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Originally Posted by NetBSD Blog
In a software project as large as NetBSD the interactions between different software components are not always immediately obvious to even the most skilled programmers. Tests help ensure that the system functions according to the desired criteria. Periodic automated runs of these tests with results visible on the web ensures both that tests are run in a regular fashion and that the results are available to all interested parties.
This short article explains the NetBSD test strategies and provides a brief overview of the enabling technologies. It also details how effortless it is to run the test suite and why doing so is in every developer's, patch submitter's and system administrator's best interest. The intended audience is people with a keen interest in testing and quality assurance, and a desire to reduce personal headache. The article is written against NetBSD-current as of June 2010 and applies to what will eventually become NetBSD 6.
to read the full article. | <urn:uuid:68372fa4-7b7d-486b-a10f-5735ec080b15> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=4916 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948637 | 189 | 2.25 | 2 |
SFA Physics Olympics - Joins with the SFA STEM Day
To learn more about STEM Day, click on the link below.
Physics, Astronomy, Engineering
MarsQuest: Exploring the Red Planet in the Planetarium
Ed Michaels, Planetarium Director
MarsQuest traces humanity’s centuries-long cultural and scientific fascination with the planet Mars. In first part of the program we trace Mars through history – from an "incantation" of the various War God forms given by different cultures, to the early observations of Schiaparelli and Lowell, and the infamous "canals" which led to science-fiction stories about Martians. We hear excerpts from H. G. Wells’s "War of the Worlds" and Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Barsoom" novels.
The second part of the program details the Mars of our time -- as seen in the night sky, through binoculars and telescopes, and from our Mars explorations. Mission findings from Viking, Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor feature reports on Mars weather, climate, and areology. We compare the climate and terrain of Earth and Mars, and present the current thinking about the areologic history of the planet, and a rationale for future exploration.
The third part examines where on Earth we can prepare to live on Mars, what will be needed to get crewed missions to the Red Planet, and what the first landing may be like. The show ends with “Rhapsody on a Red Planet,” a poetically-styled “ode to Mars,” this time from a future perspective; an eloquent soliloquy tracing the efforts that led to humanity’s first footsteps onto the desolate and dusty Martian surface.
Physics Magic Show
Walter Trikosko, Harry Downing, Ali Piran, Dan Bruton
This show is a demonstration of physics "magic" by SFA physics professors. Unlike the magic shows performed by magicians, where they keep their tricks secret, the physics "magic" can all be explained using simple physics principles and can be performed at home with some practice. The purpose of the presentation is to show people that physics is an experimental science, it is exciting, and it can be a lot of fun!
“Lay a little music on me.” Using simple plastic tubes music is created by participants hitting themselves or perhaps their neighbors with the tubes.
“So you think you see the light.” After viewing different colored pictures on a slide for 20-30 seconds participants will have the stimulus removed and will see the complementary colors of what they had been viewing.
Don't break the Egg!
Objective: To design a container that will protect a Grade A Large egg from a fall of about 13 meters (3 stories) onto a concrete surface of area approximately 3m x 2.5 m.
Apparatus: Each team will construct one container before the day of the competition. Each team will be responsible for the secrecy of their design. We will provide the eggs and theywill be raw.
Regulations: The container must be able to fit inside a box of dimensions 40 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm. Its mass must be less than 1 kg. The container may be constructed of any kind of material. There will be a five-minute time limit to load the egg into your container on the day of the event.
Procedure: The container will be dropped from a hinged board, extending from a balcony over a concrete surface. The container does not have to survive the fall, but the eggmust. A cracked or broken egg will disqualify the entry. The judge will inspect the egg within one minute of the drop. Only one drop will bemade for each team's device. Scoring: Scoring will be based on the following equation:
Score = Mass + (10 * Time)
where Mass = mass of the egg container in grams (not including the egg) and
Time = time in seconds from release of the device till its impact.
The device with the lowest score is the winner.
Objective: To program a robot to navigate through an obstacle course in the minimum amount of time.
Apparatus: Each team will be provided with a NXT Mindstorm Robot and a laptop.
Procedure: Each team will use simple symbolic programming elements to direct the robot to move or turn. The team that completes the course in the minimum amount of time is the winner. If no team completes the course, then the team that travels the farthest distance along the course is the winner. | <urn:uuid:ee17b63a-bf5f-4aaf-939d-03f09853ec65> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://astro.sfasu.edu/news/index.aspx?URL=StemDay | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908447 | 947 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Does Mars Methane Indicate Life Underground?
for National Geographic News
|October 7, 2004|
Data obtained by the Mars Express probe that is currently orbiting the red planet show that water vapor and methane gas are concentrated in the same regions of the Martian atmosphere, the European Space Agency recently announced.
The finding may have important implications for the possibility that microbial life could exist on Mars. If microbes are making methane in the Martian atmosphere as part of their living process, they would rely on water.
Some scientists remain skeptical, however. They are not convinced that the new methane measurements are real and statistically valid. Even if the overlap exists, they say, it could just as easily be explained by other processes.
Vittorio Formisano of the Institute of Physics and Interplanetary Science in Rome, Italy, lead the team that made the recent announcement. In March the same researchers said they had detected methane in the Martian atmosphere. The scientists used the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS) on Mars Express, an instrument that maps infrared radiation on Mars.
Now new PFS data shows that at 10 to 15 kilometers (6.2 to 9.3 miles) above the Martian surface, water vapor is well mixed and uniform. Close to the planet's surface, however, water vapor is two to three times more concentrated in three equatorial regions than in other areas.
The data also shows concentrations of methane in the same areas where water vapor and underground water ice are more concentrated. A water-ice layer a few tens of centimeters (8 to 12 inches) below the surface was detected by NASA's Odyssey spacecraft, which is also orbiting Mars.
"This overlap [of methane and water vapor] points to a common underground source in the same regions," Formisano said in an e-mail interview.
Formisano stresses that an underground source doesn't prove there is microbial life. The methane could be a byproduct of volcanic gassing. Or it could be the chemical reaction between water and rocks in the soil and crust.
However, there is a possibility that the methane is produced by organisms called methanogens, which are microbes that produce methane as a waste product of their life process. The gas would be released to the surface and into the atmosphere.
Scientists have speculated that the methane-producing bacteria may live in water below the presumed ice table.
The new results suggest that whatever is producing the methane is ongoing, because methane can only survive in the Martian atmosphere for a few centuries.
Some scientists are skeptical about the detection of methane on Mars. Bruce Jakosky, a planetary geologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, has studied atmospheric water on Mars for 25 years. He says he is not yet convinced that the methane measurements are real and statistically valid.
"Also, there is nothing in the water vapor measurements to suggest that there's a need to invoke a subsurface source," he said. "The distribution of water vapor is controlled primarily by the circulation of the atmosphere and the motions of the wind. If the water vapor and methane correlate, I would be more inclined to think the methane is also being redistributed by the wind."
Jakosky says there would have to be a "humongous" source of methane for the gas to be hovering over one region without being redistributed. "It's just not physically plausible," he said.
The evidence for an underground ice table around the Martian equator is also controversial. This is based on Odyssey's detection of hydrogen atoms in the top layer of the soil. Some experts interpret the hydrogen as being locked in ice and others say it could come from minerals affected by water in the past.
Formisano presented his results on September 20 at the International Mars Conference in Ischia, Italy. But the findings have not been published yet, which Jakosky says makes it difficult for the science community to evaluate.
"It's frustrating that we increasingly seem to be doing science by press release," Jakosky said. "It's time for these guys to publish their results."
Mars is the planet in our solar system that most closely resembles Earth. It has a rocky surface, perhaps making it easier for life to gain a foothold.
Earlier this year, NASA announced that its roving robot Opportunity had found evidence that water once soaked the planet Mars. Pictures from the rover's panoramic imager revealed salt-laden sediments that would have been shaped by flowing water or maybe a great Martian lake or sea.
Mars may not have only been wetter in the past, but could have had a denser atmosphere. There is the possibility that life arose on Mars, only to die out as conditions on the planet changed. Some researchers have suggested that future searches for life should focus on extinct, rather than current, life.
Don't Miss a Discovery
Sign up for the free Inside National Geographic newsletter. Every two weeks we'll send you our top news stories by e-mail.
For more Mars stories, scroll to bottom.
|© 1996-2008 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.| | <urn:uuid:124756e4-08b4-4c52-92f3-91285d18b7d4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/69863315.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959993 | 1,039 | 3.734375 | 4 |
Cliches for the College Masses
Justin Bieber knows more than one may think
If you’re like me, you’ve spent much of your college career clocking hours in class or in the library, learning about everything from media theory to the formula for compounding interest. This kind of learning is what brought us all to Charlottesville in the first place, and it’s this kind of learning that will keep this institution running long after we’ve all worn the honor of honors.
Yet, as you quickly realize in your first weekend at the University, there’s more to college than academics. It’s cliché, but I’ve found it to be true. And it’s not the only cliché I’ve found to be true in college — some of the most important lessons I’ve learned won’t be heard in a lecture or found in a book. Instead, they’re contained in the pithy phrases we often throw around without much thought.
“Never say never”
Obviously, if Justin Bieber says it, it has to be true. Still, even more concrete evidence than a pop star’s endorsement is my experience with the college admissions process. As a high school student, I wanted to attend one school and one school only — the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My Dad, a U.Va. and UNC alumnus, astutely realized this interest was based more on my love of the basketball team than anything else. As a result — and I believe partly as an excuse to relive his college days — he took me and my friends on more college tours than I can count, showing us there were other options under that vast Carolina-blue sky.
At the time, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with U.Va. Who wants to go to the same school as half their high school? Does anyone actually look good in orange?
Even though it was one of the coldest and grayest days in January, after the information session in the dome room of the Rotunda, a tour lead by a very attractive fourth-year and lunch on the Corner, I never looked back — eventually declining the opportunity to wear Carolina blue. So take it from me — or from Justin, if you prefer — and never say never.
“Actions speak louder than words”
Here’s the thing — words mean nothing without follow-through. Actions show someone’s true character. Apologies and empty promises are made all too easily. There are people in this world who know exactly what to say to make you feel like you have everything you want. Even when they let you down yet again, they know how to seem genuine in their apologies. But I’ve learned people don’t change in the span of a few short months, and you can’t make them change either.
So when someone isn’t treating you the way you know you deserve to be treated, you should walk away. No matter what they say to you, their actions indicate the reality of the situation. You shouldn’t be wasting your time waiting on empty promises or text messages that never come.
“It’s who you know”
This summer in New York City, my roommate and I were shameless about networking. I’d go to an event and make it a game: collect five business cards, talk to three new people or find a University graduate in the crowd. We both realized we were more likely to obtain full-time employment through someone we knew rather than simply sending our resumes out into the black hole that is the Internet.
Somewhere along the way, I realized networking isn’t all that different from joining clubs, Greek organizations or societies back on Grounds. In college, first-years scramble to name brothers to get into fraternity houses on Friday nights. As upperclassmen, those first-year connections provide important access to Sunday brunch at the dining hall.
And the more people you’re able to meet through these opportunities, the more weak ties you have access to. And through my classes — where it really is all about what you know — I’ve learned weak ties, not strong ones, provide you with more social capital, like jobs or a date for next Friday.
But the good thing about realizing the strength of who you know is when you are a student at the University, most alumni, professors and students really do want to help you out. Even though daily life might get in the way, it’s important to keep up with your old friends and professors, or reach out to someone at a company or in a field you’re interested in — you never know where it may lead you.
Katie’s column runs biweekly Tuesdays. She can be reached at email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:c72f0748-f825-4aa1-a311-49181ef45305> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2013/02/cliches-for-the-college-masses | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960694 | 1,018 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Selenium Can Protect Against Fluoride Toxicity
December 11, 2012 by Bob Livingston
Sodium fluoride is added to most American drinking water. American dentists recommend using fluoride toothpaste. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls fluoride one of the “ten greatest public health achievements of the 20th Century.”
They don’t tell you it is a poisonous pesticide and industrial waste product. Just a half tube of the flavored toothpastes marketed to children contains enough fluoride to kill them.
Studies have shown fluoride causes tooth and bone fluorosis, increases cancer risk, reduces IQs in children, causes arthritis symptoms and is an endocrine disrupter. A World Health Organization study conducted from 1978-1992 showed that Americans living in areas where drinking water was treated with what the Environmental Protection Agency deemed was “optimal” levels had increased risk of cancer in 23 different areas of the body. Male children exposed to high levels of fluoride may have a 546 percent increased risk of developing osteosarcoma later in life, according research conducted at Harvard.
Chinese researchers have determined that selenium supplementation is a valuable tool against fluoride toxicity. Other research has shown that selenium has halted damage to the liver, kidneys, hearts and brains of lab animals. One study showed that selenium also increased the rate at which fluoride was eliminated from the body.
Supplementation of up to 100 to 200 micrograms is recommended by many natural health professionals. The National Institute of Health’s upper tolerance limit is 400 micrograms.
You should take a selenium supplement, use only non-fluoride toothpastes and mouthwashes, and use filters to remove fluoride from drinking and cooking water to greatly decrease your chances for developing cancer and myriad other diseases. | <urn:uuid:a28e2990-c3d9-4af8-b3f8-607700970da4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://personalliberty.com/2012/12/11/selenium-can-protect-against-fluoride-toxicity/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=8099f58e7f | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939574 | 368 | 2.65625 | 3 |
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Short-term exposure to air pollution could trigger appendicitis in adults, possibly because pollutants cause inflammatory responses, according to a Canadian study published Monday.
Researchers found that people exposed to nitrogen dioxide for a week during June, July and August -- when levels of the pollutant are at their highest -- were almost twice as likely to come down with the potentially deadly condition as those who had no exposure.
Those over 64 were more than four times more likely to develop appendicitis under the same conditions.
Nitrogen dioxide is most usually produced by traffic and causes most health problems during summer months.
The Canadian team -- led by Dr. Gilaad Kaplan of the University of Calgary -- studied the cases of 5,191 people admitted with appendicitis at three adult hospitals in Calgary, Alberta, over a seven-year period.
Kaplan said 52.5 percent of overall admissions occurred between April and September, the warmest months of the year in Canada, when people are more likely to be outside.
Appendectomies are among the most common surgeries that are performed in United States and Canada, where one in 12 people have a chance of developing appendicitis.
"Even though the outcomes of the operations are actually really good, because it's such a serious condition if it's missed ... it actually is a significant burden to the healthcare system," Kaplan told Reuters in an interview.
"The one thing we know about air pollution is that it's modifiable and so if there is a potential link then maybe we could improve air quality and prevent some cases."
The link between air pollution and appendicitis was more marked in men, possibly because they worked more outdoors. Kaplan wants to study the phenomenon further in an attempt to confirm the initial findings.
Most medical specialists believe appendicitis is caused by obstruction of the appendix opening but Kaplan's team said this theory did not explain the trends of appendicitis in developed and developing countries.
Appendicitis cases increased dramatically in industrialized countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They then decreased in the middle and late 20th century, a period that coincided with legislation to boost air quality.
"That correlation between seeing the incidence of appendicitis decrease following improvement in air quality was one of the things that motivated me to do the study," Kaplan said.
The incidence of appendicitis has been growing in developing countries as they become more industrialized. The team said air pollution was a known risk factor for several medical conditions such as asthma, strokes and cancer.
The study -- conducted by researchers at the University of Calgary and the University of Toronto as well as the federal health ministry -- appeared in the latest edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
SOURCE: Canadian Medical Association Journal, October 5, 2009.
The #1 daily resource for health and lifestyle news!
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We could all use some encouragement now and then - we're human!
Explore your destiny as you discover what's written in your stars.
The latest news, tips and recipes for people with diabetes.
Healthy food that tastes delicious too? No kidding.
Yoga for Back Pain
Pets HelpYour Heart
Are YouMoney Smart? | <urn:uuid:73205735-fef5-4f02-8437-4c5a309705d4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lifescript.com/health/centers/digestive/news/2009/10/05/bad_air_quality_could_trigger_appendicitis_study.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968172 | 667 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Mathematics Concentration for Students Matriculated Before July 1, 2012
Feb. 1, 1993 — AOS Guidelines: Science, Mathematics and Technology
Mathematics serves as a creative and organizing force for studies in the sciences, as a problem-solving methodology for studies in technology and as an abstract study of fundamental structures for its own sake. It has become increasingly important as a tool for the social sciences.
A concentration in mathematics should include the following core areas:
- differential and integral calculus
- linear algebra
- abstract algebra
- real analysis.
In addition, there should be in-depth study of a particular area of mathematics. Possibilities include mathematics education, mathematical modeling, statistics or numerical analysis.
Each program in mathematics should include some application project, based on the area of specialization. For example, a degree program focusing on statistics could include a statistical research project. A student preparing for graduate work in mathematics may want to research the development of the proof for the four-color problem.
The computer has become an essential tool for mathematics. Along with including areas of discrete mathematics in the program, attention should be paid to the use of the computer as a tool. For example, programming would be included in a study of numerical analysis and the computer would be used for statistical analysis. | <urn:uuid:d3d52b53-b4d3-4f0f-85bb-0e14b7785a45> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://esc.edu/degrees-programs/undergraduate-aos/science-math-technology/detailed-guidelines/smt-concentration/mathematics/matriculated-before-2012-july-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947153 | 265 | 3.34375 | 3 |
But that's one vision officials have for this former manufacturing town, which is growing more vacant every year as residents move elsewhere -- leading to more empty homes in need of demolishing and more vacant lots harboring nuisance weeds.
A new draft report completed for Flint's master plan process shows the city has at least 11,298 vacant lots within its 33 square miles, and another nearly 6,000 houses that were rated poor or substandard in a citywide survey of Flint's housing stock.
All told, Flint has a $50 million demolition problem, Mayor Dayne Walling said in his State of the City address Monday, Feb. 18.
More vacant space and empty housing present city leaders with a challenge: How to pay for a citywide infrastructure system that's serving fewer people and how to eliminate the escalating blight.
In some of the more vacant residential neighborhoods, where crime and abandonment are high, Walling said more "healthy green space" could help the city provide services to residents at a lower cost.
Services wouldn't be cut off to any areas of the city, he said, just modified.
"A neighborhood that has a lot of vacant land could have a new pond and wetland put in to replace the old concrete stormwater pipes," Walling said in his State of the City address Monday. "This would create a kind of green and healthy new development type of environment in a neighborhood that is highly distressed today."
To deal with the poor housing stock, the Genesee County Land Bank was recently awarded a $3.7 million blight elimination grant from the state.
The money is only enough to take down less than 7 percent of the thousands of structures in need of demolition -- but it will help, said Genesee County Land Bank Executive Director Doug Weiland.
The residential demolition will be targeted in several areas that were chosen based on guidelines set by the state, which included proximity to schools and leveraging demolition that's already occurred.
Weiland said much of the demolition will be done in the areas around Flint Northwestern High School, Northern High School and the International Academy of Flint. A small portion will be razed in Mt. Morris Township, Flint Township and Burton, he said.
The Land Bank will also attempt to deal with vacant lots over the next year or so. It owns about 4,000 of the vacant lots in Flint -- a number that will likely grow with each new demolition.
"When you do a demolition and take a house down, the houses don’t grow back but the weeds do," he said. "We’re trying to move forward now with taking a lot of areas and taking land and trying to grade it over and plant ground cover."
Weiland said he wants to start a pilot program in Flint that would take areas with adjacent vacant parcels and plant clover, which doesn't require labor-intensive maintenance like grass and weeds.
He said they're investigating potential funding sources this year.
"It would require a significant amount of funds over a number of years but the payoff in the end would be worth it," he said.
Weiland said the Land Bank is also in talks with its founder, now-U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, about getting more resources to do more demolition and blight elimination.
"I think everybody here agrees the blighted property we have in Flint is of the magnitude that it's going to require federal action," he said.
Kildee said it's one of his office's top priorities that he hopes to address this year.
As for Flint's land use issues, he said it makes sense for Flint's leaders to examine interim uses for vacant space -- such as community gardens and other green initiatives -- that will cut costs while Flint attempts to recover from its financial struggles.
Years down the road, Flint may be able to again rebuild its housing stock in those spaces, he said.
"The most important thing is to take the land and use it for what it's intended for... and not look at it as an indication of failure," he said. "Nobody should perceive the greening of what was once a neighborhood as a permanent condition." | <urn:uuid:40853552-ef07-45c5-84ba-bed300a83734> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2013/02/fields_of_clover_flint_studyin.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978036 | 849 | 2 | 2 |
The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was developed in 2004, with the objective of creating a space of prosperity, stability and security between the enlarged EU and her Eastern and Southern neighbours.
Based on common values, such as democracy, human rights, the rule of law as well as principles of market economy, the European Neighbourhood Policy aims at a privileged partnership with sixteen States: Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Moldova, Morocco, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Syria, Tunisia and Ukraine. Independent from the EU-enlargement process, the European Neighbourhood Policy envisages deepened political relations as well as economic integration, while both depend on progress in reforms and commitment to the above mentioned values.
The joint communication “A New Response to a Changing Neighbourhood” by the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and the European Commission inspired a debate about the future of the European Neighbourhood Policy. In its Council Conclusions of 20 June 2011, the Foreign Affairs Council agreed on a number of guiding principles for the future of the European Neighbourhood Policy. It states that future EU support “will be tailored to the needs of partners willing to undertake reforms and to cooperate effectively with the EU in all relevant domains, and may be reconsidered where reform does not take place.” Austria welcomes the proposed principles for the ENP-reform and in particular the new focus on conditionality and differentiation between the sixteen partner countries.
In 2009, the Eastern Partnership was created as a specific Eastern dimension of the European Neighbourhood Policy. It encompasses new Association Agreements, deep and comprehensive free trade agreements as well as enhanced mobility and security through visa facilitation and re-admission agreements with the six neighbouring countries.
Besides, the Eastern Partnership offers a multilateral framework for cooperation between the six partner countries, including four thematic platforms. In addition, regular summit meetings are organized. The next summit will take place in September 2011 in Warsaw. | <urn:uuid:88b83492-d805-4773-94e2-422947858cd6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bmeia.gv.at/en/foreign-ministry/foreign-policy/europe/neighbourhood-policy.html?ADMCMD_editIcons=' | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948404 | 418 | 2.421875 | 2 |
post on my Polar Bears but did not have many pictures of it's adaptation for the classroom.
I completed this year's Polar Bears with Grade 1 last week and presented it as part of this weekend's workshop with Calgary teachers so I thought I would update this post for all of you out there in blogland!
At school we do this project on paper that is about 12 X 18............
- watercolor paper
- blue and purple tempera disks
- gesso or white liquid tempera
- stencils (see template 1 and template 2)
- plastic cling wrap
- plastic cup
- fine sharpie
Tape down your paper to an art board. I get the kids to lightly pencil in a horizon line.
They paint in a purple sky.
While the paint is wet we quickly wrap a Kleenex on the bottom of a plastic cup....
and then press onto the painting where we want the moon to be...count to 10 and then lift the cup.
We then take a little salt and add it to our sky hoping to get a little snow effect....make sure to leave that salt on until the sky is fully dry.
Paint in your ice.....
Have your plastic cling wrap ready to go and while the blue paint is still wet......
...lay it on the blue paint along the horizon line.
If the paint has dried before you were able to wrestle that plastic wrap onto it just re moisten it with another pass of the brush.
Take the template, cut it out and trace it onto thin cardboard (cereal box). Then cut it out...I always cheat and just cut through one of the sides, I then just tape it back together.
I find with kids it's good to have lots of cardboard space outside of the stencil shape as they can get a little eager in their pouncing.
At the weekend workshop I gave everyone a little bear stencil that I cut out using the Cricut (come in handy when you need 80 stencils), using transparency sheets.
This art project can easily be adapted to a black bear project making a summer or fall background (note to self: Make up a Black Bear Stencil Project) hopefully you'll see that one soon posted!
The kids hold the stencil in place and pounce in white liquid tempera or gesso. The gesso is nice because it so thick it actually adds a furry texture.
You need to wipe off the stencil a bit with paper towel before using it with the next student so you won't have any smudges.
I have the kids practice pouncing up and down, you don't want brushing back and forth as the paint brush bristles may actually get under the stencil.
Let dry and then using the sharpie you can add the nose, eyes, and a few claws.
That's it...Great work Grade 1!!
See you next time. | <urn:uuid:3f6ea12d-d7d3-49b8-b6b5-0f3ad14c0a5e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thatartistwoman.org/2011/01/polar-bears-revisited.html?showComment=1308231532998 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923991 | 607 | 2.28125 | 2 |
Koch-Funded Plan in Development to Teach K-12 Kids Global Warming isn’t Real
from Wildlife PromiseAh, the old ‘teach the controversy’ gambit. If there’s an easier, more cynical way of casting doubt on reality, I haven’t seen it yet!
Case in point: ThinkProgress Green says it has acquired documents that show the partly Koch and ExxonMobil-funded Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank, is working on developing a curriculum for K-12 schools intended to paint global warming as “a major scientific controversy” rather than the systematically-reached conclusion of decades of peer review and careful research. (Update: the Heartland Institute has since issued an advisory claiming that the documents are ‘fake and stolen.’ Stay tuned.)
The curriculum will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, who has worked as a consultant for multiple coal interests and is an old hand at ‘making the case for uncertainty’ in climate science:
Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy“), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).
This project would apparently cost about $100,000—chump change compared to the $8 million Koch Industries spent lobbying Congress in 2011. I guess even veterans of the science obfuscation game learn new tricks sometimes (though not all of ‘em work out).
Sadly, this isn’t a new wrinkle. Last year, a libertarian school board member pressured California’s Los Alamitos Unified School District to make sure a new environmental science class includes “multiple perspectives” on climate—namely, those that accuse scientists of being dogmatic worrywarts—and education experts (ahem) like Rush Limbaugh and Jim Hoft have made a habit of excoriating the so-called ‘junk science’ that informs environmental education in between reports on President Obama’s birth certificate.
These measures try to paint educators as, at best, irresponsible—at worst, bent on keeping kids from the truth. The implication that some contrarian curriculum is all it takes to set things right only adds insult to injury, and at a time when many students are struggling.
Any scientist would tell you that there’s a high bar for what is conclusive. But when the preponderance of legitimate climate scientists confirm that global warming is manmade and a threat to life on earth, can the remainder even be considered capable of controversy? Aren’t they more like the random guy on the metro with a theory about the moon landing being a hoax? Should we teach that one too?
(As an aside: I definitely do plan on picking up a ‘Teach the Controversy’ t-shirt soon.)
If you’d like to help America’s kids learn accurate, balanced environmental science, ask Congress to pass the No Child Left Inside Act, a bill to help states develop stronger K-12 environmental literacy programs.
For more information on environmental education, check out Eco-Schools USA’s Climate Change pathway on incorporating global warming education into the curriculum in a practical and instructive way. You can also see the Guidelines for Excellence developed by the North American Association for Environmental Education or the reworked Framework for K-12 Science Education, from the National Academies’ Board on Science Education. | <urn:uuid:17ff4f65-ca7e-4f15-8884-15ff57c76959> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.nwf.org/2012/02/koch-funded-plan-in-development-to-teach-k-12-kids-global-warming-isnt-real/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92549 | 778 | 1.960938 | 2 |
A short while ago in this space, I criticized the Fed's efforts to depress long-term interest rates, and urged the Bank of Canada and the federal government to avoid doing the same in Canada. No matter how persuasive I was, savers face a few rough years, and even the boomers still some years from retiring may see mediocre returns until they do.
If you, like me, hold lots of dull, low-yielding assets, you're probably tempted to flip the page. This magazine has lots of advice about boosting returns-getting some "alpha" from your assets-so you can retire richer. But the simpler, safer route to a secure retirement is this: work a few years longer.
I sense some pages turning. If you're still with me, though, here are two thoughts to start.
First, consider what many of the readers who flipped ahead are thinking: "The smart money-the pension funds-are into real estate, infrastructure, and private equity. They see alpha there. So I should get some too." Trouble is, those readers will be bidding against people who are buying that stuff not just because they're smart, but because they have to.
Most pension fund managers do not control their liabilities. Plan sponsors do that. The sponsor makes promises that cost, say, 5% after inflation, then tells the asset manager: "Earn that!" So the manager buys riskier assets, hoping for the required return. That doesn't necessarily end happily. Certainly not for the many pension plans whose risky plays have already landed them in deep holes. And especially not for the retail investor who gets only what the big players leave behind.
Second, alpha is seductive. Why work, when my money can work for me? True-if a timely payoff were guaranteed. But risk is risk. Over a three-year time horizon, a eurozone meltdown, for example, could devastate your savings. At least a lottery ticket limits your downside.
The math is compelling: a few extra years of work can boost your retirement income far more when you take risk into account. Consider one of those hypothetical readers who flipped ahead. He's 52, earns $100,000 annually, has $400,000 in savings, and will save $20,000 a year until retirement. He expects low-risk returns in line with economic growth, say about 2% after inflation. (We'll ignore taxes and government retirement benefits to keep things simple.) If he retires at 62, his nest egg will pay out $42,000 a year until he's 82. But if he works until age 65-just three more years of saving-then his nest egg will provide a much larger annual income of $56,000.
Could he get that increase by getting a higher investment return instead? Yes-if he could get his return up to 3.5% after inflation, year-in year-out. Maybe the smart-money pension plans can get that. And plenty of promoters promise it. But risk is risk. Undershoot the 2% low-risk return by the same margin, and if he wants to get that $56,000 annual payout, he'll have to work until he's 69.
Here in the real world, the message that working longer pays off is getting through. Over the decade ending in 2011, the average retirement age for private-sector workers rose by nearly two years. Even governments, whose pension-plan payouts are far outpacing contributions, are starting to get their workers to stay on the job longer. Take into account the delay in Old Age Security, and the fact that the Canada and Quebec pension plans will pay more to people who put off receiving their benefits, and later retirement becomes even more attractive.
The guy who flipped ahead has other thoughts. By now, he might be trolling the investment forums looking for hot tips, ready to challenge the sharpest operators in the financial world. It's too late to tell him that working longer can deliver higher retirement income far more reliably than riskier investing. (And perhaps note that people who work longer often live longer too.)
Those messages are for those of us still on this page. And don't worry that the guy who flipped ahead might chill out ahead of you. His risky quest for alpha will keep him tense, and likely keep him working, years after you've cashed out.
William Robson is president and CEO of the C. D. Howe Institute
More stories from Canadian Business
latest money galleries
canadian press - Business
We mine the markets for gold miners with Pawel Rajszel, Equity Analyst, Veritas
Date 13-05-17, Duration 6:54, Views 633 | <urn:uuid:e619940d-c1c4-4076-9a8a-54cace506537> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://money.ca.msn.com/investing/canadian-business/work-longer-and-retire-better | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965848 | 962 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Jonathan Bernstein responds to my post on reforming the presidential appointment process with a convincing case for the merits of the status quo:
At it's best, the system will achieve input from national level interests (through the presidency), relevant local and narrow interests (through Congress), and expertise (through the bureaucracy). Moreover, at its best, the incentives within the system will push everyone to compete for control of policy, which should -- by forcing people to defend their positions, and choose which things are worth fighting for -- yield better policy in the long run.
I should say that I broadly agree with Bernstein. To walk back a little from my previous stridency, it's a good thing that the president can staff the bureaucracy with people committed to his political ideals, and a good thing -- as far as democracy goes -- that the bureaucracy is permeable and (somewhat) responsive to electoral demands. As someone who mostly supports robust presidential action, I agree that executive-branch appointments "are an important weapon for the president, and one that shouldn't be taken from him."
That said, democratic accountability and bureaucratic permeability doesn't necessitate a regime where -- from the outset -- the White House is responsible for recruiting and screening tens of thousands of people for thousands of positions. For the Office of Presidential Personnel, which is mostly responsible for the grunt work of presidential appointments, the sheer volume of people reduces its effectiveness, lengthens the appointment process, and slows the staffing of a new administration. Presidents need their own people in place throughout government in order to have a responsible government, yes, but the truth is that the president hardly knows most of the people appointed in his name. These people may be personally loyal to the president, or they may not, and they aren't necessarily responsive to the president's concerns.
Granted, a high volume of presidential appointees makes sense if the bureaucracy is hostile to political influence, but it's not clear that's the case; in at least the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administration's, an overwhelming majority of political appointees agreed that high-level civil servants were responsive to the needs of the administration. I understand the need and rationale for presidential appointments on the leadership and high-level subordinate level, but I don't think that extends to the countless low-level political appointees. I might be mistaken here, but I think you could significantly reduce the number of low-level appointees without actually harming the president's ability to bend and influence the bureaucracy.
-- Jamelle Bouie
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(If there's one thing we know about comment trolls, it's that they're lazy) | <urn:uuid:70344fb1-cebf-48c9-995c-8aeb8939cb10> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://prospect.org/article/more-presidential-appointments | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965448 | 542 | 1.601563 | 2 |
It’s Flag Day, and that means the flags and lips were flapping in equal measure. Here’s what a few MPs had to say about the day marking when the maple leaf flag first flew above parliament in 1965.
James Moor, Minister of Canadian Heritage
On this date 47 years ago, the red and white maple leaf flag was raised for the first time on Parliament Hill, in communities across Canada and at Canadian embassies around the world.
Every year on Feb. 15, we celebrate National Flag of Canada Day. This celebration encourages us to learn about the symbols that define us as Canadians.
This year, we commemorate two important milestones that have contributed to who we are today: the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 and Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee.
The 200th anniversary of the War of the 1812 marks a landmark event in our history. It helped determine the kind of country we are today: an independent country with its own parliamentary system.
This is also the Diamond Jubilee year of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The 60th anniversary of Her Majesty’s accession to the Throne reminds us of the central role of the Crown in our ongoing evolution as a country.
Our Government is proud to celebrate our national flag and to honour all those who have borne the Canadian flag and have represented our nation around the world. On behalf of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Government of Canada, I invite all Canadians to visit www.canada.gc.ca/flagday to learn more about this powerful symbol of our country and reflect on what it represents.
Bob Rae, Liberal interim leader
On this day, 47 years ago, the maple leaf flew for the first time as our official national symbol. Since then the red and white maple leaf flag has been proudly worn by our athletes in international competitions and sewn on the backpacks of Canadians traveling abroad.
The Canadian flag has become a ubiquitous symbol of both worldliness and hospitality across the globe. That worldliness took on a whole new meaning in 1981, when the Canadarm was deployed from the Columbia space shuttle; the world saw an amazing piece of technology that donned our flag.
Today, as we look at the Canadian flag and consider its significance and its history, I would like to salute the determined leadership of Lester B. Pearson during the flag debate. I also extend our appreciation to former Liberal Member of Parliament from Leeds, John Matheson, who still lives in Kingston today, and who was the driving force behind the multi-party committee to select the maple leaf flag, and later helped develop the Order of Canada.
On behalf of the Liberal Party of Canada and our Parliamentary Caucus, I wish all Canadians a happy Flag Day.
Judy Sgro, Liberal MP for York West
Mr. Speaker, it was on this day in 1965 that, under the watch of Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson, the maple leaf flag was first raised over the Peace Tower here in Ottawa. Since that day, nearly half a century ago, the maple leaf has served as a banner and as a beacon to millions.
For more than 47 years the red and white maple leaf flag has fluttered over our heads as a reminder that this nation has been built through the hard work and dedication of both those born here and by those who have adopted Canada as their home.
Together we have constructed a society that cares for the vulnerable, values our seniors, educates our children and celebrates the diversity of languages, cultures and beliefs ascribed to by our neighbours.
Canada’s national flag may be unpretentious but it represents so much more. It represents a trust that is placed in each one of us, to leave our children a Canada better than the one given to us.
Mr. Wladyslaw Lizon, Conservative MP for Mississauga East—Cooksville
Mr. Speaker, today we celebrate National Flag of Canada Day. It has been 47 years since our national flag was inaugurated. Our national flag, designed by George Francis Gillman Stanley and John Matheson, made its first appearance on February 15, 1965, and now the date is celebrated annually as National Flag of Canada Day.
Although simple in design, Canada’s flag well reflects the common values we hold so dear: freedom, peace, respect, justice and tolerance. The maple leaf flag pays homage to our geography, reflects the grandeur of our history and represents our national identity. Canada’s flag is a symbol that unites and honours Canadians of all origins who through their courage and determination have helped to build, and are continuing to build, our great country.
Let us be proud of our flag. Let us recognize how privileged we are to live here in Canada, this magnificent country that encompasses our history, our hopes and our future.
John Carmichael, Conservative MP for Don Valley West
Mr. Speaker, the maple leaf forever. It was not our flag until this date in 1965, but our flag has become part of us. It reflects our courage and determination as we work together to build this great country.
Although it was not the flag of Sir John A. or Mr. Diefenbaker, it is our flag today. It was our flag when we welcomed the world at Expo for our centennial, when Paul Henderson defeated the Soviets 40 years ago, and is now when we send the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces overseas to defend freedom and the rule of law.
We are proud to be here representing Canadians under our single red maple leaf that was raised 47 years ago. On behalf of our Conservative government, I would like to wish all Canadians a happy Flag Day. | <urn:uuid:37ed2edb-2f09-4f23-8259-bd80238e8530> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ipolitics.ca/2012/02/15/for-the-record-the-maple-leaf-at-47/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950706 | 1,160 | 3.109375 | 3 |
Welcome to Pandora's Aquarium, a rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse survivor message board and chat room.
If you've been a victim of any type of sexual violence, you belong here. What you see below represents just a fraction of the resources and survivor support available. Register now to join our community and take full advantage of what this online support group has to offer you as you heal and recover, or sign in to remove this message.
You are not alone, we can support you as you heal, and you've made an important step toward recovery by reaching out. If you are unable to register or have any questions, please contact the staff or view our home page.
Coping with Anger complied by Lauren
Posted 08 November 2009 - 12:37 PM
•Dark art (poetry, painting, sculpting, other writing)
•Exercise (running, walking, boxing, swimming, elliptical trainer, weight training, bike rides, yoga, martial arts, push ups)
•Throwing ice cubes in the bathtub
•Ripping up old magazines of phonebooks
•Playing drums. They can be built by pillows, also heard of wooden plates covered with carpet... The "drums" shouldn't be solid hard, coz it damages the wrist. Sticks need to be bought.
•Baking... You are kind of supposed to knead the dough thoroughly!
•Music to awaken the "underlying" emotions
•Visualize yourself yelling and screaming and whatever you'd like to do but can't
•It can also be put in the Containment box and dealt with sometime in the future
•Scream into a pillow, cushion, or blanket
•Punch a punching bag or pillow
•Release energy through positive/healthy sexual interaction
•Having a good cry
•Clean, dust, vacuum, sort through junk
•Take pictures of relaxing things to help you relax
•Play a game to calm things down inside
•Vipassana meditation: Experiencing anger in the form of bodily sensations, while observing it with a balanced mind was the most powerful thing I ever experienced.
•Count to 10 or 100 or whatever you need to count to.
•Put it in perspective
•Do another activity until the anger subsides
•Go on Pandy’s
•Journal to vent
•Don't hold grudges for longer than necessary
•Talk or vent to a friend
•Drawing or scribbling on a piece of paper
•Throw a tennis ball or stress ball against the wall
•Listen to loud music
•Say bad words
•Vent to your therapist if you have one
•Get in bed and pout and throw a tantrum like a 3 year old
•Write the name of somebody who hurt or is bothering you on toilet paper, with felt pen, then flush it away
•Go out to the sea or to the air port at take off time and shout as loud as you can
•Watch TV/ movies
•Drink something soothing like hot tea or hot chocolate
•Take prescription medication if you have it | <urn:uuid:b1398271-f65d-4bcd-bcd7-b530dd009b32> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pandys.org/forums/index.php?s=b481f8e8a78ee0f478fe32a632dddec6&showtopic=130669&pid=1078965&st=0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919865 | 644 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Bodie is a ghost town in the Bodie Hills east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Mono County, California, about 75 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe.
Bodie is an original mining town from the late 1800's. What's left today stands in a state of "arrested decay" and is maintained by the California State Parks System, who took over the town in 1962 to make it a State Historic Park. Only about five percent of the buildings it contained during its 1880 heyday still remain.
In 1859 William (a.k.a. Waterman) S. Bodey discovered gold near what is now called Bodie Bluff. Bodie began as a mining camp of little note following the discovery of gold in 1859 by a group of prospectors, including W. S. Bodey perished in a blizzard the following November while making a supply trip to Monoville never getting to see the rise of the town that was named after him. A mill was established in 1861 and the town began to grow. It started with about 20 miners and grew to an estimated 10,000 people by 1880! By then, the town of Bodie bustled with families, robbers, miners, store owners, gunfighters, prostitutes and people from every country in the world. At one time there was reported to be 65 saloons in town. Among the saloons were numerous brothels and 'houses of ill repute', gambling halls and opium dens - an entertainment outlet for everyone. | <urn:uuid:7222beb8-a755-45b4-ac42-4890f13e2e35> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marantettephotos.com/Portfolio/Bodie-Ghost-Town/25835897_L5jNQs/1/2139250217_MvG2SFd/Small | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974284 | 310 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Officials are warning Oklahomans in the southwestern part of the state about a spike in dog thefts.
In the past six months, the number of dogs being stolen has doubled in Commanche and Caddo Counties. The thieves are targeting smaller and more expensive breeds in order to sell them.
The problem has become so bad that animal activists are urging dog owners to take extra precautions.
"There was a couple that actually were caught on video camera going over a fence and stealing a dog out of a yard in Snyder," said Jean Whetstone, a concerned resident.
Authorities say the best way to protect your pet is to get them microchipped. Animal activists advise those buying a dog to get it checked for a microchip to make sure it has not been stolen. | <urn:uuid:b47909e2-9391-450b-a8ee-ff32805d8fa1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.koco.com/news/oklahomanews/around-oklahoma/Dog-thefts-rise-in-parts-of-Oklahoma/-/12530084/18337702/-/kngqhu/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976433 | 161 | 2.203125 | 2 |
Baltimore's former health commissioner has come out with a way that just might get regular people to care about public policy -- he mixes in a heavy dose of "The Wire."
Dr. Peter Beilenson, who's now Howard County's chief health officer has written a book with journalist Patrick McGuire called "Tapping into The Wire: The Real Urban Crisis." Each chapter is a different scene from the beloved HBO show, but with the storylines broadened to examine public policy questions.
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, the 232-pager comes out Sept. 6, but it's already available for pre-order -- and it already has a raving review from Omar.
"Living in Baltimore for most of the five years that I filmed The Wire," actor Michael Kenneth Williams writes, "I was astounded to see how closely life mirrors art for too many residents of this — and most other — major cities in America. I hope the readers of this intriguing book really 'feel' the problems that are highlighted and emerge committed to change."
Here's how Amazon describes the book:
"Did Omar Little die of lead poisoning? Would a decriminalization strategy like the one in Hamsterdam end the War on Drugs? What will it take to save neglected kids like Wallace and Dukie? Tapping into 'The Wire' uses the acclaimed television series as a road map for exploring connections between inner-city poverty and drug-related violence. Past Baltimore City health commissioner Peter Beilenson teams up with former Baltimore Sun reporter Patrick A. McGuire to deliver a compelling, highly readable examination of urban policy and public health issues affecting cities across the nation."
According to Amazon, even if you didn't watch the show, one would be able to get into the book.
Beilenson, who has also taught a public heath class at Hopkins with a 'Wire' theme, and McGuire will talk about their book at the Enoch Pratt Free Library at 7 p.m. Sept. 11.
@BaltInsider on Twitter | <urn:uuid:bfaec511-33ee-458f-8214-538cd6a34de3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/baltimore-insider-blog/bal-wire-book-20120828,0,1093530.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95437 | 414 | 1.710938 | 2 |
6-Minute NASA Rocket Launch Tracks Solar 'Nanoflares'
A look down the telescope tube on FOXSI ¬ (Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager)¬ reveals state-of-the-art optics that will help focus hard x-rays, which usually simply pass right through telescope mirrors.
CREDIT: NASA/S. Christe
NASA scientists launched a small telescope into space this month to study faint flares on the sun. But there's a twist: The mission took less time than it takes to hard-boil an egg.
The solar telescope flew atop suborbital sounding rocket on Nov. 2 during the short 6-minute flight, which launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico aboard. The rocket, which is designed to fly experiments into space but not orbit the Earth, carried the Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager (or FOXSI) to study small changes in the sun's weather.
Though short-lived, the 200-mile (321 kilometers) rocket flight could provide new data on mysterious solar nanoflares — tiny, sudden bursts of energy that constantly erupt on the sun's surface. As their name suggests, nanoflares are much smaller and thus harder to see than the massive solar flares that get attention for wreaking havoc on Earth's electronics and communications networks.
"Most people like to look at the really big flares. They're complicated and do crazy things," Steven Christe, project scientist for FOXSI at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement a day before launch. [Amazing Solar Flare Photos]
FOXSI, however, was geared to check out at very faint events using a next-generation X-ray telescope with extra sensitive optics. During the six minutes of intense data gathering, the telescope was to focus on an active region on the sun with big, dancing solar flares before fixing on a quieter region to glimpse an unobstructed patch of smaller flares, NASA said.
Scientists at the space agency hope the mission will shed light on the makeup of nanoflares and their relation to their bigger, more boisterous counterparts.
"There are two basic possibilities," said Christe. "One is that small flares are similar to large flares. But then we'd have to explain why they appear at a different rate and in different places than the big ones. So we need to determine whether these small events are really happening all the time, all over the sun."
The other possibility, Christe said, is that nanoflares are fundamentally different than large flares, which would be "extremely interesting" and would suggest a difference in the physics of the two types of flares.
Data gathered by FOXSI also might help explain how the sun's atmosphere gets so much hotter than the surface.
"If you think of a stove, the surface of the stove is hotter, and the air gets cooler as you move farther away," Säm Krucker, the principal investigator for FOXSI, explained in a statement. "But with the sun, something else is happening to make the atmosphere 1,000 times hotter than the surface."
MORE FROM SPACE.com | <urn:uuid:c3dc046c-c9b4-4218-aab9-4ea25f4cea8c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.space.com/18482-nasa-solar-nanoflares-telescope.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939346 | 656 | 3.53125 | 4 |
Matt Kelley, What's So Funny About Prison Rape?, Change.org,
August 18, 2009
An excellent post yesterday from Anna Clark at Alternet explores a question I've grappled with for a long time: Why is it ok to make jokes about rape in prison?
Pop culture and casual conversation are rife with references to the sexual assault of prisoners by fellow prisoners or corrections officers, and this lighthearted treatment of such horrible violence is complicit in the problem itself. What's more, the jokes reveal a deeper belief held by some that prisoners deserve this as part of their punishment. Commenters here at change.org have responded to previous posts about sexual assault in prison with this sentiment. I can't imagine a more repugnant and counterproductive idea.
Speaking of repugnant, Clark points in her piece to one of the more disturbing treatments of prison rape in recent years - a board game sold by John Sebelius, son of Kathleen Sebelius, the misspeaking Health and Human Services Secretary. John Sebelius developed a game called "Don't Drop the Soap," which invites players to "escape prison riots in The Yard, slip glass into a mob boss' lasagna in the Cafeteria, steal painkillers from the nurse's desk in the Infirmary, avoid being cornered by the Aryans in the Shower Room, fight off Latin Kings in Gang War, and try not to smoke your entire stash in The Hole..."
Linda McFarlane, the deputy executive director of Just Detention International and a change.org contributor, told Alternet that the pop culture treatment of prison rape is a major reason it is still such a pervasive problem.
"Humor is part of the cultural attitude that (prison) is the one place where rape is okay," McFarlane said.
McFarlane added that, "Jokes target the pain of a particular group of people and dehumanizes them. … It layers the discourse with a veil of acceptance."
Clark also makes the important distinction in her post that for all of the jokes about the rape of men in prison, there is an overwhelming silence about sexual assault of women. She writes:
There’s no soap-dropping counterpart "joke" referring to the abuse of female inmates. Ultimately, these distorted punch-line/silence memes enforce each other and perpetuate the reality of prison rape.
Prison rape can be stopped, and ending pop culture's lighthearted treatment of the issue would be an important step in the right direction. A federal commission on prison rape released its recommendations in June for the first-ever binding national standards on the issue. Attorney General Eric Holder has a year to review the proposed standards. The commission's recommendations include:
* an attitude of zero tolerance for any kind of sexual abuse in any facility
* improved hiring practices for facility staff
* consideration of the inmates’ risk for rape (including physical stature, sexual preference, gender identity, and age) when placing them in bunks and programs
* stringent internal and external oversight
* staff training
* medical and mental health services for survivors
But you can do your part to stop prison rape by calling out casual jokes about the issue when you hear them and refusing to support movies, TV shows and wacknut board games when they make light of this injustice. | <urn:uuid:9e9068ff-ee62-4711-a0fb-28431d5172d4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.justdetention.org/en/jdinews/2009/081809.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93783 | 676 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Living Wage Effects: New and Improved Evidence
NBER Working Paper No. 9702
This paper explores the effects of living wages on low-wage workers and low-income families. First, we update our earlier analyses, using data for 1996-2002, and address a number of criticisms of those analyses. We confirm our earlier findings that business assistance living wage laws boost wages of the lowest-wage workers, at the cost of some disemployment, but on net reduce urban poverty. Second, we expand the analysis of distributional effects beyond looking just at the poverty threshold. We do not find that living wages increase the depth of poverty among families that remain poor, and we find that families somewhat below and somewhat above the poverty line are also helped by living wages. Finally, we suggest that the poverty reductions generated by living wages may stem from income gains for individuals with higher wages or skills who are nonetheless in poor families, rather than for the lowest-wage or lowest-skill individuals.
Published: Adams, Scott and David Neumark. "Living Wage Effects: New And Improved Evidence," Economic Development Quarterly, 2005, v19(1,Feb), , 80-102. | <urn:uuid:69275aec-8a98-4d45-a850-a35a0f840e21> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nber.org/papers/w9702 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916803 | 237 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Updated 04/11/2012 06:58 PM
Senator Little introduces invasive species bill
As YNN's Matt Hunter reports, environmental groups may soon have a new tool in their fight against the spread of invasive species, thanks to a proposed piece of legislation.
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LAKE GEORGE, N.Y. – "Once invasives get in a lake, it's very hard to do anything," Lake George Association (LGA) Director of Education Emily DeBolt said.
Environmental groups like the LGA have had their hands full in recent years trying to combat the spread of invasive species. Numerous varieties like Asian Clams and Eurasian Water Milfoil have spread throughout Warren County's largest body of water.
"Obviously we come to Lake George to boat because it's clean and clear and beautiful and if it was no longer that way, there would be very large economic impacts as well," DeBolt said.
To aid them in their fight, state lawmakers passed a bill in 2008 regulating invasive species. Taking it one step further, State Senator Betty Little from Queensbury recently introduced an amendment that would ban the sale or transport of certain invasive species and impose up to a $250 fine for anyone caught selling them.
In a statement, Little said, “Invasive species are not only an ecological threat, but also an economic one. Once they take hold, managing and eradicating invasives can be very costly and time-consuming. Preventing the introduction of invasive species through education, common-sense guidelines and if need be, financial penalties, is the best approach. And given our region's dependence on tourism and sportsmen activities, the importance of better protecting our streams, rivers and lakes is a given."
"It's [legislation] just going to be one more step but it's a very important step and an important tool to help us move forward with preventing these invasions," DeBolt said.
While groups like the LGA support the bill, others, including retailers of plants and animals do not. Many of the potentially banned species are commonly used in home gardens, ponds or aquariums.
Getting rid of all that plant and marine life could prove costly for retailers and home owners alike.
While they don’t pose a direct threat to public waterways, invasive species in personal ponds or gardens can be transported by wildlife, boats or by natural events, like floods.
In one Queensbury yard where landscaper Dave Linehan from Jim Girard Landscaping was working Wednesday, Linehan showed YNN a half-dozen plants that could potentially be banned.
"This [Oriental Bittersweet] is probably one of the more controversial plants that are being considered or to be nominated to be listed in New York State," said Linehan, who represents the New York State Nursery Landscape Association and serves on the group’s advisory board.
While Linehan says he believes regulation is necessary, he thinks the bill is unfair because it's yet to be determined which species will be banned. His industry and environmental groups remain at odds while lawmakers debate the bill.
"I'd like to see continued discussion and I'd like to see the actual process for listing actually be hard lined so we know what's ahead of us,” Linehan said.
"We're spending millions of dollars managing invasives and if they can just keep coming back in, then it's really just an uphill battle," DeBolt said.
The bill is expected to be voted on sometime around Earth Day later this month.
If it becomes law, the DEC and Department of Agriculture and Markets will host public hearings and develop a list of banned species. | <urn:uuid:b41f30d9-2a20-4b0d-a6a7-71b97790bf1c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mohawkvalley.ynn.com/content/top_stories/580228/senator-little-introduces-invasive-species-bill/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958337 | 782 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Shucking the shackles of the inner geek
The University of NSW has launched a course dealing with hard-nosed business aspects of IT, aiming to give human management skills to graduates that match their technical prowess.
The course is based on the premise that students must develop strong business skills if they are going to become the chief information officers of the future.
Lecturer Loretta O'Donnell is teaching the human side of technology and innovation as part of the master of information systems course, after hearing from students that they have no experience in managing and motivating people.
Ms O'Donnell says her students are pleased to have tools and techniques needed to think through management problems and to create innovative approaches.
A theme is for students to consider themselves as much people managers as system designers.
She says some IT people are "fringe dwellers" those who fix problems but often miss out on team meetings and strategic planning. "I think some of this marginalisation could be a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that IT people may prefer to take on the stereotyped roles and so are treated accordingly," Ms O'Donnell says.
"One of the principles in this course is that IT professionals can be proactive in making change at all levels, including changing themselves, and so begin the process of changing others' perceptions of them."
Student Danny Xiao agrees. He says IT is quick to cop the blame if things go awry, but praise usually goes somewhere else. The full-time UNSW student says he worked in IT for a company in which the business team owed an excellent quarter to a critical IT implementation.
"Presenting to the president, the sales manager praised his team, his marketing strategies and his sales reps. Fortunately the IT manager was on the spot to grab at least a little of the glory for us," Mr Xiao says. "But in another quarter the same sales manager had pretty poor results this time he shared the problem with IT and said the result was mainly due to the system tool not being stable.
"There's an analogy with office cleaners you don't see what a good job they're doing until one day the office is dirty. The same with IT nobody worries about it until something goes wrong and then all the blame goes on to the technology department."
Mr Xiao says the course covers self-management, such as how to cope with challenges, and how to lead a team, manage organisations and many other communications skills.
He has high expectations and hopes he can learn more about project and people management, and business communication.
Kevin Jin, enterprise architect with Sydney Water, says he hopes the course will slide him over from development to systems architecture and management.
"Information technologies are very hard to master, taking time and energy, and many professionals are only interested in this skill," he says. "I believe this is a dangerous mistake because IT is only a tool to enable business processes and sustain business competitiveness.
"The most important factor in IT is people your team members, your customers and stakeholders. I believe this human management capsule can break the ice for me to further develop my ability to manage people.
"Lack of these skills can hinder a person's career. I believe this course focuses on providing guidance to become modern managers in the IT industry." | <urn:uuid:6c1b7fa3-4d76-48d5-9ba0-cb00ee099535> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-training/shucking-the-shackles-of-the-inner-geek/2005/08/15/1123957995163.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97699 | 668 | 2.234375 | 2 |
Half the world’s forests have now disappeared and, according to the UN, a further 13 million hectares are lost every year. Even more has been converted from rich primary forest to monoculture plantations.
At the current rate of deforestation, the world’s rainforests could disappear in 100 years.
Deforestation accounts for around 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and is the biggest immediate threat to biodiversity.
But as well as being home to half of all endangered species, diverse forests provide livelihoods to communities and indigenous people around the world.
Find out more about FoE International's work on forests and biodiversity.
Plantations in the South are increasingly being used to grow agro-fuels for the European and North American markets. The international trade in soy and palm oil in particular is unsustainable.
Increased demand may also lead to a bigger concentration of major multinational companies in the agricultural market and increased pressure on scarce resources such as water.
Growing crops for agrofuels is already contributing to increases in food prices with potentially dire consequences for the world’s rural and urban poor.
Find out more about FoE Europe’s agro-fuels campaign.
Land grabbing occurs when land that was previously used by local communities is bought by or leased to outside investors, often multinational corporations. The land is then taken over for the production of food and agro-fuels to sell on the international market.
In some cases land grabbing by multinationals has led to serious human rights violations, as communities are forced off their land to make way for large scale plantations.
Read FOE Europe’s report Africa: up for grabs – the scale and impact of land-grabbing for agro-fuels.
REDD stands for "reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries." It is a financial mechanism that was set up to ensure that governments, companies and forest owners in the South are compensated for not chopping down their forests. Find out more about how REDD works.
Indigenous peoples and local communities are being marginalised in the development of these schemes. Meanwhile corporations and major investors are intent on reaping huge financial rewards at the cost of local communities.
Large transnational corporations including BP, Shell and energy companies are honing in on REDD as a new business opportunity.
Read Friends of the Earth International’s latest report on REDD.
Keep up to date with the REDD Monitor website. | <urn:uuid:41c1f703-b5ae-40af-b90b-6006564315e0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foe-scotland.org.uk/forests | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953426 | 507 | 3.8125 | 4 |
Tuesday, September 04, 2012 Latin America
In many parts of the world, if families outgrow their homes they simply add on to them. They grow 'em, piece by piece, room by room, brick by brick, when they get some extra cash. But, turns out, that's not very efficient. It wastes money, supplies, and lots of time.
Alex Goldmark reports from Mexico, on a new way to build affordable housing -- and I mean really affordable. | <urn:uuid:bbd1b5e4-9578-4aef-bfdc-4268600361d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nextbillion.net/newsfeed.aspx?tagID=798 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965424 | 98 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Lewis, Peter J. (2010) Dimension and Illusion. [Preprint]
The world looks three-dimensional unless one looks closely, when it looks 3N-dimensional. But which appearance is veridical, and which the illusion? Albert contends that the three-dimensionality of the everyday world is illusory, and that 3N-dimensional wavefunction one discerns in quantum phenomena is the reality behind the illusion. What I try to do here is to argue for the converse of Albert's position; the world really is three dimensional, and the 3N-dimensional appearance of quantum phenomena is the theoretical analog of an illusion; we represent quantum reality to ourselves as 3N-dimensional in order to more readily visualize the correlations between wave packets.
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Actions (login required) | <urn:uuid:2ee57986-49af-415f-88f5-e7ed93fbfa83> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8345/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925631 | 196 | 2.0625 | 2 |
Lessons of the Lufthansa strike
14 September 2012
There are important political lessons to be drawn from the recent strike by Lufthansa cabin crew workers. The strike demonstrated that the fight against temporary work and the associated attacks on wages and benefits requires a socialist perspective and an international strategy.
Instead of broadening and deepening the struggle, the flight attendant union, Ufo (Independent Flight Attendant Organisation), responded to the strike’s power and solidarity by closing ranks with Lufthansa management.
Flight attendants at Lufthansa took part in strike action on three days last week. On the first two days the strikes were limited to eight hours and selected airports but last Friday the Ufo called a 24-hour, nationwide strike.
This was the first such strike in the history of Lufthansa. For the first time since the founding of the company in 1954, cabin crew struck at all German airports. Despite the use of temporary personnel and the transfer of flights by Lufthansa to its subsidiaries, Swiss and German Wings, the company was forced to cancel almost two-thirds of its 1,800 flights scheduled for Friday.
The company’s management was taken aback by the high level of militancy, and Lufthansa CEO Christoph Franz announced his willingness to negotiate. Ufo leader Nicoley Baublies immediately declared the end of the strike.
In a letter to its members the Ufo executive described the offer to negotiate by Lufthansa as a “resounding success”. “In the moment of triumph,” the letter declared, “we have offered out our hand to management which hoisted the white flag on Friday with the deletion of almost the entire flight program.”
This peace offering from the unions will come at a high price for the flight attendants. The Lufthansa executive merely wants to end the strike as soon as possible to gain time to better prepare for future conflicts. Although the Ufo executive referred to a “triumph” for the strikers, management has not submitted a new offer. It has only made vague statements of intent and indicated its willingness to initiate a settlement.
The union tries to gloss this over. Under the heading: “The waiving of temporary work” Ufo claims that Lufthansa has publicly agreed to renounce the use of temporary staff. That’s not true. In its postscript Ufo is forced to concede: “Well …— not really, only initially in Berlin, only for cabin crew, and only for a ‘foreseeable’ period.”
This means that Ufo called off the strike without reaching any arrangement with Lufthansa— neither with respect to salary issues, nor over the questions of temporary work and cuts in benefits. One is forced to ask: what was the point of the strike in the first place? And on what basis can the union speak of a moment of “triumph”?
The hope that management will now enter arbitration and commit to a waiver of temporary work and social dumping is either hopelessly naive or deliberate deception of union members. In any event, Lufthansa is using the end of the strike in order to prepare for the next round of attacks. The company is determined to enforce its austerity program, “Score,” and plans to increase its profits by 1.5 billion euros by 2014. With an annual turnover of nearly 29 billion euros and a staff cost share of 22 percent this means cutting around a quarter of the budget for personnel costs.
The vague announcement by the company to refrain from using temporary agency workers in Berlin must also be seen in relation to the announcement that the opening of the new expanded airport for the German capital will be delayed for a considerable period of time. This provides a respite for Lufthansa to proceed with a series of graduated attacks on the working conditions of cabin crew while reducing its reliance on external agency staff.
The company plans to carry out this restructuring in close cooperation with the Verdi trade union and also with Ufo. The fact that the leadership of Ufo reached out its hand to strike a deal is a considerable success for Lufthansa CEO Franz.
Ufo was founded twenty years ago in the course of a sharp confrontation with the predecessor of Verdi, the ÖTV public service union. In May of this year Ufo replaced its former executive, which had indicated its readiness to make compromises, with a newer and ostensibly more militant leadership. Now, however, a few months later, the new union leadership is taking the same path as Verdi. How can this be explained?
Ufo made an organizational break with Verdi but did not break with the policy of social partnership. Ufo officials place company interests, i.e. the so-called “well-being” of the concern, at the heart of their policy. During the recent strike the union stressed in a number of leaflets and speeches that it was striking “not against Lufthansa but for Lufthansa”.
Ufo described company plans to use contract workers at the new Berlin airport as “irresponsible damage to its image”. The union argued that it was unworthy for one of the last of the traditional companies in the DAX 30 to replace employees who enjoyed close personal contact with airline customers by cheaper temporary workers.
This standpoint purposefully ignores the character of the attacks launched by Lufthansa. The company’s efforts to cut salaries by 20 percent and more, introduce temporary cabin crew and outsource its European flights to a budget subsidiary are bound up with the offensive by governments and businesses worldwide to wipe out the social gains obtained by workers in previous decades. This process finds its sharpest expression in Greece, but also here in Germany a huge low-wage sector has emerged in recent years.
Under circumstances in which wages are being depressed across the globe, the price for fuel is rising, and airlines face fierce competition from low-cost providers, it is not difficult for Lufthansa to make a case for reducing its costs. Under these conditions to pursue a policy based on recognising “fair and trustful contract bargaining and social partnership” means automatically capitulating to management. Whoever makes competitiveness within the capitalist system their guiding principle will inevitably be forced to accept the harshest forms of exploitation, up to and including child labour.
This is the path now being taken by Ufo. Instead of rejecting the company’s austerity program, the union has repeatedly signalled its readiness to compromise. “We recognize,” it said in a release on September 7, “that as one of the leading German DAX 30 companies Lufthansa must always consider reforms—but not at the expense of its social partner.”
The Lufthansa strike won broad support because workers in other areas of the airline industry and workers generally face similar problems. However, instead of pursuing the strike to the end by expanding and organizing this broad support, the Ufo leadership was shocked at the success of the movement it had unleashed. Instead of expanding the struggle, it cut a deal with management, putting an end to the strike.
Lufthansa is now using this cooperation to introduce its planned cuts in close collaboration with the Ufo leadership. Ufo has thereby replicated a development which can be observed in all unions around the world, which now operate as co-managers and offer concessions in the name of “competitiveness”.
This transformation of the unions is not merely the result of the corruption of individual officials. The entire union perspective based on unconditionally accepting capitalist property relations is bankrupt. In the past unions put the company under pressure to achieve wage increases and social improvements. Today, under the conditions of globalization, they put their members under pressure to accept cuts to their wages and benefits in order to ensure that “their” company remains competitive.
Globalization and economic crisis does not mean that labour disputes are fruitless. On the contrary, workers worldwide face the same problems. The fight against social dumping and temporary work is universal and must be made the starting point for a broad mobilization against the profit system and the overturning of a society run by a criminal financial elite.
This is only possible on the basis of a socialist perspective which places the needs of the population above profit interests. The right to work and fair wages and benefits are basic democratic rights. The most important task facing the workers is the building of its own mass political party that fights for a socialist program. This is the perspective of the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site. | <urn:uuid:92662b8a-096a-4e7c-8f7a-ac8399835d3d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/09/luft-s14.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960825 | 1,794 | 1.929688 | 2 |
In November 2011 the FBI closed down a ring of cyber-criminals believed to be responsible for distributing a computer virus known as a DNS changer. Approximately 4 million users worldwide have been affected and this will become a problem on July 9th 2012.
A temporary fix was created to remove the actions of the virus, which changes a user's Domain Name System (DNS) settings, enabling criminals to direct unsuspecting internet users to fraudulent websites and otherwise interfere with their web browsing. If you are infected, you will lose internet access.
This fix will be removed on July the 9th 2012.
- To ensure your computer is not affected go to the Australian Government site: www. dns-ok.gov.au this site will check your computer. You should log on regularly between now and July 9. | <urn:uuid:d52372a2-176f-4232-9318-2bf6953ec346> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newcastlenow.org.au/newcastle-now-news/2012/6/6/your-computer-may-be-at-risk-follow-these-steps-to-ensure-yo.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953956 | 164 | 2.34375 | 2 |
Starbucks to phase out coloring from crushed beetles
(Reuters) – Starbucks Corp said on its blog on Thursday that it will stop using a natural, government-approved coloring made from crushed beetles in its strawberry flavoring by late June, bowing to pressure from some vegetarian customers.
Starbucks has been using the extract in its strawberry frappuccinos and smoothies, as well as some deserts like raspberry swirl cake.
“After a thorough, yet fastidious, evaluation, I am pleased to report that we are reformulating the affected products to assure the highest quality possible,” Cliff Burrows, president of Starbucks U.S., wrote in a blog post.
Instead, the coffeehouse chain said it plans to use lycopene, a natural, tomato-based extract.
Burrows said Starbucks “fell short” of customer expectations. One blogger in March began an online petition to pressure Starbucks to stop the practice.
Ground up cochineal beetles is a commonly used Food and Drug Administration-approved food coloring.
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You must be logged in to post a comment. | <urn:uuid:770290f5-0bb5-4cea-a0e1-e93f8de900d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bobfartall.com/blog/starbucks-to-phase-out-coloring-from-crushed-beetles/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934919 | 241 | 2.21875 | 2 |
My husband hasn’t seen a doctor in at least five years. His last visit came when I insisted on taking him to the emergency room for help extracting a shard of wood he’d accidentally stepped on. Dave, a former athlete in his early 40s, is a fit, healthy nonsmoker. He’s never had an annual physical, and he doesn’t see any need to start now.
Once upon a time, an annual physical was just something you did if you cared about your health (and had the insurance to pay for the exam). But a recent review by researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen suggests that my husband’s “wait for a reason” approach may be perfectly wise.
Researchers examined the most rigorous studies they could find (14 in all) comparing people who received so-called general health checks and those who didn’t, some 182,000 people in all. Their analysis found that routine medical exams failed to reduce overall deaths, disease-related deaths, hospitalizations or costs.
The Cochrane review isn’t the first to question the effectiveness of the annual exam. A 1979 Canadian panel convened by the government concluded that “the routine annual physical examination should be discarded in favour of a selective plan of health protection packages appropriate to the various health needs at the different stages of human life.” The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force does not advise for or against annual exams; instead, it makes age-specific recommendations about which screening tests you need and when, says Michael L. LeFevre, a physician at the University of Missouri and co-vice chair of this independent group of national experts.
Even without formal recommendations, many Americans continue to see their doctor once a year, whether they have symptoms or not. The 2009 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey showed that general medical exams were the No. 1 reason people visited their doctors.
The annual physical became popular, in part, because it seems so logical that a regular exam might catch medical problems before they get out of hand, says Ateev Mehrotra, a health policy researcher and physician at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. But given the lack of evidence that the yearly ritual improves health, he says, “my own view is that the medical community should no longer encourage patients to receive an annual physical.”
It’s not just that these exams are unlikely to help the patient, Mehrotra says. They come with potentially serious downsides, too.
For patients, the negatives include time away from work and possibly unnecessary tests. “Getting a simple urinalysis could lead to a false positive, which could trigger a cascade of even more tests, only to discover in the end that you had nothing wrong with you,” Mehrotra says.
There’s also potential for false assurance that everything is okay, which may lead people to ignore or minimize new symptoms. “You may come in and have a completely fine bill of health, and three months later you develop leukemia,” says physician Christine Laine, editor of Annals of Internal Medicine. “Unfortunately, we can’t prevent that from happening.”
When you go in for a physical, the doctor checks for things that are common and easy to screen for, but there remain plenty of other conditions that lack a good screening test, and there are others whose outcomes aren’t improved by identifying them earlier, Laine says.
Mehrotra says that annual physicals also are straining the medical system. “We’re spending 12 percent of our primary-care time on something that has no evidence to support it.” Primary-care doctors are in short supply. “If physicians stopped doing annual exams and used that time to accept new patients, it would greatly alleviate the problem.”
But that’s unlikely to happen soon, he says, because so many health-care plans create a financial incentive for physicians to provide annual exams. “As a society, we’re spending about as much money on annual exams as we are on breast cancer. That’s a tremendous amount of money for something with no evidence base,” Mehrotra says. He’s particularly alarmed that Medicare recently introduced an annual wellness exam, because health plans are required to cover the same range of preventive services as Medicare. “This perpetuates the myth that the annual physical is important,” Mehrotra says.
But, says Sung T. Kim, a family physician at the Inova Medical Group in Centreville, Va., the annual exam isn’t just about improving the patient’s health; it’s also an opportunity to foster the doctor-patient relationship and a chance for him to check on a patient’s mental health. He recommends annual physicals for his patients: “It’s a chance to spend quality time together. We can discuss all the things that are recommended from a prevention standpoint.” Kim routinely sees cholesterol readings that change from year to year and blood pressure that’s gone up between one annual physical and the next.
“When they come in for an acute visit, a lot of times we can only focus on that problem. An annual visit allows me to take time to spent that extra 10 or 15 minutes really talking,” Kim says. “When we don’t see a patient for two or three years, there could be a lot of things we are missing in the interim.”
Some people don’t want the responsibility of keeping tabs on their prevention needs, Laine says. “It takes a very organized patient to realize, ‘Oh I haven’t had my blood pressure checked in four years, maybe it’s time.’ ” So a regularly scheduled doctor visit can ensure that a patient remains on track, but every 12 months is probably too often for many people, she says.
How often you see the doctor should depend on your age and your health status. A 25-year-old male in good health probably doesn’t need to see a doctor more than every five years. But as you get older, or if you’re taking medications or managing a chronic condition such as high blood pressure or diabetes, you might need to see the physician even more than once a year, LeFevre says.
I stopped seeing my doctor annually after the Preventive Services Task Force changed its recommendations on women’s health screenings. Where it once advised yearly Pap smears for women of reproductive age, the panel and the American Cancer Society now recommend them once every three years for women older than 21 or every five years if done in combination with the HPV test for women older than 30. At 40, unless I develop unusual symptoms, there’s no need for me to go in more often than that, LeFevre says.
What about my husband? Should I nag him to see a doctor, or can he wait until he needs his next screening exam?
Mehrotra says that given his health status, he’s okay — for now. “If he doesn’t smoke and isn’t at risk for any major diseases and he’s up-to-date on the screenings recommended by the task force, then I don’t see a critical need for an exam.”
On LeFevre’s advice, I went to www.healthfinder.gov to get a list of government recommendations for someone of my husband’s age and health status. Turns out that he’s due for a blood pressure check (every two years for men his age) and a cholesterol screening (recommended every five years for his age category). But he may evade the doctor’s office yet, since these are tests he can get at our annual community health fair, without a formal visit to a doctor. | <urn:uuid:cd830963-4817-40a3-90cf-69c75bfb5b56> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bangordailynews.com/2013/02/13/health/do-you-really-need-an-annual-physical-benefits-are-hard-to-prove/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968436 | 1,655 | 2.171875 | 2 |
Building a website for your business is not as complex as it once was. Today anyone who can fill in a form can build a sophisticated website, without knowing any HTML code, or learning expensive and complicated website design software.
Before you begin to build your website you should think about what your site will be designed to do. Today when consumers are looking for goods and services, their first port of call is the Internet, and at the very least you need your name and contact details on the site.
For many businesses, a single one page site is more than adequate to give them an online contact point for potential customers.
You have a number of choices when constructing a website:
- A one page website that includes your business' basic contact information can be set-up in seconds thanks to services like About Me
- Website hosting services such as those from 1&1 Internet have simple website building wizards that allow any business to build a site in just a few minutes
- If you need an e-commerce enabled website there are many platforms and types of solution to choose, from simple ecommerce packages through to sophisticated epos solutions examples include SellerDeck, Actinic, Volusion, Cybertill and Shopify
- When more control is needed over the website's design, professional applications like Adobe Dreamweaver can be used. However, you can make the design of your site easier to set up by using a ready-made template from suppliers like Template Monster that you then simply customise.
- Many business that also want to speak directly to their customers start a blog that can also act as their website. The leading blogging platform is Wordpress that now has thousands of themes that you can choose from
- Third party website construction services are also available from companies including Moonfruit, Weebly and Yola
With so many options available to businesses that want to develop their presence online, choosing the right method for your company is important to get right.
How to choose your construction method
Your business has a number of decisions to make about how it will construct its website. Ask yourself these questions to help you decide whether building a website from scratch or using one of the many website construction services is more appropriate:
- Does your business already contain the skills and knowledge needed to build a website from scratch?
- Will your website need specific and bespoke features built into the design?
- Do you want your website to be updated regularly by a number of different people?
- Will you need to move your website to another hosting service?
Pros and cons
The pros and cons of using DIY approach to website design, or handing the construction to a third-party designer include:
- Using website design applications like Dreamweaver gives you total control over the design of your website
- Template and hosted systems are easier to set-up and don't require any technical knowledge of website design
- Hosted services often have website construction services built into their hosting packages for no extra cost
- Many of the DIY sites also offer payment mechanisms, promotional platforms and social media support already built in
- Building your site from scratch can be time consuming and expensive
- Template-based website design can be limiting
- Possible copyright issues over the design and pictures used with a template-based service
- If you need to move your site to another host, this can sometimes be difficult
- Bespoke components are often not available for template-based websites
Whether you build your site from scratch, or using a hosted service, your site still needs to offer good usability and be search engine friendly.
Usability and design
No matter how you construct your website it must ultimately be attractive, engaging and intuitive to use. If you confuse your visitors or frustrate them with over the top design, they will simply click away to another site.
There are a number of fundamental principles that have been developed over the last decade that you can use when designing a website for your business:
- Don't overly complicate your design. Never confuse or frustrate your visitors with unnecessary design elements
- Use flashing banners and other animations minimally eg to draw attention to short-lived special offers, or a one-off sale
- Always have the same navigation on each page, and ensure there is a 'home' button on each page
- Ensure that pages download quickly. Research has shown that 8 seconds is the maximum that users will wait, but you should aim for even faster downloads as that figure is reducing every year
- Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and not tables to layout your web pages, as CSS will ensure your pages load faster
- Text should be written so it can be scanned. Most users will look for headlines and subheadings before reading the rest of the text on a page
- Make any shopping cart and checkout system you use easy to navigate. Irritated users will simply abandon their baskets, which is a lost sale.
Search engine optimisation
As over 80 per cent of websites are found via a search engine it is vital that all businesses understand how to apply SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to their websites. The key elements of good SEO include:
- Good SEO begins with choosing the right keywords to use on your web pages. Use the Google Keyword Tool or Good Keywords to choose popular search words to use on your site and use tools like Keyword Tracker to then analyse their effectiveness.
- Keywords should be included in strategic places across your site including page titles, headings and subheadings and within the first 25 words of each page's text, as search engines will look at this text first
- Search engines like to reward websites that have a large number of links back to them. This shows that the site is popular. Make strategic alliances with other sites to link back to yours
- Content is king when it comes to search engines. The more relevant and engaging you can make the content on your business' web pages the higher its ranking on search engine results pages
- Optimise your website's code by ensuring your site has a map – create on using the XML Sitemap Creator application and submit it to Google Webmasters and Bing Webmaster, and always include Alt tags on all images as search engines use these as part of your page's ranking
No matter what techniques you use to construct a website for your business remember every page is for your audience. Think about what they want to see on your website and deliver this with engaging content. | <urn:uuid:2f731f9f-a088-4efd-90e7-68e358ac3d62> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/roundup/creating-a-website-for-your-business-1076170 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944646 | 1,318 | 1.671875 | 2 |
A new, grassroots effort by Alex Benzer, Tara Tiger Brown and Sean Bonner, Represent.LA, is looking to map out the Los Angeles startup community, by plotting out the list of startups, incubators, accelerators, and others in the community. Brown says that the site is a way to "promote the LA tech scene and strengthen the community bonds that span across a wide distance and many freeways." The map is similar to a map of the Los Angeles technology ecosystem provided by this publication, although Represent.LA is looking to engage the community in developing its own list of startup companies.
Top NewsMonday, June 4, 2012
Represent.LA Looks To Map LA Startups | <urn:uuid:27733cee-d35d-4949-aebd-f846b30b7d9c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.socaltech.com/fullstory/0043120.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9248 | 141 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Prairie School (I Can Read Book 4) (2001)
References to this work on external resources.
Wikipedia in English
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0060513187, Paperback)
Reading the prairie
It's the 1880s, Noah works hard on the family farm and roams free on the Colorado prairie. One day his Aunt Dora arrives to give him some schooling. Noah doesn't think he needs it. What use is reading on the prairie? But what Noah discovers will change his life forever.
(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:35:52 -0500)
In 1880, Noah's aunt teaches the reluctant nine-year-old how to read as they explore the Colorado prairie together, Noah pushing Aunt Dora in her wheelchair.
Is this you?
Become a LibraryThing Author. | <urn:uuid:2d3d1fe1-3e7b-40b1-ba3e-703f938c81fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.librarything.com/work/1354556 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923852 | 194 | 1.921875 | 2 |
The Lego Architecture series features great buildings from around the world. Gregory Johnson’s Empire State Building, Frank Loyd Wright’s Falling Water and Carl Gotthard Langhans’ Brandenburg Gate are just a few examples of structures featured in the series. Jenny Williams wrote a great review of the Robie House set this past November.
Well now Lego needs some help deciding on the next architectural marvel they will immortalize in plastic. At the Lego Architecture Inspire Us page you can vote on three of the ten buildings being considered for inclusion in the series. Go vote on your favorites in the bunch and you just might find the Eiffel Tower on your desk in the near future.
When I was a kid, my lack of imagination always steered me toward building houses out of our piles of Lego bricks. I never built airplanes or spaceships or any of the other things kids usually built. I built houses. Pretty much the same one each time. Boooring. I know. But no other ideas seemed to occur to me. And my first significant Lego kit that I asked for and received as an adult was even a Lego Creator set for building different houses.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Brickstructures and the recently formed Lego Architecture brand have come out with two new sets of the Lego Architecture line, The Guggenheim Museum and Fallingwater. They are part of the new Frank Lloyd Wright collection. If you’re a fan of Lego, architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright like I am, these are very exciting new toys.. um.. I mean, educational opportunities for you and your geeklings.
The Lego Architrecture line was officially introduced in 2008 and already has four other building sets available (the Sears Tower, the John Hancock Center, the Space Needle and the Empire State Building). Lego is looking to inspire future engineers and architects by making great building design more accessible.
The Guggenheim Museum
Some of the Lego Architecture kits sell for about $20 each, but it seems that some of the fancier models, such as the Frank Lloyd Wright kits, will go for about $40. That’s enough money that you probably can’t afford all of them, but if you have your heart set on having your own Fallingwater, the price isn’t too high.
Both new Frank Lloyd Wright sets include booklets containing detailed building instructions, and they also include archival historial material and photographs.
The Guggenheim model was released on May 15, 2009 but no word yet as to Fallingwater’s release date.
As a big fan of architecture, I am very excited about these new products. I’m hoping they’ll do some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie style homes next. One thing I love about Wright’s buildings and homes is that they are all interesting, all original. You aren’t building just another cube-like box with a roof, such as the kind I built every time I played with Lego bricks as a kid. The scale on these kits is pretty small, though, so don’t expect exquisite detail. But creating with Lego bricks is quite a fun way to pay homage to great architects.
Last October, GeekDad’s own Dave Banks built the Lego Taj Mahal and made a video to take you along for the ride. If you don’t have the patience or the money for such a huge endeavor, however, try the new Lego Architecture series. | <urn:uuid:e672ba88-9872-4f7b-9f54-3409d3b6d0d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wired.com/geekdad/tag/lego-architecture/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950202 | 720 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Blythe at the Tottori sand dunes in Japan - not Mars
Girls of a certain age may remember playing with Blythe, a big-headed doll introduced by American toy company Kenner in 1972. A generation later, Blythe has taken on a new life in far-off Japan. Blythe's most devoted Japanese fans hold her in such deep esteem, one might liken it to mania!
Cute huh? Like cuddly zombies...
Got an original Kenner Blythe stashed away in your attic or basement? Well, you may be shocked to know how valuable she is today to legions of Japanese fans.
An original in excellent condition can sell for thousands of dollars, and there is a thriving online marketplace for Blythe parts, clothes, even mohair used by fans to make Blythe wigs! How do I know this? My wife has two Takara (Japanese) Blythes and a small “Petit Blythe” in Gothic Lolita regalia who rests on a small inflatable sofa in our living room cabinet. Sweet!
Twin Blythes - or an outtake from The Shining
Besides the oversized head, Blythe dolls had color-changing eyes – a unique feature activated by pulling a string at the back of her head. The doll's eyes would also blink when tipped forward.
Death Valley of the Dolls?
Kenner sold Blythe for just one year, 1972, then stopped due to poor sales. About 10 years ago though, Blythe was featured in a series of ads for Parco stores in Japan, sparking a somewhat surprising boom that shows little sign of fading.
Was Blythe the original Bride of Chucky?
Japanese toy company Takara has released more than 100 editions of their “NEO” Blythe (modeled closely on the original) since 2001, helping to satisfy the huge demand for dolls from Japanese Blythe devotees.
One of these fans is Takahito, whose haunting cute/creepy images are featured in this article. Takahito posed several Blythes at the otherworldly Tottori sand dunes in Japan, dubbing the photo set “Planet of the Blythes”. I don't know about you, but they remind me of the images beamed back to Earth from the Mars rovers.
They only come out at night...
In viewing Takahito's photos, it's easy to understand both the timeless appeal of Blythe and the obvious affection Blythe aficionados like Takahito have for Kenner's big(headed) idea. | <urn:uuid:5712b460-a861-4085-82a5-9eb60c22c22c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://inventorspot.com/articles/kenners_blythe_doll_takes_new_life_japan_15575 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935409 | 558 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Take this medicine only as directed by your doctor to benefit your condition as much as possible. Do not take more of it, do not take it more often, and do not take it for a longer time than your doctor ordered.
Sometimes this medicine must be taken for up to two or three weeks before you begin to feel better. Your doctor should check your progress at regular visits.
The dose of this medicine will be different for different patients. Follow your doctor's orders or the directions on the label. The following information includes only the average doses of this medicine. If your dose is different, do not change it unless your doctor tells you to do so.
The amount of medicine that you take depends on the strength of the medicine. Also, the number of doses you take each day, the time allowed between doses, and the length of time you take the medicine depend on the medical problem for which you are using the medicine.
- For oral dosage form (tablets):
- For depression:
- Adults—At first, 25 milligrams (mg) taken one to three times a day. Your doctor may increase your dose as needed. However, the dose is usually not more than 150 mg a day, unless you are in the hospital. Some hospitalized patients may need higher doses.
- Children—Use and dose must be determined by your doctor.
- For depression:
If you miss a dose of this medicine, take it as soon as possible. However, if it is almost time for your next dose, skip the missed dose and go back to your regular dosing schedule. Do not double doses.
For once daily dosing at bedtime: Do not take the missed dose in the morning since it may cause disturbing side effects during waking hours. Instead, check with your doctor.
Store the medicine in a closed container at room temperature, away from heat, moisture, and direct light. Keep from freezing.
Keep out of the reach of children.
Do not keep outdated medicine or medicine no longer needed. | <urn:uuid:ab4b7245-17ae-4f1d-bf1f-828a3e606a2e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/drug-information/DR600873/DSECTION=proper-use | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932188 | 414 | 1.757813 | 2 |
The Charlie Hotel, Los Angeles, California
In 1924, the Ruth Gordon family built Charlie Chaplin a set of private bungalows as a countryside escape. In 2008, the property opened as The Charlie in what’s now West Hollywood. Although no one knows for sure which old Hollywood stars absconded to the hideaway, hotelier Menachem Treivush made the most of the rumors by naming many of the 14 English cottages after whispered guests: Marilyn (Monroe), Gloria (Swanson) and Marlene (Dietrich) included. Still, the big draw is the duplex named Charlie, which retains a touch of the Little Tramp: Canes decorate the living-room wall, and anyone taller than five-foot-five will need to duck through the original door, which the diminutive star is said to have had custom built so that guests would have to bow to enter. Rooms, from $400; thecharliehotel.com. | <urn:uuid:92022b5e-45c9-47f1-b035-ca7332bacf08> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.departures.com/slideshows/hotels-with-history/5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944561 | 204 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Under the forfeiture process, individuals who have an interest in seized domain names can contest the action in federal court. If no claim is filed, the domain names become the property of the U.S. government.
Morton advised online shoppers to research the websites they use. "Do your homework. Know your supplier," he said. "At the end of the day, trust your instincts. This is probably your best line of defense, so don't reason away your intuition simply for the sake of an extra dollar or two."
ICE officials said that law enforcement agencies from Belgium, Denmark, France, Romania and the United Kingdom, and the European Police Office (Europol) are participating in this year's crackdown, dubbed Project Transatlantic. They executed seizures of foreign-based domains such as .eu, .be, .dk, .fr, .ro and .uk.
The intellectual property center and Europol received leads from various trademark holders regarding the infringing websites. Those leads were disseminated to eight field offices in Baltimore; Buffalo, New York; Denver; El Paso, Texas; Newark, New Jersey; San Antonio, San Diego and Ventura, California, and to the investigating Europol member countries. | <urn:uuid:f372a60e-89d5-4060-8ecf-c7e7b8b7a1d6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wlky.com/news/national/US-Europe-shut-websites-selling-fake-goods/-/9366074/17556890/-/item/1/-/9b0411/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93056 | 245 | 1.859375 | 2 |
Gloss: Gloss on See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media
Moore's Promethea, on the other hand, is something akin to a theoretical text which gives a great deal of attention to Moore's metaphysical views. Promethea starts as a superhero story, but quickly turns into a meditation on the relationship between reality and representation. In a way, it reminds me of Yeats' Golden Dawn years, but without the pretension... and it offers further insight into the meaning of an under language. In Promethea, the under langauge is not simply a technique that is available to the comic book writer, but it fits with some primordial sense of what language is and what consciousness does, and models it in a manner consistent with the sort of Hermetic ("as above, so below") view that underpins Moore's work. Promethea also picks up on apocalyptic themes developed in the Watchmen and From Hell, but suggests that transformations don't have to be sinister... they can be utopian, too, if we learn how the proper spells of consciousness. | <urn:uuid:3004e861-c63f-474c-8c78-7cae00868e74> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.electronicbookreview.com/node/1610 | 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 | 0.94505 | 223 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Good question about the comfort factor, Jim. The material that forms the cushion is 75% thinner. But the fact that the shell conforms to the person's body shape, like certain styles of office furniture on which it was based, is supposed to make it equally comfortable.
Jerry points out that a similar approach has been used in race cars. I wonder what the comfort factor is in them?
With the75% reduction of foam filler, and apparently also with no wrapped "upholstery" per se, (cloth, velour or even "Fine-Corinthian Leather") I wonder how it rides against your shorts on a hot day in August,,,,, I live in Ft. Lauderdale and my first impression said, "Hot & Sticky".
Many have done seats like this for decades aftermarket, racing, high end sportscars, homes, etc. Just big auto is finally coming around.
Eliminating steel isn't smart as every material has it's place. Some places like highest point loading areas, steel, other metals is best. Those places are becoming fewer and fewer as composites get better.
As a buyer of such seats much depends on price while keeping quality.
My 2wh Streamliner will need a great seat and 4-5 pint seatbelt to makes it's safety systems work as so light it will bounce around like a pinball in a crash, making airbags not good enough.
Recycling the plastic in the seat would be great. So far, to my knowledge recycled car seat materials have been limited to the fabric covering, or perhaps the cushion, but not the structural materials. Considering what can be done with recycling materials for bridge structures, as in the Scottish bridge I wrote about,
I think that a lot of the seat placement will trend with type of vehicle. Like Alex notes, these seats would look right at home in some of the plug-in electrics with boxy, funky designs. And the type of buyer gravitating towards those cars would likely see get the design appeal, albeit slightly quirky, and love the lighter-weight factor. But seeing this type of seat as a replacement for steel seats in musclely SUVs or luxury sedans--not so likely.
This is a great idea to use various plastics to produce seats with minimal steel. The best of both worlds would be to use a certain amount of recycled plastic in the seats. This would allow the seats to be "green" as well as lightweight.
I agree, TJ. As we've seen with electronics, automakers will gravitate toward features that appeal to customers, and they will flee in terror from any product deemed unappealing. A seat can have a huge effect on consumers and one of the problems is that we often can't tell if a seat is uncomfortable until we've spent many hours in it. As badly as automakers want to cut weight, you can bet they will test and test and re-teat these seats to make sure that customers don't find them unappealing or uncomfortable.
Those are good points, TJ, though notwithstanding the "flimsy feel" issue, I can see these seats immediately being adopted by makers of plug-in electrics. These seats would look right at home in a Mitsubishi MiEV (or one of those new Fiats sold in the U.S., for that matter. Actually, I don't think they could fit into the Fiat.)
Thanks for the comments everyone. Many plastics including composites can be created in a wide range of combinations of strength, give and stiffness/flexibility, depending on the app. Materials, and sub-assemblies made from them, that go into cars are researched and tested stringently, especially for crash-resistance and crash performance. And it's the frame, not the cushion or its foam, that adjusts to different sizes and shapes of people. So I doubt if there are any problems associated with either. But like TJ, I've wondered the same thing about how flimsy they may feel. OTOH, that's a relative judgment we make based on what we're used to.
This is a good show piece to promote increased use of plastics, but, like TJ, I'm skeptical about the viability of this outside the context of an auto show. The claim that it weights 20% less than a steel frame seat doesn't necessarily impress me, because I suspect it might be possible to take 20% or more out of the weight of a steel frame seat by using aluminum or by going to stronger grade of steel. (See Chuck's article about the Cadillac ATS, for example).
We looked at a number of sources to determine this year's greenest cars, from KBB to automotive trade magazines to environmental organizations. These 14 cars emerged as being great at either stretching fuel or reducing carbon footprint.
Healthcare might seem to be an unlikely target application for the Internet of Things technology, but recent developments show small ways that big-data is going to make an impact on patient care moving into the future.
A quick look into the merger of two powerhouse 3D printing OEMs and the new leader in rapid prototyping solutions, Stratasys. The industrial revolution is now led by 3D printing and engineers are given the opportunity to fully maximize their design capabilities, reduce their time-to-market and functionally test prototypes cheaper, faster and easier. Bruce Bradshaw, Director of Marketing in North America, will explore the large product offering and variety of materials that will help CAD designers articulate their product design with actual, physical prototypes. This broadcast will dive deep into technical information including application specific stories from real world customers and their experiences with 3D printing. 3D Printing is | <urn:uuid:65ad8a3c-6d39-4c23-891f-f4a80a675ac3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.designnews.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=245352&piddl_msgid=550720 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964029 | 1,160 | 1.5625 | 2 |
17 November 2010
Lecture at LSE on Friday
Fixing Climate Policy
LSE Mackinder Programme for the Study of Long Wave Events public lecture
Date: Friday 19 November 2010
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Professor Roger Pielke Jr
Chair: Professor Gwyn Prins
The diplomatic disaster that was the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009 signalled to many that climate policy needed to change course. In this talk, Professor Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado will explain why the proposed policies that have been at the centre of the climate debate for decades are doomed to failure, and what an alternative way forward might look like.
Roger A. Pielke Jr is Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences where he served as the Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research from 2001-2007. Roger's research focuses on the intersection of science and technology and decision making. Formerly a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, he is the author of several books including the recently-published The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming. He is currently Visiting Senior Fellow, Mackinder Programme, LSE.
This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis. For any queries email Gwyn Prins email@example.com|.
If you are planning to attend this event and would like details on how to get here and what time to arrive, please refer to Coming to an event at LSE | <urn:uuid:e3235450-f58b-4b5a-8d7b-6d12f5658b14> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/11/lecture-at-lse-on-friday.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946277 | 345 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Viewing the King James Version. Click to switch to 1611 King James Version of Lamentations 5:5.
Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest.
- King James Bible "Authorized Version", Cambridge Edition
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Other Translations of Lamentations 5:5
Our neckes are vnder persecution: we labour and haue no rest.- King James Version (1611)
- View 1611 Bible Scan
Our pursuers are at our necks; We are worn out, there is no rest for us.- New American Standard Version (1995)
Our pursuers are upon our necks: We are weary, and have no rest.- American Standard Version (1901)
Our attackers are on our necks: overcome with weariness, we have no rest.- Basic English Bible
Our pursuers are on our necks: we are weary, we have no rest.- Darby Bible
Our necks are under persecution: we labor, and have no rest. - Webster's Bible
Our pursuers are on our necks: We are weary, and have no rest.- World English Bible
For our neck we have been pursued, We have laboured -- there hath been no rest for us.- Youngs Literal Bible
To our very necks we are pursued; we labour, and have no rest.- Jewish Publication Society Bible
What Do You Think of Lamentations 5:5?
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conception of sculpture
...content, and expressiveness—is the concern of a designer, and it should be distinguished from the execution of the work in a particular technique and material, which is the task of a craftsman. A sculptor often functions as both designer and craftsman, but these two aspects of sculpture may be separated.
There is no reason to suppose that the shape of an instrument is governed only by acoustic requirements; it seems often to be the other way around: the symbolically appropriate shape preferred by a given culture produces a particular tone quality, which then becomes the desirable one. Available materials, manufacturing techniques, and complex historical, symbolic, and artistic considerations...
The high value placed upon musical instruments within a culture is generally reflected in their craftsmanship. In addition to the skill and quality of materials the maker incorporates into the construction itself, artistry comes into play as the maker decorates an instrument with symbolic designs or with elaborate carvings or inlays. In the case of wind instruments, the form of the instrument...
importance in Oceanian art
...not only the objects, dances, and speeches used in ritual but also the materials and tools used to create them. The individual who creates or commissions a work is similarly esteemed, and the craftsman’s skill—whether applied to ritual or to secular, utilitarian works—is highly valued. Craftsmanship, in fact, is the main criterion by which a work is judged. Art, moreover, is...
In societies whose members are largely self-reliant, some degree of craft skill is practically universal. Men make their own canoes, build their own houses, and carve simple household equipment such as hooks and stools; individuals are responsible for decorating their own belongings, including their bodies. In the case of body decoration, however, which can be culturally prescribed in form,...
What made you want to look up "craftsmanship"? Please share what surprised you most... | <urn:uuid:b7536ae4-ccce-4db1-b67e-edc1cce6bbb5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/141619/craftsmanship | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948795 | 434 | 3.078125 | 3 |
There’s just not much of a reason to own a car in the greater metropolitan Portland area. Can we say the same about our own community?
If bicycling is so culturally central to Portland, even when it’s truly cold (not “California cold”) and raining nonstop, why is it so difficult to get around by pedal or by foot in San Lorenzo Valley? The steep elevation changes in the Santa Cruz Mountains make it challenging, true, but that in itself is no excuse.
Portland’s obvious advantage is its impressive network of trails and rights-of-way for bikers, while the Max helps shorten the longer distances. But I’d argue that the most important ingredient of the city’s bicycle infrastructure is the bicycle culture itself, which empowers bikers to travel safely and efficiently without fear.
Ever try biking along Highway 9? It’s not advised, though some brave souls do traverse its narrow shoulders and hairpin turns with white knuckles and — some might say — a death wish.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We’ll never be like Portland, but a local movement known as Safe SLV Streets (Yahoo group: safeslvstreets) is working to add more bicycle and pedestrian access to SLV’s public schools and other high-traffic areas near the Highway. 9 corridor.
Safe SLV Streets member Bryan Largay discussed the group’s goals, its status and what needs to happen to build a safe network of biking and walking trails in SLV at a recent Transition SLV meeting. It’s definitely a possibility, and the county actually completed an SLV trails feasibility study not too long ago.
Largay and his fellow group members looked at the study and tried to determine which routes would have the least community opposition and cost the least to implement. They believe they have a reasonable plan and even were able to identify a federal grant program specifically to pay for safe access to schools.
So, what are we waiting for? Largay said it’s just a matter of political will and, of course, money.
A network of bike and foot paths (beginning in Felton) comprising the Caltrans corridor, neighborhood streets, wooded areas and some spots along Highway 9 could cost anywhere from $500,000 to a few million, which is quite modest for an infrastructure project.
“Everyone I’ve mentioned it to said they thought it was a pretty good idea,” Largay said. “What’s needed now is getting a committee together to champion this, build political will, foster community support and to work on the grant proposal.”
County Supervisor Mark Stone is known to support such initiatives, so it might just come down to his ability to prove to his fellow supervisors that the community indeed wants a network of biking and pedestrian trails.
The benefits of greater access are self-explanatory. But there also are the intangibles, including increased neighborly interactions and greater community cohesion in general.
Portland’s emergence as a bike-friendly city didn’t happen overnight. I’m confident we can cultivate a similarly bike-friendly culture here at home.
If you think a network of bike and foot paths in SLV is a good idea, call your supervisor or otherwise get involved, even just a vocal show of support. It won’t happen without us.
Steve Tanner is a writer and journalist living in Ben Lomond with his wife, young daughter, dog and four hens. He is on the steering committee for Transition San Lorenzo Valley, a local nonprofit committed to creating a more sustainable and resilient community. For information: www.transitionslv.org. | <urn:uuid:a39f218d-6df8-41c7-895a-e4706a0d82fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pressbanner.com/view/full_story/10514459/article-Sustainable-Living--How-to-make-SLV-safer-on-bike-and-foot | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959304 | 784 | 1.679688 | 2 |
And Sara lived a hundred and twenty-seven years.
And she died in the city of Arbee which is Hebron, in the land of Chanaan: and Abraham came to mourn and weep for her.
And after he rose up from the funeral obsequies, he spoke to the children of Heth, saying:
I am a stranger and sojourner among you: give me the right of a burying place with you, that I may bury my dead.
The children of Heth answered, saying:
My lord, hear us, thou art a prince of God among us: bury thy dead in our principal sepulchres: and no man shall have power to hinder thee from burying thy dead in his sepulchre.
Abraham rose up, and bowed down to the people of the land, to wit, the children of Heth:
And said to them: If it please your soul that I should bury my dead, hear me, and intercede for me to Ephron the son of Seor.
That he may give me the double cave, which he hath in the end of his field: For as much money as it is worth he shall give it me before you, for a possession of a burying place.
Now Ephron dwelt in the midst of the children of Heth. And Ephron made answer to Abraham in the hearing of all that went in at the gate of the city, saying:
Let it not be so, my lord, but do thou rather hearken to what I say: The field I deliver to thee, and the cave that is therein; in the presence of the children of my people, bury thy dead.
Abraham bowed down before the people of the land.
And he spoke to Ephron, in the presence of the people: I beseech thee to hear me: I will give money for the field; take it, and so will I bury my dead in it.
And Ephron answered:
My lord, hear me. The ground which thou desirest, is worth four hundred sicles of silver: this is the price between me and thee: but what is this? bury thy dead.
And when Abraham had heard this, he weighed out the money that Ephron had asked, in the hearing of the children of Heth, four hundred sicles of silver, of common current money.
And the field that before was Ephron’s, wherein was the double cave, looking towards Mambre, both it and the cave, and all the trees thereof, in all its limits round about,
Was made sure to Abraham for a possession, in the sight of the children of Heth, and of all that went in at the gate of his city.
And so Abraham buried Sara, his wife, in the double cave of the field, that looked towards Mambre, this is Hebron in the land of Chanaan.
And the field was made sure to Abraham, and the cave that was in it, for a possession to bury in, by the children of Heth. | <urn:uuid:2c117b0a-9fd9-43e5-9d82-6501aa2494a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.biblestudytools.com/rhe/genesis/23.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967856 | 649 | 1.9375 | 2 |
José Castro (1895-1968) has
earned widespread recognition as one of the most important Argentine
composers of the 20th century. Since his twenties he championed
the modern music cause both as a conductor, performing South American
premieres of such works as Le Sacre du Printemps, and as
a composer, experimenting with dissonant techniques and neoclassicism.
Castro's musical language is synthesis of three different musical
trends: the Spanish, with modal Moorish colors and vital rhythms;
the French, with both "Franckian" textures and the biting
dissonances of Les Six; and the Argentine, with tango rhythms
following is copyrighted material. Reproduction prohibited.
internationally known Argentine conductor.
Jose Castro was born to a family of musicians on March 7th. 1895,
in Avellaneda, province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. In this country,
he studied with Manuel POSADAS, Constantino GAITO and Eduardo FORNARINI
From the last two teachers, Castro inherited Gaito's fondness of
the folk element and Fornarini's tendency to controlled and cerebral
the French belle epoque, in the 1920s, he completed his studies
in Paris under the teachings of the composer Vicent D'INDY and the
pianist Edouard RISLER. Back in Buenos Aires in 1925, Castro devoted
himself mainly to orchestral conducting, making his debut in 1928
with the "Renacimiento" Chamber Orchestra. A year later, he was
invited to conduct the Argentinean premiere of "El amor brujo" ("Love,
the sorcerer") -piece by the eminent Spanish composer Manuel de
Falla- in the Colon Theatre in Buenos Aires. With this performance,
Castro initiated two fruitful and longlasting associations: first,
with the Colon Theatre, and second, with Manuel de Falla. Juan Jose
Castro's active and ever growing career as a conductor can be followed
decade by decade, between the 30s and the 50s. During the 1930s,
he was intensely busy with orchestras in Argentina. His programs
frequently included music by 20th century composers, such as the
French Impressionists, members of "Les Six", and contemporary Spanish
and Argentine composers.
decade of the 1940s marked the beginning of Castro's international
career. Some important tours throughout the Americas took him to
the USA -invited by Toscanini to conduct the NBC Symphony Orchestra,-
Mexico, Peru and Chile. Later, between 1947 and 1949, he was the
music director of the Philarmonic Orchestra of Cuba, and between
1949 and 1952, of the SODRE Symphony Orchestra in Montevideo, Uruguay.
the 50's Castro's international reputation continued to extend to
the rest of the world. In 1950, a succesful debut with the Belgrad
Symphony Orchestra, in Yugoslavia, launched a European tour that
included England, Switzerland, France, Spain, Norway and Finland.
After Europe, he travelled to Australia to conduct the Melbourne
Victorian Symphony Orchestra and other orchestras of that country
and New Zealand, between 1952 and 1953.
J. Castro and Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo (dedicated
after an absence of more than seven years, Castro returned to the
Argentine musical scene in 1955. Back in his native country, he
directed the National Symphony Orchestra until 1960. During these
years, the broad experience acquired in his tours and his exceptional
talent as a conductor, allowed Castro to transform this orchestra
into the foremost musical institution in the country.
last stages of Castro's career took place at the Music Festival
of California, USA, and in San Juan of Puerto Rico, where he bacame
the Dean of the National Conservatory after a formal request made
by its founder the violoncellist Pablo Casals.
neo-classic Argentine composer.
Jose Castro appeal as a composer is the result of his rich and eclectic
style, and of his balanced aesthetic sense. His works include numerous
symphonic pieces, fiIm music, chamber music, music for piano solo,
bandoneon solo, voice and piano, choir, operas and arrangements
of music by other composers such as Bach, Weber, and Julian Aguirre.
musical language is a very personal and original synthesis of three
different musical currents: the Spanish, with its modal scales,
moorish flavor and vital rhythm; the French, with Franck-like harmonies
and textures, and Impressionist atmospheres, and finally the Argentinean,
with its folk flavor from the countryside, and its urban tanto from
the "arrabal" (outskirts) of Buenos Aires. Among Castro's most important
pieces, mention is due to his Biblic Symphony (1932), the ballet
"Mekhano" (1934), the Sinfonia Argentina (1934), the Piano Concerto
(1941), the String Quartet (1944), "El Llanto de las Sierras" (The
weeping of the hills, 1947), "Corales Criollos no. 3" (Creole chorales
no. 3, 1953), and his operas "La Zapatera Prodigiosa" (The woundrous
shoemaker, 1943), "Proserpina y el Extranjero " (Proserpine and
the Foreigner, 1951) and "Bodas de Sangre" (Blood weedings, 1952).
a composer, Juan Jose Castro was always committed to the Argentine
avant-garde movement. ln 1929 he joined the "Grupo Renovacion" -that
grouped contemporary Argentine composers- and, in 1948, the Argentine
Composers Association. His pieces were awarded prizes in many ocassion.
The opera "Proserpine and the Foreigner" -premiered at the "Alla
Scala" Theatre in Milan- received the "VERDl" award after having
been chosen among 138 pieces; "Corales Criollos no. 2" won a prize
in Caracas at the Latin American Music Festival in 1953; and, lastly,
the National Fund for the Arts of Argentina awarded him the Honorary
Grand Prize in 1965 for his musical production.
Carlos Chaves, Alejo Carpentier, J. J. Castro, Hilario Gonzalez
and Julián Orbón in Venezuela, 1954
to his career as a composer and conductor; Castro held many important
administrative appointments: he was the General Director of the
Colon Theatre from 1933, professor in the National Conservatory
of Music in Buenos Aires from 1939 to 1943, member of the Fine Arts
National Council in Argentina from 1945 and member director of the
National Endowment for the Arts.
the Ricordi Prize ceremony, awarded to Julian Bautista (6/2/58).
J. J. Castro and Alberto Ginastera (first to the right) among others.
information about Manuel de Falla and Julian Bautista, two Spanish
composers and close friends of Castro's visit Julian Bautista 's
website at http://www.julianbautista.com.ar
photos from the personal archives of Ms. Raquel Aguirre de Castro.
Reproduction prohibited without written permission. | <urn:uuid:75199c50-7a5e-4217-a686-552b22b764d9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ostinato.tripod.com/castro.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919822 | 1,582 | 2.46875 | 2 |
This question already has an answer here:
I know that as velocity approaches the speed of light the time dilation shoots to infinity as shown below.
1)So I want to know how time is perceived from the point of view of the photon?
2)Since time stops at the speed of light how do photons move?
3)Is this why photons do not decay or are made up of any smaller particles? | <urn:uuid:df9d4143-e2ee-4953-960d-c6658714993d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/55393/how-do-photons-experience-time | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961458 | 86 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Progress? Yes. Change? - Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
LITTLE has changed in the 40 years since Bernadette Devlin McAliskey took her seat in Westminster.
There’s been progress, she says, the token gestures, the handshake.
By Patricia Devlin
In 1969 the 21 year-old was thrust onto the main political stage when she took up her role as Mid-Ulster’s Member of Parliament.
It was a revolutionary victory, not only for the young Queen’s psychology student, but for civil rights, socialism, nationalism and women, across the Province.
Never before had a female firebrand as young, passionate and sincere as Devlin taken up a seat in the Houses of Parliament.
Many say there has not been one since.
In the by-election which saw the Unity candidate take over 53 per cent of the vote against unionist Anna Forrest; 91.5 per cent of the Mid-Ulster population queued at the polls.
She remains the youngest woman ever to have been elected to parliament.
“It was like something you would see now in other parts of the world,”” she recalls.
“It had nothing to do with me as a person...well, it had something to do with me as in I was a catalyst but it was about bigger things than me.“There was a battle being enjoined here and you could see it in that election. There were core lines being drawn and fights being fought.”
“And when I look back on it, people have different reasons for doing what they do, but at the end of the day all the candidate can do is set out the election manifesto and say: ‘‘If you elect me this is what I will do’,’ and I set mine out very clearly and I stuck by it.
“And I discovered after a period of time that the people who voted for it hadn’t read it!””
Delved into detail or not, the substantive of Devlin’s manifesto was unmissable.
It called for the cancelling of the national debt, more jobs and more social housing, a challenge to sectarianism and an end to segregated education.
“It is a wee bit sad for me that those issues were all live issues for me when I stood for the Mid-Ulster election in 1969,”” she says.
“And we fast forward to 2012 and we are back to not having enough social housing to house the poor. We still have segregated housing, we are still talking about Catholic estates and Protestant estates and who is allowed to live where. We are still marking them with flags.””
““All of that was there before the Troubles and having gone the long way round, took Stormont down, put Stormont up again, we haven’t moved the argument on to addressing poverty, to challenging and dismantling the segregation that feeds sectarianism, and I am now fighting the corner for the next poorest people, which are migrant workers, as well as holding that other link.””
Today Mrs McAliskey sits, not only as the co-founder of the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme (STEPs), but as its project co-ordinator.
Over 15 years the project, a first of its kind in the area, spread its wings across Mid-Ulster and now holds three offices, employs 32 staff, and caters to an ever growing list of those seeking help, from single mothers to migrant workers.
Her role today maybe a far cry from the socialist female politician that shook the Wilson government, caused unease among Tory MPs and saw her serve a jail sentence for her radical left wing approach to politics, it is clear her values and core beliefs remain the same.
She still believes that prisoners here are created and treated unfairly; she still believes sectarianism is institutionalised in our political structure and she still believes that democracy is threatened by those who hinder the right to say ‘’no’’.
“”People say ‘well you’ve made good progress’, yes, we have, and nobody would deny that.”
”We have made good relationship progress but because we haven’t made a good structural process, the relationships now begin to look a bit tatty and orchestrated because they have no substance in moving things forward.
“So on the one hand we have Martin and the Queen, arm-in-arm, and we have, I was going to say, without being disrespectful, but it is hard not to be, but if wrapping yourself up and attending someone else’s football match fixed this, we would have fixed it long ago.”” “
”That’s not to demean those things, but they have to be representations of something real, not substitutes for something real and to my mind they are substitutes for something real.”
“Because meanwhile back at the ranch, at Stormont, we have no racial equality strategy agreed, we have no cohesion, sharing and integration strategy agreed; we cannot get nationalism and unionism to move forward with the Review of Public Administration and give authority back to the councils.
“We have no real change in education because the same jockeying for position of the two big blocks is going on. On local government, on health and well being, on more democratic participation, is all not happening.”
“We have no Bill of Rights which was to underpin the human rights; we have no civic forum, two big pillars in the Good Friday Agreement structure - never to be seen, disappeared.
“The civic forum was to provide some sort of check-in-balance against that pillars of nationalism and unionism being erected.
“”So, it was the first thing the two of them got rid of. So we have no civic forum, no Bill of Rights and we have no tolerance of dissidents.””
Dissidents, the founding member of People’s Democracy states, is a word synonymous with “the “rump of the militarist republican movement””, but in the democratic sense: “”I think that makes it necessary for democrats to be dissidents, if I can say that carefully.
“There is a legitimate need, and a legitimate right of dissidents, to say this isn’t working,” she says.
“”To claim back for participative politics for democratic politics, to claim part the right of dissent from the configuration that a dissent threatens the peace, that dissent threatens democracy. The right to say ‘’no’’ is the fundamental right to democracy”.
“”The right not to be punished for disagreeing, and I think that there is less tolerance of a minority viewpoint in the new Northern Ireland than there was in the old one. Given that we know where the lack of democracy took us before. I think that’s scary.”
From 1969 to 1974 that fight for democracy, for rights, for fair governance, instilled the 21 year-old as a figure not to be messed with.
Her time in Parliament is best remembered for her 1972 crossing of the floor of the House to punch Secretary of State, Reginald Maulding, who said the security forces “shot in defence” on Bloody Sunday - a day of bloodshed she witnessed.
“My only regret is that I didn’t hit him harder,” she smiled.
She was banned from the House for six months, and refused to apologise.
“The single biggest thing for me in Westminister was nothing that happened in parliament, which is funny I am not an abstentionist,” reflects Bernadette.
“What it did do for me, I think, firstly it created that platform which was like both platform and a mega phone, that brought Northern Ireland onto that stage and partly that had to do with what people would now call the brand.
“I was 21, long haired, shirt skirted, big eyed and big mouthed, and I was a phenomenon.
“So once I was elected to Westminster that was not only amplified onto the Westminster stage, but onto the world stage, and I was a media product.”
“The one thing I did learn is you can’t take this away from me, once this was there - it’s a bit like innocence, it can’t be retrieved.
“So I think that when the media and the politicians realised ‘too late, too late, this woman is deadly serious, this is not simply a brand, this woman has independent ideas and they are not going to go away’.
“They moved very quickly to try to pull it all back, and they used the fact that I was a woman. So they would start to talk about the trivia of it - ‘green MP drinks orange’.
“They also never reported in the Guardian or anywhere else what everyone else was wearing,” recalls the one time MP.
“And then putting you in a box, redefining who you were. But even within that they created an opportunity for me to build relationships.
“They could switch off the light, they could try to reconfigure you, but actually, they couldn’t take away the learning that you got and the relationships that you built.”
Bernadette has remained on the hardline fringes of Northern Irish politics since her brief spell in Parliament from 1969 to 1974.
She lost her seat when the nationalist vote was split when SDLP stood a candidate against her, allowing John Dunlop of the Vanguard Progressive Unionist Party to win the 1974 general election.
Her thoughts? “Did they (the SDLP) use the fact I was a single, unmarried parent to help justify their vote?
“Yes they did. And were people open to that? Yes they were.”
In that same year Bernadette co-founded the Independent Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), set up as a break-away to Sinn Fein, only to leave a short time later.
“It didn’t work for me,” she explains, “I just looked at them and said, retreat, reverse. And that was good learning.”
By that time, and in the midst of the Troubles, Bernadette Devlin had become Bernadette Devlin McAliskey after marrying long-term love Michael. Both went onto survive a loyalist assassination attempt in 1981.
“I think for people today, giving the whole traumatic times we have lived through, it is often quite difficult for people who aren’t of my age group to have any real understanding of how it all started,” she explains.
“When you try to explain that you find yourself saying, ‘well, I’ll start to explain this, but then if you need to understand that I need to go a bit further back’. Because what has changed very interestingly that I have noticed over the time is the way people tell the story. It changes.”
“Not simply changing with who is telling it, the people who have told their own story have changed how they tell it, as they have gone along. As we have got into the worst part of the conflict, people began to think that all this trouble started with the conflict, so that before, which is a time they didn’t remember, things here were good, and then somehow it all fell apart and we started to behave badly towards each other. Then there was war and violence and that was what created fear and sectarianism and separation and isolation and a whole lot of other things.
“But, for those of us who lived before the Troubles, it was the way we lived that caused the Troubles, not the other way around.”
Her main fear today is for young people, and how they perceive the Troubles, and what the Troubles mean for our future generations.
“They only know the story that is given to them,” she tells me.
“Whether that’s from dissident loyalists, dissident republicans, from loyalists and republicans now in government, or loyalists and republicans now in positions of community power.
“But John Wayne once said, ‘sorry doesn’t make it alright’ and there is a lot of sorry around, but there is no real understanding that war doesn’t work.”
“My other biggest fear is that you look at society and you look at the people who aren’t young, I look at the government, I look at the schools, I look at the youth justice system, I look at everything and almost everybody is speaking about our young people as if they were a problem.
“How will we protect ourselves from young people? As if young people were born a problem. Once a society defines it’s future as it’s problem, there is something wrong with society.”
There is no doubting that Bernadette’s youth played at least a small part in her appeal to those that voted for her in 1969.
“I think people voted for change, I think people voted for protest and I think people voted no matter how non-sectarian my campaign was, people voted on nationalist, and although the nationalist question was not an issue in my election people voted in the national question. People voted for all.”
“I think women voted for me because women were in a very different place and it was incredible to many women that a young woman would stand there and articulate and not have the wit to be afraid of those things,” she says.
Bernadette continued: “There’s also a different discussion opened up about that explosion at the time, if that is the word to use, in the sixties of the ‘ism’s’, feminism, socialism.
“The sixties was a dramatic period of change for us and in a way if you look around the world today, along the Mediterranean and along Egypt, Syrian and Africa there have been big changes, but it has been very, very difficult.
“Because the structures don’t change for young women to have equal access to leadership that young men do, it is difficult.
“It is difficult for somebody, a young journalist like yourself, to balance a personal life and that includes children, you will have no choice but to do two jobs for the price of one.
“The one you get paid for outside the home and the one you either then do, around that. Two full-time jobs done in the space of one life. And men, don’t.
“And I know that young men will say ‘I do this and I do that’, I know what you do.
“As little as you can get away with because the reality is that the personal family, private sphere responsibility is still predominantly female and women who want to function in the public sphere still have to prepare to do both of them not only simultaneously but better than anyone who is only doing one of them, in order to justify doing the two in the first place.”
It may be over 40 years since the young Irish Socialist Republican took her seat in Westminster, but her dedication to fighting for the rights of those still on the margins of Ulster society is still as evident as ever.
“I can understand why people support their neighbour, but how people stand in the street saying that the Quinn family have been abused against, because they created jobs in some kind of feudal loyalty or exaggerated parochialism, when the evidence clearly suggests, however it happened, that business was taking risks financial risks.
“Putting people’s jobs at risk, and that, in high class gambling, not at bookies for five pound notes, that had direct impact on people’s jobs, that actually contributed in some way or another, all of those high class people, bringing down the entire Irish economy.”
“And people can stand there and say ‘poor Sean Quinn is getting a raw deal’.
“I have not seen that level of understanding for poor women who have stolen food to feed their children.
“And that astounds me, what makes the people tick?”
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Weather for Belfast
Sunday 19 May 2013
Temperature: 8 C to 16 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: South east
Temperature: 8 C to 14 C
Wind Speed: 18 mph
Wind direction: North west | <urn:uuid:b1daa0d7-ad02-493d-be7c-85b8da16575e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.midulstermail.co.uk/news/local/progress-yes-change-bernadette-devlin-mcaliskey-1-4177025 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974568 | 3,551 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Pro-pollution Sen. Inhofe aims to block life-saving standards
By Arpita Bhattacharyya and Daniel J. Weiss
Americans can celebrate a big step toward cleaner air and healthier communities today as the final Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for power plants are published in the Federal Register. This is a significant milestone for the life-saving Environmental Protection Agency rules that were announced on December 16, 2011. However, these long overdue safeguards from the known neurotoxin mercury continue to face relentless attacks from coal heavy utilities, coal companies and their Congressional allies. Today, Senator Inhofe (R-OK) filed a Congressional Review Act resolution to block the rule, just as it made it onto the Federal Register.
The Federal Register is the official publication for proposed and final rules. Publication of the mercury rule begins the implementation process. The rule requires power plants to reduce mercury, lead, arsenic, acid gasses, and other toxic chemicals from their smokestacks. The huge reduction in toxics would save 11,000 lives, prevent 130,000 asthma attacks and avoid 4,700 heart attacks annually. Such drastic health improvements would provide economic benefits of up to $90 billion every year.
Senator Inhofe disregards these important health benefits and calls on his colleagues to join him to “stop EPA’s destructive agenda” through a joint resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act. The Congressional Review Act allows Congress to completely block rules it opposes. It works like this: Once the mercury rule is published in the Federal Register, legislators have sixty legislative days to introduce and vote on it. According to the Library of Congress, a legislative day begins:
“when a house of Congress meets and ends when it adjourns…the Senate often does not adjourn at the end of a daily session, but instead ‘recesses,’ so when the Senate next meets, it continues in the same legislative day. As a result, a legislative day in the Senate may extend over days, weeks, or even months.”
In addition, the resolution requires a simple majority of senators voting for it to pass – it cannot be blocked by a filibuster that requires 60 votes to end.
Albert A. Rizzo of the American Lung Association blasted Senator’s Inhofe’s attempt to block the standards, stating that “These safeguards have been delayed for far too long already. The public cannot wait any longer for these life-saving clean air protections.”
Senator Inhofe will likely have the support of many utilities and coal companies that have ignored the health benefits. Instead, they want to prevent, weaken or delay these vital safeguards, claiming that the cost of cleanup is simply too high.
The emitters claim that the rules will reduce electricity reliability, increase electricity prices, and increase unemployment. Many also assert that they don’t have enough time to comply. The Center for American Progress and other clean air defenders have proven these claims false time and time again.
- A CAP Analysis found that 22 members of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a coal industry coalition which is leading the charge against the rule, has nearly $18 billion in cash reserve which could go towards scrubbers and other equipment necessary to slash these pollutants.
- The Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Congressional Research Service, and the North American Reliability Corporation have all done analysis showing that the rule will not threaten Americans’ access to reliable electricity.
- Studies by the Center for American Progress and Ceres found that many of the plants already have the capability to meet the air toxics rule.
- The EPA concluded that increase in electricity price increase would be relatively small and would actually account for the harmful costs of pollution on the public.
- The Economic Policy Institute determined that the rules would yield a net increase of 84,500 direct jobs by 2015.
- The rules go into effect in 2015 and the utility Exelon has testified that three years is enough time to implement pollution control technology.
- EPA also makes a fourth year option widely available.
- Opponents’ predictions of high costs are likely overblown. History shows that estimates of reductions costs under earlier pollution laws are always higher than the actual costs. For instance, In 1989, the EPA calculated that complying with the acid rain program would cost $2.7 billion to $4.0 billion but a decade later, an EPA analysis found that the actual cost was substantially lower at $1 to $2 billion per year.
EPA Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy summed it up best: “For 40 years, we have been able to implement the Clean Air Act, grow the American economy and keep the lights on.”
We will do it again with the Mercury and Air Toxics rule. It is time for Senators to ignore polluters’ rhetoric and protect the health of our kids, families, and communities by opposing Sen. Inhofe’s Congressional Review Act resolution to block the rules. | <urn:uuid:dc8bea33-ca4f-4115-a319-082ea286dba3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/02/16/427240/lets-get-going-federal-register-publishes-mercury-and-air-toxics-standards/?mobile=nc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944049 | 1,023 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Choosing a CFD Solver
If you are new to computational fluid dynamics, selecting a CFD solver can sometimes be a daunting task. There are a bewildering variety of choices.
Commercial CFD Packages
Even though I make
developing non-commercial CFD codes and helping people use them, it must be said that commercial packages are a good solution for many organizations. So before we dive into the discussion of the various non-commercial CFD solvers, we need to make a quick side trip to the world of commercial software.
If you are looking at commercial CFD packages,
evaluate the different alternatives carefully
to be sure you're getting the right solution for your organization. There are many reputable companies that offer different CFD packages which cover the whole spectrum from highly customized expert systems, to stand-alone solvers, to all-in-one packages that attempt to provide everything you need to do CFD at your company. Follow the link for
a short discussion of just a few of them.
One size does not fit all, however, and sometimes businesses find that their needs require a different approach, either for a single project, or for all of their CFD simulations. For example, your projects might require the inclusion of terms in the governing equations which are normally neglected (because they're very small in most cases). Or, you might require a higher order scheme than is commonly available (for an acoustics application, perhaps). Or maybe your budget just won't stretch for the licensing costs.
Whatever your reason, if you need something besides the commercial packages, there are many high quality CFD solvers which are freely available from one source or another. Here are some thumbnail reviews of some of them. Where present, you can follow the links to more detailed descriptions of the software you're interested in.
What about the many packages I haven't covered here? If you are a developer or user of another package, you can
contribute your own tip or review of a free cfd solver.
You can also see and comment on the reviews that other users have submitted.
This is the code
I use for
a lot of my CFD work,
whether development or applications. It solves the compressible Euler or Navier-Stokes equations, but beyond that, it is about as flexible a code as any I've encountered. There are
numerous options for the handling of flow physics
and many different
computational grid topologies
can be handled. Also, Wind-US can be
run in parallel
in many different ways.
Along with the CFD solver there are
numerous other utilities
that come with it to make your life a bit easier. In summary, Wind-US is not the best code for everything, but it can be applied to more different areas than many other codes. It is freely available (including source code) to U.S. organizations (see the license for restrictions). If that sounds like what you need, check it out.
In November 2011, the NPARC Alliance released Wind-US version 3.0. I have a review of the new features of
this free cfd analysis software.
This “code” is really a library of C++ routines which facilitate the numerical solution of partial differential equations. Using this library, many different solvers (included with the software) have been built to address many classes of problems in fluid dynamics (and other fields as well). Applications range from laminar incompressible flow to fully turbulent reacting compressible flow to solving the Black-Scholes equation for pricing commodities options. OpenFOAM is freely available worldwide under the GNU Public License. To learn more, see my
review of this free CFD solver.
This is a general purpose structured grid compressible CFD solver maintained primarily by Chris Rumsey at NASA Langley Research Center. One of the code's many strengths is the diversity of available turbulence models. Like Wind-US, access to CFL3D is restricted to “U.S. persons”.
The development of this widely used code is led by Pieter Buning at NASA Langley Research Center. This compressible CFD solver is specialized for use on overset structured meshes (aka CHIMERA grids). The recent release of OVERFLOW 2.0 (and now 2.1) saw significant additions which make it a leader in its ability to compute large-scale unsteady problems such as store separation from a full aircraft configuration. For additional details, see
my review of this capable computational fluid dynamics software package.
This code is the solver portion of the TETRUSS (TETRahedral Unstructured Software System) system developed by NASA Langley. USM3D solves the compressible Navier-Stokes equations on unstructured grids made up of tetrahedral elements. Like the other NASA codes, USM3D is free to U.S. organizations, and in this case, training and support for USM3D (and the whole TETRUSS system) is available, for a fee, from ViGYAN, Inc.
Development of this CFD solver is led by Stéphane Popinet, with support from the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. Gerris solves the incompressible Euler, Stokes, or Navier-Stokes equations using unstructured Cartesian meshes with immersed boundaries. This allows the use of dynamic mesh refinement to automatically generate quality grids around complex geometries.
At the present time, it is best suited for unsteady flows, but no turbulence models are available as of this writing. As a result, turbulence must either be completely resolved (a direct simulation) or the numerical dissipation of the discretization algorithms must be relied on to act as a model (a la MILES approach). Gerris is freely available under the GNU Public License.
A World of Options
From the above, you can see that there is quite a variety to choose from, and this is just scratching the surface. To any readers from outside the United States, I apologize for the U.S. slant to the reviews here; I will try to balance things out eventually with additional reviews of more internationally available packages.
If you have your own favorite code, you can
tell us about it here.
You can also see other users' submissions, and add your own comments.
When you're ready,
return to the Innovative CFD home page | <urn:uuid:b9e657e6-9244-4e19-81b2-1ad7cc484550> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.innovative-cfd.com/cfd-solver.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930466 | 1,349 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Kids love to play soccer! Soccer is the fastest growing sport for kids in the United States and California has some of the largest and most competitive soccer programs in the nation. Elite Kids is one of the few professional youth sports providers that offers instructional soccer to the very young athlete. Taught in our outdoor soccer classroom, our program provides structured but fun instruction on fundamental soccer skills, strategies and mechanics. Great foundations begin at a young age and this program will give your child an excellent head start!
Tutsi Goals (Ages 1-2 ½ years. Parent and Me) 30 minutes
This class introduces our youngest athletes to the exciting game of soccer! With a parent by their side, our tiniest students are exposed to the basic movements, balance, foot contact, overall goals, and general concepts of soccer. Using special balls and equipment designed for toddlers, students will learn foundational skills of kicking, collecting, moving with the ball, and awareness of group play. Students will also be introduced to basic game rules related to direction of play, scoring, and use of feet. Little ones LOVE to have their own class and soccer is fun, action oriented and instantly rewarding!
SoccerBees (Ages 2½ - 4 years) 45 minutes
This class introduces preschool athletes to the fun, athleticism and camaraderie of soccer! Emphasis is placed on basic elements of forward ball movement, forward passing, trapping, collecting, kicking and scoring. Students are introduced to the group dynamics of play, teamwork and sportsmanship. Coaches will lay a fun foundation for the conditioning and fitness that will be required of (and will distinguish!) our future soccer players!
Kickeroos (Ages 4-6 years) 1 hour
This class is designed to prepare 4- 6 year olds for AYSO and other team soccer programs. Kickeroos will learn ball movement, dribbling, trapping, collecting, and scoring. They will learn forward and side passing and will be introduced to using both feet in ball movement. With a continued focus on the object of the game, students will gain an understanding of team play and the general rules and strategies of soccer. Kickeroos will have a great head start to joining a competitive soccer team! | <urn:uuid:5f5c35d5-0dd8-41d2-8aa3-74e5c5cbdc8b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://elitekidsusa.com/soccer.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942737 | 453 | 1.796875 | 2 |
De Wilde, H. and De Bie, M.J.M. (2000) Nitrous oxide in the Schelde estuary: production by nitrification and emission to the atmosphere. Marine Chemistry, 69, 203-216. ISSN 0304-4203.
|PDF - Published Version |
Restricted to KNAW only
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0304-4203(99)00106-1
Concentrations of nitrous oxide (N2O), oxygen, nitrate, and ammonium, as well as nitrification activity were determined along the salinity gradient of the Schelde Estuary, Northwest Europe, in October 1993, March 1994, and July 1996, The entire estuary was always supersaturated with N2O. Concentrations ranged from 338 nmol dm(-3) (31 times supersaturated) in the O- 2-poor upper estuary, down to about 10 nmol dm(-3) (slight supersaturation) at the mouth of the estuary. Nearly all N2O was lost to the atmosphere within the estuary rather than being transported to the open sea. The mean annual emission from the Schelde estuary to the atmosphere was estimated to be 2.8 X 10(8) g. Per unit area, this flux is large when compared to data published for other estuaries. Nitrification in the water column was the main source of N2O. The oxygen gradient along the estuary controlled the location and intensity of nitrification. In the upper estuary, the maximum nitrification activity was 6.4 mu mol N dm(-3) h(-1). The N2O yield, associated with nitrification, varied spatially and seasonally. Between 0.1% and 0.4% of the oxidised NH4+ was converted to N2O. The total amount of N2O in the estuary appeared to be controlled by the NH4+ concentration of the river water which entered the estuary. [KEYWORDS: nitrous oxide (N2O); nitrification; gas emission Schelde estuary Coastal marine ecosystems; trace gases; nitrosomonas-europaea; sw netherlands; nitric-oxide; elbe estuary; fresh-water; n2o; denitrification; rates]
|Deposited On:||24 Nov 2011 01:00|
|Last Modified:||24 Apr 2012 16:37|
Repository Staff Only: item control page | <urn:uuid:cd973357-e29f-4561-ab18-af5528213720> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://depot.knaw.nl/10856/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930521 | 526 | 2.671875 | 3 |
A Primer on The Nation's Move Toward 'Smart Meter' Utility Grids
Published: Thursday, December 13, 2012 at 11:55 p.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, December 13, 2012 at 11:55 p.m.
A week after Superstorm Sandy left a huge swath of the East Coast without electricity, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo unleashed a blistering critique of his state's utilities, calling their restoration efforts inadequate and deriding the electric system as “archaic and obsolete.”
The vast and lengthy power outage isn't the first disaster to expose weaknesses in the nation's aging electric grid. But Sandy — and the prospect of climate change fueling more storms like her — has added a sense of urgency to fixing the power system and has drawn politicians and the public into the debate over how to do it.
“We need to seriously overhaul the energy regulatory and power distribution in this state,” Cuomo said last month as he announced an investigation into utilities' storm preparations. “Let's make the changes we need to make, and let's do it while we are still in the moment.”
Cuomo's post-Sandy wish list is sure to include transforming the state's antiquated power network to a smart grid that's capable of sensing, reporting and automatically adapting to problems anywhere in the electrical system. Such upgrades are a complex and costly undertaking. But the need for them — in New York and across the country — is becoming hard to ignore.
Experts say a modern grid wouldn't have fared much better against the physically destructive powers of Sandy's fierce winds and surging floodwaters, but a smart power system could have preserved electricity for hundreds of thousands of customers by preventing storm-induced outages from spreading to adjacent areas. In addition, a smart grid could have cut economic losses by speeding up reconnections for homes and businesses.
There are major benefits in normal weather, too. Adding equipment to monitor grid conditions, relay the information to grid operators and automatically make adjustments could help maintain day-to-day reliability, prevent cascading blackouts, pave the way for the widespread use of rooftop solar and accommodate fleets of electric cars.
A transition to a smart grid has been under discussion among regulators and power utilities for years, but progress has been slow and spotty. The primary hurdle is the enormity of the project — and the price tag that goes with it. There are also thorny regulatory and policy complications and cybersecurity and privacy issues.
Here's a primer on the nation's move toward a smart grid.
The nation's grids are a patchwork of interdependent, separately managed networks that are wasteful, overloaded and increasingly fragile. They're heavily dependent on 40-year-old equipment that's operating beyond life expectancy. Compared to advances in telecommunications networks, they're only marginally more sophisticated than the grids first energized 100 years ago.
In most cases, today's power network depends on large distant power plants to generate electricity. High-voltage transmission lines carry the power to cities, where it passes through a network of lower-voltage, neighborhood distribution lines and then into individual homes and businesses. The distribution lines, which run along local streets and are often surrounded by trees, are especially vulnerable in storm situations. A tree limb hitting a power line in the wrong place can send entire neighborhoods into darkness.
A smart grid includes a mix of digital equipment, sensors, two-way data communications and software programs that are deployed in grid control centers, on the power network and in people's homes to give utilities a real-time picture of grid conditions and an early warning of problems that can lead to blackouts.
A variety of digital smart grid sensors can constantly measure and react to heat, light, magnetism, ambient temperature, voltage, current, moisture and other physical characteristics in the network. Newly installed phasor measurement units provide readings on grid conditions 30 times per second, compared with once every few seconds on the old grid. The devices can constantly tune the grid to an optimal state, and when there's a disturbance, automation technologies in substations and control centers react faster than a worker could.
Smart meters, meanwhile, are installed in homes, transmitting energy use data back to utilities in 15-minute intervals. Web programs let customers see how much energy their homes are gobbling and where they could use energy efficiently. About 36 million smart meters — one in every three U.S. households — have been installed, according to IEE (formerly the Institute for Electric Efficiency). The number could jump to 65 million meters by 2015.
Smart grid and Superstorm Sandy
Utilities and smart grid experts were quick to point out that an already upgraded power network would not have prevented the massive power outage that came with Sandy and left millions of East Coast residents without electricity for weeks.
Chris Olert, a spokesman for New York's Consolidated Edison Company, put it bluntly: “No piece of the smart grid is waterproof or storm proof … the smart grid would not have stopped 12-foot walls of water.”
The utility has received nearly $200 million from the Department of Energy to implement smart grid projects, which are still being deployed. As part of a related pilot program, Con Edison has deployed 1,500 smart meters.
Even so, experts say the smart grid did help in tangible ways — though the utilities haven't yet quantified the benefit.
“The utilities that had started down the path of grid modernization fared much better in terms of being able to avoid outages at the edges where the storm didn't cause complete devastation but was disruptive,” said Miriam Horn, who directs the smart grid initiative at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Pepco, which provides power to nearly 800,000 customers in Maryland and the District of Columbia, was one of the utilities that cited smart meters as a benefit in Sandy's aftermath. More than 130,000 of Pepco's customers lost power after the superstorm's winds sent trees and limbs crashing on power lines. By Oct. 31, two days after the storm, the vast majority of customers had their lights back on.
Pepco spokesman Marcus Beal said the utility had activated more than 400,000 smart meters when Sandy hit. The ones knocked off line sent the utility a last-gasp message just before they went dead. Those alerts allowed Pepco to automatically add those sites to the repair order queue.
Beal said “power-is-back” alerts allowed the utility to immediately close out 60,000 repair orders without having to verify the restoration with a call or by dispatching a crew.
Smart grid and renewable energy
Most experts agree that smart grids will pave the way for more renewable power and distributed generation like small-scale rooftop solar arrays.
Unlike fossil fuel plants, which provide a steady flow of electricity to the grid, solar and wind energy systems deliver power to the grid intermittently, when the sun shines or the wind blows. The swings in power production (when a cloud temporarily shades a solar system, for example) are hard to manage on today's grid. And without proper controls, a region with a lot of solar production can overwhelm the system on a sunny day.
Because most of today's power grids don't have smart controls, regulators severely limit the amount of renewable power that can be connected to the grid. Current grids also automatically shut down renewables when the grid is under duress to protect workers from being injured by uncontrollable inflows of power. That engineering safeguard rendered thousands of solar panels useless in New Jersey — the nation's No. 2 solar state — after Sandy ravaged the region.
Smart grid technologies, by contrast, tip off operators to any potential disturbances so they can keep the flow of electricity balanced by adjusting and rerouting power or by changing the location where power is being added to the grid.
Cost of a smart grid
Massoud Amin, a leading smart grid expert and an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Minnesota, estimates the United States will have to invest $30 billion a year for the next 20 years to get a smarter grid, according to his own calculations.
About one-quarter of those dollars would be spent just to keep the old grid from collapsing, including power line repairs, substation upgrades and regular maintenance work. The rest of the money would go to replacing clunky, decades-old analog equipment with digital sensors, devices, meters and other smart grid components.
Separate estimates by the Electric Power Research Institute put the cost of modernizing the grid between $338 billion and $476 billion over the next 20 years. The institute has said that while the bulk of those costs will be passed on to consumers, those customers could reap up to $2 trillion in benefits over the same period through greater grid reliability, energy-efficiency improvements and improved integration of renewables and plug-in electric vehicles into the grid.
Cost of doing nothing
The price tag of a smart grid is high, but the costs of maintaining the status quo are even higher. That's in part because more frequent storms and an aging, overloaded and unprotected grid will cause increasingly costly outages.
According to Amin, outages and power disruptions cost the U.S. economy between $80 billion and $188 billion a year as businesses and public transportation are forced to close down and grocery stores and other shops have their inventories melt and spoil. That doesn't include the cost of fixing damages to the grid infrastructure.
Sandy alone may have caused $30 billion to $50 billion in economic losses along the East Coast, according to Eqecat, which tracks hurricanes and analyzes their impact.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)
It's not the first time the region has suffered power outages in part because of the grid's shortcomings. In 2003, an estimated 55 million people lost power in the Northeast and in Canada after overgrown trees brushed a high-voltage power line in Ohio, causing it to shut down. “Because there was no ability for grid operators to see what was happening, that (outage) cascaded across the United States,” said Horn of the Environmental Defense Fund.
The blackout killed 11 people and caused more than $6 billion in economic losses. If a smart grid had been in place, “you keep hundreds of millions of people, literally, on the grid who got knocked off,” Horn said.
Who will pay for it?
Who pays the smart grid bill remains an open question, though some spending is already under way.
The Obama administration's 2008 economic stimulus package gave the smart grid industry its first and biggest boost with $4.5 billion in grants and incentives for projects in nearly every state.
Of that amount, $3.5 billion went to 100 smart grid projects across the country. That funding is expected to help deploy 18 million smart meters as well as other devices. The rest of the money went to help cities and utilities study the technical and economic performance of their smart grid technologies.
Private firms and investors poured $4.4 billion into those efforts during that same time, said Amin, the smart grid expert, adding that partnerships are key. “The government cannot do it alone. And industry cannot do it alone.”
One way to do that is to create a national infrastructure bank, he suggested, an idea that's already received a lot of buzz in Washington, D.C. The bank would target smart grid initiatives — along with other energy, water and transportation projects — providing private investors with loan guarantees or cheap, long-term loans.
The Senate last year floated a bipartisan bill, called the BUILD Act, to create a general infrastructure bank. Policymakers called for an initial federal investment of $10 billion, which they said would help stimulate up to $600 million in private investments to upgrade the nation's infrastructure systems. The effort remains stalled for now.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)
Beyond figuring out how to pay for the smart grid, utilities, regulators and lawmakers will also have to grapple with a host of ancillary issues ranging from new billing schemes and the cost to low-income customers. And they will have to address rising concerns about privacy violations and cyber security issues.
Some privacy advocates worry that smart meters reveal too much personal data to utility companies, and that customers would be unable to prevent the information from being shared with other companies. Others are concerned that hackers or so-called cyber-terrorists could break into utility servers and manipulate all those remotely controlled sensors, causing widespread blackouts or explosions of grid equipment in populated areas.
Such concerns are being addressed, albeit slowly and only in certain areas.
Last year, the California Public Utility Commission passed rules requiring the state's largest utilities to regularly conduct independent security audits of their millions of wireless meters and to restrict the access of third parties to customers' personal details.
Meanwhile, the North American Electric Reliability Council, which sets reliability standards for the Canadian and U.S. transmission systems, requires all bulk power system owners, operators and users to follow a series of cyber security rules for monitoring, assessing and managing the nation's critical infrastructure.
Plenty of money is expected to go into bolstering the smart grid's defenses. Pike Research forecasts public, private and utility investments in cyber-security technologies will total nearly $14 billion by the end of 2018.
Cooperation, the biggest hurdle of all
The smart grid transformation needs the cooperation of state and federal agencies, policymakers and utilities — as well as the acquiescence from ratepayers — to make sound decisions about which projects should get priority and how to get them done.
That's not happening yet.
The lack of “coordinated decision-making is a major obstacle,” Amin said.
High-voltage transmission lines and systems, for instance, fall under federal jurisdiction, while the distribution grid and metering are regulated by individual states, often through public utility commissions. So far, there's no consensus among state commissions about which smart projects, if any, are worth the cost. And many have balked at the price tags.
“National oversight may be needed” to get everyone on the same page, he said.
Some steps are being taken in that direction.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the U.S. Commerce Department, was charged under the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act with developing protocols and model standards for how to implement smart grid technologies across the country. Its Smart Grid Advisory Committee, a group of utility executives and electricity experts, has met five times in the past two years to advise the institute on what should be made a priority and where deployment efforts fall short.
While those and other issues get worked out, climate scientists warn that the warming planet will force people around the world to contend with increasingly fierce severe weather.
“We are seeing more storms, and they are coming more frequently,” said Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute. “Every time we have an outage, more people are affected.”
No matter how quickly key decisions and investments are made in the grid, a truly smart U.S. power infrastructure will take decades to build, said Stephen Connors, an electric power researcher at the MIT Energy Initiative.
“This is still very early,” he said. “The smart grid is long term, it's not near term.”
(InsideClimate News is a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers clean energy, carbon energy, nuclear energy and environmental science. More information is available at http://insideclimatenews.org/.)
©2012 InsideClimate News
Distributed by MCT Information Services
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged. | <urn:uuid:e66428cd-8b64-4845-84f7-ecdcc8cb0f76> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theledger.com/article/20121213/POLITICS/121219622/1494/TOPIC0404 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952082 | 3,253 | 2.328125 | 2 |
Preface/Introduction to AEP book
Preventing Occupational Exposures to Bloodborne Pathogens
Articles from Advances in Exposure Prevention, 1994-2003
Advances in Exposure Prevention was launched by the International Healthcare Worker Safety Center in 1994 as a forum for rapidly communicating the latest findings from our EPINet multi-hospital database and for discussing government policy, legislative developments, and best practices and devices to prevent occupational exposures to bloodborne pathogens. We also intended AEP to be a resource for government policy-makers and legislators to support initiatives to protect healthcare workers from occupational infection. Over the past ten years AEP has been put to good use in many ways, fulfilling its original objectives. The numerous issues of AEP have been read and circulated, some filed, some scattered to the four winds. Because they represent a coherent body of work, we decided to gather them into a retrospective volume, which we are pleased to present here.
We introduce this volume with our first article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1988, “Rates of Needle-Stick Injury Caused By Various Devices in a University Hospital,” which set us on a national course to safer medical device design. We conclude the volume with an article published in the Journal in 2001, “Risks to Health Care Workers in Developing Countries,” which set forth our vision for the future: to bring effective protection to healthcare workers in the farthest reaches of the globe.
The cumulative body of work this book represents traces the history of a critical period when risks to healthcare workers had become more lethal than ever, while at the same time preventive technologies were becoming more effective than ever. It tells the story of the coordinated, and ultimately successful, efforts of researchers, government agencies, medical products manufacturers, professional associations, unions and individual healthcare workers to tip the balance in favor of workplace health and safety.
We thank all those who have contributed their ideas, energy and time to AEP—especially our editorial advisory board and our many colleagues who have written articles for AEP. We particularly want to recognize and thank our colleagues at what was once the Vascular Access unit of Johnson and Johnson—a unit that was first part of a division called Critikon, then Johnson & Johnson Medical, then Ethicon Endo-Surgery. More recently, the vascular access business was sold to Medex, Inc. Their generous financial support for AEP over the last nine years has been unwavering and crucial to our efforts.
BD and Medisystems, Inc., have also been long-time supporters of AEP and the Center, through bulk subscriptions and educational grants. In addition, Medisystems provided some funding for production of this book, for which we are grateful.
One of AEP’s most important roles has been providing a voice for healthcare workers who have experienced the consequences of an occupational blood exposure. Their courage in sharing their experiences in AEP gave names, faces and a heart to this issue, and a sense of urgency to legislators and government policy-makers. They have been a continuing inspiration to us, giving meaning and purpose to our efforts.
We would also like to recognize each hospital that contributed their EPINet surveillance data to our multi-hospital research database; their names are listed in the acknowledgements. The database now includes more than 25,000 blood exposure incidents—each one representing a healthcare worker who reported information on his or her exposure. The database as a whole is the source of much of what we know about the risk of blood exposures to healthcare workers; that knowledge rests on the foundation of individual reports diligently provided by thousands of workers. The surveillance coordinators at each participating hospital made a special contribution of their time and effort to compile, maintain, and transmit data to our center. We thank them and we hope that we have been good custodians of their information.
Our international collaborators have brought depth and perspective to our understanding of healthcare worker risks. In particular, we acknowledge our close collaborators at the SIROH group (Italy’s national program of surveillance and research on occupational risk of HIV and other bloodborne diseases among healthcare workers), directed by Dr. Giuseppe Ippolito; and also our Japanese colleagues, who developed an EPINet-Japan surveillance database on occupational exposures under the direction of Dr. Satoshi Kimura. We have benefited tremendously from the expertise of these colleagues, and the opportunities for comparative research that they have made possible.
We are particularly proud to document the history of healthcare worker protection in the United States. Nationally, we have accomplished something unique in the time interval represented in this volume. Working together, we have brought about a revolution in the safety of medical device design. Healthcare employers are now required by law to provide to workers sharp devices with engineered sharps injury protection. No other country has achieved the level of safety that has become a standard requirement for U.S. healthcare employers. This is an accomplishment we share. But there remains so much more to do beyond our borders. Let us learn from our experience and set our sights high in order to bring these beneficial changes to every healthcare worker around the globe.
Janine Jagger, M.P.H., Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief, AEP
Jane Perry, M.A., Managing Editor, AEP | <urn:uuid:5f50644e-c2af-4052-8d76-b3b07f4f5b5c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/pub/epinet/aep/aep-book-preface.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955343 | 1,088 | 1.945313 | 2 |
IN OLD MYSORE
Published in London Magazine, of October-November, 1972
Fifty years ago the streets of Mysore were not tarred. Tarring is what we used to call it. Words like surfacing and asphalting were not in vogue then. Maybe some Parsis in Bombay knew the words, for everything came to Bombay first, from England; and the Parsis received it first.
The stretch of road from the municipal building to the market sqaure was covered with fine red mud. Red mud is nature’s bounty. A city must be lucky to have it. The Red Road in Calcutta is not red at all. I believe they had to use science to make London’s Mall red.
Basava, the famous wrestler of Koppal on the outskirts of Mysor, filled his arena with red mud. His disciples said it was like wrestling on a Persian carpet.
This stretch of road, about 300 yards, was the domain of three British Viceroys. It was bounded on the east by Curzon Park, on the west by Lansdowne Buildings, and on the north by the Elgin Fountain. It was 100 feet wide. All the main streets of Mysore were that wide. They were named after the Ruler’s forbears and their consorts, and when the names were exhausted, one of the roads was called simply “100-feet road’. That stretch.
Twice a day, at nine in the morning and five in the evening, a municipal servant opened the hydrant on either side alternately and watered it. It was filtered water. The municipal servant was a craftman at his job. No mechanical sprinkler could have watered any surface so perfectly.
Years later the municipality bought a lorry mounted with a water tank and fitted with a sprinkler at the rear. The lorry was driven by Ramiah, the town’s first Brahmin lorry-driver. He was a venturesome man. Lorry-driving was not a calling for Brahmins then. The lorry did not do the watering job half as well as the municipal servant did. It was not Ramiah’s fault; it was the lorry’s.
When the servant finished his job the amount of water he had caused to be sprinkled on this stretch was just right. it watered the red mud evenly, leaving no patches, dry or slushy. He achieved this result by moving the water jet from the hose in a zig-zg manner and by playing at the hose’s nozzle dexterously with his fingers. In the gentle breeze filtered water on red mud threw up a most agreeable smell which, when I began to drink many years later, I discovered was exactly like that of Vat 69.
When a hose-drawn carriage approached, the man lifted the hose at such an angle as to make an arch of water jet and let the carriage pass underneath without any water splashing on it. In a small town with few cars and little traffic it was common for pedestrians to use the road rather than the footpath. When a pedestrian approached, the man at the hose freed an appropriate path from his water play, till he passed. When an important-looking person approached, he curbed his hose altogether. One such was my father.
My father was the picture of the affluent Brahmin. He wore his dhoti in the traditional style, that is, knoted at five place around the waist. Three knots would do to keep it in position but traditionalists would have to have five. It was handwoven, with a prominent border of red silk, and so more expensive than the imported Manchester mull dhoti, No. 1703, which most others wore.
His buttoned-up coat was of white silk and his white turban, as well as the shuffled white cloth hanging from his neck, had gold lace of the appropriate width. He wore the red sandals, curved up in front, commonly worn by the Chitpavan Brahmins of the West Coast. In short, his dress was a combined indicator of caste and class. He carried a sandalwood walking stick or an umbrella, depending on the weather, of course. Not in the English sense though. In India an umbrella is a protection against sun as well as rain. My father’s umbrella was made by Ebrahim Currim, the famous umbrella manufacturer of Bombay.
Past the Elgin Fountain and market square, my father entered the market building by a side entrance and climbed a flight of stairs to a small room upstairs. This was the Merchants’ Association. Downstairs, on either side of the entrance, were shops selling local perfumery and sandalsticks. When you pass an Indian perfumery shop you smell perfume. When you pass a perfumery shop in the west you smell only cardboard cartons. Those huge exposed bottles of perfume in the shop-windows of Paris are my despair. As I am looking at them I am only smelling the fetid atmosphere of the shop. Indian perfumery seems to cater to two sensory perceptions at the same time, sight and smell.
My father was a member of the Merchants’ Association because he was a merchant. He was a rice merchant. Brahmins were not merchants as a caste, nor as a class fifty years ago. But a few ventured into business. Sundaram Iyer, for example, had a big grocery in the same bazaar where my father had his rice shop, and Upadhyaya, a perfumery establishment not far from market square.
The more orthodox of my father’s Brahmin friends did not like his being a rice merchant. Rice was the food of life. A Brahmin did not sell this life sustainer. He had two privileges in respect of life. He either begged for it or gifted it, but sell never. The orthodox believe that some curse would visit on my father for trading in rice. He did get diabees, but this had less to do with selling rice than with his eating it.
My father’s business was vertically integrated, in the language of modern capitalism. He grew his own paddy in the village, brought it to town for milling in his own mil, and sold it wholesale in his own shop. His two junior partners were a Vysya and a Sudra. Rather by accident than by design, their shares in the business descended in the same order of the caste hierarchy.
The Merchants’ Association was a sort of a club, and by convention only the head of the firm was a member. In the prevailing laissez-faire in business, its petitions to authority were few and seldom had to go beyond the town’s municipal council. It was, in fact, little more than a reading room. Its high moment came twice a year when it presented a garland of flowers and a bouquet to the Maharaja when he rode in procession that way. This was a privilege enjoyed by a select few which included the local European Club and the Masonic Lodge.
In the reading room of the Merchants’ Association my father settled down to the English language newspapers from Madras and Bombay, and I to Mercantile Guardian from England. I understood nothing of its writing but was attracted to its green cover with the picture of Britannia on it. Perhaps no engraver ever etched a simpler drawing that produced so much reassurance in so many millions in so many lands.
Britannia, solid, remote, imperturbable, mistress of the waves. Trident in hand, she seemed more powerful than Siva, the third of the Hindu trinity, who carried a similar instrument. I passed my eyes idly over the advertisements until it was time to leave. We got home in a horse-drawn carriage. It happened to be the same carriage every evening.
Sabu, its Muslim owner, knew the time we usually emerged from the reading room. As he saw us approaching the carriage stand a few yards away, he politely drew up his carriage for us to board. His pony was always in fine fettle. We were back home by 8 pm, the deadline that all good men of the town had imposed on themselves. Those who habitually got home later were suspect. They, perhaps, played bridge somewhere, consumed alcoholic beverages at the railway station bar, or visited prostitutes.
The two Bs—the British and Brahminism—pervaded life. In a sense the two were interchangeable. The British were the Brahmins among the Europeans of the town. Otto Schmidt, the German conductor of the Maharajs’s private orchestra, and Simonelli, the Italian superintendent of His Highness’s garage, were lower in the caste status to the Rollos, the MacIntoshes and the MacAlpines, who filled the educatioal establishment.
The Maharajs was benign, to the Indian castes and the European castes. But there was no mistaking his recognition that the two Bs were on top. He was an anglophile. He contrived a national anthem for his state in the local language whose musical score very closely resembled God Save the King. He was benign to all Brahmin ecclesiastics, even to those on the West Coast who kept concubines.
The elders at home told me he was a demi-god and I believed them. The transference of this belief to other Maharajs landed me in utter confusion years later when the late Maharajs of Kashmir, Sir Hari Singh, gave me his visiting card in a Paris cafe. The idea that demigods cary visiting cards like you and me was a shock. | <urn:uuid:2e7bb4a3-7eaa-479c-ad15-0dacb13f1442> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://churumuri.wordpress.com/what-is-churumuri/h-venkatasubbiah/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9855 | 2,011 | 2.1875 | 2 |
A few weeks ago we pointed out the conceit of New York City health commissioner Thomas Farley, who called every single New Yorker “my patient.” The implications are even scarier when you realize that the good doctor isn’t even an elected official, but an appointed one. But with New Yorkers rejecting Farley’s latest prescription to fight obesity, a ban on large soda, who wins the battle between the self-important state and public opinion?
In New York, it looks like the self-important state wins. The Wall Street Journal reports that Big Apple Mayor Michael Bloomberg “isn’t contemplating any changes to his proposal to ban restaurants and other venues from selling large-size sugary drinks.” Hizzoner also channeled “toxic sugar” mythmaker Robert Lustig. Lusting ironically characterized his own proposal for a ban on (among other things) letting children buy cookies as “trying to undo the nanny state.” The mayor claimed that companies have been “dictating” portion sizes “all along.”
But unlike New York City government officials, beverage companies listen to the public about soda sizes. In response to consumer demands for lower-calorie options, store shelves are now stocked with the option of smaller soft drink cans for people who want them. Or, you know, you can also just not drink soda if you don’t want to. No one is forcing you to buy or drink it—but Bloomberg and Farley are forcing New Yorkers to abide by their ridiculous edicts.
New Yorkers—even those who maintain a healthy weight—will be prohibited from buying large sodas at the ballgame on a government doctor’s orders. One of these is not like the others, and Hizzoner is playing a very Orwellian game by claiming they’re the same. | <urn:uuid:3b55b970-a682-41d8-8ce6-8b8236d5ac72> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.consumerfreedom.com/2012/08/new-york-says-take-your-medicine/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945705 | 388 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Getting Auto Insurance Is A Sign Of Being A Responsible Individual
Anyone who drives a car knows the importance of getting car insurance.
Being Prepared is a Must!
It is a mistake to not get covered by an insurance policy because you’ll never know when something bad may happen. Plus, it is against the law in most states to drive around without insurance. Not to sound fatalistic, but everyone should be always be prepared for anything.
- Auto insurance can provide you with a security blanket in case you get into a car mishap.
- Having your car insured will protect you from unwanted costs from future repairs of damaged properties.
A basic car insurance has six types of coverage:
- property damage liability
- body injury liability
- medical payments or Personal Injury Protection
- uninsured/underinsured motorists coverage
Shop Using the Internet
The Internet is one of the easiest and best places to get auto insurance. Here, you will be able to get the most competitive rates from different insurance companies.
- There are companies that can offer you cheap insurance.
- As long as you take proper measures in choosing the right policy for you.
- Additionally, there are different things that can help bring down the price of your insurance policy.
- If your car has anti-theft devices, airbags, and automatic seat belts, you can save money on your policy.
- Remember that getting your car insured is a social responsibility; it is also a means of protecting yourself and loved ones from unexpected problems.
- It’s as important as life and health insurance.
- A car insurance, depending on your policy, can save you from future worries in case you get into an accident, get your car stolen or damaged.
Are you looking for the best rate possible for the coverage you need? The only way to do this in your area is to search our directory of local auto insurance agents or to compare auto insurance quotes from multiple providers. Look around our site, learn about different insurance products, and find local agents or national companies by entering your zip code into one of our convenient forms located on every page.
Leave a Reply | <urn:uuid:0d44f5c8-dfc6-4bea-b754-80eb811f064e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://findinsurancecompanies.org/getting-auto-insurance-is-a-sign-of-being-a-responsible-individual/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942868 | 440 | 1.953125 | 2 |
Thanks to a stimulus funded grant, Jennings is starting to make this happen.
Recovery Act Impact: Sustainability Initiative
A $150K stimulus-funded State Energy Sector Partnership grant has enabled the Office of Campus and Community Sustainability to develop an online course in sustainability studies.
"We want to foster interaction, build a literacy and benefit communities," said Jennings.
For its students, the sustainability course is also providing them with 21 st century skills.
Al Olivera works as a municipal manager for the City of Fall River, which wants him to get educated in sustainability methods. "I'm using what I'm learning every day," he said. "We're building schools and everything we're talking about is sustainability."
Ryan Collins is working as an Americorps Vista student on Habitat for Humanity. For him the program is applicable to his weatherization work for Habitat. The course has led him to help the organization develop energy audits it can offer at reduced rates.
"We are learning things that could be put in people's hands," said Baroudi. "Sustainability is the way we are going to live."
According to Jennings, the course will graduate 60 students and she anticipates it will be self sustaining once the grant is completed. They have already received permission to develop a Master's program in sustainability and have recently applied for a federal grant to bring foreign students to the campus for a 5-week sustainability course.
"This grant has allowed us to move forward," she said. "We will be certifying sustainable development throughout the world." | <urn:uuid:fdaf8341-ac9a-4ac3-86b6-f4dbbfd8484b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mass.gov/recovery/see-the-impact/stimulus-stories/stimulus-sustainabiltyi.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977101 | 321 | 1.570313 | 2 |
East Asian Art
Scholar's StudyMade in Beijing, China, Asia
Qianlong Period (1736-1795), Late 18th century
Artist/maker unknown, Chinese
Lacquered wood, concrete block floor
1929-30-1Gift of Wright S. Ludington in memory of his father Charles H. Ludington, 1929
The scholar's study was one of the innermost chambers of a Chinese scholar-bureaucrat's residence. This example was acquired by the Museum in Beijing, where similar interiors may still be seen in the palaces of the former Forbidden City. Designed to be a contemplative setting away from official duties, the two side walls are lined with hinged, lacquered panels, each with silk-covered latticework at the top and delicately painted landscapes at the bottom.
The study is furnished in a style typical of the period. The rosewood desk seen at the back left is of the "kneehole" type, long popular in China. It offered ample room for storing the scholar's books, brushes, and writing equipment. The long, narrow table at the right front was designed for painting or looking at scrolls.
The occupant of the study was most likely a highly ranked mandarin, or civil official, who had passed a series of difficult competitive examinations in the Chinese classics in order to attain his position. He was versed not only in the duties of his office but also in music, poetry, and the arts of calligraphy and painting, and was a connoisseur of art with a keen interest in collecting.
* Works in the collection are moved off view for many different reasons. Although gallery locations on the website are updated regularly, there is no guarantee that this object will be on display on the day of your visit. | <urn:uuid:41a52513-5238-4ca5-b6e5-fd68a4c4e582> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/42577.html?mulR=15986%7C6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966393 | 372 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Why won't Windows allow me to change a system setting?
If your computer is part of a network at an organization such as a school, government agency, or business, your organization's system administrator might have disabled or even removed certain settings by using Group Policy. Group Policy is a feature of Windows that lets system administrators manage users' access to Windows features. If you suspect that Group Policy is preventing you from changing a setting that you need to access, contact your system administrator.
If your computer isn't part of a network, a user with administrator privileges might have modified Group Policy on your computer to remove access to the settings. In this case, contact the administrator to modify the settings you'd like to change.
For more in-depth technical information about Group Policy, go to the Microsoft website for IT professionals. | <urn:uuid:34d69a95-e322-46c9-ab65-196e4664ab58> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/why-wont-windows-allow-me-to-change-a-system-setting | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935529 | 165 | 2.625 | 3 |
Photos by Mary Knox Merrill/Staff
Forget the funny hats, glitzy parties, and rousing, partisan speeches. The sober business of hurricane Gustav – though making landfall 1,200 miles away from the Twin Cities – has sent the 2008 Republican National Convention into uncharted territory.
What normally would have been a four-day extravaganza advertising the GOP ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin has been downsized, at least early in the week, into a bare-bones affair. The Republicans could not afford to appear insensitive to the plight of the nation's Gulf Coast.
"There's nothing to gain from politics as usual," says John Zogby, an independent pollster.
Many actors face crucial tests this week: President Bush, months away from leaving office, has an opportunity to redeem himself from the missteps of hurricane Katrina three years ago. Although local and state officials shared in the blame, Mr. Bush appeared asleep at the wheel and his presidency never really recovered.
Senator McCain and Alaska's Governor Palin, who was just named to the ticket last Friday, needed to appear engaged in the response effort and above politics. Sunday morning, they headed to the Gulf region for a briefing and to call on Americans to volunteer or donate money. "America needs us now, no matter whether we are Republican or Democrat," said McCain, who has made service a central campaign theme.
Page 1 of 4 | <urn:uuid:8fd3a0eb-08b3-4cd3-af4e-657acc91111e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2008/0901/hurricane-gustavs-political-fallout-a-subdued-gop-convention | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959288 | 288 | 1.546875 | 2 |
What Fr Z calls 'bad old ICEL' worked very hard for several years to produce a new version of the Missal which went on to be approved by various episcopal conferences, but was then rejected in Rome.
Since the publication of our new 2011 Missal, many (especially on the Pray Tell site) have compared the 2011 version unfavourably to the unpublished 1998. Those who take this line usually have an advantage over mere mortals such as me, in that they have had experience, or at least sight of, the 1998 Missal, which has been kept as a jealously-guarded secret.
Some of the arguments go a bit like this:
Fred: I quite like the 2011 Missal.
Harry: Well you're clearly not a liturgist, Fred! Now, the Missal of 1998, which we spilt blood over, was far superior until some Dark Forces in Rome proved that they knew nothing about liturgy by rejecting it out of hand. All that work, binned!
Tom: Yes, Harry, you're right. What chance did we get to experiment with the 2011? We weren't even consulted, and we know about liturgy. The 1998 was tried out in all sorts of normative groups, ordinary parish situations, like the St Gregory Society, like the Bishops' Conference LGBT awareness Caucus. Every word was pored over, weighed, agonized over. And now this Mgr Moroney can sketch some ideas on the back of an envelope, and because he has friends among the Dark Forces, can have it imposed on the whole English-speaking world!
Fred: But I still like the 2011. It's a lot better than the 1975.
Harry: Hm; discuss. I don't agree; though I think that the 1975 certainly needed updating. It had far too much sexist language in it, and it is true that a lot of the imagery had been ironed out. That is just why the 1998 is so good.
Fred. I still like the 2011.
Tom: That's because you haven't seen the 1998. You are speaking out of ignorance. I have seen, used, the 1998, and it is simply wonderful. In fact, I was one of the writers.
Fred: Well, would you give me some examples?
Tom and Harry together: No!
Harry: Certainly not! It is forbidden for non-initiates to see. You must simply take our word that it a much better translation. You must remain in ignorance until you are Enlightened by us.
Fred: Well, how do I become an initiate?
Tom: You have to become a Liturgist. You must go to music days, join the Society of St Gregory, write bitter letters to the press, join What If We Just Said No, take the oaths of secrecy.
and so on.
Well, all that changed for me this morning, because I found a link where you can download the whole 1998 Missal to your computer in pdf form. The veil of the temple has been torn, and all can see inside where, in my opinion, the Emperor is prancing around without many clothes on.
Don't get me wrong. Genuinely I can sympathize with those who worked for years on the 1998 Missal. It must have been galling and disheartening to have the thing rejected when so many had given it the green light.
But it really does belong to a different era. Essentially, the Ordinary is that of 1975 with some tweaks and corrections here and there. EP4 is substantially rewritten, and is actually quite nice, but the text strains painfully to be inclusive. There is an alternative version of the Our Father; the Lamb of God is substantially altered to make it match up to the frequently-used 'Communion-Song' style; quasi-litanic in form. In the rubrics, 'hostia' is rendered 'consecrated bread'; calix is 'cup' and 'patena' is 'plate':
The priest genuflects and takes some of the consecrated bread and the cup and,
extending them toward the people, says one of the following invitations:
After the completion of communion or after Mass, the deacon or another minister,
or, if there is no other minister, the priest, cleanses the plate over the cup and
then the cup itself, either at the side table or at the side of the altar.
Taking inspiration (I expect) from the Anglican liturgy, the acclamations after the Consecration have priestly lead-ins that differ according to which particular acclamation the celebrant wishes the congregation to use, losing in most cases the 'Mysterium Fidei' connection.
The collects aren't bad, actually, much better than 1975, and actually some of the ones I have looked at are preferable to the rather tortured ones in the 2011 Missal. You can find some side-by-side comparisons here, on the What If We Just Said Stuff The 2011 Missal site (useful; though it would have been more useful to have had the Latin alongside).
1998's texts and choices seem very much to come out of the Society of St Gregory school of liturgy. It really seemed, back in the 1990s, to be the way that liturgy was going, so the rejection of the Missal, and the publication of Liturgiam Authenticam must have seemed a real slap in the face. And you can see where comments such as 'Pope Benedict is not a liturgist' have come from.
I'm very glad to have been able to look at the 1998 Missal now. But if I had the choice, I have to say that I would stay with the 2011; our new translation isn't all joy for me—I do find it tortured from time to time, and sometimes inaccurate (simili modo, for instance, does not mean 'in a similar way' [though see the comments]), but in my view, on balance, it's much better than the 1998, and light years better than the 1975. | <urn:uuid:1fea4fe2-1c0b-4b5d-b771-6a25e85064bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://valleadurni.blogspot.com/2012/03/1998.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968857 | 1,263 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Economic, Spiritual, and Political Motives
The revolt was spreading with incredible speed over central and N Germany and almost immediately extended beyond the German borders. All the elements of discontent and rebellion coalesced. The learned, such as Luther himself, Melanchthon, and Martin Bucer, saw the opportunity to express and expand their own views. The nobles were enabled to cast off allegiance to the Holy Roman emperor and to enrich themselves by seizing the immense landed estates of the church. Too much can be—and has been—made out of this economic motive, however, for many of the princes belonged to the intellectual group that had been stirred to critical rejection of church doctrines, and they were perhaps better aware than the common people of the venality and money-mindedness of many of the clergy. Many of the pious, increased in number by a spontaneous religious revival in the late 15th cent., drank the doctrine of a new spirituality with pleasure, for Luther's doctrine of justification (i.e., salvation) by faith alone and not by sacraments, good works, and the mediation of the church placed humans in open and direct communication with God. The new insistence on reading the word of God in the Bible placed a greater responsibility on the individual.
Those who were feeling the first and welcome experience of nationalism were anxious to shake off the hand of Rome. Absolutist rulers, particularly in Scandinavia, welcomed the opportunity to end the interference of the church in state affairs; by creating national churches they were able to escape outside influence. Merchants and capitalists found the air of individual freedom exhilarating. The peasants, chafing under the old restrictions of feudalism, lifted up their heads in hope that the new dispensation would take away their burdens.
Sections in this article:
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
More on Reformation Economic Spiritual and Political Motives from Infoplease:
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Protestant Denominations | <urn:uuid:c514fa1e-bb89-4189-8d03-3b5d1a4f612c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/society/reformation-economic-spiritual-political-motives.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961719 | 411 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Since the dawn of time, mankind has crossed intersections in an orderly fashion. When the light turns red and traffic in one direction stops, you cross. Meanwhile, traffic flowing in the other direction whizzes on by.
But is that the best way to do it?
Vancouver doesn’t think so. The city is planning to test a radical new type of intersection called a scramble – and it’s just as exciting as it sounds. Car traffic will be stopped in all directions at once. Pedestrians can then cross any way they choose, even – get ready for it – diagonally.
The new scramble intersection will be rolled out sometime soon along Robson Street, the Vancouver Sun reports. While it may potentially slow traffic, the big advantage is that it can dramatically reduce car-pedestrian collisions. Because autos and people cross the street at different times, there’s less of a chance of someone being struck by a vehicle making a turn into a crosswalk. | <urn:uuid:8dd25193-4acb-4bcf-8a00-7d3c739feab6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.insidevancouver.ca/tag/barnes-dance/ | 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 | 0.948 | 204 | 2.21875 | 2 |
It is disturbing that so many of the anime heroes that lose their humanity are children. It reminds me of a quote from The Outer Limits which, paraphrased, basically states that the greatest tragedy of war is turning our children into heroes.
I am also led to think about Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. At the end of the hero’s journey, they are no longer a part of the community they went forth to save. With children, this is even more tragic, because not only do they lose their community and family, but their entire childhood…
Writes Sean O'Hara:
Most of you probably remember Sailor Moon as a rather silly cartoon series from the mid-90s. And you're probably looking at me wondering, "Why is he reading a stupid kid's comic?" What you have to understand, though, is that what aired in the US was a bowdlerized dub of a series that was itself heavily watered down from its source material. Among the more notable offenses, the American dub handwaved away all the deaths in the series, turned one gay male character into a straight woman, turned a lesbian couple into cousins, and added in facile "and knowing is half the battle" tags to the end of the show. The two part series finale was so heavily censored that it ended up airing as a single episode, and another half dozen episodes were simply never aired in the US.The girls have been watching a few videos on Youtube, and if my VCR still worked, I'd let them see my old fansubbed movies and forever ruin their understand of the English language, but this. This is much better.
Which reminds me... they are also ready for Magic Knights Rayearth, created by my beloved CLAMP.
Rayearth starts out as your typical school girls granted magical powers to save the day, but trust CLAMP to ensure that good and evil is never black and white.
Sailor Moon and Rayearth are prime examples of why I love manga over North American comics, particularly for young children. They aren't afraid of what we consider to be adult themes, such as death, responsibility and even sexuality (no, I'm not talking about hentai). | <urn:uuid:d5fd4449-aa81-4c1a-8c43-6e9763f036d4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nightxade.blogspot.com/2011/09/fighting-evil-by-moonlight.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977291 | 457 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Educational inequalities in the midst of persistent poverty: Diversity across Africa in educational outcomes
Lloyd,Cynthia B.; Hewett,Paul C.
Journal of International Development 21(8): 1137-1151
Publication date: 2009
This paper explores inequalities in education across sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest continent. Although we primarily focus on primary school completion rates, attention is also given to literacy as a more proximate indicator of human capital acquisition. Using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and UNICEF's Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), we explore cross-country variations in primary school completion rates, gender and wealth gaps, and literacy rates in relation to each other as well as in relation to cross-country variations in national income per capita. While these data paint a picture of overall educational progress, particularly for girls, this general picture is juxtaposed against an extremely diverse landscape across Africa with respect to primary school completion rates as well as retained literacy. Although cross-country variation in primary school completion rates can be partially explained by variation in national per capita income, the same cannot be said for literacy rates. Even among the poorest countries, there is significant variation in achieved literacy, suggesting that learning can occur even in resource challenged environments. At the same time, our findings are sobering; in many countries, international educational goals are unlikely to be reached by 2015 and learning outcomes are abysmal. | <urn:uuid:dde17f7a-d742-4778-b89b-9c0c5239b591> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.popcouncil.org/publications/abstract.asp?RefID=6980 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935688 | 296 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Policy & Politics
New Jersey Senate Set to Consider Sterile Syringe Program
June 21, 2012
A Senate panel is expected to vote Thursday on a measure that would expand and make permanent New Jersey's sterile syringe program. The Bloodborne Disease Harm Reduction Act of 2006 is a demonstration program, permitting six cities to operate the needle-exchange programs; Atlantic City, Camden, Jersey City, Newark, and Patterson currently do so. The new legislation would authorize any municipality to operate an NEP, and it would appropriate $95,000 to fund it. The outreach has reduced HIV risks and boosted access to drug treatment and other services without increasing crime or drug use, a 2010 state report showed.
This article was provided by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is a part of the publication CDC HIV/Hepatitis/STD/TB Prevention News Update. Visit the CDC's website to find out more about their activities, publications and services.
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The Bay of Naples and the Amalfi Coast in Campania, have had
a long and eventful history, abound with archaeological, historical and
cultural treasures, some of the richest to be found in southern Italy.
The Amalfi Coast remained relatively isolated until recent
times, and could only be reached by sea. It was made more accessible to
visitors from the construction of the Amalfi Coast Road, also known as the
Amalfi Drive, which was started in 1815 by Ferdinand II of Bourbon. It is the
only road that runs along the coast, and connects all the main resorts, from
Positano in the west to Vietri sul Mare in the east. Today, a trip along the
coastal road, now known as Highway 163, and referred to as the "Nastro
Azzuro," or Blue Ribbon, because of the color of the sea, which is always
in sight, is a highlight of any visit to the Amalfi Coast. The road clings to
the cliff-face, climbing past headlands and dipping down to the sea to reach
tiny fishing villages.
The History of Pizza.
First-made in Naples for Queen
Margherita, a recipe for Margarita pizza, which is still popular today - over
100 years later.
It is said that the pizza that made Naples world famous is
the Margherita pizza. It
was first baked in 1889 by a local man and a town baker, who went by the last name, Esposito. He
created the pizza in honour of a visit to Naples by the Queen of Italy, Queen
He designed the pizza to follow the colors of the Italian
flag, so he chose tomatoes for the red, basil for the green and Mozzarella for
the white, to create the famous and patriotic pizza we still eat today. | <urn:uuid:f3a2495d-0175-4719-82bb-fed9de366a9d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.amalfisofstatesville.com/default.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960133 | 390 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Well, by education I am a doctor. Here is the genuine truth.
Doctor tells you what is safe to the best of their knowledge.
No doctor will ever harm a patient knowingly or lie to a patient intentionally. Doctors are scientific minded people and they make recommendations in accordance to the current guidelines.
Now keep in mind that research is advancing everyday. Something considered safe today might not be considered so five years from now. FDA changes drug safety categories based on reported adverse reactions and/or research data. Researchers make new findings, technology advances. Medicine is an ever changin science and art.
Why we should follow our doctor's advise, is because no one has the better current knowledge then them. What they will recommend will be the best advise based on current scientific data. If someone feels that rumors spread through google.com give better scientific evidence, good luck!
And doctors conflict with each other because often there is conflicting evidence to a case out there (for example medicating a patient during pregnancy). When one research study comes out declaring something "safe", some start prescribing it. Others are more cautious and want more evidence one way or the other before prescribing anything. I am in favor of more cautious side always, and I agree that patients should do their own research. I find it problematic when people use discussion boards for research instead of peer reviewed material or reliable websites.
I take Tylenol and Zofran. I HAVE to, and still I worry.
If I had a choice, I would not, but at the 30 lbs lost mark, whenmy baby stopped growing on track, I HAD to do something to keep food down and the tylenol is as needed but still. I have so much guilt for taking these things, I cannot imagine taking more.
I believe in the "empowered patient". I listen and trust my doctor, but I also do my research and try to ask a bunch of questions and educate myself. Sometimes I need further clarification, sometimes I decline things... but I try to work WITH my doctor, instead of taking her word as gospel.
And people thought this was going to get heated.
I'm so glad we can discuss things :)
thank you all very much for taking the time to respond. My BFF and I have very different views. If doc says it's okay, it must be. Hence why *I* have been the one to tell her why two diff medications were making her so sick (they had aspirin in them, even though she is allergic!) and she has no clue why. Blah! lol | <urn:uuid:fa0c01db-b88d-42a0-9f5e-dcdca81f2e79> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://community.babycenter.com/post/a38205103/doctor_says_its_safe?cpg=7&csi=2403107335&pd=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971465 | 525 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Designing for Touch and Surface
For a good hour, the cynic inside me kept telling me it was just a table, and an expensively priced one at that. But my inner five-year-old, as it turned out, was really the one running the show; while an expensive table it may be, my fingers simply couldn't resist.
The table in question is officially known as the Microsoft Surface, a multi-touch enabled computer screen released last year that is literally set into the top of a table. Ignoring the numerous, power-at-the-tip-of-a-finger clichés, Microsoft promises that the table will present a new and intuitive way for users to interact with their computers.
While not intended for consumers just yet, the device has slowly been finding its way into the hands of software developers, businesses, and design firms like teehan+lax - one of the few Toronto-based companies who have begun exploring the possibilities this sort of technology may hold.
"We recognize that it's a new, emerging platform, and something completely different," Jeremy Bell explained to me at the teehan+lax office, "and that's really what interested us in it."
Bell, along with the rest of teehan+lax, are primarily developers of web-based interfaces. Chances are, if you've ever done any banking on BMO's website, or checked your Air Miles online, you've seen some of the company's work. That being said, Bell is quick to admit that designing applications with touch in mind is a very different way of working than what the company is used to.
"You have to design these things where anyone can walk up and interact with it," explained Bell, as Brendan Lynch, teehan+lax's primary Surface developer, demonstrated the software.
" I can do my thing, and you can do your thing. For a design philosophy, it's completely different."
So what exactly does this mean for users? Remember that, with a regular computer screen, there's usually only one user interacting. The Surface, meanwhile, is designed for multiple people, and even more fingers; in fact, the table is designed to respond to 52 individual touches at once. This, of course, poses the challenge of maintaining simplicity amongst potential chaos; everything on the screen has to be easily available to multiple people, all at the same time.
But how does this sort of technology fare in real world applications? Microsoft says the intuitive nature of the device makes it perfect for social settings - in particular, bars, hotels, or other settings centered around social interaction. Just last month, for example, Canadian realtor Coldwell Banker demonstrated their own Surface app in Toronto, which the company hopes to eventually see in a number of their sales locations.
After spending about an hour with Bell and Lynch, I can see why the people at teehan+lax are excited to begin developing potential Surface applications for clients. Interacting with the Surface, if designed right, can be simple, even for inexperienced computer users.
Of course, the device has its shortcomings, some of which have posed interesting problems for Lynch. The Infrared cameras, for example, can't detect pressure, meaning developers are somewhat limited in the way users can interact with the table. Also, darker materials can prove difficult for the cameras to detect, while direct sunlight can also render the machine inoperable.
To be fair, the technology has enough positive qualities and potential applications to balance out its kinks. Having been in the wild for just over a year, more companies like teehan+lax are beginning to explore the possibilities it could hold for clients, meaning it may just be a matter of time before the device sees more widespread use throughout the city.
Just don't plan on buying one for your basement anytime soon, cautions Bell.
"The reality of this thing is that it costs so much, that it's not going to be inside of a home any time soon."
To see more pictures of the teehan+lax Microsoft Surface, check out the company's blog. | <urn:uuid:d919cedb-6e6d-4a55-9f21-538efb3a6ce6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.blogto.com/tech/2009/04/designing_for_touch_and_surface/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958237 | 841 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Prominent Wall Street investors are arguing acrimoniously over whether the nutritional supplements company Herbalife is a pyramid scheme.
The company’s fate, though, will ultimately be determined by ordinary people like Victor Aragundi, a taxi driver from Corona, Queens, who regularly visits a local Herbalife storefront to buy teas and protein shakes.
“They help me reduce weight,” Mr. Aragundi said. “They replace regular food.”
In many ways, the fight over Herbalife boils down to one question: How many Mr. Aragundis actually exist?
As regulators and investors scrutinize the company’s sales, they face a major stumbling block. The public numbers do not provide a clear picture of who buys Herbalife products — and why.
So-called direct-sales companies like Herbalife operate in an accounting gray area that allows them to book goods bought by its network of sales representatives as revenue. Most traditional retailers record sales when a customer buys something.
The uncertainty has left shares of Herbalife vulnerable to wild swings in recent months. On Monday, the stock sank sharply in the morning over fears that the company faced new regulatory scrutiny, but it later shook off the early losses.
Investors are betting on the extremes: Herbalife is a pyramid scheme or it is not.
William A. Ackman, a hedge fund manager, has called the company an abusive pyramid scheme and said the stock was essentially worthless. He says repeat purchasers like Mr. Aragundi are not the main source of Herbalife’s sales but rather sales recruits. If a significant number of the recruits fail to sell the goods, they can face large losses.
“Money from the millions of low- and middle-income people at the bottom of the pyramid is being transferred to the tiny fraction of distributors at the top of the pyramid,” Mr. Ackman said in an interview. “It’s Robin Hood in reverse.”
The company has fought back, generating support from big investors like Daniel Loeb and Carl C. Icahn. Herbalife cites its long history of sales growth and its compensation plan, which it says focuses on product sales, not recruitment.
“Herbalife is a financially strong and successful company, having created meaningful value for shareholders, significant opportunities for distributors and positively impacted the lives and health of our consumers over our 32-year history,” Barbara Henderson, a spokeswoman for the company, said in a statement.
But it is hard to discern the underlying demand. The company doesn’t specify how many of those products are eventually sold to customers outside the sales network. Nor does it detail how many products are consumed by members of its network.
One saleswoman who left Herbalife in October said she saw little consumer demand. “They want to make people believe there is this long line of consumers,” said Ana Arias, of Scottsdale, Ariz., who was part of Herbalife’s network for three years before quitting. “I realized it was going to go nowhere.” Ms. Arias, who is considering legal action against Herbalife, estimates her overall losses at $210,000.
Ms. Arias’s name was mentioned in a consumer’s complaint about Herbalife that was submitted to the Federal Trade Commission last year. The complaint was one of 188 released by the commission in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The New York Post.
Frank Dorman, a spokesman for the F.T.C., declined to say whether the agency was investigating Herbalife. In a statement on Monday, the company said that except for “voluntary dialogue with regulators,” it was “unaware of any other regulatory interest and/or investigation.”
The enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an investigation into Herbalife, according to a person briefed on the matter. Last year, the agency exchanged letters with Herbalife about its financial disclosures. In 2011, Herbalife stopped including data in its annual report about members’ buying patterns, and the agency wanted to know why.
Some people in the Herbalife network say consistent consumption drives profit. Edgar Montalban, an Herbalife salesman who oversees the Queens location that Mr. Aragundi visits, says the store has monthly sales of $4,000 to $5,000. He declined to say what his personal income was from the store, as well as his earnings from sales recruits. “We promote daily consumption,” he said through an Herbalife representative.
In theory, Herbalife could silence the critics by disclosing a crucial number in its financial statements: the percentage of sales outside its network. It would be hard to call the company a pyramid scheme if it disclosed that, say, 80 percent of its final sales were to customers, rather than new sales representatives.
Some industry executives have promoted the importance of this number. “The final litmus is, ‘Who is the customer?’ ” Rick Goings, the chief executive of Tupperware Brands, said last week in an interview with CNBC.
More than 90 percent of Tupperware’s sales are to people outside its network, he said. The remaining amount, he said, is to sales representatives who like the company’s new products. Tupperware, however, does not include this number in its public financial disclosures.
Regulators also emphasize sales such figures.
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission, along with some state attorneys general, moved to shut down Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing, accusing it of being a pyramid scheme. The lawsuit noted that few of the products were ever sold to anyone outside the network.
Herbalife says it does not collect comprehensive data on sales to people outside its network. Herbalife does, however, require its sales representatives to keep records of their transactions.
To address the skepticism surrounding the company’s external sales, Herbalife has provided two pieces of new data. The company said 31 percent of its orders in the United States were “directly shipped” to customers outside its network. It also produced a study by a consulting firm, Lieberman Research Worldwide, that found that 92 percent of Herbalife sales went to people outside the company’s network.
The study was not based on Herbalife’s actual sales data. Instead, Lieberman extrapolated from an Internet survey that the company had more than six million customers. Given the 480,000 Herbalife distributors in America, the firm estimated that only 8 percent of Herbalife products were consumed within that network.
Des Walsh, Herbalife’s president, said the study validated the company’s view that people in its sales network “are selling to millions of customers outside the distribution channel.”
Defenders of Herbalife can point to the meager number of regulatory actions. In theory, an abusive pyramid scheme that produces scores of failed recruits should generate a steady stream of complaints.
That does not seem to be the case with Herbalife.
An official at the office of the attorney general of California said it had received no more than five complaints a year about Herbalife over the last eight years. And those complaints were mostly related to Herbalife’s products, not its recruitment practices, said the official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media on this matter.
Still, pyramid schemes may not produce large numbers of complaints.
In its home state of Kentucky, Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing, which was accused of being a pyramid scheme, received only about a dozen official complaints since 2008, according to the office of the state attorney general. Allison Martin, a spokeswoman for the office, explained that victims of a pyramid were often embarrassed about revealing losses. Fortune Hi-Tech may also have focused on people who were not legal immigrants, which might have made them even less likely to report the scheme, Ms. Martin said.
On a recent winter morning, Herbalife customers in Queens brushed aside the controversy. Mr. Aragundi, the taxi driver, and others streamed into the store for their daily teas and shakes.
“Four years ago I took the product,” said Mr. Aragundi. “I lost like 30 pounds.”
A tower being built on Park Avenue is part of Manhattan’s booming ultraluxury construction business, a trend that is warping the real-estate market and driving up overall costs.
A journey across Pakistan’s crumbling railway presents a picture of the country’s troubles: natural disasters and hardened insurgencies, abject poverty and feudal kleptocrats, and an economy near meltdown.
A document due Monday is the latest of three studies by the British government meant to sway opinion in Scotland ahead of a planned referendum next year on independence.
In Brady, Tex., a vote to approve the purchase of smart meters played a large role in the recall of the city’s mayor and the electoral defeat of two council members.
Grass-roots protests against Chinese oil projects are worrying Beijing as it competes for influence in Myanmar with the United States.
Beach nourishment projects will restore shorelines but require expensive upkeep and affect ecosystems; federal taxpayers will foot the bill.
Among other topics, Mr. Miles, who specialized in unearthing lost material about forgotten subjects, made films about the history of Harlem and a black regiment that fought in World War I.
Awash in hits, but not in profits, a proud Hollywood studio has suddenly found itself in the cross hairs of an activist investor who wants to spin it off from its parent company.
Mr. Venturi won the 1964 United States Open, nearly collapsing from heat exhaustion. He later became a chief golf analyst for CBS Sports, where he worked for 35 years.
A federal judge’s ruling could halt the resale of digital music as well as other digital good like e-books.
A world-renowned physicist meets a gorgeous model online. They plan their perfect life together. But first, she asks, would he be so kind as to deliver a special package to her?
The Winklevoss brothers have moved on from their battle with Mark Zuckerberg and are more active than ever.
As Republicans and Democrats in Texas House and Senate hash out the details of the state’s 2014-15 budget, one issue they are not arguing about is support for mental health.
The Illinois Senate has voted to approve the use of marijuana for medical purposes, which if signed into law would make it the second-most-populous state after California to do so.
The secretary, Eric Shinseki, is being held accountable for his overwhelmed agency’s problems dealing with claims for disability compensation.
Sign up for the DealBook Newsletter, delivered every morning and afternoon, and receive breaking news alerts throughout the day. | <urn:uuid:2329bea8-884c-42f6-8f5b-6fe6e896e657> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/seeking-a-companys-elusive-sales-data/?emc=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962792 | 2,291 | 1.8125 | 2 |
John DiTraglia MD
There are two kinds of exercise, aerobic and resistance training. Aerobic exercise is running, or swimming or cycling and exercises your heart and lungs mainly, and most of the big the muscles of the body more or less simultaneously.
Resistance training is also known as strength training or isometric exercise or body building. This type of exercise is sit-ups or push ups or weight lifting and exercises just more specific muscle groups with the aim of increasing their individual size.
There is another thing called anaerobic exercise or interval training that happens when you exercise intensively to the point that you exceed oxygen delivery to the muscles and this leads to rapid fatigue. This may have certain different benefits too but that’s a discussion for another day.
Which method would be best for weight loss? This week there was an article examining this question. (1) These investigators from Duke University got 119 sedentary, overweight or obese adults and put them through one of three exercise protocols for eight months:
Resistance training (RT), aerobic training (AT) and combined training with both (RT/AT). The combined resistance training-aerobic training group spent twice as long exercising. They found that the AT and AT/RT groups reduced total body mass and fat mass more that RT but they were not different from each other. RT and AT/RT increased the muscle mass more than AT as expected. So while RT did nothing to the fat mass it decreased the fat mass to lean body mass ratio because it made bigger muscles. They conclude that, “Balancing time commitments against health benefits,… aerobic training is the optimal mode of exercise for reducing fat mass and body mass.”…Unless you want to build up muscles.
Remember, we have said that exercise isn’t worth much when it comes to weight loss. So lets look closer at the details provided by this project. The aerobic training involved the equivalent of running 12 miles a week at 65 to 80 percent of peak ability. This group lost about four pounds out of 194 pounds or about 2 percent. Most of that, but not all was fat, and their waist circumference decreased a little less than half inch.
They measured total fat in the body and the AT group lost 4 percent of that. The combined RT/AT group lost about the same total weight but since they also built up some muscle, more of that weight loss was fat, actually twice as much and their waist circumference decreased a little more than half inch and almost seven percent of their total fat. Not a lot but something and it almost makes doing twice as much exercise by including resistance training seem worthwhile. Again the resistance training alone group gained some muscle and a little weight and didn’t lose any significant fat or waist circumference.
Caloric intake was monitored but not restricted and did not change during the exercise period for any group. It sounds like their bodies just got more efficient since exercise didn’t make them eat more.
Willis LM et al. Effects of aerobic and/or resistance training on body mass and fat mass in overweight or obese adults. J of Applied Physiol. December 15, 2012;113(12):1831-7. | <urn:uuid:9c05713e-2f9c-4e33-b7b2-eb7cdffd1315> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.portsmouth-dailytimes.com/view/full_story_myown/21315474/article-Which-kind-of-exercise-is-best | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970532 | 651 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Dr. Robert Latham, chief of medicine at Saint Thomas Hospital in Nashville, Tenn., is interviewed on Thursday, Oct. 4, 2012, in Nashville. Latham said a fifth person has died in a growing outbreak of a rare form of meningitis that has sickened more than two dozen people in five U.S. states. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)
Custom-mixed medicines like the steroid shots suspected in a deadly meningitis outbreak have long been a source of concern, and their use is far wider than many people realize.
These medicines are made in private and hospital “compounding pharmacies” and are used to treat everything from menopause symptoms and back pain to vision loss and cancer. Unlike manufactured drugs, these specialty products are not subject to approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
They’re often drugs obtained from manufacturers that are split into smaller doses, or drug combinations mixed from ingredients sold in bulk. Any of those steps can easily lead to contamination if sterile conditions aren’t maintained. For example, the fungus suspected in the current meningitis outbreak can spread in the air.
The risks from these products also may be compounded by the national shortage of many drugs. That has forced doctors to stretch supplies and seek custom-made alternatives if the first-choice treatment was not available. The steroid suspected in the current outbreak has been in short supply.
“Because of the incredible number of drugs that are out of stock or back-ordered, compounding pharmacies are working with local hospitals, clinics and physicians to fill that gap,” said David Miller, executive vice president of the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists, a trade organization.
These products have had remarkable growth. More than 7,500 compounding pharmacies operate in the U.S., up from 5,000 in 2009, Miller said. They account for a $3 billion segment of the drug market and 3 percent of all prescriptions filled.
Some say this industry needs more regulation.
“There’s not a lot of oversight of compounding pharmacies” compared with drug manufacturers, said Allen Vaida, executive vice president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a suburban Philadelphia advocacy group that tracks medication errors.
The outbreak of fungal meningitis has sickened at least 35 people in six states. Five of them have died. They all received steroid shots, mostly for back pain.
The FDA has said the steroid came from the New England Compounding Center, based in Framingham, Mass. The company recalled three lots of the drug last week and has said it has voluntarily suspended operations and is working with regulators to identify the source of the infection. Investigators also are looking into the antiseptic and anesthetic used during the injections.
Compounding pharmacies are supposed to supply products to meet unique patient needs, and to prepare drug products that are not available commercially, based on an individual prescription. They may cross a line if they supply a product on a large scale to a clinic or hospital without individual prescriptions, Miller and other experts said.
“They, in effect, since they do this on a large scale, have become mini-pharmaceutical companies,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University.
That appears to be the basis for an FDA warning to the New England company and four other firms in December 2006. The FDA told them to stop compounding and distributing anesthetic creams “marketed for general distribution rather than responding to the unique medical needs of individual patients.”
In May, officials reported 33 cases in seven states of a fungal eye infection stemming from products mixed in a Florida pharmacy that also prepared supplements that killed 21 elite polo horses in 2009.
In 2007, three people in Oregon died after using a compounded drug that was 10 times stronger than it was supposed to be. In 2006, the FDA sent a warning to a Maryland pharmacy for a bacteria-contaminated solution used in open-heart surgery; five patients at a Virginia hospital developed serious infections and three died.
The same steroid in the current outbreak was also tied to five cases of a different type of fungal infection in North Carolina in September 2002. Those patients also had shots from pain clinics, and one died.
Previous FDA warning: http://1.usa.gov/VAlOjm
Trade group: http://www.iacprx.org
Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP | <urn:uuid:debff4b4-7798-4b0e-8acc-7465724d8329> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailytribune.com/article/20121004/LIFE02/121009781&template=printart | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960028 | 933 | 2.109375 | 2 |
This is Baptisia 'Purple Smoke.' Last spring I planted seven of them. They developed a fungus on their roots and leaves, and died back in early autumn. I've never had a single problem with baptisia grown in previous gardens. I've found them to be tough, reliable perennials not subject to mildew, black spot or other fungus that can plague other varieties such as phlox, roses, and monarda. They've bloomed beautifully for me in part sun in previous gardens.
In the past I've planted the species, and it's possible this cultivar isn't as sturdy. The baptisia still haven't emerged, and I feared the garden had suffered more casualties. I dug up this one to inspect the roots. I found some dead spots and trimmed them off, and found no visible signs of the fungus from last year. I also saw, much to my delight, some small signs of new growth. After trimming the roots, I lovingly replanted the baptisia. Two days later, this is how I found it.
Evil yard monkeys had struck again. Anytime I have new transplants, I check them daily and too frequently find them dug up by the squirrels. Sometimes, with smaller transplants, they cart them off, never to be seen again. Fortunately this one was left behind. I replanted it, saturated it to settle the soil, and piled several inches of mulch around the disturbed soil. Squirrels seem to smell freshly-dug soil, gravitating to new transplants and digging them out before the roots have an opportunity to knit into the soil. Heavy mulching seems to throw them off. I leave only as much bare soil around the crown as needed to allow top growth to emerge. I didn't initially mulch this baptisia like that. But replanting it the second time, I didn't make that mistake. So far, it remains undisturbed.
Sometimes the silly yard monkeys replant their finds elsewhere. Last spring while planting a few hosta divisions, I found two missing astilbes replanted under an overgrown yew hedge. It was generous of the squirrels to reconsider stealing them, and so helpful of them to replant them and thus prevent the roots from drying out. Unfortunately, they haven't learned how to replant them crown side up. These two poor astilbes were trying very hard to emerge in spite of their dire circumstances. I rescued and replanted them. Also unfortunately, I didn't find them in time and they ultimately succumbed.
The squirrels are busily building their nests in our cedars. Next, as the maples leaf out, more nests will appear. We usually have at least five nests between the maples and cedars, with an average of 2-3 litters per nest per season. Like juvenile primates, young squirrels are often even more mischievous than their adult counterparts.
I have a friend who enjoys squirrel stew, and I've often fantasized about inviting him over for some backyard hunting. My friend also enjoys rabbit. Since the rabbits often eat what the squirrels don't destroy, I figure, why not let my friend cull the rabbit population as well. Don't be alarmed, it's just a fantasy, one I don't really intend to carry out. But on days when they pull stuff like THIS, my harmless little fantasy brings me some comfort. | <urn:uuid:bbe949cd-0f1b-43c0-99a0-af83a2e31d76> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gardengirl-lintys.blogspot.com/2008/04/this-is-what-they-do.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980082 | 703 | 1.757813 | 2 |
People with multiple sclerosis should make every effort to preserve their general health. A healthy diet, sufficient rest, establishing priorities to conserve energy, and developing emotional support networks can all be very helpful.
Some dietary suggestions for patients with MS include:
When researchers, observers, and hypothesizers begin to make connections, it can become very interesting. I recently came across listings... Read more »
You've found a great site for multiple sclerosis information and community. We have much to offer to people who having been living with... Read more »
Living with multiple sclerosis often means making lifestyle changes, big and small. While it is very difficult to take that first step and... Read more »
The night was winding down, as were we. I was in the kitchen leaning against the counter. I was waiting-- listening for the popcorn that I... Read more »
Multiple Sclerosis care is so rewarding because it is so multi-faceted - from the different types of presentation, different patients,... Read more »
Living with multiple sclerosis often means making lifestyle changes, big and small. While it is very difficult to take that first step and admit that... Read more » | <urn:uuid:619a6a51-0349-420d-966f-80fd2b61f2ee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.healthcentral.com/multiple-sclerosis/h/skin-changes-with-multiple-sclerosis.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971109 | 235 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Displaying page 1 of 22
123Doc’s collection of several thousands academic e-books covering most academic fields,available from www.123library.org. It is available with a PDA/Pay-Per-View combined with a Concurrent Users Business Model allowing institutions to have unlimited access to a large number of e-books whilst only purchasing copies of the most popular titles in perpetuity
18th and 19th and 20th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 2012-2014, including British Periodicals Collections I and II and Periodicals Archive Online: JISC Collections Selection from 2013-2014
JISC Collections has licensed this archive in perpetuity to provide higher and further education and research councils with pages of documents from core 18th, 19th and 20th century official Parliamentary publication. This includes debates, proceedings and reports of their committees and more going back to 1688. The British Periodicals Collections I and II provides online access to nearly 6.1 million pages from over 460 journals published from the 1681 to the 1937 covering subjects such as archaeology, architecture, art, the fine arts, drama, history, literature, music, philosophy, science and the social sciences. Periodicals Archive Online: JISC Collections Selection prvides online access to over 288,000 articles from a subset of 80 full text journal backfiles published between 1891 and 2000, from the Periodicals Archive Online collection. Although JISC Collections paid for the content in perpetuity, institutions will now need to pay an access fee to accessed the content via the publishers’ server.
19th Century British Library Newspapers: Users can now cross search 2.2 million pages from 48 nineteenth century national and regional newspapers. The Burney Collection: This resource provides access to 1 million pages from 1,270 parliamentary papers, pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks, and newspapers published in England, Ireland and Scotland between 1600-1800.
Users can now cross search 2.2 million pages from 48 nineteenth century national and regional newspapers.
Institutions now have free online access to the filmed images of over 100,000 papers and 5.2 million pages of documents going up to 2004. The content has been purchased in perpetuity, and access via the publisher's server is free until 08/01/2013. An access fee may apply after this date, but institutions can choose to self-host the content for a one-off fee of £500 + VAT. Institutions which have renewed their subscription to the 19th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers will not need to renew their subscriptions to the 18th or 20th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers
Academic OneFile is a multidisciplinary journals collection which is largely made up of peer reviewed titles, and is underpinned with reference, newspapers, magazines, and audio content. Updated daily, it contains a large number of journals covering a wide variety of subject areas within the arts, humanities, science, engineering, technology, health, life sciences, medicine, and the social sciences. Millions of articles are available in both PDF and HTML full text, with no restrictions. This agreement is for higher education institutions only.
American Chemical Society
The American Chemical Society is a self-governed individual membership organization which has more than 161,000 members at all degree levels and in all fields of chemistry. The ACS Publications Division will publish 41 peer-reviewed journals from 2013 onwards, as well as Journal of Chemical Education and the magazine C&EN News (both of which would need to be subscribed outside of this agreement) and around 35-40 new books each year.
ACSESS (Alliance of Crop, Soil & Environmental Science Societies)
The ACSESS Digital Library is a complete collection of all content published by the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America and Soil Science Society of America. The Digital Library makes if possible to search, browse, research, comment on and share all published literature in one convenient place.
The ACS Legacy Archives has been purchased by JISC Collections and is available free of charge in perpetuity to UK Higher and Further Education institutions and Research Councils. Institutions now have free online access to over four hundred and sixty four thousand articles from the complete backfiles of twenty two journals published by the American Chemical Society between 1879 and 1995. Titles include some of the most highly-cited journals in the field, such as Chemical Reviews, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and the Journal of Organic Chemistry.
American Institute of Physics
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) NESLi2 offer is for access to the AIP Complete Collection only. These are among the most highly cited journals in physics. The publisher’s content is currently accessible via Scitation. Eligible institutions can particpate in this offer by confirming their orders via JISC Collections. | <urn:uuid:d9cf98f7-a28b-4de0-b666-672a3e05960c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Catalogue/?subjectArea=3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918744 | 989 | 1.945313 | 2 |
You have some pictures that you want to scan and add to your post. What to do, what to do?
Well, if you've got a scanner, here's some tips to make capturing your photos to an image and posting them easy.
First off, you need to have a scanner. If you've got a copy of Irfanview, you can go to File>Acquire and select your scanner.
From there, IrfanView will get the software that came with your scanner awake and ready to operate. I'm using an HP scanner here, but the general idea is universal.
Your scanner software will probably go through and take a rough scan of the entire area of its glass and return something that looks like this.
Most scanning interfaces (which is what you're looking at here) will allow you to select just a portion of that whole area. In the HP software, you just click on the upper left corner of the picture and drag a rectangle out until it gets to the bottom right. It'll show you that through some flashing dashed lines or something similar. Then, all the rest of the area will go gray to show you it's not going to scan that part. If you want to do some adjustment, you can drag the little rectangles on the frame around to fit the picture better. If you want to crop out some unwanted items in the photo, this is a good way to do it.
Tell the scanner to get busy by clicking send to scanner (at least in this Hewlett Packard example) and the image will wind up in IrfanView and the scanner interface will close.
Resize/Resample the picture so it's at 72dpi and about 300 across. See this thread for instructions to help you resize.
When you're done, make sure you save your picture somewhere where you can find it. I like to keep my pictures in My Documents in the My Pictures folder. I make new folders to keep them organized. For this one, I just made a folder called ~0 so it's at the top of the folder list.
Make sure you remember where you left the picture.
Now you can go to the MOA forum, make a post and attach your picture. The thread mentioned above talks about the mechanics of doing that. And then you'll be done! Here's the picture I scanned. That's MrsK on the left there. She was riding our VFR that day. The other folks are Steve Hancock and Jim O'Connor, fellow Yankee Beemers. We were riding in the hills to the east of Morro Bay that day.
Again, if you want to practice, use that thread - "How Do I Post a Picture?"
Have fun! Now you can get those pictures of the kids scanned to send to the family! | <urn:uuid:bd122893-db0d-48a3-8961-6eec6d6f8068> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bmwmoa.org/forum/showthread.php?2039-How-do-I-scan-a-picture-and-post-it&s=f1e1be822349d605e2cc5ba1872f70b5&p=19749 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959406 | 575 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Definitions of allowance
n. - Approval; approbation. 2
n. - The act of allowing, granting, conceding, or admitting; authorization; permission; sanction; tolerance. 2
n. - Acknowledgment. 2
n. - License; indulgence. 2
n. - That which is allowed; a share or portion allotted or granted; a sum granted as a reimbursement, a bounty, or as appropriate for any purpose; a stated quantity, as of food or drink; hence, a limited quantity of meat and drink, when provisions fall short. 2
n. - Abatement; deduction; the taking into account of mitigating circumstances; as, to make allowance for the inexperience of youth. 2
n. - A customary deduction from the gross weight of goods, different in different countries, such as tare and tret. 2
n. - To put upon a fixed allowance (esp. of provisions and drink); to supply in a fixed and limited quantity; as, the captain was obliged to allowance his crew; our provisions were allowanced. 2
The word "allowance" uses 9 letters: A A C E L L N O W.
No direct anagrams for allowance found in this word list.
All words formed from allowance by changing one letter
Browse words starting with allowance by next letter | <urn:uuid:8a6226da-572b-4afa-8398-55efe323810e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.morewords.com/word/allowance/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91474 | 280 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Colonial Secretary's Papers 1788-1825
Letters relating to Land 1826-1856
Main series of letters 1826-1922
Special bundles - Letters received
Listed separately from main record series due to quantity and/or significance
NRS 898 - 1794-1825
NRS 906 - 1826-1982
- Fact sheets
Archives in Brief 64 - an introduction
Archives in Brief 65 - correspondence
Archives in Brief 104 - how to search
Colonial Secretary's Correspondence
History of the Office
The British Government in establishing the convict settlement at Botany Bay was little concerned with such administrative details as who would be responsible for the records of the colony...
Yet the Governor was responsible for almost all aspects of the inhabitants' lives and these activities had to be recorded. Phillip and his successors regulated the supply of rations, they granted lands, they allotted convicts to those who could employ them. They gave assistance to settlers and established Government stores. They fixed the prices of commodities, the rates of wages, and the hours of labour. They imposed tolls and duties. They gave and withdrew licences to trade. They established and controlled markets. They checked the weights and measures, struck a currency and fixed the rate of interest. They mustered the population periodically and published orders which forbade the holding of seditious meetings. They caused the different courts to be assembled, they examined and modified the penalties which the courts imposed. They made provision for the maintenance of order. " | <urn:uuid:91968229-61ab-4526-bac0-40fea96aaff4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/state-archives/research-topics/colonial-secretary | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956233 | 310 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Google’s Sergey Brin said that the openness and accessibility that led to the creation of the Internet is under serious threat — and that threat is from none other than Facebook and Apple.
I tend to wonder about motives when a statement from a CEO of one company is directed directly at one or more other companies. So, let’s take a moment and ask why Brin would target Facebook and Apple.
Personally, I think it’s because Google is feeling threatened in the core business that has brought them success — search advertising. Google has a near monopoly on search right now:
Desktop Search Engine Market Share
|Search Engine||Total Market Share|
|Google – Global||79.86%|
|Yahoo – Global||6.79%|
|Ask – Global||0.56%|
|AOL – Global||0.40%|
|Excite – Global||0.02%|
|Lycos – Global||0.01%|
What threats do Facebook and Apple pose to Google’s search business? After all, neither one is even in the search business. Well, that may hold true at the moment, but why wouldn’t they target that business?
Let’s start with the case for Facebook. What does Facebook have that Google doesn’t? Infinitely more personal information about you! They know your Likes, your friends and their likes, the games you play, the content that interests you, your demographics, family — you name it, and they probably know it about you. Google spends vast resources trying to gain information about you that isn’t even close to as personal – or valuable – about you. That’s why they’ve been trying so hard to get Orkut, Wave, or now Google+ to gain some traction. Why? So they can target better ads to you.
People visit Google to find something, then they go there. People live at Facebook. If Facebook could build a search algorithm even close to as accurate as Google’s they would be in an exceptionally strong position to compete in search.
Then, there’s the case for Apple. Apple doesn’t know nearly as much about you as Facebook or even Google does. So, what’s Apple’s advantage? Mobile is the direction everything is moving toward. And, Apple leads the charge. What if Apple didn’t so much want to do what Google does? What if their goal isn’t to be a better search engine? What if they instead want to improve the way we look for things?
Forget about typing in a search query and weeding through ads and nearly infinite search results. Sometimes you find what you want, but often you find what the best SEO efforts bring you instead.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could have an interface (showing my Geekiness) like Star Trek’s computer? Ask for what you want. Most often the computer voice would understand you and give you one correct answer. Sometimes the answer would involve choices on your part, but the choices were intelligently derived.
What if Siri isn’t so much a gimmick to get you to buy more iPhones as it is a new way to find what you want?
Give Apple a little time here. I think they’re on to something huge. And so, I believe, does Sergey Brin. The threat isn’t to Internet Freedom. The threat is to Google’s core business. | <urn:uuid:330c55e5-0f7e-48f5-8a10-f168eeae5213> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.searchterms.com/blog/seo/google-declares-facebook-and-apple-a-threat-to-internet-freedom-really/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948063 | 735 | 1.601563 | 2 |
8 VoIP Internet Phone Service
The cost savings
offered by VoIP can be enormous. One of the Packet 8 service
plans includes unlimited long distance service everywhere in
the US and Canada!
And Packet 8 are
offering signup discounts to Travel Insider readers (see the
summary section below).
2 of a
7 part series - click for Parts
Our earlier review of the
Vonage service includes an introduction
to what VoIP is and how it works. In quick summary, VoIP
('Voice over Internet Protocol') enables you to send and receive
phone calls over the internet, rather than over a regular phone
line. This can potentially save you money, and nowadays with the
low cost of broadband internet, is easy to implement at home and
The Packet 8 Product
The VoIP service offered by
is (unsurprisingly) quite similar to that offered by Vonage.
But, the differences are important and make a positive
difference to the overall service.
Packet 8 uses a different
type of voice processing interface box to that offered by Vonage.
Installing the Packet 8 box was as simple as installing the Vonage box, however. There were simple three step instructions
included - plug in the power supply, plug in the network cable,
and plug in the phone! What could be simpler than that.
All cables and connectors
were included, and the power supply is an international
The different interface box
does has two major differences, however :
The first difference is that
the Packet 8 interface box has a light on it that lights up when
there is voicemail waiting for you. This is a nice feature.
Packet 8 Uses Less Bandwidth
The second difference is
invisible, but perhaps more important. It seems that the Packet
8 service uses up less of your internet connection's bandwidth
than does the Vonage service. Packet 8 say that the phone uses
about 17kb of bandwidth in both directions, and suggest not
using it on lines slower than 64kb for best quality. Vonage
recommend a minimum line speed of 128kb.
This means that it will work
better than the higher bandwidth consuming Vonage product when
used with slower speed internet connections - indeed, there are
even instructions on how to use it over a dialup internet
connection, but for most people, it makes little sense to use
your phone line to dial to the internet, and then connect up the
Packet 8 VoIP service, so as to - well, so as to then make phone
If you are considering
adding VoIP phones to your business, the lower bandwidth can be
important, meaning you can get more 'phone lines' to fit into
less internet bandwidth. And if you're in a country that charges
you for data usage, the lower bandwidth reduces the data related
cost of using the VoIP service.
The lower bandwidth does not
seem to have any noticeable impact on the quality of the phone
Making and Receiving Calls
Making a call is exactly the
same as with any other phone, and exactly the same as with
Vonage. Pick up the handset. Dial the number.
Receiving calls is also
identical. The phone will ring, same as a normal phone. You can
connect a caller ID unit to the phone and it will show the
number (but, alas, not the name) of the person calling you. Pick
up the phone and start talking.
The service also offers call
waiting, call forwarding, voicemail and other services. But it
does not - yet - allow fax messages to be sent over its line
(unlike Vonage), however they promise an enhanced fax service
that will be released in the first quarter of 2004.
Voicemail messages can be
received from your phone, or can be sent as digital files to
your email, in a manner very similar to Vonage.
The quality of the Packet 8
service is as good as - and perhaps even better than - regular
phone service, and definitely much better than cell phone
I have called a wide range
of different phone numbers around the world, and never had any
Furthermore, I have taken
the unit with me to Russia and used it from Moscow to place
calls to Britain and the US, and have enjoyed the same high
quality connections from Moscow as from here in Seattle. And a
colleague now has a Packet 8 phone in London and is using it for
international calling all around the world, also with no
I've had no problems with my
My colleague in London
reports that sometimes, when he is making international calls
from his Packet 8 phone, he can't get through to the number at
the other end. He doesn't know if this is a Packet 8 problem or
a normal phone line problem or what, but he does feel it is
happening more commonly with the Packet 8 phone than with a
I haven't experienced the
same problems when calling from Seattle or Moscow, so it is
probably not something related directly to Packet 8's service.
Packet 8 offer four
different service plans. Their lowest price plan has no monthly
fee - you pay only 8c per minute of calling. This is definitely
a 'heads you win, tails you don't lose' type arrangement, where
you have no fixed monthly costs at all.
Their $20 a month 'Freedom
Unlimited' plan offers unlimited calling anywhere in Canada and
the US for only $20/month.
They also have two business
plans that are considerably more expensive - $60 and $130 a
month, with either 4,000 or 10,000 minutes included.
If you're able to take
advantage of their $20 unlimited usage service, then the cost is
much less than the competing Vonage product as well as, of
course, much less than regular phone and long distance service.
But if you're forced to register as a business user, then
probably the Vonage products become better value.
The Vonage advantage for
businesses grows even stronger if you're signing up for a second
line. Vonage have discounted rates for multiple business lines,
Packet 8 do not.
The good news is that,
unless you're going to be using vast amounts of time each month
that clearly establishes you as a business rather than as a
private individual, you can probably register at the residential
rates and will find that Packet 8 will be happy to accept your
Most international calls are
charged at 5c a minute or less.
UPDATE : Only one
week after originally writing this, Packet 8 brought out two new
plans. They allow for unlimited (!) international calls, either
to most of Europe, or to much of Asia, for a flat fee of $30 a
month. If you make a lot of calling, these packages can be very
Unlike regular phone
service, you don't find yourself paying massive surcharges in
taxes to your local city and state and federal government. Just
a single 3% federal tax and nothing else.
Packet 8 provides 24/7
customer support by phone which is convenient and helpful.
Some Clever 'Tricks' with
Most of the same clever
tricks mentioned in the Vonage review also apply to the Packet 8
The key thing about VoIP
service (with both Vonage and Packet 8) is that your phone
number no longer has any direct relationship to where in the
world you are located. You can have your phone working anywhere
in the world where there is a broadband internet connection, and
you can choose any area code you like (from within the US, of
which all but a handful of states are available).
Another feature of Packet 8
is that all calls from one Packet 8 phone to another Packet 8
phone are always free, no matter what service plan you have
signed up for, and no matter where in the world each phone is
located, or what its official area code might be.
These two factors can make a
huge difference to the cost of your calls, and probably an even
larger difference to people outside of the US who make lots of
calls to the US.
Summary and Comparison
Vonage, VoicePulse and Packet 8
services all offer a revolutionary new way of making and receiving
phone calls. They are both as simple and easy and good as they
Which is best for you? For
most people, there is very little to choose between the three
service providers - other than cost. To help you
understand the differences, we've prepared a
helpful table of comparative VoIP features for the three
SPECIAL OFFER : If you use the
code 'travel' when signing up for their service, Packet 8 will
give you a $5 discount off the activation fee.
But, whichever you choose,
if you do a reasonable amount of long distance calling, or if
you have a business with multiple phone lines, be sure to choose
one or the other. You'll save yourself appreciably over regular
phone company costs for extra phone lines and for long distance
If so, please donate to keep the website free and fund the addition of more articles like this. Any help is most appreciated - simply click below to securely send a contribution through a credit card and Paypal.
14 Nov 2003, last update
28 Nov 2012
You may freely reproduce or distribute this article for noncommercial purposes as long as you give credit to me as original writer. | <urn:uuid:1d20c8c7-bdd1-48cc-8d08-aa479a422330> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thetravelinsider.info/2003/1114.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941804 | 2,027 | 1.664063 | 2 |
HB 1523 -- Official State Codes
This bill specifies that beginning July 1, 2013, certain codes
including specified electrical, building, residential, fire,
plumbing, mechanical, fuel gas, and property maintenance codes
will be deemed the official state codes. Each county and
municipality may adopt and enforce the state codes by reference,
and each fire protection district must adopt the state fire code.
No agricultural building as defined in the bill will be subject
to any official state code.
Each county, municipality, or fire protection district that
adopts a state code must remain within one code version of the
official state code. These provisions cannot limit the authority
of a jurisdiction to adopt a code that is equivalent to or has
higher standards than the official state code or to amend,
delete, or make additions to a state code. In the case of any
conflict between a state code and other sections of law, the
state code adopted under these provisions will apply.
The State Code Commission is established consisting of nine
members appointed by the Governor with the advice and consent of
the Senate and the State Code Manager and State Fire Marshal
serving as ex-officio members. The powers and duties of the
commission are specified, including the appointment of the State
Code Manager who is to review, maintain, and amend the official
state codes. The State Fire Marshal will review, maintain, and
amend the official state fire code.
Each county, municipality, and fire protection district must
enforce the state codes within its jurisdiction through
inspection services by its employees, intergovernmental
agreements, or registered third-party inspectors who may be
charged an annual registration fee of up to $25 by the commission
which will be deposited into the newly created State Code Fund.
Copyright (c) Missouri House of Representatives
Missouri House of Representatives
Last Updated February 9, 2012 at 6:44 pm | <urn:uuid:18e10370-0484-4619-9bd7-ff96fd123dda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://house.mo.gov/content.aspx?info=/bills121/bilsum/intro/sHB1523I.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904361 | 401 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Ports Elizabeth and Newark handle most of container traffic in the “port” called Greater New York. All tallied, the traffic was estimated to value over $130 billion in 2005. Elizabeth and Newark lie along Newark Bay.
A remarkable aspect of the Port is the juxtaposition of natural and human industrial. Maybe a better way of expressing this is just that nature–in these photos specifically bird life–adapts to transformations in the environment. Newark Bay is not only shipping, the Skyway is not just habitat for cars, and the meadowlands is not wasteland or sports complexes.
At the southern entrance to Newark Bay is Shooter’s Island, and at the east end of Shooter’s is this osprey nest.
Going north from Newark Bay the water diverges into the Passaic and the Hackensack. Spanning both these rivers is the Pulaski Skyway, which peregrine falcons use as a hunting platform.
Now let’s continue northward on the Hackensack into the meadowlands. Three centuries ago this was a freshwater river covered with a cedar forest.
Because the “impenetrable” forest served as cover for pirates who operated on New York harbor, the government gradually burned down the forest. | <urn:uuid:30da7ea6-8dab-4e85-b84a-0bf0819a891f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tugster.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/towards-meadowlands/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924257 | 264 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Deadheading your flowers
What is deadheading? Deadheading is removing dead or spent flowers off your plants. This keeps your flowerbed fresh looking and well manicured throughout the season.
It is important to deadhead for several reasons. Not only does it improve the looks of your flowers bed, but it can lenghten bloom time and may even give you a second blooming. By pinching or cutting spent flowers, the plants redirects its energy back to more flower production instead of seed production. The more you discourage seed production the harder the plant will try produce flowers. Deadheading also keeps unwanted perennials from spreading all over your flower bed.
When you deadhead, it stimulates new growth and plants will be stronger, bushier and healthier. For best results cut plants back after they have bloomed for 6 weeks which by this time tend to get leggy with less flowers.
Depending on the type of plants, the general guidelines to deadheading (which may vary with some plants) is accomplished the following ways.
Single individual flowers such as bee balm, delphinium, cosmos, larkspur, phlox, zinnias, Shasta daisies, salvia can be cut back to the strong side buds where they will make new flowers.
With tall individual flowers such as columbine, hollyhocks, foxglove, balloon flowers, gladiolus, faded florets should be pinched off along the stem. This will promote larger flowers as the new buds open. Once all the flowers are finished blooming, cut the stem to a leaf bud to encourage smaller side shoots.When the plant is finished blooming cut the stem down to the base. It may re-bloom later with smaller flowers from the base.
For small bushy plants that produce lots of blooms such as alyssum, lobelia, dianthus, and thread leaf coreopsis, it is best to snip the drying/faded heads with scissors or shears when the blooming season is half over. This is much faster than trying the tedious task of clipping each flower. The plant may look a little scrawny but will recover in time for fall bloom.
As you admire your colorful flowerbed outside, don’t hesitate to pick a bouquet to bring inside to enjoy. It’s good for the plant and good for the soul. | <urn:uuid:38f73dd8-d3f9-4290-b84c-76bc92764dba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hortchat.com/info/deadheading | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925766 | 492 | 2.3125 | 2 |
Ronald Reagan, governor of California for eight years and President of the United States for another eight, never thought of himself as a politician. His journey to the White House was not marked by a burning lust for power or position. Ronald Reagan preferred to see himself as a simple citizen who had been called upon to come to the aid of the nation he so loved. His mission, as he saw it, was to free his fellow citizens from the clutches of an invasive federal government, and to rid the world of the tyranny of Communism.
Reagan believed in the promise of the American Dream. In an era of growing cynicism, he proclaimed America a place where "everyone can rise as high and as far as his ability will take him," and pointed to his own meager beginnings as proof.
Promising to cut taxes and reduce spending, while restoring America's prestige abroad, Reagan soundly defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. Less than three months into his administration, Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt outside of a Washington, D.C. hotel. Arriving at the emergency room, the 70-year-old president confessed to his wife, "I forgot to duck." Such poise and good humor in the face of a life-threatening wound went far in securing public goodwill.
His approval ratings soared even higher as the economy rebounded strongly from the recession of 1981-82. More Americans were working than ever before. New businesses were being started up and Wall Street was robust with activity. Still, worried voices pointed to a ballooning federal deficit as a sign that tax cuts, coupled with increased defense spending was a recipe for disaster. And while "Reaganomics" was helping to produce more and more millionaires, the disparity between rich and poor grew greater and greater. Reagan challenged his fellow citizens to "dream heroic dreams," but made no mention of making sacrifices for the benefit of future generations.
Known as the Great Communicator, Reagan modestly explained, "I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things." In the style of Theodore Roosevelt, Reagan never tired of preaching the doctrine of American can-do-ism. In times of tragedy, such as when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Reagan's soothing words gave comfort to a grieving nation. Even his political adversaries admitted to having an admiration for his personable approach to leadership. House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, with whom Reagan clashed on many issues, surmised, "There's just something about the guy that people like. They want him to be a success."
Reagan's ability to escape accountability for the mistakes and misdeeds of those around him led to his being called the Teflon president -- nothing would stick to him. Time and again polls indicated that while Americans did not always share Reagan's views on any number of issues, and often questioned his aptitude for the job, they nonetheless supported his single-minded determination to achieve the goals he held most dear.
Reagan's world view could not accommodate the existence of international Communism. He minced no words in branding the Soviet Union the "focus of evil in the modern world." Peace through strength, in Reagan's view, was the only effective means of dealing with a system bent on world domination. Such blunt and loaded rhetoric strained relations between the two superpowers. Cold War tensions began to thaw, however, in the mid-1980s as the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as Soviet leader. By 1988, Reagan and Gorbachev had hammered out agreements drastically reducing the nuclear stockpiles of each nation. On his last trip aboard as president, Reagan visited Gorbachev in Moscow, in the land he once declared "an evil empire."
Even Ronald Reagan could not have foreseen how swiftly change would sweep Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Shortly after Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall was taken down and Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union.
Historians will never know just how Reagan, once again a private citizen, received news of these events. Indeed, there is real doubt as to whether or not he could even recall the role he played in their coming about. In November 1994, Reagan revealed to the world what his doctors, and those closest to him, had suspected for some time -- he was suffering from the memory-destroying neurological illness known as Alzheimer's disease.
There was a bitter irony in the fact that Reagan, once a brilliant raconteur who so delighted in entertaining friends and aides with stories of his past, had been robbed of the ability to access those tales. The man who left the White House with the highest approval rating of any modern president reportedly had little memory of having lived there.
In a touching epistle to the citizens who twice elected him their leader, Reagan wrote, "I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life." Riding off into the sunset -- perhaps just as Ronald Reagan, former actor and sometime cowboy, would have scripted it.
My American Experience
Who was your favorite 20th-century American president? Was it FDR? Kennedy? Reagan? Or one of the other 14 men who helped usher the United Sates through the 1900s? Who do you think was the most influential? | <urn:uuid:373aa9b1-5621-4025-96be-285bc4d76e7c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/reagan-legacy/ | 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 | 0.983611 | 1,067 | 2.671875 | 3 |
April 6, 2004
The Referendum on IraqBy Richard Baehr
The Baehr Essentials
[Editor's note: Today we begin a regular series of columns by Richard Baehr, one of the founders of The American Thinker. He has written a subscription—only newsletter of political analysis for many years. In his columns for us, he will cover politics, the world of sports, and other topics.]
The news from Iraq has been very bad the past week. Two dozen Americans have been killed, four civilian workers' bodies were mutilated after they were murdered, and there is now a violent insurrection raging, inspired by a young Shiite hothead cleric. Some political analysts have suggested that whether the Iraq news is good or bad really does not matter for the Bush campaign, since any international news only forces national security to the top of the campaign agenda, and that is Bush's strength. I beg to differ.
At a certain point, some Americans, who are not just reflexive Bush—haters of the left, may begin to question whether our boys should be sacrificed for this madness, and for a people who show such remarkably little appreciation for the sacrifices in blood and treasure we have already made on their behalf. At that point, maybe even in November, enough Americans may decide that these people do not deserve the best this country has to offer. They could turn on the man who sent our soldiers to Iraq. This election therefore will almost certainly not be about John Kerry, but a referendum on George Bush.
Bush's father lost the Presidency in 1992, despite a very successful military operation against Iraq that liberated Kuwait. When the economy tanked, and he showed little appreciation for the anxiety many people were experiencing, voters turned elsewhere. Bush senior was also unlucky. A nutcase populist, Ross Perot, had a short term appeal to many disaffected voters, and polled strongly among white males, the GOP's strongest voting group. Perot hurt Bush much more than he hurt Clinton. Clinton kept talking about the economy in 1992, so much so that many Americans were unaware that the economy was already rebounding smartly at the time of the election. The bulk of the press did nothing to clarify the actual state of economic affairs, leaving in place the Clintonian fiction that America had 'The worst economy in 50 years.'
President George W. Bush will likely have a stronger economy behind him than his father did during his re—election effort. Summer and Fall constitute the period when voters' perceptions about the race are hardened.
The best that can be said of Senator Kerry is that he is the alternative candidate for those who reject Bush. He is a cold man, with a rich man's tastes, and little visible likeability. In the Democratic primaries, he was considered the most electable candidate, but only after narrowly winning Iowa with a late surge, as Dean and Gephardt faded. He gained momentum from the enormous publicity overkill showered on the winner of this first caucus,with its barely 100,000 voters.
A report in the Sunday New York Times suggested that Kerry seems reluctant at the moment to bow to the pressure from many Democrats, and select John Edwards as his running mate. Kerry's reasoning seems to be that Edwards does not yet have the experience to be President, particularly in an era when national security concerns are so prominent.
This may be an accurate reading of the North Carolina trial lawyer's shortcomings shortcomings, but Kerry has his own image problem, despite the personal gravitas and military background he keeps pounding home. Americans like to see some warmth and charm, and even a bit of the common touch in their President. Kerry does not have these qualities in large supply.
The coolness to Edwards may reflect a fear on Kerry's part that an ebullient, happy warrior running mate like Edwards, with clear star power (however faked the individual campaign performances) would overshadow the dour New England Ichabod Crane figure at the top of the ticket.
The Bush ad campaign has done a good job in the past month, filling in the blanks about Kerry (the indecisiveness, the liberal voting record) while Kerry skied and had shoulder surgery. Kerry campaign surrogates —— the various 527 groups, such as moveon.org and America Coming Together (a group with ties to former President Clinton) —— have continued to match the Bush campaign expenditures dollar—for—dollar in the 17 battleground states.
But Kerry ads won't form the image of the President for most voters. Bush is a known quantity. Richard Clarke did not do terrible damage to Bush, because it took most Americans about five seconds to recall that a month after 9/11, our forces were taking out the Taliban in Afghanistan, not going after Saddam in Iraq. They also know that Bush's response to 9/11 was substantively different from what the prior administration did after previous al Qaeda attacks against our bases in Saudi Arabia (Khobar Towers), the embassy bombings in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole.
But Iraq is a wild card in this election. If it turns very sour, Bush could lose, despite a strong economy and a weak opponent. You can pay a price for boldness and decisiveness. Bush has been, in many ways, the least politically cautious President in recent memory, a sharp contrast with his predecessor Bill Clinton, perhaps the most cautious. Let us recall that President Clinton conducted a poll to determine where he should take his summer vacation one year.
Bush could have coasted to victory in the current election. He chose to take the fight to Iraq, at great political risk. President Clinton was so terrified that a single American would die in the Kosovo campaign, that the war was fought exclusively with fighter bombers from the air. Even Apache helicopters were not used, though they might have shortened the war, and minimized the collateral damage on the ground, because they were more likely to get hit, and thereby increase the casualty risk for American forces.
Some risks, political and strategic, pay off. And others don't. Bush, to his credit, took a huge political risk with Iraq, because he thought it was the strategically correct thing to do. Creating a functioning democratic society in Iraq, after decades of callous, murderous, authoritarian rule there, is, as Fred Barnes points out this week, a very difficult task.
Americans, in the internet age, often display a short attention span. But our history is full of long commitments and efforts, involving great sacrifice (World War II, the Cold War), that, in the end, led to success and a better world. Our Iraqi venture is not destined to turn out visibly successful in the short run. At best, we are in a particularly difficult transition period, and the long term trends are favorable. But this is not assured.
If Iraq stays in the news, it will be because there is bad, rather than good news from there. That is what makes banner headlines and leads the television broadcasts, especially among those who are unremittingly hostile to the Administration, despite their pretense of non—partisan journalism. Positive things are getting accomplished and getting done all the time in Iraq, but Americans are dying again, and in horrible ways. For Iraq's future, and for that of President Bush, we must decisively and visibly turn a corner, and soon.
Majette stunned most political observers last week by announcing that she will run for the Senate seat of retiring Democratic Senator Zell Miller. | <urn:uuid:25b435e3-a5ab-446c-86d8-67d4d211072e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.americanthinker.com/2004/04/the_referendum_on_iraq.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973117 | 1,523 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Entering the world of Hispanic dating? Before pursuing that special partner, consider the following:
Hispanic Dating: Family Matters
In most Latin communities, family is of the utmost importance. Enter into a relationship with respect for the family you’re about to join; significant others are often quickly adopted into the fold. Close-knit community is often the rule rather than the exception, but everyone’s situation will still be unique. It’s important that you learn to honor that relationship and embrace his/her family. Talk about family dynamics early on. In Hispanic dating, family will always play an important role.
Hispanic Dating: Faith and Tradition
Even if your Hispanic date isn’t specifically religious, his/her family may have a faith association. Be careful about how you approach discussions on religion, especially if your own ideas may come across as cynical. Learn about your date’s relationship with both faith and cultural traditions and discover if you’re spiritually compatible. Respect what you don’t know, ask questions, and be honest about your own relationship with God, faith, and tradition.
Don’t assume that your date’s world view will mirror yours just because you share Latin heritage. As with any new relationship, Hispanic or not, discovering spiritual and cultural differences and commonalities is part of the adventure. Faith can be a deal-breaker, so share early on.
Hispanic Dating: Take it Slow
Before you make any smooth moves on your date, acknowledge that some Hispanic daters may have traditional, stricter dating rules and expect certain restraint or dating etiquette. Others will have adapted a more “Americanized” — for a lack of a better term — approach to dating. Don’t overwhelm your date with premature advances and instead talk about physical boundaries and the pace of your relationship. Show respect for one another’s boundaries.
Stereotypes can be dissected and trust established when a relationship is entered with defined intentions and with respect. By getting to know one another, you’ll also discover insecurities and baggage stemming from previous broken relationships. If infidelity was an issue, reassure your partner by taking extra steps to show your loyalty and respect for him/her.
Taking a relationship slow physically allows you to determine if you’re compatible in ways that will dictate a long, healthy relationship. | <urn:uuid:4365e7dc-f0aa-44c1-a082-b2f789182dd1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eharmony.com/dating-advice/dating/hispanic-dating-things-to-consider/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927395 | 485 | 1.578125 | 2 |
“The idea that you can or should base entire exercise training programs on trying to manipulate testosterone or growth hormone levels is false. There is simply no evidence to support this concept.” says Stuart Phillips, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology to McMaster Press Flickr
Despite popular views on the body-building efficacy of hormonal steroids, scientists at McMaster University reveal that exercise-related testosterone and growth hormones do not play an influential role in building muscle after weightlifting.
Two separate studies published in the Journal of Applied Physiology and the European Journal of Applied Physiology suggest that those bodybuilders who look to manipulate those hormones through exercise routines are wasting their time.
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“A popular mindset for weightlifters is that increased levels of hormones after exercise play a key role in building muscle,” Daniel West, lead author of both studies and a graduate student in the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster, tells university correspondents “That is simply not the case.”
Researchers found that anabolic hormones-ubiquitously thought to be essential for building a muscular frame-do not influence muscle protein synthesis, or the process that leads to bigger muscles.
“While testosterone is definitely anabolic and promotes muscle growth in men and women at high doses, such as those used during steroid abuse, our findings show that naturally occurring levels of testosterone do not influence the rate of muscle protein synthesis.”
In the first study, researchers asked male and female subjects to participate in an intense leg exercise. While the activity increased testosterone levels, the muscle mass of individuals were unaffected. The second study involved 56 male participants between 18 to 30-years-old, who were asked to train for five days a week for 12 weeks total.
Researchers found that their levels of testosterone and growth hormone after exercise showed “no relationship to muscle growth or strength gain.” However, according to West, researchers also found that a hormone called cortisol previously thought to be unrelated to building muscle building, as it breaks down tissue and reduces protein synthesis, plays a large role in building muscle.
This coincides with idea that you have to “break” your muscle in order to build it back up, causing an increase in muscle mass. | <urn:uuid:a7208e63-1fb5-4cde-bb3d-497612283b87> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://musclepumping.net/testosterone-and-growth-hormones-do-not-build-muscle/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957796 | 459 | 2.515625 | 3 |
CastratoThe Castrato is a male soprano or alto voice produced by castration of the singer before puberty.
This practice was begun in the 16th century and reached its peak in 17th and 18th century opera. The male heroic lead would often be written for a castrato singer (in the operas of Handel for example). When such operas are performed nowadays, a woman or countertenor takes these roles.
Castration before puberty (or in its early stages) prevents the boy's larynx from being fully transformed by the normal physiological effects of puberty. As a result, the vocal range of prepubescence (shared by boys and girls) is largely retained, and the voice develops into adulthood in a unique way. As the castrato's body grows (especially in lung capacity and muscular strength), and as his musical training and maturity increase, his voice develops a range, power and flexibility quite different from the singing voice of the adult female, but also markedly different from the higher vocal ranges of the uncastrated adult male (see soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, sopranista and contralto).
The only acknowledged castrato to make phonograph recordings was Alessandro Moreschi, the last surviving castrato of the Pope's choir. Moreschi recorded disc recordings for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company in 1902 and again in 1904. Critical opinion is divided about Moreschi's recordings; some say they are of little interest other than the novelty of preserving the voice of a castrato for Moreschi was a mediocre singer, while other critics detect the remains of a quite talented singer who was unfortunately past his prime by the time he recorded.
In more modern times, Ugo Farell has been suspected of being a castrato.
There have also been reported cases of so-called "natural castrati" who were born with hormonal disorders that reproduce the above "desired" effects of castration without the surgeon's knife.
Some uncastrated male singers are able to use their voices up into the soprano register, apparently without the use of the falsetto voice, and are known as sopranistas. There are very few such singers performing today. Sopranistas are also able to perform some music which was written for castrati, and composers such as Rossini wrote parts specifically for sopranista.
See also: eunuch | <urn:uuid:cae785cf-d99c-414c-b62f-f8a68e7a9d61> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.encyclopedia4u.com/c/castrato.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97854 | 513 | 3.109375 | 3 |
I am experiencing a certain kind of truth every day in my work. It’s the kind of truth that one does not need to argue – the kind that does not depend on who is the more skillful debater. It’s the truth that I knew when I was six or seven years old – an undeniable, agenda-less, observed, felt-in-your-face truth. It’s the kind of straightforward truth adults have to laugh about, blushing, when children catch them with it.
In their hearts, local organic food producers relate to the land in this truthful way – caring, observing, learning, and adjusting, constantly and respectfully, as tenants of the land. They understand, accept and even embrace that it is nature that feeds us. Not the grocery store, not the food manufacturer, but something so much bigger. Working with farmers warms my heart, feeds my soul, and reminds me of my childhood’s innocence. What a precious gift this experience is.
This truthful and humble dialog with nature has endless rewards. At a time when the pressure of economics and development has caused the death of 400 family farms in the United States every week for the last 30 years – that’s 56 farms a day, or one farm every 25 minutes – small-scale local organic producers throughout the country are able to survive as we begin to remember the importance of the story of our food, to know where our food comes from and to care about how it was produced. At a time when signs around the San Francisco Bay warn us to not ingest more than one fish a month because of the toxic pollution levels in the water and bay bottom, the Coho salmon are beginning to return to Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate, after 30 years of near extinction.
A rise in awareness of and eco-literacy about the food we eat and the choices we make every day, is taking place.
In this context, the debate over “organic versus local” food production seems incomplete and missing the point, as neither one in itself offers a true solution. “Industrial organic” could mean that one single crop is grown on thousands of acres and then shipped halfway around the globe. This brings as many challenges to our society as local non-organic production, which could potentially mean that toxic pesticides are used closer to your home. Local and organic farmers who follow small-scale, artisan production methods and add a personal story to their work will thrive in the future because they offer a truly wholesome product. Theirs is the kind of food that respects life and nourishes not just our bodies, but our spirit, heart, environment, and community, as well.
In fact, by definition, food that tells the story of the land, the season and the farmer is the only real food that exists. According to Webster’s Dictionary, “food” is defined as “something that nourishes us” and “nourishment” is defined as “…to foster and sustain life” – attributes that many so-called “foods” in the marketplace no longer possess, or never had to begin with.
Even though our minds may forget that it is the land that feeds us, our bodies will not. Our love for the land is cellular.
So, the next time you hold that bunch of local organic carrots up to your nose to take a deep, earthy whiff of healthy soil, close your eyes for a moment, and pause. You might connect to something deep inside you and realize that by eating local organic food your innocence and internal truth is nurtured too. | <urn:uuid:f5a2716b-5178-4447-bc3f-3399e2963481> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.helgehellberg.com/date/2011/04/?cat=10,9,7,1,12,5,8,4,11 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956743 | 749 | 1.703125 | 2 |
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Coastal trading vessels
, also known as coasters
, are shallow-hulled ship
Since the end of the age of sail a ship has been any large buoyant marine vessel. Ships are generally distinguished from boats based on size and cargo or passenger capacity. Ships are used on lakes, seas, and rivers for a variety of activities, such as the transport of people or goods, fishing,...
s used for trade between locations on the same island or continent. Their shallow hulls mean that they can get through reef
In nautical terminology, a reef is a rock, sandbar, or other feature lying beneath the surface of the water ....
s where deeper-hulled sea-going ships usually cannot.
- Short sea shipping
The modern terms Short sea shipping and marine highway refer to the historical terms coastal trade, coasting trade and coastwise trade, which encompass the movement of cargo and passengers mainly by sea, without directly crossing an ocean. Deep sea shipping, intercontinental shipping or ocean... | <urn:uuid:2c578052-09af-4b8a-93f8-01a55e6c3b32> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Coastal_trading_vessel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937636 | 239 | 3.078125 | 3 |
The English do not do revolutions, but they do revolts. And they do it in style. That's Shakespeare's legacy. Bloody coups and mob uprisings against absolute authority, but never a change in ideology.
And so in the last two weeks we have seen the mauling of King Murdoch, brought down to his knees and forced to face the executioners. Bleeding and exiled possibly, but not decapitated yet. The English lost their appetite for 'off with their heads' some time ago. He still lives, waiting for someone else to do the dirty deed of beheading.
The English need their monarchs, the real ones, not the constitutional one they have installed as living museum in show case castles. The House of Windsor was neutered long ago and then cruelly maintained perpetually in a cocoon of pomp, heritage and grandeur. Like Barbie dolls, they can only speak and act what the commoners have choreographed for them. When the heir apparent, Prince Charles started thinking aloud, his mouth was quickly sewn. The English constitutional Monarch has all the pretence of an absolute ruler, but lacks even the power to order his/her servants to kneel - let alone be beheaded for subordination. It is a strange English fixation. A dainty Monarchy as the Americans say.
But the English live for real Monarchs. This is a Shakespearian nation. There are no ideological revolutions or republics in Shakespeare's vision of the world. And with true Shakespearian theatre the subjects also need to gorge the monarch, drag him through the streets and pelt him with eggs every few decades. The mob then enthrones a new sucker.
Real Monarchs are dictators. They thrive on fear. They survive on absolute authority. They destroy lives and they grant privileges. In the 1970s the rulers were the British Trade Unions who would drive any tough minded capitalist to an early grave with their strikes and bullying. Thatcher arose from the bosom of the commons to lead the gentry and the mobs against them, decimating the Trade Unions to winging creaky wooden horses. Eventually their ideological Emperor, the Soviet, bled to death. But Thatcher was not the new Monarch. She was the charge brigade.
The backroom coup was staged by Lord Murdoch of Ozland. From farway land he had sensed the English appetite to be ruled, to be oppressed, to be treated as commoners. He saw great profit in the loot. News of the World, the Sun, the Times and BskyB. But he went on to rule quite a bit of the world, creating an Empire in the wake. London is still the spring board to create great Empires even though it lost its own, just as Rome continued to be for Christianity long after the Roman Empire became septic ash.
Murdoch swept into the vacuum after the bonfire of Trade Unions. Immediately he went about controlling the nation's mind and soul. For a long time he was the messiah who understood the common mind. Partly because he fashioned the common mind. He led the crusades against devil incarnates and weaker upstarts. Like any wise Monarch, he had an intricate web of informers, drawing secrets from phones, bank accounts and medical records, the modern man's cherished hinterlands. This was capitalist version of CIA.
Like all successful Monarchs he ruled with cruelty, making example of hapless politicians, ordinary mortal Vicars and randy stars. They were hung dry in the press, mocked in public and mentally tortured to seek comfort in Prozacland. He ruled with fear. Politicians and Bishops, Superstars and socialists, all dreaded seeing their skeletons swinging in the public air. He commanded and they obeyed. Some challengers like Kinnocks went out like fused bulbs.
Exercising real power is what real Monarchs live for. Murdoch decided the political agenda. He appointed the Chief courtier, the Prime Minister, and went about polluting the English minds with his version of the Murdoch creed - ruthless capitalism. Britain became Murdochistan in all but name. The Scots and the Welsh often defied his command. But then neither the Scots nor the Welsh are passionate monarchists.
But the English are not compliant subjects. History tells us, they like revolting and love coups. Parliament is designed for a permanent state of revolt by an opposition against the ruling order. And every five years there is a minor coup with a freshened Prime Minister. But the real bloody revolt is against the dictator Monarch.
Once the English see weakness, they unite as a mob to dethrone the King. It is a cultural need. They need to escape their own self inflicted oppression and wound the King with verbal stones.
So its Murdoch's turn now. He failed to see the rebels plotting treason under his draconian nose. It was the usually harmless benign Guardian, mocked for its idealism, that fired the booming cannons. The mobs have followed with new found strength, with the sudden adrenalin that follows the lifting of fear. The Business Secretary Vince Cable speaks for all parliament when he says a dictatorship has been lifted. The fratricidal British Parliament, suspended its hormone filled teenage mudslinging to join hands and maul the Monarch in Unison. Their time has come.
Murdoch is groping in the dark. Wounded, confused but still believing he has power. Where once he summoned British Prime Ministers to his wooden towers in Ozland, he has been reduced to sit in humility in front of the lowest order of political class, the toothless backbencher committee. The King is being tried by the footmen. Power has shifted.
Yet the English will not decapitate him. The English haven't had the stomach for a long time and now they don't have the power. The French still like beheadings and are busy reviving the Guillotine habit in Libya. Murdoch's decapitation will be left to the new King, perhaps more ruthless and dictatorial than Murdoch.
While the English rattle their swords and daggers for a few days in disorderly way, order will soon be restored as the throne is captured by another more powerful and more self deluded pretender. It depends who beheads Murdoch. All signs are that, while the English have reduced King Murdoch to a mere mortal, its the United States that will chop his head.
The throne will pass over to the Americans. Americanisation has already been creeping in UK. The long prophesised 52nd state will become a reality as Washington begins to adorn the English crown. Why America? There are many reasons juggling for another article. It will revive the American Empire but also lead it to its final demise because no one does revolts with the tenacity and style as the English, But that is a few decades down the line. All Shakespeare really.
Follow Jasdev Singh Rai on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JasdevRai | <urn:uuid:7f1b0fa2-71e1-4172-9e11-1a7a87c5495b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jasdev-singh-rai/bloody-revolt-the-english_b_904208.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96481 | 1,426 | 1.96875 | 2 |
By Rick Schutt
1:28 PM EST, February 11, 2013
WSBT is taking a close look at the new Health Care law, many call Obama Care.
The Affordable Health Act is moving forward.Washington has been trying to cut physician reimbursement from Medicare by 27%, but that has been kicked down the road for one more year, leaving doctors in an unstable position.
Facing tremendous pressure and making their jobs more difficult, The Affordable Care Act looks to create 10,000 new residency slots to make more doctors in the U.S.
It also will provide loan relief to doctors coming out of medical school, but the dollars aren't there yet for that program.
Al Gutierrez is the president and CEO of Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center and says physicians are facing the most unstable economic position in the last 50 years.
“They are committed to their individual performance meeting their expectations clinically of their patients,” said Gutierrez. “I've never seen a more dedicated group of individuals than we are kind of blessed with in Michiana. But they are de-stabilized on their individual economic security issues right now, and they haven't been acting that way in the office. They’re still ordering the right prescriptions. They’re still doing the right things for patients irrespective of their own financial condition, and I'm very proud of all of them."
Policy change is in place to help young doctors coming out of medical school with loan relief, but that has not been funded in the president’s budget, so it's a tough time for doctors, who wonder if they'll be able to take Medicare patients in the future.
Copyright © 2013, WSBT-TV | <urn:uuid:dd1de197-640b-40be-bd42-488184bfd341> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wsbt.com/wsbt-obamacare-changing-life-for-doctors-20130211,0,4957936,print.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964166 | 349 | 1.617188 | 2 |
With new regulations scheduled to hit, Europe's banks can expect lower returns, according to a new report from McKinsey & Company . Down the road, banks have an opportunity to make up the lost ground and build more sustainable practices, but first the hit on returns will look something like this: We estimate that without any mitigating action by banks or material changes in the economic and competitive environment, recent global rules, especially Basel III,1 and new regional and national regulations will help reduce retail banking’s average return on equity (ROE) in Europe’s four largest markets to 6 percent, from about 10—a 41 percent decline. The analysis, based on 2010 financial-year data, assumes that the cumulative regulatory impact expected over the next several years will be realized immediately. The effects vary across the four markets, but in all cases the outlook is grim (exhibit). In France, ROE will fall to 9.5 percent, from 13.5—a 29 percent decline driven by changes affecting mortgages, debit cards, and investments. In Germany, ROE will fall to 3.5 percent, from 6.6 (a drop of 47 percent); almost all retail products will be affected and many will become unprofitable. ROE in Italy’s retail banks starts from a lower base, 5.1 percent, but will fall further, to 3.1 percent. In the United Kingdom, returns will fall to 7 percent, from 13.6 percent. The impact here, 48 percent, is high because of extensive country-specific regulation. Access the full report here .
Filed under: mckinsey quarterly, Regulation, banks, Germany, bank regulation, Italy, McKinsey & Company, france, basel III, return on equity, United Kingdom, European banks. ROE | <urn:uuid:0b68b6b9-846a-445d-bf54-67f3bc37c1c1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://community.cengage.com/GECResource/blogs/gec_blog/archive/tags/bank+regulation/default.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.915893 | 369 | 1.921875 | 2 |
The fertility rate in the United States has been declining for the past few decades. The fertility rate is the number of children an average woman bears over the course of her life. The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Today, America's total fertility rate is 1.93, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; it hasn't been above the replacement rate in a sustained way since the early 1970s.
Infertility is defined as the inability to become pregnant after a year or more of sperm insemination or well-timed, unprotected vaginal intercourse. Infertility may be a temporary or a permanent condition; this depends on the available treatments, the cause, and the fertility of the partner at any particular point in time.
Infertility is often incorrectly considered "the woman's problem". To improve the couple's chances of conception a child together, both the man and the woman should be evaluated, and treated, if necessary, Because conception is a complicated process, it depends upon several factors.
There are many potential causes for infertility or reproductive problems. Chronic illnesses, as well as their treatments, can lead to fertility problems. Illnesses like diabetes and hypothyroidism can cause fertility problems. Insulin, antidepressants, and thyroid hormones may lead to irregular menstrual cycles, for example. Premature ovarian failure has become a common cause of infertility in younger women, often diagnosed as “unexplained infertility”.
Environmental toxins and xenoestrogens in foods are known to cause hormone disruption, and free radical damage to both ovaries in women and sperm production in men. Certain toxins such as phthalates may be linked to genital abnormalities in boys. Products that contain phthalates include food packaging, cosmetics, make-up, soaps, fragrances, shampoos, hairspray, nail polish, pharmaceuticals, nutritional supplements, herbal remedies, building materials, vinyl flooring, paints, adhesives, detergents, solvents, lubricating oils, plastic bags, garden hoses, automobiles, children’s toys, modeling clay, glow sticks, cleaning products, and as inert ingredients in insecticides. In many instances phthalates are not identified on product labels.
40% of infertility can be due to male factors, and acupuncture also treats male partners of women trying to conceive. Medication used to treat peptic ulcers or hypertension can cause male factor infertility, including problems with sperm production or their ability to fertilize the egg. In men, average sperm concentration went from 72 million/ml in 2001 to 52 million/ml in 2011. When sperm concentration drops below 40 million/ml, conception becomes difficult. Researchers agree that diet, lifestyle, and exposure to chemicals are causing the worldwide decline. Fertility issues are environmental issues
Couples experiencing difficulty conceiving may be referred to a fertility specialist for evaluation. Typically, blood testing, genetic testing, and sperm testing are done to determine if there are any medical or hormonal abnormalities that need to be treated.
Currently, there are several medical treatments for infertility performed by MDs who specialize in Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART). These treatments are typically hormones to induce ovulation, IUI or intrauterine insemination, which is a procedure in which sperm are placed directly into the uterine cavity near the time of ovulation and IVF, or in-vitro fertilization, which is a procedure that involves retrieving eggs and sperm from the bodies of the male and female partners and placing them together in a laboratory dish to enhance fertilization. Fertilized eggs are then transferred several days later into the female partner's uterus where implantation and embryo development will hopefully occur as in a normal pregnancy.
Success rates with IUI can vary from 5% to 20% for a single cycle, depending on the age and health of the couple. With several IUI cycles, the conception rate can be even higher. According to the American Pregnancy Association, the success rate of conception with IVF is 10%-35%, again depending on the age and health status of the couple. Both IUI and IVF procedures can cost several thousand dollars per cycle or treatment, and are not always covered by insurance.
From the viewpoint of Traditional Chinese Acupuncture and Naturopathic Medicine, other factors contributing to infertility include imbalances in the energy meridians of the body, toxic overload, and lifestyle factors such as poor diet, stress, and lack of proper sleep.
Acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine are affordable therapies that have been used safely and effectively alongside with IUI and IVF, as well as a stand-alone treatment for infertility. Studies have shown that acupuncture can improve the success rate of IVF by 40%-60%. The typical cost for an Acupuncture session is only $85.00.
Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine can help improve fertility and the success of IVF in a number of ways:
1. Improve the function of the ovaries to produce better quality eggs
2. Restore hormonal balance and blood flow to the ovaries to produce a large number of follicles
3. Increase blood flow to the uterus to increase thickness of the uterine lining
4. Reduce stress, increase relaxation and improve sleep
5. Lessen the side effects of drugs used in IUI and IVF
6. Balances the immune system
7. Improves sperm count, motility, and morphology.
Using proven Acupuncture techniques, Chinese herbal medicine, detoxification, nutritional counseling, nutritional supplementation, and stress reduction can help to restore balance and overall wellness. Restoring balance allows the body’s hormones and natural cycles to become more regular, and increases the body’s response to IUI and IVF, thus improving fertility.
Traditional Acupuncture involves inserting extremely thin, sterile, stainless steel, disposable needles into specific points on the surface of the skin, restoring balance to the body, mind, and spirit along with the correction of infertility-related imbalances and deficiencies. This age-old system of medicine has stood the test of thousands of years and yet continues to rise above and improve health even in our modern western culture. This sophisticated yet subtle method of treatment is so effective because of its focus on each individual's particular needs. At the same time, acupuncture is a very relaxing and rejuvenating treatment.
Dr. Helene Pulnik is a board-certified, licensed Naturopathic Physician, and Licensed Acupuncturist. She is also a Registered Pharmacist and holds a Master’s Degree in Human Nutrition.
She has studied infertility treatment using acupuncture, herbs, nutrition, and stress reduction with Mike Berkley, Lac. In New York, and Dr. Randine Lewis, author of The Infertility Cure.
Integrating the wisdom of proven acupuncture techniques and natural medicine, Dr. Pulnik treats couples by supporting the body’s natural cycles to enhance fertility. Dr. Pulnik provides Acupuncture, detoxification, herbal, and nutritional counseling for infertile couples.
Acupuncture & IVF: Increase IVF Success by 40-60% by Lifang Liang
The Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, Updated Tables, September 2012 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility: Handbook for Clinicians (pocket sized) by Dan I. Lebovic, John David Gordon and Robert N. Taylor
The Infertility Cure: The Ancient Chinese Wellness Program for Getting Pregnant and Having Healthy Babies, by Randine Lewis, Ph.D.
Declining Sperm Counts, BMJ. 1996 July 6; 313(7048): 43–45,
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A recent study has verified that hormone replacement therapy, including "bioidentical" hormones, can cause breast cancer and increase your sisk of dying from breast cancer.
Los Angeles Times (latimes.com) - Study Upholds Breast Cancer Mortality For Hormone Replacement -(Saturday, March 30, 2013)
In the nearly 11 years since researchers first rang alarm bells that women on hormone replacement therapy faced an increased risk of breast cancer, some have suggested that taking estrogen and progestin to treat symptoms of menopause might not be so dangerous after all.
Though it was generally agreed that woman who took the two hormones to curb their hot flashes and night sweats upped their chances of developing the disease, many studies suggested that the cancers the women developed were less likely to be deadly.
A new analysis of data from the Women's Health Initiative now casts doubt on those findings. The study, published Friday by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, concludes that the prognosis for cancers related to hormone replacement therapy is just as dire as for other breast cancers. As a result, women who turn to the treatment are more likely to die of breast cancer than their peers who don't take hormones. | <urn:uuid:0127cee7-938c-415a-8d90-658b7c5b7b78> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.naturopathicwellness.com/index.php/blog/entry/the-dark-side-of-sun-exposure | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931391 | 1,874 | 3.015625 | 3 |
What is "invoice aging"?
I'm just starting out with my own business, importing clothes and jewelry from Jamaica, and just had someone ask how I do "invoice aging". What the heck is invoice aging, Dave, and why would I want to do it?
It's pretty easy to explain invoice aging, actually, but we should probably be sitting at a table in Vegas for the explanation to really make sense. Here's the basic idea:
Let's say that today I do some work for you and hand you an invoice on the spot. Do you pay me immediately, or do you let it sit for a few days - or longer - until you get to it?
That process of 'letting it sit' is what invoice aging is all about and it's one way that companies "play the float" and manage their cashflow. For example, many big corporations have a policy that they pay "net plus sixty", which means that they're going to let your invoice sit and "age" (think wine) for two months before they issue a payment, even if you have written on it "payment due net plus 14" or similar.
Most companies pay on a thirty day cycle, so if I handed you an invoice today, I'd be unsurprised if it took a month to pry the money out of your hands.
Why do this, rather than pay promptly? Well, let's say that your business is really rockin' and you're selling a million dollars in goods each month. Your cost of goods (what we back in MBA school called COGS, or cost of goods sold) were $350,000 and you had invoices from your suppliers for that amount.
Now let's assume that you have your business accounts in an interest earning money market account that pays, oh, what works out to be 2.5% interest on a daily basis (though interest payments aren't usually calculated daily, but we'll ignore that for simplicity). That means that each day you don't have to pay out that $350,000 in invoices, you actually earn $8,750.00. Now you can see where paying invoices in 14 days will actually cost your company a cool $122,500 in interest revenue.
Suddenly invoice aging sounds pretty good, doesn't it?
Of course, some companies - notably Fortune 500 companies who shall remain nameless - push aggressively on this and I know of at least one firm that does 90 day aging, which might be really good for their bottom line but stinks for vendors and suppliers. I mean, why not just stiff your suppliers completely if you're going to wait three months to pay an invoice? But that's another discussion.
In general, invoice aging is a common accounting practice and 30 days is a very common "age" for paying invoices and debts for a business.
Hope that clears things up. Good luck with your import business!
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How to Approach and Talk to Adoptive Parents
November is Adoption Awareness Month:
Adoptive families. You see them because they are conspicuous; they don’t “match.” You know them because they are family, friends, or acquaintances. Being curious is natural, but sometimes it gets the better of you and you approach them, because darn it—you’re just dying to know.
Adoptive parents may find themselves the focus of attention, simply because they chose to form their families through adoption. Those who have adopted internationally or trans-racially find themselves under more scrutiny and approached more often.
Usually, non-adoptive parents don’t realize that they’re being intrusive and possibly disparaging with the questions and comments they direct to adoptive parents. They aren’t familiar with the words that express positive adoption feelings or empower a positive perspective. Certain terms and phrases, well intentioned most of the time, rankle the adoptive parent by implying that a family formed through adoption doesn’t measure up to the traditional family.
On the other side, many adoptive parents aren’t always good at answering the questions, especially when they are asked by a stranger or in the company of their child. Keep in mind that how something is said reflects how the person saying it feels. When approaching the adoptive parent about her family, remember these things:
• The details about how the family has come together are private.
• The adoptive parent expects you to respect their privacy.
• These are the adoptive parent’s children.
• Let’s start with some of the big bombs—what not to do.
Don’t say anything along the line of “God bless you!”or “You’re an amazing person to do this.”
In, Shared Fate: A Theory and Method of Adoptive Relationships, H. David Kirk found that 92 percent of adoptive parents have been called “saints” in one form or another. Adoptive parents aren’t saints. They’re parents. This type of praise makes the adoptive parent uncomfortable. It also implies that the adoptive parent is an exceptional person to have adopted. They’re not.
Don’t use the word “real” to qualify the adoptive family relationships—as in “real mom,” “real dad,” “real parent,” “real child,” or “real sibling.”
Adoptive parents and adoptive families are as real as birth parents and birth families. The word “real” implies that the relationships within the adoptive family are not real. This isn’t the case. The relationships within the adoptive family are as true and as permanent as in any other.
“They’re so lucky!”
This may be the top contender for cringing among adoptive parents. Like non-adoptive parents, adoptive parents consider themselves to be the lucky ones. They have a beautiful child to raise and enjoy.
Don’t use phrases like, “one of your own,” “your own” or ask “Which one is yours?” or “Are they sisters?”
Statements and questions like these devalue the relationships within the adoptive family. They address the dissimilarities, especially within the multi-ethnic families. The adoptive parent knows that the relationships within her family transcend blood and genetics.
So, how do you talk to an adoptive parent? Say:
• Parent, mommy, daddy, sister, brother, etc. to describe adoptive family members.
• Birth parents, birth father, birth mother for describing the man and woman who conceived and gave birth to the child.
• Was adopted instead of is adopted.
• My child instead of adopted child or own child.
• Placed for adoption or made an adoption plan instead of orphaned, given up, unwanted, or abandoned.
They want to be seen as a family, not judged as an adoptive family. Be a PAL to the adoptive parent. Use Positive Adoption Language and be considerate when striking up a conversation with them. They’ll appreciate it.
Judy M. Miller lives with her husband and four children. Judy’s essays and articles have appeared in parenting magazines. Her story, “Souls Speak,” is featured in A Cup of Comfort for Adoptive Families (Adams Media). “Healing the Roots of Our Grafted Tree” is featured in Pieces of Me: Who Do I Want to Be? (EMK Press). | <urn:uuid:bec023f7-cb82-4128-95a4-1e6e8a17cbdd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sandiegofamily.com/resources/san-diego-family-digital-issues/317 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946506 | 975 | 1.578125 | 2 |
In the celebrated novel The Rebel Angels, the famed Canadian author Robertson Davies mentions Ozias Froats, a fictional professor potentially on his way to a Nobel Prize for discovering that everyone’s feces reflect the maker’s personality. He did not have today’s ready recourse to metagenomics (that being still in the future), so he looked at "extremely thin slices of faeces, cut transversely, and examined microscopically and under special light.” He found that each person’s specimen reveals differences in individual temperament. It occurred to me that using this same approach could add another dimension to fecal metagenomics by determining the intra-turd location of individual species. This could readily be visualized using specific fluorescent-labeled antibodies on thin sections—merely a technical elaboration on Froats’ methods.
Click "source" to read more. | <urn:uuid:4218884c-ee3f-47b6-8759-705e2f2248ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.microbeworld.org/component/jlibrary/?view=article&id=10136 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934219 | 183 | 2.828125 | 3 |
A Pentecostal Way Forward Through the Challenges of Science
By George Paul Wood
Every day, it seems, scientists uncover new wonders — both large and small — in our world. These wonders redound to God’s glory, for He created them all. And among those wonders, surely the human mind ranks high. Aside from the angels, only humans are able to perceive God’s handiwork and praise Him for it.
Yet many humans do not. Instead, they “suppress the truth by their wickedness” (Romans 1:18). Consequently, “although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (1:21). By they, of course, I mean we. Ingratitude for God’s gracious gifts mars every human heart.
Because creation is wonderful and the human heart wicked, I am ambivalent about science.
On the one hand, I benefit from advances in science. For example, I use Enbrel — a TNF inhibitor drug — to treat my ankylosing spondylitis. My iPhone, iPad, and laptop are indispensable tools in my work and my graduate studies. Their apps and programs make use of complex mathematical algorithms to produce, store, and communicate information. Energy efficient air conditioning and heating keeps me and my family cool in the summer and warm in the winter, at low cost. I could go on with more examples, but you get the point: Science has its benefits.
On the other hand, advances in science seem to portend retreats in faith. A 2009 Pew Forum poll of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that “scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power.” According to David Kinnaman, 25 percent of “18- to 29-year olds who have a Christian background” indicate that the belief, “Christianity is antiscience,” is “completely or most true of me.”
I don’t believe Christianity is antiscience. How can God’s Word and His world contradict one another? But many people — including many Pentecostals — believe Christianity is antiscience. How, then, should we as Christians live between the benefits of science and the challenges it seems to pose to our faith?
First, we must be filled with the Spirit. One of Pentecostalism’s greatest strengths is its empirical quality. For us, God is not a concept we ponder or a historical Actor whose past deeds are interesting to archive (though pondering Him is wonderful and recounting His past deeds is encouraging). Rather, God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is a living Person who invites us into fellowship with Him, changes our character at deep levels, and empowers us supernaturally to speak and to act on His behalf. Our experience is evidence — proof, even — of the realities our faith lays hold of. Perhaps that is why Psalm 34:8 says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” If you find your faith questioned by science or anything else, the answer always begins with a prayer: “Come, Holy Spirit, I need You.”
A focus on Pentecostalism’s empirical quality does not mean that arguments are unimportant. We are people of the Spirit, yes, but we are also people of the Word. Jesus Christ is the Logos of God (John 1:1–3,14), His Word, Reason, and Logic. If science or anything else challenges our faith, we must mount a tough-minded apologetic. Paul’s ministry is exemplary in this regard: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Since God exists, any scientific or philosophical argument that denies He exists is a bad argument, and we should be able to demonstrate this through close reasoning. Paul did not merely evangelize the lost, he reasoned, explained, and proved Christ’s vicarious death and victorious resurrection to them (Acts 17:2,3).
Third, we must interpret both Scripture and nature humbly. Scripture and nature are God’s self-revelation (Romans 1:20; 2 Timothy 3:16). Theology is primarily our interpretation of God’s revelation in Scripture, while science is primarily our interpretation of God’s revelation in nature. God is infinite, we are “the grass [that] withers and the flowers [that] fall” (1 Peter 1:24). God is all knowing, “we know in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9). God is all good, our “heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9). Given the distance between God’s perfection and our imperfection, we need to interpret both His Word and His world humbly, always ready to learn more about Him through them.
A new baptism in the Holy Spirit, confidence in the truth of Jesus Christ, and humility in the light of our limitations is a Pentecostal way forward through the challenges that science seems to pose to faith, even as we enjoy the many benefits it confers. | <urn:uuid:1c400e82-33fe-4ba6-94df-13869277ce6f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/201204/201204_144_In-Closing.cfm | 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 | 0.937579 | 1,136 | 1.984375 | 2 |
Tropical Weather Picture
POSTED: Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - 9:03am
UPDATED: Wednesday, June 8, 2011 - 2:31am
STORMTRACKER33 — The National Hurricane Center has cancelled the planned reconnaissance mission to a large Low Pressure area located over the Northwestern Caribean Sea, about 100 miles South-Southwest of Grand Cayman. The conditions nesscessary have become less favorable for development so a low chance has been forecasted for this system becoming a Tropical Storm during the next 48 hours. The Low Pressure area is forecasted to continue moving North-Northwest over the next few days. It will be watched for any changes. | <urn:uuid:fa9fc366-5855-405a-a20b-12043e0dd404> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbc33tv.com/news/tropical-weather-picture | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95806 | 141 | 1.9375 | 2 |