $G$ is universal for all countable groups, by adding one generator at a time. This would generalize the saturation property of the random graph.
If there is a universal countable group, can one find a finitely generated such group, or a finitely presented such group? (This would lose amalgamation, of course.)
Moving higher, for which cardinals $\kappa$ is there a universal group of size $\kappa$? That is, when is there a group of size $\kappa$ containing as a subgroup a copy of every group of size $\kappa$?
Moving lower, what is the minimum size of a finite group containing all groups of finite size at most $n$ as subgroups? Clearly, $n!$ suffices. Can one do better? | <urn:uuid:37bcb09d-a4e9-4bbe-bec2-e0c089434201> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mathoverflow.net/questions/28999/is-there-a-universal-countable-group-a-countable-group-containing-every-countab | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937384 | 416 | 1.625 | 2 |
Saudi Arabia - Future trends
Barring the discovery of a new energy supply that renders oil obsolete, Saudi Arabia will be able to maintain its economy through the production and distribution of oil for nearly another century. The discovery of new reserves, which appears likely, will extend the viability of the oil-based economy even further. However, as oil supplies rise and efficiency increases, prices will likely go down. To compensate for lower oil revenues, the Saudi government will continue to take steps toward economic diversification, expanding its agricultural, non-oil mining, and tourism sectors. The government will also continue to push for private sector growth as it loosens its grip on the economy.
In the meantime, Saudi Arabia will continue to implement oil policies that are favorable to the West for 2 main reasons. One, Saudi Arabia is dependent on the West, primarily the United States, for trade and military protection. And two, it is in Saudi Arabia's own interests to maintain stable oil prices to keep the commodity competitive with other forms of energy.
Saudi Arabia will also further its efforts to attract foreign investment, especially in heavy industrial sectors where the government is encouraging the creation of public-private partnerships. Although the government has expressed interest in decentralizing the economy, full privatization in most industries has yet to occur.
Cooperation between the United States and Saudi Arabia should continue, at least into the near future. However, relations could become strained if the situation in Israel continues to deteriorate. Historically, U.S. support for Israel has generated hostility in the Arab world. If the violence in Israel escalates and the Palestinians are perceived as being grossly victimized, the Saudi population, for reasons of Muslim solidarity, may begin pushing for intervention. Any move in that direction would complicate U.S.-Saudi relations.
Young Saudis will continue to enter the labor market in growing numbers. As such, the so-called Saudiization of the workforce will remain a government priority for the foreseeable future. Hiring fees will be raised for foreign workers, and those workers with expired visas may be forbidden to renew them. The Saudi infrastructure will also expand in the coming decades as new oil fields are discovered and the non-oil mining sector grows. Saudi Arabia's push to gain entry into the World Trade Organization will accelerate the pace of economic reforms currently underway. | <urn:uuid:674d259b-e1a4-4071-ac9b-a7119ca8b5c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Asia-and-the-Pacific/Saudi-Arabia-FUTURE-TRENDS.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956496 | 465 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Starting Your Career In - Country Guides for International Students
This series offers practical advice to international students who have chosen to return to their home country to look for work. Each country guide includes key facts about current trends and jobs, advice about seeking employment, hints and tips for making a successful application, and helpful information sources.
There are profiles for Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates and the USA.
The series was produced with funding from the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the devolved administrations under the Prime Minister’s Initiative for International Education (PMI2).
Author(s): Expertise in Labour Mobility
Other Publishers: i-graduate, NASES, Education UK
Production date: 2010
How to obtain: The country guides are available to download below. They are also available from the NASES website (AGCAS members may link to this page from their own websites to provide students with direct access to the guides).
Audiences: Careers practitioners , Students and graduates - all
Starting Your Career In - Country Guides for International Students downloads
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employer job employability AGCAS fair careers fair University London Sector careers adviser Scotland graduate labour market international students work experience internships graduate employment international enterprise GLAM careers education | <urn:uuid:e1f22659-7c43-4a68-9035-85e23588f011> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.agcas.org.uk/agcas_resources/132-Starting-Your-Career-In-Country-Guides-for-International-Students | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.902705 | 329 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Scientific studies have suggested that a wandering mind indicates unhappiness, whereas a mind that is present in the moment indicates well-being. Now, a preliminary UCSF study suggests a possible link between mind wandering and aging, by looking at a biological measure of longevity.
In the study, telomere length, an emerging biomarker for cellular and general bodily aging, was assessed in association with the tendency to be present in the moment versus the tendency to mind wander, in research on 239 healthy, midlife women ranging in age from 50 to 65 years.
Being present in the moment was defined as an inclination to be focused on current tasks, while mind wandering was defined as the inclination to have thoughts about things other than the present or being elsewhere.
According to the findings, published online on Nov. 15 in the new Association for Psychological Science journal Clinical Psychological Science, those who reported more mind wandering had shorter telomeres, while those who reported more presence in the moment, or having a greater focus and engagement with their current activities, had longer telomeres, even after adjusting for current stress.
Telomeres are the DNA-caps that protect the ends of chromosomes, preventing them from deteriorating or fusing with neighboring chromosomes. Telomeres typically shorten with age and in response to psychological and physiological stressors. In research pioneered at UCSF, scientists have discovered that telomere shortness predicts early disease and mortality.
As the study assessed mind wandering and telomeres at the same time, the researchers don't yet know whether mind wandering leads to shorter telomeres, whether the reverse occurs, or some common third factor is contributing to both.
Mindful meditation interventions, which promote attention on the present with a compassionate attitude of acceptance, lead to increases in some aspects of health. Previous studies have found that they are associated with increased activity of an enzyme known as telomerase, which is responsible for protecting and in some cases, replenishing telomeres.
Along with the new UCSF study, these findings support the possibility that a focus on the present may be part of what promotes health measurable at the cellular level, the researchers said.
"Our attentional state—where our thoughts rest at any moment - turns out to be a fascinating window into our well-being. It may be affected by our emotional state as well as shape our emotional state," said Elissa Epel, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and lead author on the study. "In our healthy sample, people who report being more engaged in their current activities tend to have longer telomeres. We don't yet know how generalizable or important this relationship is."
Moving forward, Epel, along with Eli Puterman, PhD, a psychologist in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, and colleagues are developing a series of classes to promote more mindful presence, to see if this intervention protects telomere maintenance or even lengthens telomeres.
In the current study, participants self-reported a tendency to mind wander, and were measured for aspects of psychological distress and well-being. The sample was highly educated and had a narrow range of both chronological age and psychological stress (most were low stress), all of which might have contributed to the ability to detect this relationship, Epel said. | <urn:uuid:e88ad76c-c557-48d4-9996-8cd34bdf3b7d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.news-medical.net/news/20121117/Possible-link-between-mind-wandering-and-aging.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95856 | 664 | 3.046875 | 3 |
Madrid (AFP) – Ratings agency Standard and Poor’s said Wednesday that if Spain requested a full bailout from European Union rescue funds and the IMF, this would not affect the country’s debt rating.
“The sovereign ratings on the Kingdom of Spain would likely not be directly affected should Spain’s government request a bailout through official financing by the European Financial Stability Facility, the European Stability Mechanism, or the International Monetary Fund,” the agency said in a statement.
Standard & Poor’s cut Spain’s sovereign debt rating in April by two notches to BBB+ and added a negative outlook, warning the government’s budget situation would worsen as the Spanish economy contracts.
Spain’s eurozone partners agreed in June to lend up to 100 billion euros ($124 billion) to salvage the nation’s banks, buckling under record bad loans built up since a 2008 property crash.
But investors increasingly believe that the country will be forced to request a full bailout for its economy as Spain struggles to borrow money on the international markets at affordable rates. | <urn:uuid:18eff371-2ddf-4ee5-87c4-ff88455f1ed4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2012/08/23/bailout-request-by-spain-would-not-affect-debt-rating-sp/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92034 | 225 | 1.71875 | 2 |
SHARE -- Educating the next generation
Educating computer science students in mainframe programming is neither prevalent nor easy. Jim Michael of California State University Fresno ITS Dep't. was the first SHARE board liason to zNextGen which looks for the younger folks coming into the industry.
JM: The gap between the demographic supporting mainframe systems and the folks entering the workforce is wide. Certainly there are people of all age groups working on the platform, but for the organizations using mainframes to have confidence, we have to address the supply.
JW: How does one address the supply?
JM: We're working with IBM Academic Initiative. We're giving student rates for the conferences. And we're working with zNextGen, especially with people who are new to the business and are trying to change their careers to mainframing. We provide mentors to zNextGen members to show them how to get productive quickly. Then tend to be excited about their choice, so we try to make sure that their experience is indeed exciting.
JW: How do you make the gray aura of mainframing "exciting"?
JM: I'm often pleasantly surprised to have these students and new hires come to us already fired up. I ask, "How did you get fired up?" Some say, "My friends want jobs as game designers but mainframes are used in the financial industry, part of the fundamental business of the world. This is important, it is real, and further, there aren't as many people doing it, so I'll be doing something real and be in higher demand."
To try to help foster that, we have high school and college students come out to SHARE, we go to universities and show them things like HOPLON, a gaming environment hosted on Z Architecture in Brazil.
JW: What about actual programming techniques?
JM: Because there's so much Linux on Z, if the students have study PHP, MySQL, Apache, these skills are transferrable to Linux on Z. Java is certainly a major part of the mainframe environment. There's a lot of things they do that are transferrable even if they haven't been studying Z Architecture. That gives them an entree into working on the platform.
From there they might branch out into database administration, or assembly language programming, or systems administration, middleware support like supporting WebSphere or Tivoli. There are a lot of opportunities on the platform once a new hire gets involved and begins to become familiar with the platform.
The other thing we're doing at SHARE is help companies identify and support the senior professional staff as mentors for these new hires. This initiative is in its early days but we hope to bring representatives of these companies together between now and Seattle (March 2010) to share best practices about mentoring.
JW: And they see their own corporate self-interest invested in such an initiative?
JM: Yes, they do. Part of it has been SHARE reaching out to them, part of it has been them coming to us to find out what other companies have done in this regard. | <urn:uuid:6314a9c2-ec99-434d-8683-84fa9cb34444> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/share-educating-the-next-generation/228701474 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967915 | 636 | 2.25 | 2 |
Welcome back to FAQs, an on-going series that answers the questions I hear most, in 400 words or less.
This questions comes up whenever a seller does not like, or does not want to do what I recommend to help get their house sold.
It is probably the quickest and easiest to answer.
Buyers DON’T use their imagination because largely they CAN’T use their imagination.
Visualizing spacial potential, carrying colors in your head, being able to project change onto a static space is like being able to ice skate, do math, or having freckles: it is a gift, something you are born with.
Like any of the above, it doesn’t make you an inherently better person, it just is-or isn’t.
Studies vary, but it’s estimated that less than 5% of the population can imagine spacial change. About HALF the number of left-handers (10% of the population), those in this world born with blue eyes, or men who are colorblind (both 7 to 8%). Or about the same number of people born with extra ribs (I know, WEIRD-right??)
Real Estate is all about numbers, and buyers have a lot to think about. They also have a lot of choices.
Bottom line if you are putting off making your house look its best, believing that buyers should be able to use their imagination, statistically you are putting 95% of the population off in the first pass through. Before you subtract those that are cranky or stressed by the home-buying process, who are not serious buyers, or financially unable to buy your house.
SO-SERIOUSLY-tell me again, why don’t you want to paint?
Photo courtesy of Flicka | <urn:uuid:d5d45d51-7b04-4195-9e4b-393d76845bdb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://therefreshedhome.com/2012/07/04/staging-faqs-why-cant-buyers-just-use-their-immagination/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9577 | 375 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Everyone wants great hair. The health of your hair is a direct reflection of your nutrition and lifestyle habits. My friend Amanda recently wrote a great blog about pregnancy and hair care. She was surprised by how much her hair changed when she got pregnant. While we usually shed an average 50-100 hairs per day, pregnancy is considered a resting stage and hair loss decreases, causing hair to thicken. The thickening is attributed to the increase in estrogen which promotes beautiful skin and hair versus high levels of testosterone that promote baldness. Hair is actually thickest in your 20 and 30’s when estrogen levels are peaking. During this time 70-90% of hair is in a growth phase compared to 30 % in your 40’s.
Knowing that your DNA and basic genetics can predetermine graying and balding, here are some tips to help you improve the health of your hair:
There are certain medications that can impact the health of your hair. Birth controls containing progesterone can shut down hair follicle production, as can thyroid problems, antidepressants and some acne medications. If you are required to take a medication that impacts your hair growth it would be important to follow some of the stress reduction guidelines and dietary recommendations to help counteract the effect.
The hair follicles are surrounded by stress hormone receptors and are vastly impacted by cortisol and adrenaline. Stress impacts the growth of your hair and can lead to thinning or even balding. Luckily we know that there are ways to reduce stress by making the relaxation response part of your daily routine. Learning to unwind and take some down time not only improves the health of your hair but also your nervous system, metabolism and mood. In Chinese Medicine the hair and bones are related to the kidney energies, our deepest reserves that we trade on a daily basis to fuel our activities. Working too hard, not sleeping enough and failing to eat a healthy diet all contribute to a acceleration of stress and the aging process.
It is important to eat a healthy diet for obvious reasons including hair health. In fact, depriving yourself of nutrients and vitamins will wreak havoc causing dullness, thinning and split ends. To strengthen hair include lots of antioxidant in fresh fruits and vegetables along with the following nutrients:
Protein is the building block of your hair
Zinc supports natural oils and contributes to shiny hair. Foods with high zinc content include liver, beef, lamb, venison, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, green peas, shrimp and mushrooms.
B vitamins support cell growth for regenerating hair follicles. Include fermented products, seaweeds and algae in your diet.
Iron fuels the enzymes that support hair growth (consume with Vitamin C (citrus) to improve absorption). Iron rich foods: liver, lean red meats,seafood, black beans, lentils, dark leafy greens, chicken, turkey, molasses, nuts and egg yolks.
Vitamin E helps with circulation which gives fresh blood supply to hair follicles. Vitamin E foods include: sunflower seeds, safflower oil, peanuts, spinach, broccoli, kiwi and mango.
Vitamin A keeps the hair root lubricated to support healthy hair. Vitamin A rich foods include: liver, sweet potatos, carrots, mangoes, spinach, cantaloupe, dried apricots, milk, egg yolks and mozzarella cheese.
Kathryn Flynn is the author of Cooking for Fertility: Foods to Nourish Your Fertile Soul. Kathryn supports men and women worldwide in achieving a healthy pregnancy through nutrition and lifestyle changes in her individual fertility nutrition consultations. For additional information, please feel free to email Kathryn. | <urn:uuid:0b5527ed-c760-4b36-bcef-25d275ae13bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fertilefoods.com/healthy-pregnancy/2010/04/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938386 | 750 | 2.21875 | 2 |
Individuals who abuse or are addicted to opiates can be treated, and the first and perhaps most vital step is an effective opiate detox. Â Although many opiate users attempt to detoxify on their own (or go “cold turkey”), this can be dangerous or even fatal. Â Â Â Serious health issues could arise that require medical attention such as high blood pressure, seizure, hallucinations and convulsions. Â To safely and successfully achieve an effective opiate detox, most treatment centers will combine the detox process with counseling and pharmacological therapies.
As the primary substance of abuse, opiates accounted for almost one fifth (19 percent) of all substance abuse treatment, according to the US Substances Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) in their most recent study.
Opiate detox can be challenging, but finding the right detox center can make all the difference.  Many effective opiate detox centers provide clients with a safe, secure facility where the physical discomfort resulting from withdrawal can be supervised and managed.  Pharmacological therapies, aka  “substitution therapies,” involve an addict’s effective opiate detox by way of other opiate-based drugs, such as Suboxone and Naltrexone.
Effective opiate detox usually lasts no more than a week, depending on the drug as well as the length and frequency of use. Â It is important to note, however, that detox is really only the first step in the recovery process. Â The greatest likelihood of success is achieved when an effective opiate detox precedes a more long-term treatment program. | <urn:uuid:893ded08-4e14-4a36-85f8-f716e6dc0575> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.southcoastrecovery.com/categories/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942769 | 345 | 2.046875 | 2 |
The fight between fiscal conservatives and public employee unions in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, and elsewhere has again thrust the issue of government employee compensation into the limelight. Perhaps the most contentious debate centers around public pensions, as growing unfunded pension obligations are placing increased strain on already stressed state budgets.
Depending on the source and the discount rate used to determine future obligations, state pension systems across the U.S. face between $1 trillion and several trillions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities (see, for example, these estimates: $1 trillion, $2 trillion, $3.5 trillion, $3.2 trillion to $5.2 trillion). For California alone, several academic studies have estimated the state’s unfunded pension liabilities in the neighborhood of $400 billion to $500 billion (see here, here, and here). That’s roughly $36,000 for every household in the state. And that does not even include another $50 billion-plus for retiree medical care.
Unfortunately, the nature of defined-benefit pension systems renders the actual value of these obligations little more than educated guesswork since such systems rely on a number of actuarial assumptions, such as how much the pension fund’s investments will earn on average each year, what average salary increases and inflation will be, when employees will retire and how long they will live, what portion of retirements will be subject to disability pensions, etc. These assumptions must be projected out decades into the future. If you think meteorologists are bad at predicting the weather next week, just try asking an economist or an actuary what economic conditions will be 20 years from now.
In an attempt to shed a little more light on the health of state pension systems, U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has introduced the Public Employee Pension Transparency Act, H.R. 567 [also sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) as S. 347]. The bill would attempt to increase transparency by establishing reporting requirements for state and local pension systems. In addition to existing pension system calculations, pension systems would be required to calculate liabilities based on uniform guidelines, including more conservative—and realistic—discount rates. The information would be reported to the Secretary of the Treasury and posted on the Internet for the public to see. Pension systems that fail to abide by the reporting requirements would lose their federal tax-exempt bonding authority. In addition, the legislation would specifically prohibit any bailouts of state or local pension obligations by the federal government or the Federal Reserve.
The prohibition on the federal government bailing out states for their pension liabilities is crucial, as such bailouts would not only be unconstitutional, but would set a terrible precedent that would open the flood gates for unlimited bailouts. This would not only be extremely costly, but would remove any remaining incentive for, or semblance of, fiscal responsibility on the part of the states.
The prohibition on the Federal Reserve essentially bailing out the states in a similar fashion is likewise critical, since the Fed might otherwise bestow such a power on itself as it continues to embark upon creative and extraconstitutional activities that are destined to further erode the value of the dollar and spawn significant inflation.
While the efforts to increase the transparency of state pension systems and their unfunded liabilities is certainly to be commended, the requirements to report on the compensation of current and former state employees to the federal government might violate the Tenth Amendment. The interstate commerce justification for the legislation, for example, seems rather weak. Just because the Interstate Commerce Clause has repeatedly been misinterpreted to grant the federal government authority that it should not have does not justify another such abuse. Individual states should be responsible for improving the transparency of their pension systems and unfunded liabilities, if necessary.
Nunes recognizes this as well, however, and though he favors more significant reforms to public pension systems, such as a switch from defined-benefit systems to the 401(k)-style defined-contribution plans common in the private sector, he describes himself as a “states’ rights guy” and acknowledges that it is not the federal government’s role to enforce such changes upon state and local governments. The fact that state pension systems and bonds do receive certain federal tax benefits makes it a more curious issue, however. While it would be nice if there were no federal strings attached to state and local government actions, the federal tax-exempt bonding authority afforded to state and local governments is a significant benefit, and a strong case could be made that the federal government has an interest in seeing that it is not abused through overly optimistic assumptions that understate actual obligations.
Given the magnitude of the public pension problem nationwide, the mere facts that public pensions are finally getting such attention, and that reform attempts are being made at all levels of government, are encouraging. While real, structural changes must be made at the state and local level—and the problems will not be solved until governments own up to their pension obligations and switch to defined-benefit systems with government employee pay and benefits set similar to those received in the private sector—the prohibition against federal bailouts, which would only invite even more fiscally irresponsible behavior, and efforts to increase public pension transparency are definitely a step in the right direction.
Adam Summers is a policy analyst at Reason Foundation. | <urn:uuid:55f3feb2-390d-446d-93d6-c61eeb47fc69> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://reason.org/news/printer/evaluating-the-nunes-pension-reform | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956784 | 1,091 | 1.726563 | 2 |
China Metallurgical Group agreed to invest billions of dollars in the project and related infrastructure development -- including the construction of a coal-fired electrical power plant and what would be Afghanistan's first freight railway.
By the estimates of some geologists, deposits at Afghanistan's Aynak copper field in Logar Province make it the world's largest undeveloped copper field.
The deal gives China Metallurgical Group the right to extract high-quality copper from the area south of Kabul.
But the Aynak copper field has neither the electrical power nor access to the transportation links needed to fully develop the area as a copper mine.
Afghan Mining Minister Ibrahim Adel says the Chinese company has agreed to invest nearly $3 billion in order to set up mining operations and overcome the lack of basic infrastructure.
"With this mining project at the Aynak copper field, we will have about $2.8 billion of direct investment," Adel said. "About $500 million will be invested in building an electrical power plant. And a large amount of money also will be invested in building a railroad. This is one of the biggest foreign investment projects in the history of Afghanistan."
Khozman Ulumi, a spokesman for the Afghan Mining Ministry, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan that preliminary plans call for a railroad link from Tajikistan to the copper field and on to Pakistan.
Ulumi said the coal-fired power plant to be built near the copper field would produce more than enough electricity to run the mine. He says excess electricity would be routed to Kabul, where most residents now have electricity for only a few hours per day -- if at all.
"They are working to generate up to 400 megawatts of electricty from coal. When this project is completed, God willing, some 5,000 people will be working at the power plant adjacent to the copper mine," Ulumi said.
Another 5,000 people -- mostly Afghan workers led by a few Chinese experts -- are expected to be employed in the mining operations and as construction workers on the railroad.
Ulumi said the Chinese firm expects to start full mining operations in about six years, after work on the power plant and railroad are completed.
The Chinese offer beat out bids by four other firms that were considered finalists. They include Strikeforce -- part of Russia's Basic Element Group, the London-based Kazakhmys Consortium, Hunter Dickinson of Canada, and the U.S. copper-mining firm Phelps Dodge.
China Metallurgical Group's bid surprised many analysts in Kabul who expected the tender to be awarded for less than $2 billion.
But Adel said the latest estimates suggest there are at least 13 million tons of copper waiting to be mined from the Aynak field. He said that with further exploration, those estimates could rise to 20 million tons before full-scale mining operations begin. And at current prices, he said the value of copper at Aynak would be about $30 billion.
But industry experts say the venture could be risky for the Chinese company. They say the same obstacles that prevented Anyak from being developed during the last 30 years also could prevent China Metallurgical Group from meeting its production goals there.
Years of war in Afghanistan have ensured that the deposit has remained largely untouched since Soviet geologists surveyed the field in 1979.
And although the mine is in a relatively secure part of Afghanistan, the railroad and electric power lines would be difficult to defend around the clock from guerrilla attacks by Taliban militants.
That makes the Aynak deal a litmus test for other possible foreign investors -- not just of about how Afghanistan deals with international investors, but also about the security that the Afghan central government can provide for high-profile foreign investment projects. | <urn:uuid:f81fdc8c-9017-48fe-b047-0c61fcc24e23> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1079190.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95942 | 761 | 1.84375 | 2 |
To the Editor:
The decision to add a petting zoo to this year’s St. Henry Carnival was a bad one! As I walked past the event on 28th Street, the first thing that caught my attention were the two miniature ponies huddled in a corner against a fence, attempting to find some relief from the sweltering sun. Then I noticed a llama confined in an enclosed steel trailer parked on Avenue C, with outside temperatures approaching 100 degrees!
These animals are stressed from transport, confinement, alien environments, irregular feeding and watering, mishandling, and crowds of strangers. Petting zoos are also hotbeds of serious pathogens, including E. coli, ringworm, and salmonella bacteria. There have been countless incidents of injuries, disease, and even death to both the animals and the people who go to see them.
Surely St. Henry Parish can raise funds without contributing to animal cruelty and putting our children’s health and welfare at risk. | <urn:uuid:08d34ced-8443-47d0-af90-f52e024f8195> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hudsonreporter.com/pages/full_story/push?article--No+more+petting+zoos-%20&id=19208018&instance=secondary_stories_left_column | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945652 | 203 | 1.546875 | 2 |
The findings presented here show quite clearly that states with high volumes of wind and solar PV have seen well below average cost increases. When this fact is considered in conjunction with the various health, environmental, energy security, and job creation benefits of renewable forms of generation, it helps to form a compelling argument in their favor. The next time someone tells you that they would support renewable energy if the costs weren’t so high, share these findings with them and see if their perspective changes.
The top five states were chosen because they accounted for over 50% of installed wind and solar PV volume by the end of 2010. On average, rates in these states increased by 1.35¢/kWh over five years (or 3.2% annually). The bottom five states were the only states to have each installed less than 1 MW of cumulative solar PV and wind capacity through 2010. On average, rates in these states increased by 1.39¢/kWh over five years (or 4.0% annually). On average across the U.S., by comparison, electricity prices increased by 1.8¢/kWh over five years (or 4.1% annually).
Brennan Lou, in a RenewableEnergyWorld.Com re-post
The health, environmental, and direct job creation benefits of renewable energy vs. traditional forms of power generation are widely accepted. All other things being equal, it would be a foregone conclusion that renewable energy should be chosen over other types of generation. Of course, all other things are not equal. To understand the total impact of integrating renewables into an electricity supply mix, the value of any benefits must be carefully weighed against the costs that may arise from choosing renewables. | <urn:uuid:b6c57213-4199-419e-82fb-acb3e6c0b336> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thinkprogress.org/climate/issue/?m=20111218&mobile=nc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961002 | 347 | 2.625 | 3 |
Japan and the United States on Thursday agreed that Guam will host around three weeks of US military drills involving Okinawa-based F-15 jets in an effort to ease the burden on the Japanese island.
As part of measures to reduce the heavy US military presence on Okinawa, which hosts Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, some of the fighter drills will be transferred to the US Pacific island territory, the Japanese defence ministry said.
Defence Minister Toshimi Kitazawa on Thursday met Okinawa Governor Hirokazu Nakaima, who was re-elected as the island chain’s governor last year with a promise to see the base moved off the island.
Under the accord, around 20 out of 50 F-15s will conduct training in Guam for about three weeks during each drill.
Japan and the United States squabbled for much of the past year over the relocation of the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, amid hardening opposition among residents of the southern island to the large US military presence.
The base lies in an urban area of Okinawa, where residents have long complained about aircraft noise and the risk of accidents, and is set to be relocated to a coastal, less developed location on the island.
Kitazawa also told the governor that Japan will enter talks with the United States about starting the process to hand back the Gimbaru training area in the island by the end of March 2012.
The two governments already agreed in 1996 about the return of the 60-hectare site where the US military conducts helicopter take-off and landing exercises, as well as amphibious training exercises.
Nakaima told reporters after their talks that Futenma is a “separate issue” from the transfer of exercises to Guam and the return of Gimbaru training area.
The Futenma issue has angered islanders as the ruling center-left Democratic Party of Japan pledged to move the base outside Okinawa when it came to power in 2009 but later backed down as it failed to find a suitable alternative site.
As the DPJ’s first premier, Yukio Hatoyama pledged to scrap a 2006 bilateral pact to relocate the base to coastal Henoko, still on Okinawa, and instead promised to move it off the island, and even outside the country altogether.
But Hatoyama flip-flopped as Washington ramped up pressure for the base to stay put, eventually backtracking on his pledge and stepping down last year having managed to offend both Okinawans and the United States.
Japan and the United States reaffirmed they would move the base to Henoko as originally agreed, despite local opposition and concerns the offshore runways would spoil a fragile marine ecosystem. | <urn:uuid:8c76d76e-e787-4f40-862a-2f6933ba9bfb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.intellasia.net/japan-us-agree-to-move-fighter-drills-to-guam-146600 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954472 | 551 | 1.820313 | 2 |
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The act of retracting or the state of being retracted.
- n. The act of recanting or disavowing a previously held statement or belief.
- n. A formal statement of disavowal.
- n. Something recanted or disavowed.
- n. The power of drawing back or of being drawn back.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The act of retracting, or the state of being retracted or drawn back: as, the retraction of a cat's claws.
- n. A falling back; retreat.
- n. The act of undoing or unsaying something previously done or said; the act of rescinding or recanting, as previous measures or opinions.
- n. Synonyms See renounce.
- n. An act or instance of retracting.
- n. A statement printed or broadcast in a public forum which effects the withdrawal of an earlier assertion, and which concedes that the earlier assertion was in error.
- n. mathematics A continuous function from a topological space onto a subspace which is the identity on that subspace.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. The act of retracting, or drawing back; the state of being retracted.
- n. The act of withdrawing something advanced, stated, claimed, or done; declaration of change of opinion; recantation.
- n. The act of retracting or shortening.
- n. The state or condition of a part when drawn back, or towards the center of the body.
- n. the act of pulling or holding or drawing a part back
- n. a disavowal or taking back of a previous assertion
“FLATOW: They will print a word retraction on it, right?”
“FLATOW: A lot of times, you don't see the word retraction, Ivan, do you on some of these retracted papers?”
“Unfortunately, no will will demand a retraction from the DNC lies.”
“I have no comment on whether that retraction is adequate or sincere.”
“A retraction is in order from the Plainfield City Clerk's office concerning Candidate Rucker's address.”
“Romero, who agrees with the scientific conclusion that fire triggered the collapses, demanded a retraction from the Journal.”
“You will hear no such retraction from the right wing pundits, who will probably keep spinning the original version for anopther week.”
“In a hurried retraction from the source of the story we hear that the Weinsteins are merely dreaming of the project, don't own the rights and casting hasn't even been thought ...”
“In a hurried retraction from the source of the story we hear that the Weinsteins are merely dreaming of the project, don't own the rights and casting hasn't even been thought about.”
“Even worse, most people don't believe the Newsweek retraction is genuine.”
These user-created lists contain the word ‘retraction’.
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
Nouns meaning a drawing or pulling
Looking for tweets for retraction. | <urn:uuid:065c4703-9349-4036-b55d-df8174d319e8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wordnik.com/words/retraction | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.909198 | 702 | 3.484375 | 3 |
Article of the Month
The Ten Best Ways to Lead through coaching
By Craig Nathanson-The Best Manager™
1. Ask lots of questions. It worked for Socrates and it can work for you.
2. Have more empathy. Putting yourself in the shoes of a subordinate will change your perspective.
3. Walk around a lot and be more visible. This produces more brief coaching moments which are unplanned and more informal.
4. Show others you care about them. Show interest in people and their entire lives and in return they will become more vested in your goals.
5. Encourage creativity, innovation, new perspectives. Discard the outdated and ineffective approach to motivation through the promise of rewards or the threat of punishment.
6. Ask people what they want out of their work and be prepared to help them to achieve their goals. Long term productivity only occurs when people find joy in their work.
7. Be fair. Treat people with respect and be nice!
8. Learn to be a great facilitator of ideas and actions. People appreciate good leadership when they have opportunities to thrive at work.
9. Always look for what is working well, then aim to make it better. Focusing on what is broken will just uncover more problems and negativity.
10. Always seek to match the right teams together. Like a great basketball coach, seek to match each person’s abilities and interests together in ways which each person and the team benefits.
Coaching isn’t just an alternative to leading. It is the way to lead to get the most out of people. Coaching is good for business and it leads to organizational success!I’ll be cheering you on as you go!
Craig Nathanson is the founder of The Best Manager™, workshops and products aimed at bringing out the best in those who manage and lead others.
Craig is a 25 year management veteran, Executive coach, college professor, author and workshop leader. Craig Nathanson is also The Vocational Coach helping people and organizations thrive in their work and life. | <urn:uuid:a7e44d55-093e-472c-b3b3-54970e4c03ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thebestmanager.com/articles/best-manager-archives/The-Ten-Best-Ways-to-Lead-through-coaching.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958268 | 422 | 1.601563 | 2 |
But not to stray to far from the topic at hand, the diagnostic criteria listed in the DSM-IV clearly support my claim in relation to the right to die issue. Depression is a poorly defined "condition" to begin with, and with widespread confusion between correlation and causation leads many people to assume depression has a physical cause because it has physical symptoms. My thesis for the purpose of this thread is that depression is diagnosed based on the ability of the individual to function in society - so to quote...
DSM-IV wrote:C. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
There is it an entirely subjective, socially justified, mandatory criteria for diagnosing depression. Don't get to bogged down on the "clinically significant" jargon at the beginning, it's already being criticized for being too inclusive and redundant. Depression is poorly understood because it's poorly defined, and we have a trivial understanding of how non-biological influences shape brain functioning. This a very common issue in young sciences which haven't yet drawn the distinctions required to properly name and study various phenomenon within the discipline. You can clearly see this pattern playing out with all the new "spectrum" disorders, and the continuous refinement and splitting of over generalized concepts.
Felstaff wrote: If depression (the mental condition) is a factor in somebody wishing to take their own life, then I believe there is a responsibility from a person of authority (i.e. doctor) to help prevent that person from doing so.
Unfortunately as pointed out previously in this thread, suicidal thoughts are part of the diagnosis for depression. It's the same assumption - it's irrational to want to commit suicide, so people who want to commit suicide are crazy by definition. The idea that depression causes suicidal thoughts doesn't even make sense in this context. It's social perception shaping psychiatry, most people don't understand it so they assume because it doesn't happen to them that it's indicative of a disorder. Until very recently this is the same justification used to defined homosexuality as a "disorder" - broadly assumed to be irrational, a minority are diagnosed, and doctors had a responsibility to treat it. Now that we've matured socially and accept homosexuality as rational it's no longer a disorder.
smw543 wrote:Schizophrenics, who you acknowledge suffer from a physiological condition Since there judgment is being influenced by a physiological condition, wouldn't you agree that we should take some preventative action?
This is a hard question to answer, as it's a highly subjective decision. Some schizophrenics are going to do just fine with support, others live in unbearable conditions with little or no chances for sustained recovery left to suffer until they die. For the former, certainly they can consider treatment, for the latter I don't think it's irrational to commit suicide. Certainly if I was in that position I'd want to die, just as I'd want to die if I suffered sever neurological trama, or had another condition that caused significant pain or suffering. I'd like to believe that as a society we value all life, and that there are enough people who are willing to work diligently to treat and rehabilitate those who can be help, however this is demonstrably false and until that changes I consider humane suicide as the most compassionate and dignified option for many people. | <urn:uuid:3ab5e8f8-dc46-4052-9c8f-042a73c35bec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?p=2128587 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97216 | 682 | 1.929688 | 2 |
Sat September 8, 2012
Tulsa Black Senator Criticizes Oklahoma Democratic Party
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A state senator says the Oklahoma Democratic Party has used blacks as workhorses for the party, but officials haven't reciprocated in promoting blacks for leadership positions.
Sen. Judy Eason McIntyre spoke during a breakfast meeting with Oklahoma Democrats at the delegation's hotel on the final day of the national convention in North Carolina.
The Oklahoman reports that Eason-McIntyre was upset that black Oklahomans weren't asked to help with the roll call, a convention ritual in which party leaders boast about their state. Humorist Will Rogers and musician Woody Guthrie were mentioned during the speech, but no black figures were named.
Party Chairman Wallace Collins stood up after Eason-McIntyre finished speaking and apologized to her.
Vice Chairman Dana Orwig says no insult was intended in writing the roll call speech. | <urn:uuid:549ffe70-5310-45ac-8cb5-3ffe87cec73b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kwgs.org/post/tulsa-black-senator-criticizes-oklahoma-democratic-party | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968482 | 198 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Welsh people could lay claim to be the most ancient Britons, according to scientists who have drawn up a genetic map of the British Isles.
Research suggests the Welsh are genetically distinct from the rest of mainland Britain.
Professor Peter Donnelly, of Oxford University, said the Welsh carry DNA which could be traced back to the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago.
The project surveyed 2,000 people in rural areas across Britain.
Participants, as well as their parents and grandparents, had to be born in those areas to be included in the study.
Prof Donnelly, a professor of statistical science at Oxford University and director of the Wellcome Trust centre for human genetics, said DNA samples were analysed at about 500,000 different points.
After comparing statistics, a map was compiled which showed Wales and Cornwall stood out.
Prof Donnelly said: “People from Wales are genetically relatively distinct, they look different genetically from much of the rest of mainland Britain, and actually people in north Wales look relatively distinct from people in south Wales.”
While there were traces of migrant groups across the UK, there were fewer in Wales and Cornwall.
He said people from south and north Wales genetically have “fairly large similarities with the ancestry of people from Ireland on the one hand and France on the other, which we think is most likely to be a combination of remnants of very ancient populations who moved across into Britain after the last Ice Age.
“And potentially also, people travelling up the Atlantic coast of France and Spain and settling in Wales many thousands of years ago”.
He said it was possible that people came over from Ireland to north Wales because it was the closest point, and the same for people coming to south Wales from the continent, as it was nearer.
However he added: “We don’t really have the historical evidence about what those genetic inputs were.”
The geography of Wales made it more likely that ancient DNA would be retained.
Because of its westerly position and mountainous nature, Anglo-Saxons who moved into central and eastern England after the Romans left did not come that far west, and neither did the Vikings who arrived in around 900AD.
The professor said modern people from central and southern England had many genetic similarities to modern people in Denmark and Germany.
The mountains were also the reason why DNA may have remained relatively unchanged, as people would have found it harder to get from north to south Wales or into England compared with people trying to move across the flatter southern English counties, making them more likely to marry locally and conserve more ancient DNA.
“In north Wales, there has been relative isolation because people moved less because of geographical barriers,” Prof Donnelly said.
He added that some of these factors also held true for the extreme edges of Scotland, while the Orkney islands showed DNA connections to Norway.
The next stage of the research will looking at physical similarities between different groups, in which the team will use photographs of people and make 3D models to measure quantitative similarities between related groups. | <urn:uuid:64175281-9bd8-4ff1-abc1-b7a2fe0669bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.amren.com/news/2012/06/welsh-people-could-be-most-ancient-in-uk-dna-suggests/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979011 | 632 | 3.515625 | 4 |
Obits for "Fabled Hero" of Vietnam War, Vang Pao, Omit CIA Drug Connection
(Pictured: Hmong army leader Vang Pao.)
Cynicism, as the late Molly Ivins once noted, is the death of good journalism, but reading through the New York Times and the Associated Press’ obituaries of Laotian-Hmong leader General Vang Pao made that sentiment a difficult one to resist.
Vang Pao, who died Jan. 6 in Clovis, a small town in California’s Central Valley, was described in the Times as “charismatic” and in AP as a “fabled military hero” who led a Hmong army against the communist Pathet Lao during the Laotian civil war. Van Pao’s so-called “secret army” was financed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as part of the U.S.’s war against North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam.
Well, “financed” is a slippery word, and while, it was true Vang Pao got a lots of money and arms from the CIA, a major source of his financing was the opium trade run out of Southeast Asia’s “Golden Triangle.” That little piece of history never managed to make it into the obits, which is hardly a surprise. The people the CIA hired to run dope for Vang Pao went on to run dope for the Contras in the Reagan Administration’s war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. And talking about close ties between drugs and the CIA in Southeast Asia and Central America might lead to some very uncomfortable questions about the people we are currently supporting in Afghanistan.
Readers should search out a book by Alfred McCoy called “The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia,” and pull up a Frontline piece entitled “Drugs, Guns and the CIA” by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn. What they will find is not in the Times and the AP obits.
A major source for the Frontline piece was Ron Rickenback, who headed up the U.S. Aid and Development Program (USAID) in Laos. Rickenback says he witnessed drugs being transported from outlying areas in Laos aboard U.S. Air America aircraft, which was then put on larger aircraft for shipment to southern Laos and Thailand. Air America was on contract with the CIA.
Rickenback says the CIA knew drugs were being run on their airplanes, but that the drug trade helped finance the war against the Pathet Lao and Vietnamese. To cover their tracks, the CIA took an Air America C-47, painted it, named it Sing Quan Airlines, and gave it to Van Pao. Sing Quan quickly became known as “Opium Air.”
Frontline also tracked down several pilots that flew Sing Quan and Air America planes (some of them were in jail for running cocaine out of Central America), who confirmed that opium was a major part of their cargo. Journalist John Everingham’s investigation also linked Vang Pao to the opium trade.
Leslie Cockburn also managed to land an interview with Tony Poe, the CIA’s key man in Laos and the model for the out-of-control CIA agent in Apocalypse Now. Poe, who was driven out of the Agency when he refused to go along with the dope dealing, confirmed Van Pao’s central role in drug running.
The trade in opium and heroin in Laos was linked in turn to the U.S.-supported regime in South Vietnam led by President Nguyen Van Thieu. Much of that heroin ended up in the bodies of American GIs—during the height of the war there were between two and three fatal overdoses a day—as well as decimating neighborhoods back in the U.S.
The history of drugs and U.S. foreign policy is a long and dark one. At the end of World War II, the Agency made common cause with the Corsican Brotherhood and La Cosa Nostra to drive the Left out of the Port of Marseilles. Drug running was a major source of money for the two Italian criminal organizations.
The same people who ran the CIA’s drug operation in Southeast Asia turned up running drugs and guns for the rightwing Contras in the 1980s Nicaraguan civil war. Cocaine money was used to buy weapons and supplies for the Contras, with anti-Castro Cubans acting as organizers and middlemen.
And lest we think this is all ancient history, maybe Congress should take a close look at our current allies in Afghanistan: the Karzai government and the Northern Alliance.
First, a few facts.
The United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crimes estimates that the Afghan opium trade generates about $3.4 billion a year, of which about 4 percent goes as taxes to the Taliban. There is some dispute over how much cash this represents: the UN says $125 million a year; U.S. intelligence agencies estimate $70 million a year. Some 21 percent goes to the farmers. What happens to the 75 percent left over?
According to Julian Mercille, a lecturer at University College, Dublin, the bulk “is captured by government officials, the police, local and regional power brokers and traffickers.” This includes President Hamid Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, and Northern Alliance general, Nazri Mahmad.
Mercille argues that the U.S. has an “historical pattern of toleration and empowerment of local drug lords in [its] pursuit of broader foreign policy goals.”
The pattern—established after the Second World War in Europe, and then later in Southeast Asia and Latin America—is that drugs are a handy way to generate lots of off-the-books money, and an easy way to buy loyalty. It is also good business. That UN report also found that between 90 to 95 percent of illegal opium sales over the past several years—some $400 to $500 billion—were laundered through western banks. Part of that money ended up being used to keep some of those banks from going under during the recent economic meltdown.
What these policies leave in their wake are ruin and destruction. Over 35,000 members of Van Pao’s army were killed fighting a losing war with the Pathet Lao, and some 200,000 Hmong were re-settled in the U.S., mainly in Minnesota, Wisconsin and California. Nicaragua is still trying to recover from the Contra War, and Afghanistan has turned into a bleeding ulcer.
Vang Pao was a pawn, first of the French, in whose colonial army he served, and later of the U.S. In the global chess game called the Cold War, he and his people were disposable. So were the Nicaraguans, and so are the Afghans. The dead are at peace; the living should remember, and the media should help preserve, not obscure, those memories.
More of Conn Hallinan's work can be found at Dispatches from the Edge. | <urn:uuid:2cf4b058-d014-4bfc-af09-e3722185188e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fpif.org/blog/obits_for_fabled_hero_of_vietnam_war_vang_pao_omit_cia_drug_connection?q=Tag%3Atear+gas | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966816 | 1,488 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Guest Author - Jenna Robinson
Do you know who you are inside? There seems to be a problem with people having the self confidence that comes with knowing who you are. What does that mean? Usually, self esteem issues are grown out of by the time a person grows up. Itís only a problem during the teen years or for those who have not had the same up bringing with two parents.
Knowing who we are is imperative to living a full life. Itís what we try to teach our children by instilling in them a sense of their background and our principles and values. But as the time of Jesusí return gets closer the attacks on our minds grows stronger. Our kids today are in a greater battle than we ever were. Everyone has heard of Columbine and now even in Germany kids are under fire. Gang violence is out of control in most places. It is spreading to places that we donít even associate with gangs and urban violence.
The Bible teaches us that when we are born again we are adopted into the family of God. He is our Father and Jesus is our brother. It also teaches us that we enter into a battle when we accept Jesus as Lord. But do we have the confidence we need to fight this battle? Are we sure that God is all powerful and in control of every situation? Or are we just paying lip service to these truths because deep down we just want to belong. Has our self esteem been so undermined that even Christians are succumbing to peer pressure?
Where does the confidence come from? It comes from Jesusí death on the cross. It comes from the silence before and the silence after. Jesus was silent when approaching the cross. He knew the outcome of the battle was victory for God and defeat for the Devil. Satan knows this too and he is going to try to take as many of us with him as he can. The fact that the end is coming soon only makes him more anxious to convince us that God is a myth. Thatís why we have so many lost people running around trying to tell us that all religions are based on the same thing. That itís just a matter of perspective; like the blind men and the elephant story.
Our confidence also comes from Jesusí resurrection. With out the resurrection, Christianity would have just fizzled out. It was the hope in the life after death that Christianity is built on. Jesus didnít just talk a good game but he fulfilled exactly what he was saying. He said He would be raised after three days, and He was. It was the ultimate act of consistency. Say what you mean and mean what you say. We are children of God. He created us and before we were born He knew us. If even the birds do not worry, then why do we? Does God not love the birds? Then how much more does He love His children? He has numbered our days and knows the number of hairs on our head. How intimate is that? We go around hiding our bald spot and our wrinkles, some of us better than others, we try to appear to be something more than we are. God knows us intimately.
Can we have confidence in that relationship? YES. We have the greatest warrior on our side. How can we fail? How can we falter? Remember what Paul says ďWho can be against us when God is for us?Ē Who are we? We are the beloved, the children the legacy of the Father God in Heaven. Ruler of Heaven and earth. The Lord of Lords, the King of Kings. | <urn:uuid:fd86eff2-7524-43f6-a3ce-1fcf0a63973e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art2687.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981617 | 723 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)Article Free Pass
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), international organization founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. Current members are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Member countries produce two-thirds of the world’s goods and services.
The convention establishing the OECD was signed on Dec. 14, 1960, by 18 European countries, the United States, and Canada and went into effect on Sept. 30, 1961. It represented an extension of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), set up in 1948 to coordinate efforts in restoring Europe’s economy under the Marshall Plan.
One of the fundamental purposes of the OECD is to achieve the highest possible economic growth and employment and a rising standard of living in member countries; at the same time it emphasizes maintaining financial stability. The organization has attempted to reach this goal by liberalizing international trade and the movement of capital between countries. A further major goal is the coordination of economic aid to developing countries.
Lacking the power to enforce its decisions, the OECD is essentially a consultative assembly that pursues its program through moral suasion, conferences, seminars, and numerous publications. Although the rule of unanimity inhibits its impact on member countries, the OECD is considered to have a significant influence as an advisory body. By maintaining contact with many governmental and international agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund, the organization has become a clearinghouse for a vast amount of economic data. It publishes hundreds of titles annually on a variety of subjects that include agriculture, scientific research, capital markets, tax structures, energy resources, lumber, air pollution, educational development, and development assistance. Its bimonthly magazine, The OECD Observer, constitutes a useful source of information on economic and related social matters. Annual evaluations of individual member countries’ economies are also issued.
What made you want to look up "Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)"? Please share what surprised you most... | <urn:uuid:ce7a7dda-f1e1-416b-a036-2b100b3b2ae9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/178340/Organisation-for-Economic-Co-operation-and-Development-OECD | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932281 | 486 | 2.890625 | 3 |
Published in the first month of the first year of the new century, Zadie Smith's debut novel "White Teeth" - winner of the Guardian First Book Award ... Show synopsis Published in the first month of the first year of the new century, Zadie Smith's debut novel "White Teeth" - winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award - was an immediate bestseller and stunningly acclaimed. One of the most talked about fictional debuts of ever, "White Teeth" is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book. "Funny, clever ...and a rollicking good read". ("Independent"). 'An astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious...I was delighted". (Salman Rushdie). "The almost preposterous talent was clear from the first pages". (Julian Barnes, ("Guardian"). "Quirky, sassy and wise ...a big, splashy, populous production reminiscent of books by Dickens and Salman Rushdie ...demonstrates both an instinctive storytelling talent and a fully fashioned voice that's street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time". ("New York Times"). "Smith writes like an old hand, and, sometimes, like a dream". ("New Yorker"). "Outstanding...A strikingly clever and funny book with a passion for ideas, for language and for the rich tragic-comedy of life". ("Sunday Telegraph"). "Do believe the hype". ("The Times"). "Relentlessly funny ...idiosyncratic, and deeply felt". ("Guardian"). Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. Her debut novel, "White Teeth", won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers' First Book Prize, and was included in "Time" 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. Her second novel, "On Beauty", was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has written two further novels, "The Autograph Man" and "NW", a collection of essays "Changing My Mind", and also edited short story anthology "The Book of Other People" Zadie Smith was chosen by "Granta" as one of its twenty best young British novelists in 2003, and as well as to "Granta" has contributed writing to the "New Yorker" and the "Guardian". Zadie Smith's new novel, "NW", is available from September 2012. | <urn:uuid:485264e8-9b57-4c85-80e0-21beeb6762dd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=7204313&matches=847&qsort=p&cm_sp=1rec-_-RHS-_-p1-0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952869 | 596 | 1.953125 | 2 |
EMGAS Training Programmes at Al Manzil Hotel
Emirates Gas (EMGAS), a subsidiary of the Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC), has unveiled a series of dedicated training programmes for various stakeholders in line with its corporate social responsibility to promote the safe handling, usage and operations of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) in the country.
The training programmes, to be conducted throughout the year, commenced with special sessions recently held for Dubai Municipality, Dubai Civil Defence and the Al Manzil Group of Hotels.
“The comprehensive training programmes are a strong demonstration of our commitment to promote the highest standards of safety in LPG handling and operations. We are focused on continuously engaging with our stakeholders, especially partners like Dubai Municipality and Dubai Civil Defence who tirelessly work with us to promote safety,” said Zaid Al Qufaidi, Managing Director – Marketing, ENOC.
The sessions for Dubai Municipality and Dubai Civil Defence were held on May 6 at the Civil Defence Training Centre in Al Hamriyah. It covered comprehensive training on cylinder safety and handling, and aimed to prepare and equip local authorities in handling emergency situations. The training also underlined the importance of implementing proper procedures in the handling, storage and usage of LPG cylinders, improving safety and quality of life in the community, and strengthening relations with government partners.
The training sessions for the Al Manzil Group of Hotels, led by Ali Abdullatif Al Hammadi, Quality Coordinator, and Pramod Mandiram, Marketing Executive – Accounts & Product Development, covered topics such as basic safety for end users, how to identify and tackle gas leaks, causes of fires and combating fire.
“These training programmes have been tailor-made in line with the nature and functions of our stakeholders. The training programmes for Dubai Municipality, Dubai Civil Defence, and our committed partners in all safety drives, are aimed at promoting safe usage of LPG throughout the community,” said Hesham Ali Mustafa, Senior Director, ENOC Gas Marketing & General Manager of EMGAS.
EMGAS recently concluded the second phase of its public safety awareness campaign, held in association with Dubai Municipality and Dubai Civil Defence. During the first phase, around 200,000 LPG safety leaflets were distributed across ENOC/EPPCO service stations. An estimated 5,000 households were also approached to promote awareness on safe LPG usage, alongside a full-fledged media campaign held in three different languages.
For over 38 years, EMGAS has been the leading supplier of LP gas products and services in the UAE. Its customer portfolio includes hotels, residences, industrial and shopping malls in the UAE, and several international markets. | <urn:uuid:f8c25b24-b42d-4612-b883-c38afdfc9d9a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.albawaba.com/business/pr/emirates-gas-lpg-training-425880 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953281 | 556 | 1.53125 | 2 |
What is FCL?: Benefits
"My children are now constantly talking about the future."
"My child enjoys going to those classes and comes home and teaches me."
Benefits for Students
Children increase their motivation to learn when they see their capacity to make a difference in the world. Full-Circle Learning infuses purpose into every aspect of learning. Each project reinforces the current habit-of-heart and culminates in a local or international service project. For instance, when the habit-of-heart is sacrifice, math/science lessons include buying fruit to raise the blood sugar of those who make the ultimate sacrifice - voluntary blood donors.
The integrated lesson plans encourage students to develop social skills, bonds and leadership capacities that prepare them for success as tomorrow's compassionate leaders. They help students develop habits of lifelong learning and giving as they experience new fulfillment in discovering and applying their talents. Full-circle learning helps them link academic work and arts to real-world service projects and the study of ethics.
Benefits for Communities
Training children to give back to society presents benefits for adults as well. Personnel at each site customize the program to meet real community needs, often linking people of varying ages and backgrounds with students in meaningful ways. For instance, seniors can serve as mentors and adopted grandparents who share their own life experience.
Guest presenters and thematic, service-based trips expand the children's horizons and sense of their own potential. Families develop leadership skills as parents learn from the children. Volunteers find fulfillment as they model the traits and goals needed for an ever-advancing civilization. | <urn:uuid:c09f8dd8-30c7-4f22-b4db-ecae876dad19> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fullcirclelearning.org/s/1/bid/2001608691816420578/aid/5216933436422732288/t/What_is_FCL_Benefits/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949773 | 323 | 2.765625 | 3 |
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Waiting for one era to end and another to begin is a revealing time to stroll through the William J. Clinton Presidential Center.
To be sure, the 165,000-square-foot library and museum has much to offer visitors, regardless of the season. But lingering here during the transition from one administration to another is to be acutely aware of history; a reminder that, for all of America's current woes, we've been down this road before.
Words like "change" and "hope" ring with a new familiarity from the November 1992 front pages. There's the young upstart governor who also came from humble roots -- and his lawyer wife -- outsiders who overcame doubts about experience.
And there are the daunting challenges facing the country: frayed relations overseas, the health-care debacle, a nose-diving economy -- all pulsating with a new urgency that might have gone unnoticed when the library doors opened four years ago.
The deja vu is dispiriting -- but it's also oddly reassuring. After all, the angst eventually ushered in the most sustained period of prosperity in American history.
"It makes me feel like better times are ahead," said Lisa Brady of Orlando at a graph charting the increase of 20 million jobs during Clinton's eight years in office. "Maybe we can get there again."
The $165 million complex on the banks of the Arkansas River has helped revitalize downtown Little Rock, drawing about 300,000 visitors a year and more than $2 billion in new construction and other renovation, said Jordan Johnson, a spokesman for the Clinton Foundation.
In keeping with a man who was never at a loss for words, the library houses an archive of 80 million pages of documents and two million photographs. In addition to the serious, there's the silly (sunglasses worn by the saxophone-playing candidate on "The Arsenio Hall Show," late-night TV that also can be filed under "nostalgia") and the stately (the only full-size replica of the Oval Office).
Presidential libraries are planned and built as private ventures -- then turned over to the federal government and operated by the National Archives. Soon, George W. Bush will join this elite club, with a $300 million project at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Of course, time is essential for viewing events with detachment, say historians.
Consider the alcove titled "The Politics of Persecution" documenting the president's affair with intern Monica Lewinsky, ultimately leading to the 1998 impeachment (another relevant rerun -- at least for folks in Illinois).
"Clinton acknowledged that he had not been forthcoming about the relationship," is the summary -- hardly what his critics would write. But regardless of interpretation, most visitors will leave with a larger message: "This too will pass." | <urn:uuid:6edce3bb-bfa5-457d-9daf-ada96bc62ea7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-01-18/news/0901170675_1_clinton-foundation-library-presidential | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954856 | 579 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Managing hardware and storage needs; building custom, in-house applications; making information accessible via the Web—such tasks are the mainstays of IT work, so mundane that they're generally not worth talking about.
But science gives these routine tasks a fascinating twist. The hardware purchases support a compute cluster on the Caltech campus, while storage questions deal with the flood of data from genome sequencing. The in-house software reconstructs the text of ancient manuscripts. And the Web app helps people around the world follow our solar system and the hardware we've sent out to explore it.
For the people we've talked to, "working in IT" means working with some of the best minds on the planet on some of the hardest problems anywhere.
Doug Ellison wanted to be a rocket scientist, but one year of coursework in electrical engineering convinced him it was not to be. After graduating with a degree in graphic design, Ellison found himself working on software for medical education, but he never lost his fascination with space exploration and gradually found ways to express it. When NASA started posting online all the images taken by the Mars rovers, Ellison joined a small community of enthusiasts who stitched the images into panoramas, turned multiple exposures into real-color images, and even put together time-lapse videos of the rovers driving across the red planet.
The folks at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were impressed—so impressed, in fact, that they offered Ellison a job. He left his native England for Southern California to work as the visualization producer for a team that takes space ship data and images and converts them into a Web app that lets anyone take a guided tour of the Solar System.
Ellison's biggest project is something called Eyes on the Solar System. The system relies on decades of data on various spacecraft, all distilled down into a file format called SPICE. SPICE-formatted data can produce exact details about a spacecraft's position and orientation at precise time points in the past, which is combined with maps of the planets and moons of our Solar System, creating a complete 4D environment (the three dimensions of space, plus time). The team also updates the system as more data comes in; Ellison specifically mentioned MESSENGER's study of Mercury as requiring a major update.
How well do you have to know physics to make all of this work? "We have a grasp on what the physics is doing, but we're fortunate that people far cleverer than we are do the heavy lifting," Ellison joked. "I'm a translator, and one of my languages is science."
To serve the data over the Web, it's compressed a bit but remains "more than accurate enough," according to Ellison. To display the environment in a Web browser, the team uses the Unity3D game engine, which works on a wide variety of systems. "As long as you're not on old school decrepit integrated graphics, you'll be fine," he added.
The end result is a system that lets anyone anywhere on the planet recreate historical events, like Voyager's flyby of Saturn, or track the progress of missions like the next rover's journey to Mars, all with full-color reconstructions of the spacecraft and their destinations.
The system has been used when a JPL mission ends up on TV, and it's used by scientists in presentations. But it's used most often by people who simply access it over the Internet. "We're still trying to figure out who our users really are," Ellison told Ars, noting "our users are not [the JPL management]." He knows that the tool gets used by space enthusiasts and in classrooms, and that people tune in to watch major events like comet flybys, but there's a steady stream of traffic even on days where nothing much happens.
Eliison has his dream job, in which he gets to work with brilliant people—some of whom he can still manage to surprise. "We're in a huge, political, bureaucratic machine, but there's this little bit of excitement at the core of JPL," he said. "You do this little demo… and there will be this gasp, because they [the audience] didn't appreciate how things work, how the Solar System operates."
Storing the human—or platypus—genome
Ellison measures the data used for his work in gigabytes, but science often demands far greater capacity. Across the country at the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT, Matthew Trunnell was already dealing with a storage system that weighed in at 200 terabytes back in 2006. The reason? The automated systems built to sequence the human genome kept pouring out data for other projects, like the effort to sequence 1,000 human genomes or to capture the genomes of cancer cells. 2006 was also the year that the Broad Institute got the first of its "second generation" sequencing platforms, which only made the storage situation worse. Now, the Broad's data set sits at 10 petabytes and growing.
"Our data volumes take us completely by surprise," Trunnell admitted.
Trunnell got his start simulating fluid dynamics in oceanography. He only switched to working on bioinformatics when he moved over to the private sector but immediately found it fascinating. Eventually, he moved to supporting the people who generate the data and perform the analysis because, he said, "I like to build things but hate to run things."
What he gets to build is enough capacity to store and analyze thousands of genomes. Along with that 10PB of storage, there's a Linux cluster of 2,500 cores just dedicated to the process of assembling genomes out of the data pouring in from hundreds of automated sequencers. Such assembly is a memory-intensive task, so some of the machines involved are outfitted with a half-terabyte of RAM. Once assembled, the data has to be analyzed—which takes another 6,000-core cluster.
"IT changes quickly, and laboratory technologies are changing very fast, and the intersection between those is moving faster than either of them," Trunnell said.
Most of the processing can be split into jobs of an arbitrary length, which makes clusters an effective solution. But over time, two trends are changing the way the Broad thinks about hardware. First, the increasing number of cores makes newer nodes relatively "fat" (as Trunnell put it), meaning they require more RAM and local storage to function well. Second, as the data gets larger, getting it all to the right machine has become a growing challenge.
All that computing power goes to support three types of users. Some are just doing what you might call "traditional" genome analyses, which have been around for a while now and have fairly predictable requirements. Some of the newer projects, like the Cancer Genome Atlas, are very much works-in-progress, though, with new rules. "The focus is research—it's still at scale, so they are making very large scale use of computing resources and data, but the needs are much more fluid," Trunnell said. The computational methods are still being developed, the data is still being explored, so support requires a mix of large scale computing and a willingness to deal with rapidly developing needs.
The last group of users are typically students and post-docs who do more limited projects but who still need access to big hardware. "The needs are frequently small, but the impact is sometimes large because we have a large computing resource that is available to everyone," Trunnell said. "Groups that aren't used to using computation at scale can sometimes get carried away."
For Trunnell, the biggest appeal of the job is that he gets to work with everyone at the Institute at one point or another, so he gets a really "broad" picture of the work that's going on. And some of that work is truly significant. "The insights we're gaining into cancer right now are likely to have a tremendous impact on cancer therapeutics down the road," he said. "But being able to see these develop now is very exciting." | <urn:uuid:c5d8ffca-3a1e-429b-a397-41d91980985c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/coolest-jobs-in-tech-decoding-life-touring-solar-systems/?comments=1&post=22881432 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965232 | 1,653 | 3 | 3 |
Dr. Sen was not wrong in what he said. He pointed out the horrors of half of Indian households not having toilets and of half of India’s children being malnourished. And, he talked of the need for drastic improvements in public healthcare and education. It was his analysis and solutions that were worrying. He appeared to believe that healthcare in India had been privatised. ‘India is the only country in the world that is trying to have a health transition on the basis of a private healthcare that doesn’t exist.’
The truth is that more than 80 per cent of Indians are forced to use private healthcare because public healthcare is so appalling. The same is true of schools. Dr. Sen saw the National Advisory Council’s new food bill as the solution to malnutrition in Indian children. It is not. It will be just another expensive mistake because the solutions to malnutrition in children cannot come from massive centralised schemes but from interventions at the village level.
It is Dr. Sen’s ideas that have prevailed ever since Nehruvian socialism became the Indian state’s economic ideology. It has been a return to ‘socialist’ economic policies in the past four years, and big government spending on supposed poverty alleviation that have brought us down to 5 per cent GDP growth which is the virtual equivalent of the old ‘Hindu rate of growth’. And, it is schemes like MNREGA that have revived the ‘maibaap sarkar’ mentality.
Narendra Modi took the opposite view to Dr. Sen. He talked of how India could become the most prosperous country in the world simply by using her resources better. He talked of how having the youngest population of any country could be turned into a huge asset by skills training. He talked of Adivasi people in his state exporting bananas to Finland and coming to him with a request that he improve their roads so that their produce could be transported with less damage. He talked of how if you ate tomatoes in Afghanistan or drank milk in Thailand, it was likely to have come from Gujarat and he explained that this new vitality in agriculture had happened because of concerted reforms.
He talked of how tourism could bring prosperity and, as far as I can remember, became the first major Indian politician to do so. Some of our poorest states are poor only because they have not understood how to use pristine beaches, high mountains and magnificent temples as their unique selling point. The real advantage of using tourism as a tool for economic growth is that the infrastructure tourism needs benefits local people even more.
Roads, modern telecommunications and high standards of civic infrastructure are not things that benefit only tourists. But, since tourists do not come to places that do not have them, state governments investing in tourism build them with speed. Sadly, more often than I can recount I have heard important political leaders tell me that tourism is only for people who can live in 5-star hotels. Mr. Modi appears to take a different view.
It is his bad luck that some of his colleagues in the BJP and the Sangh parivar are unlikely to rally behind his new economic vision for India. They remain so blind to India’s new realities that the BJP president did not notice as he washed his sins in the Kumbh Mela that he should have said something about the horribly polluted rivers he was dipping himself in. The head of the RSS meanwhile tried to stir up old passions for that temple in Ayodhya without noticing that not even the gathering of ascetics and ‘saints’ he addressed was seriously impressed. Young Indian voters lost interest long ago.
The campaign to malign Modi is so powerful that it is possible that he may never become prime minister. So let us at least hope that the next general election throws up a leader who can commit to moving India towards an idea of development that involves the active participation of the people. The old idea of the beneficent welfare state is now definitely defunct. And, if it is not, then it should be because it is founded on the principle that there must always be poverty to ‘alleviate’.
Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh | <urn:uuid:f75ced40-9b91-4633-b68a-b413ea7cbb3f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/1071985/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982005 | 863 | 1.664063 | 2 |
The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act is the landmark federal law, originally known as the Campus Security Act, that requires colleges and universities across the United States to disclose information about crime on and around their campuses.
Because the law is tied to participation in federal student financial aid programs it applies to most institutions of higher education both public and private. It is enforced by the U.S. Department of Education.
Help protect your property by reading the UTPA Crime Prevention Tips.
- Terminology **Disposition**
- Active – Case is currently under investigation;
- Cleared – Case has been cleared by arrest or judicial referral;
- Closed – There is no further information available to assist with the investigation, no suspect/witnesses;
- Exceptionally Cleared – Victim refuses to pursue criminal charges or is uncooperative;
- Unfounded – After thorough investigation, case has been determined to be false or baseless, no criminal offense occurred or attempted. | <urn:uuid:a4ae8de3-2ff0-45bd-bf2a-2e4585be7468> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://portal.utpa.edu/utpa_main/dba_home/police_home/pd_crime/crime_log | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943489 | 203 | 2.296875 | 2 |
The angels announced the birth of the Savior as “good news of great joy.” In taking on our human nature, God the Son poured himself out for us, and from this we learn that joy comes from the giving of self.
Another message of the angels is that joy comes from personal acceptance of Jesus as our Savior. The proud can never experience this joy, for they refuse to admit their need for salvation; or they pursue a futile quest for joy in pleasures and possessions.
We give thanks that the Son of God came to save us.
1. [While Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem for the census,] the time came for her delivery. Hail Mary
2. And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes. Hail Mary
3. She laid Him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. Hail Mary
4. There were shepherds in the same region, living in the fields and keeping watch over their flocks at night. Hail Mary
5. And behold, an angel of the Lord came to them, and the glory of God shone round about them, and they were very much afraid. Hail Mary
6. The angel said to them: “Do not be afraid for I bring you good news of a great joy which shall be to all the people.” Hail Mary
7. “Today in the town of David there has been born to you a Savior who is Christ the Lord;” Hail Mary
8. “And this will be a sign for you: you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” Hail Mary
9. Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, Hail Mary
10. And saying: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.” Hail Mary
Reference: Luke 2:1-14
John F. Kippley
Seven Day Bible Rosary
ECO-BREASTFEEDING: If anyone needs support for ecological breastfeeding during the Christmas season, read Crunchy Lutheran Mommy’s blog. After reading this blog on eco-breastfeeding, click Part 1 at the beginning of the blog and read how she searched for God’s way to care for babies. | <urn:uuid:3c59781e-fad8-4dca-aae7-8222c60e231d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nfpandmore.org/wordpress/?m=201112 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94935 | 492 | 1.9375 | 2 |
Spaces of Memory
RA Forum: Future Memory (21 May 2011)
This event was part of a wider series called Future Memory, which examined the role of memory in various cultural practices, and explored how interventions in the present can alter, inform and distort memory in the future. In this third event in the series, held in the Life Room of the RA Schools, we considered the relationship between space and memory through a variety of contributions from artists, architects and researchers.
The event was chaired by Iain Borden with presentations by Fiona Anderson, Inez de Coo, Gregory Dart, Blue Firth, Asif Khan, Yat Ming Loo and Will Montgomery. Their presentations and the subsequent discussion can be viewed below:
Iain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at the Bartlett. He is a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced. Amongst other works, he is author of Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (2001) and the forthcoming Drive: Automobile Journeys through Cities, Architecture & Film.
Gregory Dart is Senior Lecturer in English at UCL. His research, both current and prospective, is centrally concerned with the modern city, as a cultural and material phenomenon. He is on the editorial board of The Hazlitt Review and his book Rousseau, Robespierre and Romanticism was published in 1999. With Matthew Beaumont, he edited Restless Cities, a collection of essays tracing the patterns that have defined everyday life in the modern city, which was published in 2010.
Will Montgomery makes electronic music, sound art and field recordings. His musical pieces explore aural texture and narrative. He also constructs compositions from sequences of treated or untreated field recordings. He is interested in the acoustics of the built environment, particularly London which he has explored in several works, including Thames Water (2009), Viaducts (2010) and Elephant (2007-10). He teaches contemporary poetry at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Fiona Anderson is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at King’s College London, writing on representations of waterfront cruising in late 1970s New York in the work of the artist and writer David Wojnarowicz. She is a member of the Queer@King’s research group and has lectured at Tate Modern and Oxford University, and published on Wojnarowicz in Papers of Surrealism.
Blue Firth was born in 1981 in Derby, and lives and works in London. She is about to graduate from the Royal Academy Schools in summer 2011. Previous exhibitions include Self Help, 2011 Copenhagen Place, London, Vigil, 2010 Royal Academy Schools, London, That Beautiful Pale Face is my Fate (For Lord Byron), Nottingham Contemporary, 2009, Nottingham.
Inez de Coo is a visual artist, specialising in video art. She completed her BA at Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunst, The Hague in 2008 and will graduate from the Royal Academy Schools this Summer. She is interested in applying ideas from film theory and history with psychoanalysis and philosophy to explore the intersections between fiction and reality, exploring cinema’s role in shared social and cultural heritage as a record of collective memory. Her work has been screened throughout Europe.
Yat Ming Loo is an architect. He holds a PhD degree from the Bartlett. His thesis, which examines the postcolonial architecture and urban space in Kuala Lumpur, was shortlisted for RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding Thesis 2010. He is currently leading an oral history project to trace the history of London’s first Chinatown at Limehouse. He teaches part-time in the MA Architectural History at the Bartlett, UCL and University of Brighton. | <urn:uuid:d57090b2-bbf3-44c5-aa3b-0df89e5732f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/text-only/architecture/future-memory/spaces-of-memory,1743,AR.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951263 | 800 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Christmas is just around the corner and what better way for geeks to celebrate than by decorating their tree with these cool Pokemon ornaments. Here's something you may not know: the modern-day mold-blown colored glass Christmas ornament was originally invented in the small German town of Lauscha in the mid-19th century. Continue reading to see more.
In the early days, Christmas ornaments were made by artisans who heated a glass tube over a flame and then inserted a tube into a clay mold, blowing the heated glass to expand into the shape of the mold. After the glass cooled, a silver nitrate solution was swirled into it, a silvering technique developed in the 1850s by Justus von Liebig. After the nitrate solution dried, the ornament was hand-painted and topped with a cap and hook.
[Sources 1 | 2 | 3] | <urn:uuid:f3d979f8-24e0-4b96-a54e-84f1aea81620> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/18-cool-pokemon-christmas-ornaments-for-geeks | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969866 | 182 | 2.9375 | 3 |