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In my recent Forbes.com post, 10 Reasons The Human Capital Zeitgeist is Emerging, I listed some key reasons behind the uptick in the race for skilled talent. To compete in a volatile global marketplace, I argued:
Big business, “might actually have to throw a bit more respect at the “human” in the human capital equation. It’s a socio-cultural shift that will have to address the work-life merge and worker satisfaction, like never before.”
My “Zeitgeist” theory about a new emerging workplace and business culture has been percolating for the last year as I’ve studied scores of reports and studies on talent retention, workplace flexibility practices, employee engagement and well-being. What I consistently found is that workplaces with high levels of engagement or well-being - simply performed better. The question is, are they indeed more creative, and how does it impact the bottom-line?
The Argument for Creativity
A new study by technology giant Adobe, State of Create Global Benchmark Study, reveals a creativity gap in five of the world’s largest countries (United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan). The study found:
- 8 in 10 people feel that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth
- Nearly two-thirds of respondents feel creativity is valuable to society
- But only 1 in 4 people – believe they are living up to their own creative potential.
The study showed a workplace creativity gap, with 75% of respondents saying “they are under pressure to be productive rather than creative.” That despite that they are expected to THINK creatively on the job.
Creativity is increasingly becoming more of a crucial component in the business model. Not that it wasn’t before, but now global companies are acknowledging it could offer a new important competitive edge when it comes to innovation.
CEOs Are Talking
Corporate chiefs know that creativity drives the innovation they need, to rise above the rest. CEOs are now dishing amongst themselves about the need to attract new blood in their fleets to drive profits. Not just run-of-the-mill drivers, but engaged, creative and innovative employees. Companies will need to warm-up their engines to attract the human capital they so desire, even in a rebounding economy, to effectively compete.
In PricewaterhouseCoopers 15th Annual Global CEO Survey 2012, CEO’s cited talent shortages and mismatches as impacting the bottom line.
“One in four CEOs said they were unable to pursue a market opportunity or have had to cancel or delay a strategic initiative because of talent challenges. One in three is concerned that skills shortages will impact their company’s ability to innovate effectively.” PricewaterhouseCoopers 15th Annual Global CEO Survey 2012
The report, Delivering results: Growth and value in a volatile world, found 66% of the CEO’s indicated that one of the top priorities was to personally spend more time developing leadership and talent pipelines.
Throughout the report numerous CEO’s touch upon the need to acknowledge the intricacies and importance of a humanistic approach in attracting and retaining skilled employees who once hired, will remain engaged and creative.
“People want to have an impact. They want to be listened to,” said Daniel S. Glaser COO, March & McLennan Companies Inc. Also echoing the human component in a changing world, Martin Senn CEO, Zurich Financial Services Group, weighed in with this comment: “I look for globally-minded people with the capacity to anticipate change and the flexibility to accept it.”
Culture Shift at Work
The talent pipeline is under the microscope, as companies contend with a shrinking working pool in new emerging marketplaces. New strategies to attract, retain, and engage skilled talent are in the works and that means a shift in culture, one that will arguably need to embrace human capital in new ways.
German philosopher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, “Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.”
Character and individual uniqueness are fuel for innovation. And right now, the workplace, with companies tending to do more with less, is stressful as work-family conflict is more evident than any other time in history. It’s an argument for big business to woo employees by appealing to their human side.
That appears to be happening in progressive companies. In another of my other recent Forbes.com post, Employee Stress on Radar, for National Stress Awareness Month. I wrote about how employee assistance programs are focusing more on employee well-being and stress reduction. Some of those initiatives include work-life flexibility programs.
The Families and Work Institute’s 2012 National Study of Employers, suggests that flexibility is a “strategic consideration for organizations.”
“As flexible scheduling and workplaces become more common, organizations that fail to adopt these options run the risk of being outperformed by competitors who benefit from lower operating costs and better adaptation to a global knowledge- and service-based economy.” ~ FWI 2012 NSE
In conclusion, companies that don’t invest directly or indirectly in their talent pool’s needs and well-being in the new economy risk an unknown component that reveals itself generally in the 11th hour in the form of burnout, and potentially less creative and innovative employees.
Here’s the question: Without proper attention to the “human-ness” of human capital, will a company lose traction in a global competitive marketplace? | <urn:uuid:1b80913d-f94e-470c-ac0b-ee61d5f54482> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.worklifenation.com/2012/05/embracing-human-capital-zeitgeist-boost-business/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947854 | 1,148 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Golf courses don't have a reputation for being good wildlife habitats, but a few golf courses are more ecologically friendly. From teeing off to birdwatching, we explore the recreational opportunities of our state park golf courses. We also take a look at the growing sport of disc golf. Plus, we visit a field of another type – the model airplane flying field at Georgia Veteran's in Cordele.
Georgia State Park Golf Courses
Georgia State Parks
Disc Golf Association
LEED Certification/U.S. Green Building Council | <urn:uuid:f66ea819-3106-44d9-97a2-5ce1f623a4e6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gpb.org/georgia-outdoors-classic/georgias-state-park-golf-courses | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917947 | 108 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Looking for tips and advice on home safety and childproofing? Check out our helpful videos and articles to learn more!
Consumer Safety Expert Julie Vallese talks to parents about safety in the kitchen for babies and small children. She gives several simple tips ranging from bottle heating to safeguarding your oven and more. Parents can use these tips and suggested tools to help them keep their children from unnecessary injuries.
Meet Erika Ruth, Product Manager, who talks about giving her own home a safety check for her daughter Caroline and also gives helpful tips about what parents can do to make sure their own homes are as safe as possible.
The kitchen poses many dangers to your child, including poisonous materials, choking hazards, and hot surfaces. The following tips can help you with childproofing your kitchen.
The bathroom can be fun during bath time, but it presents many hazards to babies and toddlers. The following tips can help you childproof your bathroom.
Whether you call it a family room, living room, great room, or den; it’s very important to childproof all family gathering spaces to help make them safer for your youngest family members.
Your child will spend a large amount of time in the nursery. Follow these tips to help make the area safer for both sleeping and playtime.
Even though we're just passing through these areas, Hallways & Stairways should be an important focus when childproofing your home.
General tips on childproofing other areas of your home.
Tips & tricks that will help you keep your child safe around the pool.
Julie Vallese, Consumer Safety Expert for Safety 1st, shares some basic babyproofing tips for your home. From in the kitchen to in the family room, learn more on how to make your home a safer place for baby.
Tips & tricks that will help you create safer place for your child to play.
Childproofing your home can be daunting for parents, but following a few simple tips can help set you out on the right path and make things easier as your child grows.
Designing Spaces takes on Baby Spaces to bring you the latest on having a new baby in your home.
Professional baby proofer Kimberlee Mitchell child proofs an expecting couple's home on the WeTV show Platinum Babies.
Did you know that unintentional injury is the leading cause of death among children under the age of 14? As your children start to crawl, you may be thinking about how to make your home a safer place. Watch this video for information and tips regarding childproofing your home from pediatrician Dr. Laura Jana. | <urn:uuid:58c385c9-2a7b-4f59-af35-15546de7d22b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://eddiebauer.djgusa.com/article/AllSite/en/HomeSafety | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935411 | 532 | 2.140625 | 2 |
Hello, ladies. - Flickr
Before the American Association Browns, the National League Perfectos, and the Cardinals we know today, there was another St. Louis baseball club. Their manager? Dickey Pearce, one of baseball's most important pioneers.
This is another in a series of St. Louis Cardinals history posts inspired by The Ultimate Cardinals Record Book, a collection of stories and stats I wrote that came out in March. You can buy it at the link above, and you can read a sample here. Or you can just read this post. Thanks!
The St. Louis Cardinals of today trace their lineage no further than 1892, when they joined the National League, but most baseball fans who care about this sort of thing go back further, to Chris Von der Ahe's American Association Browns. They were the same franchise, after all, and much more interesting than their NL counterpart—in the AA Von der Ahe helped invent the concept of the World Series, built a giant statue of himself, turned his baseball park into Coney Island, and then drove Bob Caruthers out of town, while in the NL he mostly just spiraled toward bankruptcy.
Before that, they were briefly a member of the National Association, baseball's first organized professional league, and the actual NL. These are the teams nobody particularly cares about—because they weren't very good, because the National Association isn't recognized by Major League Baseball, because they were eventually bankrupted in the fallout from a gambling scandal.
Here's what's worth knowing:
Their first manager was Dickey Pearce
Dickey Pearce has the third-oldest date of birth on Baseball-Reference—1836, meaning he was 35 when the National Association played its first season in 1871. When Pearce came to the sport (from cricket), Jim Creighton, the famous proto-baseball star who invented the fastball and died swinging a bat, was 15 years old. When he left it Creighton had been dead 15 years.
Pearce was old enough that he played most of his career as a nominal amateur, when the dominant stat was runs per game and batting average was something nerds calculated in their basements. By the time baseball came to St. Louis he was 39, and on the verge of retirement.
In the meantime—in those 20 years that saw the development of something resembling modern baseball—Pearce had invented a position and Mike Matheny's favorite managerial tactic, among other things.
The position first: The baseball Pearce began playing, in 1856, featured basemen who stood right on the bases they covered and a position called "short fielder," which roved among the holes that positioning left. Pearce moved the position to where it exists today, between third and second, taking advantage of his strong arm and his ungloved hands to retire all the pull hitters who'd used that particular gap.
When we finally get fielding statistics he was a five-three, 160-pound 35-year-old, but those abilities that made him the original shortstop were still apparent—his fielding percentage from 35 to 41 was .828, against a league average of .798. Baseball Reference's most rudimentary version of fielding runs credits him with 47 above an average shortstop across 291 games.
Through the 1860s Pearce was a superstar and a pioneer—SABR's excellent bio credits him with innovative catcher signals, as well as shortstop play, and explains that he brought to baseball not only the sacrifice bunt but the suicide squeeze—but by 1871, the arbitrary date on which baseball statistics suddenly look familiar and professional baseball players were suddenly allowed to throw off the mantle of amateurism, he was the top league's second-oldest regular.
Pearce's SABR bio describes what happened next—
In the fall of 1874, a group of civic boosters in St. Louis raised $20,000 to organize a baseball club called the Browns, the first openly professional nine in the city's history. James Lucas was named president. Vice president C. Orrick Bishop, a local lawyer and amateur baseball promoter, went east to recruit some top talent in order to be competitive as the club set its sights on joining the National Association. In Brooklyn, Bishop picked up Pearce, Jack Chapman, Dehlman, and Lip Pike. In and around Philadelphia, Bishop added Ned Cuthbert, Reddy Miller, George Bradley, Bill Hague, and Joe Battin. In the days before the reserve clause, such tampering and contract jumping, known as revolving, was rampant.
St. Louis agreed with Pearce; he arrived in February 1875 and stayed until April 1881. He opened a cigar store on Franklin Avenue and gained a new nickname in the town, Bad Dickey.
They poached a few stars
In addition to Pearce the Brown Stockings had signed Lip Pike, one of the National Association's most athletic hitters and, at 30, still in the prime of his career. (Pike is most famous today for being the first Jewish baseball star, and second-most-famous for the story Bill James recounts in the Historical Baseball Abstract, in which he raced a trotting horse and won.)
Early baseball is marked by a million weird-making departures from the contemporary game—misshapen baseballs, endless outfields, under-handed pitchers, weird counts—but the most important one to consider, I think, looking in on it from 2012, is that its worst players were much worse than our worst players. There just weren't that many great baseball players at the time; in 1856 that meant that Pearce, a cricket player, could slip into the lineup of a top amateur team at the same time he was learning the sport.
In 1875 it wasn't quite that absurd, but the Browns show the dichotomy well. Their worst hitter—starting catcher Tom Miller—had an OPS+ of 24 over 56 games. He hit .164—33 singles, two doubles, and one walk in 214 at-bats. Their best hitter, Pike, hit .346/.352/.494, for an OPS+ of 203—74 singles, 22 doubles, 12 triples.
In 1876 the Browns moved to the National League and finished third—at 45-19 they were one of three competitive teams out of eight. Pearce was being phased out, though, and by 1877 the team seemed set to continue successfully without him.
They blew up in a gambling scandal
The Browns most responsible for St. Louis's early exit from the National League never played a league game in their uniforms. After a disappointing 1877 the Browns signed Jim Devlin, a sturdy pitcher, and George Hall, who'd hit .376 in 1876, from the Louisville Grays, who'd finished second the year before. Poaching players like this was another common feature of 1870s baseball—with six teams in the league, and contract law of little interest to players and owners alike, poaching from the guy ahead of you in the standings was especially effective.
The Browns, though—already in financial trouble—were unfortunate enough to poach from a team that had been throwing games the year before. They probably weren't the only ones, either, but they weren't very good at hiding the evidence, and Devlin and Hall confessed to game-fixing in the offseason.
According to Before They Were Cardinals, the scandal seemed to pass almost virally from Devlin and Hall to the last year's Browns, and suspicion enveloped the St. Louis baseball scene. The shareholders were in debt, and nobody seemed especially eager to suffer for their home team.
So the Browns left the NL in disgrace, and it wasn't until Von der Ahe, looking for new ways to sell beer, bought the team and entered it into the American Association in 1882 that the Cardinals' uninterrupted major league run finally began.
The Cardinals distance themselves from those Browns at their own risk—it's like they don't want to sell me a Bob Caruthers jersey—but I can understand their reticence to connect themselves to the original team. Once you look past their lack of success and the existential threat they posed to professional baseball, though, those original Browns weren't so bad after all. If nothing else, they were interesting. | <urn:uuid:fc42c97e-7865-46f4-8655-0b6536f7e108> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/ultimate-cardinals-record-book/2012/12/8/3741252/st-louis-cardinals-dickey-pearce-shortstop | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98076 | 1,687 | 2.15625 | 2 |
[OT] Education Theory (was Re: Database Design Theory?)
shane at hathawaymix.org
Wed Nov 9 15:00:30 MST 2005
Justin Findlay wrote:
> On 11/9/05, Shane Hathaway <shane at hathawaymix.org> wrote:
>>I've always wondered if I'm odd in the way I learn things, but I've
>>always had far more success if I start with practical applications
>>before moving into theory. When I start with theory, I don't know why I
>>need to learn it, so my rebellious nature ignores it. However, when I
>>start with applications, the importance is obvious and most of the
>>theory is intuitive. Later, I fill in the gaps in my theoretical
>>understanding by talking to people or reading books.
> You're not odd. But there are people out there who learn best by your
> method backwards.
Let me tell you about an experiment I tried in college. I was having
trouble getting good grades, so I decided to give up my preferred method
of learning. Rather than work on coming to a real understanding of each
subject, I decided to memorize and regurgitate. I banned any original
thought from my mind. Since that decision, I got A's for two years
straight. I learned some useful things like active verbs, Communism,
and Descartes, but I don't feel like the theory stuck in my head as well
as it could have. Is that really learning? The institution certainly
encouraged my behavior.
More information about the PLUG | <urn:uuid:0ebd2534-ab4a-46eb-812c-9077fd95bc9b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://plug.org/pipermail/plug/2005-November/004755.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947164 | 344 | 1.632813 | 2 |
The National Endowment for the Arts announced a partnership Friday with the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to identify and calculate the contributions of the creative sector to U.S. gross domestic product. GDP measures the nation's output of goods and services.
The new measure of commercial and nonprofit arts production begins this year and likely will include Hollywood business. It will look at national data on people employed by museums, theaters and architectural firms, for example. It will also look at economics in the music industry and book publishing.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis also analyzes the economic impact of travel and tourism, research and development and health care. | <urn:uuid:e43070f2-8f9f-4bf8-b6f7-444148fb440d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.denverpost.com/entertainment/ci_21861951/government-measure-impact-arts-economy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939657 | 129 | 1.734375 | 2 |
|In 2000, Texas State University-San Marcos Texas Archaeology Field School students excavated the General Edward Burleson cabin site overlooking Aquarena Springs in San Marcos. The excavations, directed by M. Katherine Brown and Dr. Britt Bousman, attempted to locate evidence for the original location of the Burleson cabin and recover information that could be used in future interpretations for the public. Intact evidence of the original cabin was not found, but an outside cooking area was discovered. This cooking area was focused around a limestone bedrock bench and a natural solution chimney. Abundant charcoal at the base of the bench and thermal alteration of the limestone indicated that the bench functioned as a stove. Artifacts demonstrate that the original cabin was nearby, but its exact location remains unknown. Historic documents disclose the original cabin's construction in 1848 and demolition, due to a storm, in 1917. In 1960, the remains of the original cabin were dismantled and some materials were stored for the construction of a replica built in 1964.|| |
Pictured above: reconstruction of Burleson cabin. | <urn:uuid:909d61c9-d425-4d22-b798-2ce71eb5fd42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.txstate.edu/anthropology/cas/projects/crm/burleson.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951832 | 222 | 2.5 | 2 |
There are several different types of car insurance policy, and it is important that you purchase the correct one. If not then there is a danger that you will not be covered as you might wish, or alternatively it could be costing you too much money. Here is an overviews of the main type of insurance policies that are available.
Third party insurance
Third party insurance is the minimum level of car insurance and it is the type of insurance that the law stipulates you must have if you own a car. Even if you don’t intend to drive it but is does not have a SORN, you still need third party insurance. It covers any damage you might do to property that is not owned by you covers potential compensation payments to anyone who might be injured in an accident involving your vehicle, including your passengers. | <urn:uuid:cbd0c384-32dd-44be-8b28-c50c6e5b86b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.musclevehicles.com/tag/comprehensive-insurance/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978546 | 165 | 2.015625 | 2 |
We all know about Dan Brownís fictional book, "The Da Vinci Code."
But how many of us are so well versed on Leonardo da Vinciís Codex?
In 1994, Bill Gates paid $30 million for Leonardo da Vinciís Codex Leicester,
containing 36 folios. These are books containing drawings of plants, human anatomy, machine designs, the flow of water around objects, waves, currents, hydraulics, to name a few. It is a wonderful insight into the mind of Leonardo, the original Renaissance man.
By contrast, the British Library owns Codex Arundel, with an astounding 283 folios. I was surprised to discover that the Queen does not own them personally, but they are instead held in trust by the British Royal Family.
In 2003, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY to view the blockbuster exhibit, "Leonardo Da Vinci, Master Draftsman." What a delight it was for me to actually see originals by Leonardo. Besides the Codex, the painting, "St. Jerome Praying in the Wilderness" was exhibited, loaned by the Vatican Museum. Also shown was "Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing to the Right," which was a study for the painting, "Virgin and Child with St.Anne."
My first introduction to the geniusí work was, "Genevra deí Benci" (1474) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This is the only Leonardo work of art in the U.S. I have visited her many times over the years and I admit to throwing her a kiss goodbye as I would to an old friend. Iím sure Napoleon did the same when he kept the "Mona Lisa" in his private chambers. Thereís something about a Leonardo portrait (those eyes).
To celebrate Queen Elizabeth IIís 80th birthday, 10 drawings by Leonardo da Vinci will travel to 4 British museums and art galleries in 2006. Leonardo worked in metalpoint, pen and ink, and red and black chalk. A few of the works for the upcoming exhibit are:
"Study for a Womanís Hands" (1490), "Design for an Equestrian Monument" (1517-1518), "Study of the Anatomy of the Shoulder and Foot" (1510-1511).
A great way to see Bill Gatesí Codex is with his Corbis CD-ROM: "Leonardo da Vinci." Go to Corbis.com and look for the Codex Leicester Software. It sells for $35. For free, you can view the many pages displayed, or register to copy the photos without watermarks.
If you missed the exhibit in 2003, you can still see the wonderful exhibit from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase the book now from Amazon.com.
To research art market prices,you only need enter the artist's last name below: | <urn:uuid:66e53a2a-e7ec-43f7-a17d-598a435e7360> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art32869.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931362 | 599 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Black and white postcard from approximately 1910 of an aerial view of Cheboygan, Michigan, along the Cheboygan River. The large red brick building with the clock tower on the left is the Cheboygan County Courthouse, built 1898-1900. The building with the smokestack by the river is the Cheboygan Brewing and Malting Company, started in 1882 (originally named Northern Brewing Company) and brewing until 1911. The church in the center a few buildings up from the courthouse is the First Congregational Church, located at Main and Nelson Streets, built in 1901 and still standing. The old Cheboygan High School can be seen in the background, with its distinctive cupola in the center of the roof. This image shows one of the last log drives down the Cheboygan River. The lumber industry boomed in Cheboygan in the late 19th Century until about 1900, when it started its decline. | <urn:uuid:5d90143e-b5b3-460b-a130-95d8accc3fb0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cdm16317.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p4006coll8/id/1537/rec/6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968961 | 192 | 2.484375 | 2 |
The Maine Warden Service said a 16-year-old girl from Wisconsin was injured Friday while hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Officials said the teen was part of a group of 11 girls that was hiking the 100-Mile Wilderness from Monson to Mt. Katahdin. The group was part of an organization from New Hampshire called the American Youth Foundation, officials said.
The Maine Warden Service said the girl injured her ankle at about 7 p.m. and was no longer able to hike the rugged portion of the Appalachian Trail. The group camped out for the night and met a rescue team Saturday morning.
Maine game wardens, along with members of the Maine Forest Service, the Greenville Fire Department, and Appalachian Mountain Club, helped carry the injured hiker about two miles over very treacherous terrain, officials said. The rescue took about four hours.
The hiker was taken to Dean Hospital in Greenville for treatment. | <urn:uuid:b92b0e63-c552-479a-9ed5-9ac5d27f0c71> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wmur.com/news/nh-news/Teen-rescued-after-suffering-injury-while-hiking-in-Maine/-/9857858/15440920/-/ye5jrcz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972927 | 189 | 1.640625 | 2 |
A ZENIT DAILY DISPATCH
Baby Jesus in the Crèche
ROME, 4 DEC. 2007 (ZENIT)
Answered by Legionary of Christ Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.
Q: In setting up the outdoor or indoor Nativity scene, I am under the impression that the statue of the Infant is to be placed there "ab initio," not placed there at midnight on Christmas Eve. Is there documentation which supports that view? — M.H., Woodside, New York
A: Here we are in the region of custom, and customs can vary from place to place. The choice might also depend on circumstances.
There are very few mentions of this theme in official documents. No. 111 of the Directory of Popular Piety contains the following indication:
"At Midnight Mass, an event of major liturgical significance and of strong resonance in popular piety, the following could be given prominence: [...] at the end of Mass, the faithful could be invited to kiss the image of the Child Jesus, which is then placed in a crib erected in the church or somewhere nearby."
Although this is more of a pastoral suggestion rather than a strict law, it would indicate the preference that the Christmas crib in or near a church should not be formally unveiled until the Christmas Midnight Mass.
It is also technically possible to set up the crib on the evening of Dec. 24 if a parish celebrates the Christmas vigil Mass. This possibility, while liturgically correct, is probably less effective from the point of view of popular piety, which tends to associate Christ's birth with the midnight Mass.
In some places the custom exists of using a different (usually larger) statue than that used in the crib; and the faithful are invited to kiss the image of the Child Jesus at the end of all Masses on Christmas Day.
Outside of the liturgical ambience the practice of Catholic households and schools varies widely. One family I know has the charming custom of setting up the crib in the family room but placing the Holy Family, the shepherds and the three wise men in various corners. Each day the family members move the statues a few steps closer. They place the figures in the crèche on returning from midnight Mass (except for the wise men, who arrive on Jan. 6).
There may, however, be very valid reasons for setting up the full Nativity crib before Christmas Day. For example, a Catholic store owner, school, or even a parish located in a busy thoroughfare might desire to remind busy shoppers what Christmas is really all about.
The crib thus combines the representation of a historical event with a testimony of Christian conviction that this event is a central and defining moment in human and salvation history.
In such a case, having the image of the Infant Jesus from the beginning is almost certainly to be preferred. It makes little sense to have the images of Mary, Joseph, sundry shepherds, three wise men and the occasional choir of angels gazing adoringly upon an empty haystack.
While already committed Christians might perceive the empty crib as
the expectation of Christmas, the symbolism could be lost on many for
whom the familiar representation of the complete Nativity scene might
ignite a spark of true light amid the flimsy tinsels proclaiming "Happy
|This article has been
selected from the ZENIT Daily Dispatch
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ZENIT International News Agency
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WHAT'S NEW - GENERAL - RELIGIOUS CATALOGUE - PILGRIMAGES - ESPAÑOL | <urn:uuid:0c2a692c-d0f6-49f3-b7f5-30306ee2c1fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ewtn.com/library/Liturgy/zlitur199.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924572 | 751 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Click here to view the article online in a new window, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/18/ten-questions-jane-austen.
"Jane Austen's admirer Virginia Woolf said that 'of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness'. It is a brilliant insight. The apparent modesty of Austen's dramas is only apparent; the minuteness of design is a bravura achievement. But it cannot be shown by some grand scene or speech. Accuracy is her genius. Noticing minutiae will lead you to the wonderful interconnectedness of her novels, where a small detail of wording or motivation in one place will flare with the recollection of something that happened much earlier. This is one of the reasons they bear such rereading. Every quirk you notice leads you to a design. If you ask very specific questions about what goes on in her novels, you reveal their cleverness. The closer you look, the more you see. Try these 10 questions."
- Who marries a man younger than herself?
- Who says: 'I hate money'?
- What is Mrs Bennet's Christian name?
- Why is Mr Perry getting a carriage?
- Who is wearing mourning?
- Where does Wickham have a tryst with Georgiana Darcy?
- Who marries for sex?
- What does Captain Benwick say in Persuasion?
- Who has the shortest successful courtship?
- Which novel's plot relies on the weather? | <urn:uuid:578a68d8-f21e-4e0d-99c6-823a91a5f596> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jasna-orswwa.org/1/archives/05-2012/1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943332 | 327 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Still plenty of good fishingEven if you don’t have kids in school, the circadian rhythm, as I refer to it, is evident. When school is out, summer starts. When practices for fall sports begin, the sand is almost out of the summer hourglass.
By: By Doug Leier, North Dakota Outdoors, The Jamestown Sun
Even if you don’t have kids in school, the circadian rhythm, as I refer to it, is evident.
When school is out, summer starts. When practices for fall sports begin, the sand is almost out of the summer hourglass.
Some North Dakota schools didn’t hold graduation until early June, and by the first week of August school activities and informational meetings start to take the place of “free time” for the kids. It seems like “summer” used to be closer to 90 days than 60, and hunting season used to begin and end in fall.
Most hunters will lament how short the seasons are in North Dakota. However, with the Aug. 15 opening of the early Canada goose season, and archery deer season beginning Aug. 31 and not ending until the calendar shows 2013, that’s more than four months when some type of major season is open.
While some hunting seasons have expanded in recent years, it’s not time to put the rod and reel away just yet. In reality, about a third of the summer is still left on the calendar and plenty of good fishing days await.
For those who enjoy the expanded Canada goose hunting opportunities the August opener affords, go for it. This year the daily limit is increased to 15 birds. Shooting hours are one-half hour before sunrise to sunset daily, and the season runs through Sept. 7 in the Missouri River zone, and through Sept. 15 in the rest of the state.
While I’ve always associated August with fishing and baseball rather than hunting and football, perhaps that’s something I need to rethink. While temperatures might be warmer than a typical fall morning or evening, the early goose season can provide some tremendous hunting opportunities.
For those who feel a bit lulled as we approach the backside of summer, let me offer up a suggestion to perk up summer fishing. Take a kid fishing. Not just your own, though. Ask your children if they have a friend who might like to go along.
Beyond taking a kid fishing, don’t forget neighbors or friends who may have not been fishing in a while.
Or how about a gift of fresh fish? Earlier this summer my son brought a few packages of fresh North Dakota walleye to one of our retired neighbors, a true display of the popular philosophy of sharing the resource. Who knows, a fish dinner might be enough to interest someone in going along, or heading out on their own.
With more than 360 fishing waters in North Dakota, most veteran anglers of our state will agree this is the heyday of fishing. Even though we are fortunate we can start hunting in August, it’s not time to store the fishing rods just yet.
Leier is a biologist with the Game and Fish Department. He can be reached by email: email@example.com | <urn:uuid:72473700-d087-4061-8636-f19bea1c53ff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jamestownsun.com/event/article/id/166803/publisher_ID/10/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953051 | 670 | 1.5 | 2 |
17th April 22:51
World Scripture - F****veness And Reconciliation (sage evil endurance altar disciples)
F****VENESS AND RECONCILIATION
The scriptures advocate a large-hearted attitude of f****veness and
tolerance of others' mistakes, even when they cause offense or
injury. F****veness is far preferable to holding a grudge, which
would only fester and poison the spirit. It is preferable to
exacting revenge--see Love Your Enemy, pp. 999-1002. Furthermore,
we are advised to take responsibility for the grudges and injuries
which others feel towards us. This is the first of several sections
which deal with overcoming disputes, enmity, grudges, and
prejudices in personal relationships.
Subvert anger by f****veness.
1.Jainism. Samanasuttam 136
The best deed of a great man is to f****ve and forget.
2.Islam (Shiite). Nahjul Balagha, Saying 201
Where there is f****veness, there is God Himself.
3.Sikhism. Adi Granth, Shalok, Kabir, p. 1372
If you efface and overlook and f****ve, then lo! God is f****ving,
4.Islam. Qur'an 64.14
The superior man tends to f****ve wrongs and deals leniently with
5.Confucianism. I Ching 40: Release
If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that
your brother has something against you, leave your gift there
before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and
then come and offer your gift.
6.Christianity. Matthew 5.23-24
The Day of Atonement atones for sins against God, not for sins
against man, unless the injured person has been appeased.
7.Judaism. Mishnah, Yoma 8.9
Show endurance in humiliation and bear no grudge.
8.Taoism. Treatise on Response and Retribution
You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of
your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am
09.Judaism and Christianity. Leviticus 19.18
Shalok, Kabir: On tolerance of the ill-behaved, see Tattvarthasutra
7.11,p. 827. Yoma 8.9 and Matthew 5.23-24: Not only will God not
accept the offering of a hypocrite whose piety is a mask for
robbery and injury--see Qur'an 2.264, p. 428--he also will not
accept our offering if another person has a grievance against us,
though we might think our actions were justified. Therefore we
should take responsibility for others' grievances against us, and
avoid all temptations to self-righteousness. Treatise on Response
and Retribution: Cf. ****ects 14.11, p. 859.
Who takes vengeance or bears a grudge acts like one who, having cut
one hand while handling a knife, avenges himself by stabbing the
10.Judaism. Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim 9.4
Moses son of Imran said, "My Lord, who is the greatest of Thy
servants in Thy estimation?" and received the reply, "The one who
f****ves when he is in a position of power."
11.Islam. Hadith of Baihaqi
Better and more rewarding is God's reward to those who believe and
put their trust in Him: who avoid gross sins and indecencies and,
when angered, are willing to f****ve... Let evil be rewarded by
like evil, but he who f****ves and seeks reconciliation shall be
rewarded by God. He does not love the wrongdoers.... True constancy
lies in f****veness and patient forbearance.
12.Islam. Qur'an 42.36-43
In reconciling a great injury,
Some injury is sure to remain.
How can this be good?
Therefore the sage holds the left-hand tally [obligation] of a
He does not blame others.
The person of virtue attends to the obligation;
The person without virtue attends to the exactions.
13.Taoism. Tao Te Ching 79
Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim 9.4: Cf. Vachana 248, p. 793; Digha
Nikaya i.3, p. 793. Hadith of Baihaqi: Muhammad attributes this
teaching to Moses. Qur'an 42.36-43: Vv. 36-37, 40, 43. The Qur'an
exalts f****veness as the way in which the best of people respond
to being wronged, yet as a concession to human weakness, it allows
that to take revenge is not a sin--see Qur'an 7.33, p. 415.
Muhammad in the traditions consistently praises those who would
f****ve rather than take revenge. On Muhammad's own f****ving
nature, see Hadith, p. 569. Ali likewise prohibited his followers
from taking revenge for his murder; see Nahjul Balagha, Letter 47,
p. 415. Cf. Forty Hadith of an-Nawawi 32, p. 858. Tao Te Ching 79:
Cf. Matthew 7.1-5, p. 852; Dhammapada 252-53, p. 852, and related
passages on not judging others before correcting oneself.
Then Peter came up and said to him, "Lord, how often shall my
brother sin against me, and I f****ve him? As many as seven times?"
Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you seven times, but seventy
"Therefore the kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a king who
wished to settle accounts with his servants. When he began the
reckoning, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand
talents; and as he could not pay, the lord ordered him to be sold,
and his wife and children and all that he had, and payment to be
made. So the servant fell on his knees, imploring him, 'Lord, have
patience with me, and I will pay you everything.' And out of pity
for him the lord of that servant released him and forgave him the
debt. But that same servant, as he went out, came upon one of his
fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by
the throat he said, 'Pay what you owe.' So his fellow servant fell
down and besought him, 'Have patience with me, and I will pay you.'
He refused and went and put him in prison till he should pay the
debt. When his fellow servants saw what had taken place, they were
greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all
that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him,
'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you
besought me; and should not you have had mercy on your fellow
servant, as I had mercy on you?' And in anger his lord delivered
him to the jailers, till he should pay all his debt. So also my
heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not f****ve
your brother from your heart."
14.Christianity. Matthew 18.21-35
When Jesus was crucified, Roman soldiers pierced him. And Jesus
prayed for his enemies: "Father, f****ve them; for they know not
what they do." [Luke 23:34] Even at the moment of death on the
cross, Jesus was so earnest in f****ving. His very last act was
motivated by his love for his enemies. He was the supreme form of
giving--a paragon of love. The example of Jesus Christ is the
absolute standard for all mankind. Just imagine an entire nation
composed of Jesus-like men. What would you call it? The Kingdom of
Heaven on earth--it could be nothing less.
15.Unification Church. Sun Myung Moon, 10-20-73
Matthew 18.21-35: Cf. The Parable of the Prodigal Son, Luke
15.11-32, pp. 443f. Sun Myung Moon, 10-20-73: On Jesus' and his
disciples' attitude of f****veness even at their deaths, see Luke
23.34, p. 522; Acts 7.60, pp. 768f. Cf. Sun Myung Moon, 2-21-80, p.
Damian J. Anderson <email@example.com> http://www.unification.net
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast,
it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not
easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in
evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts,
always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. (1 Cor 13:4-8) | <urn:uuid:2334438f-6570-4d7e-8621-9e872e2ed009> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mombu.com/religion/religion/t-world-scripture-forgiveness-and-reconciliation-sage-evil-endurance-altar-disciples-12514524.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923653 | 2,022 | 1.96875 | 2 |
Linda, thank you for your recent memo. I have not done much
recently with Oxford genealogy because the Burke Co NC library is closed
for renovations. However, I did find some interesting things a few months
ago in nearby NC libraries.
1.When the teenage Samuel Oxford first arrived in North Carolina he
lived with his brother John Oxford Senior. A summary of the Rowan Co NC
Deed Book says, "21 Dec 1778 John Purviance enters 500 acres in Rowan
County on the north side of Catawba River. Includes improvements where
Samuel Oxfod and John Oxford Sr. lived."
2. I think John Oxfod Sr. died about Oct. 1778. The above land
entry uses the past tense (where John Oxford Sr. lived). And the last
mention of John Sr. in any of the NC records is the following land entry:
"John Oxford Sr. 150 acres south side of Lyleses Creek (Burke County) mouth of Hagans Creek. Discontinued 6 Dec 1778." He must have died and the land entry was discontinued.
3. I think the Mary Ann Oxford in the NC land records is not the
mother of Samuel as some people think, but rather she is the widow of John
Oxford Senior. The first mention of Mary Ann is the Burke Co NC Land Grant File #422: "100 acres west side of Lower Little River. Burke County 27 Dec 1778 (Surveyed 4 Nov 1779)" This date is just after the death of her
husband. There is mention of Mary Ann's land by the neighboring grants in
1798, 1803, and 1804. The Lower Little river is directly across the
Catawba River from Samuel's land and ferry on the south side of the Catawba River.
4. Samuel obtained land and moved to the ferry site on the south
side of the Catawba River just after the death of John Senior. The first
land entry for Samuel is "27 Oct 1778 300 acres south side of Catawba
River above the foot of Long Branch and lower end of Rockett Creek."
5. I now think that the only children of Samuel are the ones
specifically mentioned in his will: Samuel Jr., James, Nancy Moody,
Jonathan, Bathsheba Bylar, Isaac, Jacob, Able, and Mary Ann Polly Metcalf.
I think all the other Oxford children in the area are children of John
Senior and Mary Ann. These other children would have lived with their
mother Mary Ann and/or with Samuel after the death of John Sr.
6. This assumption would produce the following children for John
Oxford Sr. and Mary Ann:
(This list includes all the Oxfords mentioned in the NC records other than
the ones specifically mentioned in the will of Samuel)
1. Elizabeth married David Ponder and moved to Buncombe Co NC
2. Eleanor (Nellie) married Alex Ray and moved to Ashe Co NC (just north of Buncombe Co)
3. Katrine married David Adams on 29 Sept 1784 in Lincoln Co NC
4. John Jr. moved to Ross County Ohio and had a large family that moved
into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Tennessee.
5. David. Thought to have moved to Missouri
6. William. Married Barbara Icard. Moved to Kentucky. Married and later
deserted Sarah. Sarah and her children moved to Illinois.
7. A good bit is known about Samuel Jr (son of Samuel of NC). The
information comes from deeds in NC and Allen Co KY, census records in NC and KY, War of 1812 Pension files WC9644 and SC9118, and particularly from a deed made by his heirs at law selling their inherited land 20 Dec 1842 (Allen Co KY Deed Book G, page 471). He married Mary (Polly) Gilbert.
His children are Samuel, Sarah, John, Thomas, Nancy Howard, Mary Derrington, Elizabeth DeBerry, Daniel, Jane Robins, and Martha Derrington.
An interesting NC deed is "4 Jan 1788 Samuel Oxford Jr. 150 acres on Naked Creek south side of Catawba River next to Samuel Oxford Sr.
Samuel Jr. has many land grants in Buncombe Co NC 1803-1806. He is in Allen Co KY 1810-1842. (I have not yet personally seen the War of 1812 pension application.)
8. A good bit is also known about John Jr (based mainly on land and
census data). John Jr. was listed in the Burke Co NC Census in 1790. He
was in Pickaway Co (formerly Franklin and Ross Co.) Ohio for the years
1806-1820. In 1826 he is living near his son Samuel in Humphreys Co TN.
By 1830 he and his younger sons are in Southern Illinois. His children are
Abel (moved to Indiana), John (moved to Illinois), Nancy Harvey, William
(moved to Illinois), James (moved to Indiana), Jacob, and Samuel who
married (1) a Curtis and (2) Mary Hogge and moved to Benton Co (formerly
Humphrey Co) TN and had many children.
9. Most of the Oxfords moved to Buncombe Co NC shortly after 1800.
Samuel may have moved temporarily to Buncombe Co, but he was back at his homeplace on the Catawba River from 1810 until his death the following
year. I still do not know the identity of the Molly Fox who cared for him
in his final year and inherited the remainder of his estate. Molly is a
nickname for Margaret and I can find no Margaret among his children or the children of his brother John Senior. She could be another child of John
Sr. or she might be a daughter-in-law (of Isaac?) or she might simply be a
neighbor or nurse. | <urn:uuid:538fb6b1-0d0e-443b-b1c3-c9e9c9aa9b71> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~oxford/mcneeley.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954967 | 1,253 | 1.90625 | 2 |
Trouble is on the horizon for bats in South Carolina
White nose syndrome, a wildlife crisis of unprecedented proportions, has killed hundreds of thousands of bats from Vermont to Virginia and appears to be heading south and west.
First discovered in New York in the winter of 2006-2007, white nose syndrome (WNS) got its name from obvious white fungal growth on the faces of bats in their cave or mine hibernation sites. The fungus, Geomyces destructans, was not previously known to science. It prefers the cool temperatures typical of wintering sites (called hibernacula) for bats. Bats afflicted with WNS have fungus growing on their muzzles, ears and wing and tail membranes. In the summer, bats afflicted with WNS do not exhibit the white fungal growth, but they do have damaged wing and tail membranes that may hamper flight, foraging, and temperature regulation. Afflicted bats appear to starve to death.
Estimates of bat mortality from WNS range from 500,000 to 1.5 million. WNS only affects bats; it has not been seen in other animals.
Now WNS is in southernmost Virginia and is expected to expand its swath of destruction in the major cave belts of Kentucky and Tennessee, according to Mary Bunch, S.C. Department of Natural Resources (DNR) wildlife biologist based in Clemson.
"Many of the bats found in Upstate South Carolina, such as little brown, big brown, small-footed, northern long-eared, pipistrelles, and Rafinesque's big-eared bats, are the same species that are vulnerable to WNS," Bunch said. "It is likely that we'll see WNS reach South Carolina's bats. There's no treatment or cure for WNS yet. Fortunately WNS does not appear to afflict tree roosting bats. The red bat is a common tree roosting bat in Upstate South Carolina."
If anyone discovers large numbers of dead bats (not single bats), they are asked to report them to the nearest DNR office.
South Carolina's natural resources are essential for economic development and contribute nearly $30 billion and 230,000 jobs to the state's economy. Find out why Life's Better Outdoors. | <urn:uuid:07885959-2122-425e-8771-f2e8afc7ef39> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dnr.sc.gov/news/yr2009/sept14/sept14_bats.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951118 | 465 | 3.171875 | 3 |
I often have to explain
to people who never seem to have heard it before.
My logical explanation goes something like this:
"The difference between x and y is the same as the the difference between y and x."
This has the advantage of making people say "you can't argue with that." and leaving you to say it whenever you want.
What I usually actually mean when I say this is:
"Well, it's a difference, I don't care much about what it actually is. You probably just corrected me and now I'm 1. embarrassed that I missed it, 2. I didn't care enough in the first place to notice."
I would like to say that my reason for using this phrase was mostly the second one, but I'd be lying. | <urn:uuid:12085912-f550-4c58-a52d-e870a58ef95f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://everything2.com/user/pjd/writeups/same+difference | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989456 | 161 | 2.484375 | 2 |
ADL Survey Shows American Jews Overwhelmingly Supported Israel's Gaza Action
New York, NY, January 29, 2009 … American Jews overwhelmingly supported Israel in its actions against Hamas in Gaza, according to a national survey conducted for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The findings strongly contradict the notion that surfaced during the war in Gaza that American Jews were divided in their attitudes, with suggestions that many were critical of Israel.
The telephone survey of 400 American Jewish adults was conducted between January 13-19, 2009 (with a hiatus Friday evening-Saturday for the Jewish Sabbath) for ADL by The Marttila Communications Group, and has a margin of error of +/-4.9%.
• 94% expressed sympathy for Israel over Hamas; only 1% for Hamas (graph). By denomination breakdown: Orthodox - 98% expressed sympathy for Israel; Conservative - 96%; Reform - 91%.
• 81% expressed the belief that Hamas was responsible for the escalation of the violence; only 14% held Israel responsible (graph). By denomination breakdown: Orthodox - 84% held Hamas responsible, Conservative - 88%, Reform - 77%; non-practicing 77%.
• Asked whether Israel's response to Hamas rockets was appropriate or excessive, probably the major theme that has appeared in international critiques of Israel, 79% said it was appropriate, 17% excessive (graph). By denomination breakdown: Orthodox - 88%, appropriate, Conservative - 80%, Reform - 80% and non-practicing - 71%
• When asked about Israel's right to self-defense versus the need to win the "hearts and minds" of the Arab world, 79% said that Israel's responsibility to protect its citizens takes precedence (graph).
"The survey findings strongly contradict those who disagreed with Israel's actions against Hamas and claimed there was a sharp division in the American Jewish community," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.
"The vast majority of the Jewish community clearly understands and overwhelmingly supports Israel's effort to stop Hamas' constant rocket attacks and cripple its terrorism infrastructure. The Jewish community is an open community where different views are welcome. It was unfortunate that some seem to have an interest in exaggerating the level of disagreement on this issue."
ADL also explored American Jewish views of some of the key political issues facing Israel:
• Two-thirds of those interviewed indicated that they supported Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the same number continues to support that position today (graph).
• 63% support the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza while 32% oppose. On the question of who is doing more to bring peace to the region, Israel or the Palestinians, 91% said Israel and 4% said the Palestinians.
"The findings on the political issues speak of a continuing strong center in the American Jewish community that wants a secure Israel but also strongly supports efforts toward peace," Mr. Foxman said.
The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry. | <urn:uuid:85aab4a8-d7ea-4df5-a4e8-4f0bbadcecaa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://archive.adl.org/PresRele/IslME_62/5455_62.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962769 | 627 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Playing with the cities architecture always makes for eye catching art. The latest showcase of this is the work by art collective Mentalgassi, who've created several artworks that play with everyday city objects.
While still got time for Banksy and his 'isn't capitalism bad?' portraits on random city walls, we've always had a soft spot for art that plays with perceptions and expectations on a larger (and slightly more interesting) scale. And Mentalgassi, an art collective based in Berlin, do just that.
Creating game controllers using street lights, people drinking water via a canal drain and masked people on recycling bins, it's the sort of art that grabs your attention by it's sheer weirdness. And that's no bad thing.
The full set of images can be found here. | <urn:uuid:f193c216-f18d-4cf4-9e41-72c6c206ea89> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.esquire.co.uk/gear/design/97/design-urban-art-transformation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963378 | 162 | 1.53125 | 2 |
The largest earth "impact" of recent times, the Tunguska event, might have left a crater after all. The impact levelled more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest in Siberia, but is thought to have been caused by an asteroid or comet exploding in Earth's atmosphere since no crater marking the impact has ever been found. Now …
Wasn't that the one that some people say that Tesla made with Wardenclyffe?
It was space aliens testing a nuclear device. They were smart enough to not test it on their own planet.
More likely to be aliens than Tesla... :)
I think its pretty obvious that it was aliens in collaboration with Tesla.
.... we all know that it was Nicola Tesla 'who' ....
Everyone else in the world knows that Nicola Tesla was a very clever person, not a big sodding rock. | <urn:uuid:1d6040af-c31b-41a7-8691-b5909e8f15c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2007/06/27/lake_crater_tunguska/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970514 | 177 | 2.1875 | 2 |
LONDON – Europe's largest chipmaker STMicroelectronics has been linked to Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (HSMC) as being part of one of two consortia in discussions with the Indian government over a proposal to set up one or more wafer fabs in India.
The most recent initiative to stimulate the start of Indian chip manufacturing was launched by the Indian government nearly two years ago. One consortium, which includes IBM, Jaypee Group and Tower Semiconductor Ltd., is known to have been involved in the process. The Indian government has reportedly said that two projects are left in the running and STMicroelectronics (Geneva Switzerland) has been linked to HSMC in a report from Indian publication LiveMint
referencing sources familiar with the tender process.
A decision from the Indian government was originally expected by the end of 2012 but that was later pushed back to the end of the first quarter of 2013.
HSMC was originally formed in about 2007 with a plan to create two wafer fabs in India. It signed a memorandum of understanding with Infineon Technologies AG (Munich, Germany) to license a 130-nm CMOS digital manufacturing process as well as processes for RF and embedded flash. The plan failed to materialize and HSMC has been mainly quiescent since then.
HSMC has has offices in San Jose, Calif., and Delhi, India. It is led by chairman and CEO Devendra Verma, who has experience as a technology executive and venture capitalist. ST could be a source of manufacturing process technology for a newly-created Indian enterprise. This is an activity it has engaged in with chipmakers in Russia.
HSMC declined to comment on whether it was involved with ST in plans to create an Indian wafer fab. ST declined to comment on whether it was involved with HSMC in such plans.Related links and articles:
India fab decision likely this quarter
Tower asked to expand Indian fab projectGlobalFoundries, Infineon, IBM, ST linked to Indian fab plan
Tower in talks with SemIndia, HSMC
Infineon agrees to license fab processes to Indian chip maker | <urn:uuid:018a3a0c-df8a-42f3-a0c5-ff2e60917259> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eetimes.com/design/eda-design/4410035/ST-linked-to-Indian-wafer-fab-bid?Ecosystem=programmable-logic | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969238 | 444 | 1.953125 | 2 |
Carol Meeks, College of Family and Consumer Sciences, (515) 294-8060
Maurice MacDonald, College of Family and Consumer Sciences, (515) 294-1983
Mary Jo Glanville, College of Family and Consumer Sciences, (515) 294-8799
Kevin Brown, News Service, (515) 294-8986
STATE'S POLITICAL CULTURE, FAMILY POLICY DISCUSSED AT ISU
AMES, Iowa -- "Iowa's Political Culture and Family Policy" will be the subject of a panel discussion sponsored by the Iowa State University's College of Family and Consumer Sciences on Friday, Aug. 21.
The discussion will begin at 10 a.m. at the Holiday Inn Gateway Center, U.S. 30 and Elwood Drive, Ames. The discussion will be led by Shirley Zimmerman, the 1998-99 Helen LeBaron Hilton Endowed Chair for the College of Family and Consumer Sciences.
Zimmerman will discuss her recent research on Iowa's political culture and family legislation in a national context. The panel will discuss how and why families make certain choices and the connection between legislation and policy implementation.
Joining Zimmerman will be ISU faculty members Jacques Lempers, Joyce Mercier and Jeanne Warning. Zimmerman will speak from 10:20 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.; the panel discussion will be from 11:15 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.
Zimmerman is a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where she teaches courses on family policy, family policy research and family policy with an international emphasis. She is the author of two books: "Family Policies and Family Well-being: The Role of Political Culture," and "Understanding Family Policy: Theoretical Approaches." She has also written several articles on family policy and related issues
Jacques Lempers is the director for the Center for Family Policy at ISU. Lempers has evaluated and researched programs that assist children and families in Iowa and nationally. Joyce Mercier works with the college's new graduate program on family policy and researches aging and family relationships. Jeanne Warning is an assistant director for families to the ISU Extension Service. She is a state leader in workshops to help communities to respond to welfare reform.
The Hilton Chair was established is 1995 with an endowed gift of in excess of $1.3 million from the estate of Helen LeBaron Hilton. It is the largest endowed chair in Iowa State's history.
Helen LeBaron Hilton was dean of the ISU College of Home Economics (now Family and Consumer Sciences) from 1952 to 1975.
Iowa State homepage
University Relations, firstname.lastname@example.org
Copyright © 1997, Iowa State University, all rights reserved | <urn:uuid:130b8675-240f-42d8-90e7-f5bf253cb888> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.public.iastate.edu/~nscentral/news/98/fcs08.20.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919761 | 572 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Florida still hasn't emerged from the Great Recession with its economy remaining below 2008's $669 billion, but the state did eke out a 0.5 percent increase in its goods and services produced in 2011, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Tuesday.
The latest statistics show how weak the recovery has been in Florida: The nation's economy grew 3 times faster -- 1.5 percent -- than the rate of the Sunshine's growth from 2010 to 2011, the federal statistics. Indeed, Florida's economic growth in 2011 was almost half the .9 percent increase the year before in 2010.
The Sunshine State's per capita earnings actually fell from $34,913 in 2010 to $34,689 in 2011. Last year, Florida's per capital earnings dropped to lows not seen since 2000 when it was at $34,414. Per capita earnings divides the total number of residents vs. the state's goods and services produced. That doesn’t include Social Security, other retirement income, food stamps and other government checks. The U.S. per capita earnings was more than $7,000 higher at $42,070.
Still, Florida's economy was not in negative territory such as Mississippi: Its total goods and services fell .8 percent from 2010 to 2011. Florida's economy fell in both 2008 and 2009 before rebounding the next year.Professional, scientific, and technical services and information services was the leading contributor to Florida's growth in 2011, the bureau found.Overall, Florida ranked 37th in growth of the 50 states.
North Dakota was the fastest growing state in 2011, with its economy jumping 7.6 percent in a year.
The Great Recession officially started in December 2007 and did not end until June 2009.
email@example.com, 954-356-4404 or Twitter @donnagehrke | <urn:uuid:79367c95-0ee2-4945-a115-461a4c506b52> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2012-06-05/business/sfl-florida-economy-weak-20120605_1_capital-earnings-economy-florida | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962591 | 381 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (French, 1734–1781)
Etching and aquatint printed in brown ink
15 x 12 in. (30 x 32.8 cm)
Purchase, Jacob H. Schiff Bequest, 1922 (22.64.1)
The sketches Le Prince made in Russia of exotic costumes and customs served him well when he returned to Paris in 1763. He distributed suites of russeries like this one, in a breezy Rococo style, employing etched tones to make his prints look as though they were drawings in ink and wash. The Russian Dance was included among the prints Le Prince sent to the French Salon in 1769 to demonstrate his development of the aquatint technique. | <urn:uuid:965e5786-1be3-4425-bc16-0e0d4fa9e845> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/22.64.1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96917 | 151 | 2.09375 | 2 |
Author: Ann Cummins
More than thirty years after the closing of a nearby uranium mine, the arrival of Becky Atcitty, the daughter of a former Navajo mill worker and a woman involved in a group seeking damages for exposure to radioactive dust, sparks conflict in the life of Ryland Mahoney and his family, in the story of two families — one Navajo, one Anglo.
For her acclaimed collection of stories, Red Ant House, Joyce Carol Oates hailed Ann Cummins as “a master storyteller.” The San Francisco Chronicle called her “startlingly original.” Now, in her debut novel, Cummins stakes claim to rich new literary territory with a story of straddling cultures and cheating fate in the American Southwest.
Yellowcake introduces us to two unforgettable families — one Navajo, one Anglo — some thirty years after the closing of the uranium mill near which they once made their homes. When little Becky Atcitty shows up on the Mahoneys’ doorstep all grown up, the past comes crashing in on Ryland and his lively brood. Becky, the daughter of one of the Navajo mill workers Ryland had supervised, is now involved in a group seeking damages for those harmed by the radioactive dust that contaminated their world. But Ryland wants no part of dredging up their past — or acknowledging his future. When his wife joins the cause, the messy, modern lives of this eclectic cast of characters collide once again, testing their mettle, stretching their faith, and reconnecting past and present in unexpected new ways.
Finely crafted, deeply felt, and bursting with heartache and hilarity,Yellowcake is a moving story of how everyday people sort their way through life, with all its hidden hazards. | <urn:uuid:c135260c-6a6b-444b-abec-227f2b7d1b88> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kdl.org/categories/539/books/2244 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947185 | 357 | 1.78125 | 2 |
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. factory output increased in April, helped by a gain in auto production. Busier factories have driven stronger hiring this year and helped the economy grow.
The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that factory production rose 0.6 percent in April, erasing a 0.5 percent decline in March.
Half of the April increase reflected a 3.9 percent jump in the production of motor vehicles and parts. That's the fifth consecutive gain at auto plants and the biggest rise since January.
Overall industrial production increased 1.1 percent in April. In addition to the big gain at factories, output at mines and utilities both showed strong gains.
Factory output has risen 18.3 percent since it hit a low in June 2009, the month the recession ended. Through the first three months of the year, it was growing at an annual rate of nearly 10 percent.
Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics, said the report is a good sign that "the U.S. economy, for now at least, is shrugging off the euro-zone crisis and the slowdown in China."
The 1.1 percent rise in overall industrial production was the largest one-month gain since December 2010. However, analysts said much of the increase reflected a 4.5 percent jump in utility production, which was influenced by mild weather earlier this year. The warmer winter had lowered March utility output. Heating demands returned to more normal levels in April, driving utility output higher.
The manufacturing gains were broad-based. In addition to increases in auto output, production rose at a wide range of companies, from makers of computers and electronics to aerospace and furniture factories.
Other data suggest factory output is strengthening.
The Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of purchasing managers, said manufacturing activity grew in April at the fastest pace in 10 months. New orders, production and a measure of hiring all rose.
And the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said manufacturing activity in that state jumped in May, reversing a large drop in April. Measures of new orders and employment rose.
Faster output at U.S. factories has been a key reason employers have added 1 million jobs in the past five months.
Manufacturing companies have added 167,000 jobs in that stretch. That's roughly 17 percent of the job gains, even though manufacturing represents less than 10 percent of the economy.
Factories are cranking out more goods because consumers are more confident in the economy and spending more.
Consumer spending grew at an annual rate of 2.9 percent in the first three months of the year, the fastest pace since late 2010. However, some of that strength was aided by a mild winter, which boosted sales in February and March.
In April, retail sales grew by just 0.1 percent. But sales of autos, furniture, electronics and appliances rose. All are big-ticket items made in factories that help drive growth.
The economy grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the January-March quarter. That's slower than the 3 percent growth in the October-December quarter, but better than the 1.7 percent growth for all of last year.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:3a1c4d76-0f99-45d7-bc73-8cb78f0a5965> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2012/05/16/us-factory-output-rose-in-april-on-stronger-autos_print.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96501 | 686 | 1.976563 | 2 |
The Rainbows of Crane Creek
Trout are not native to Missouri. In the latter part of the last century, fishing enthusiasts released all kinds of non-native fish in Missouri waters, including eight different species of trout and salmon. It was even hoped salmon might establish a spawning run on the Mississippi River. No thought was given to the fact that salmon and trout are creatures of the northern regions of the globe and require the cold water that goes with long winters and streams fed by slowly melting snow banks.
The colorful Crane Creek "McCloud strain" rainbows have a reputation for skittishness; they have persevered in the stream because they seek shelter at the first sign of an approaching predator, be it two-legged or four. The Conservation Department protects them with catch-and-release regulations-you can fish for them, but you must release them unharmed immediately once caught.
These fish provide a wonderful challenge for anglers willing to fish with artificial lures or flies and approach the stream with stealth. They are also a genetic reservoir should Missouri's trout hatcheries be decimated by calamity or disease. Even now, the McCloud fish are used to produce offspring for a "wild" trout section of another Missouri river. Biologists use sperm collected from a few of the Crane Creek fish in late November to fertilize eggs of the regular hatchery strain of fish, then stock the resulting offspring. As adults, fish bearing the McCloud genes should flourish and reproduce naturally.
The little town of Crane, near Aurora, southwest of Springfield, is off the beaten track. Wild trout fans all over Missouri cringed when Crane Creek was featured on a national cable television fishing show. The host even caught a large rainbow out of the little stream. Devotees imagined hordes of anglers descending on what many have felt is a well kept secret. But it didn't happen; if you fish Crane Creek, you are not likely to encounter many other anglers. Most of the fish are small, and catching them is tough. It's not fishing that appeals to a lot of people, even if it did show up on the sports network.
Wild trout have a special value to some anglers. The fish have crisp colors, clean fins and an overall sleek appearance. Knowing that they are stream-bred and have foraged on their own for every ounce of protein gives them a mystique all their own. They are strong fish, too, and put up a surprisingly | <urn:uuid:0c3c2e41-ebe2-41de-91d4-01690d5bc73f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mdc.mo.gov/conmag/2000/01/rainbows-crane-creek | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957217 | 503 | 3.140625 | 3 |
Over the last 12 years, governments, major multinational corporations, and non-governmental organizations have worked together to make sure that when companies extract resources in some of the most difficult places on earth, they take tangible steps to minimize the risk of human rights abuses in the surrounding communities.
On March 27-28, 2012, in Ottawa, the Government of Canada hosted the annual meeting of the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, an initiative that provides human rights guidance to oil, mining, and gas companies in their engagement with public and private security providers. During the meeting, participants approved the creation of a formal non-profit organization for the initiative, based in The Hague, Netherlands. Along with the approval of governance rules in 2011, this transforms the Voluntary Principles from an ad hoc collaboration to a stable, structured initiative as it starts its second decade. This is a key step in cementing the relationship between governments, industry, and civil society in finding solutions to human rights problems that none could solve alone.
The Voluntary Principles initiative consists of 20 oil, mining, and gas companies; seven governments; and 10 non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In Ottawa, the Voluntary Principles welcomed the French oil and gas giant Total, S.A., as a new participant, and the International Finance Corporation and Democratic Control of Armed Forces, as observers. Participants discussed best practices and challenges on human rights and security issues, and strategies for engaging the governments of other countries where oil, gas, and mining companies are headquartered or operate. During the meeting, 13 participating companies led a conversation on the status of their pilot project to develop key performance indicators, which will guide and validate the ways that companies fulfill the commitments they make under the Voluntary Principles. These companies will integrate the indicators into their systems this year. This important step will help companies maintain high standards while they do business in these difficult areas of the world. | <urn:uuid:cebbc3ec-a235-4321-b3ed-9784305cd594> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/03/187239.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946381 | 383 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Outpatient Substance Abuse Programs
An outpatient substance abuse department is generally starting point for an AI/AN who wants help with a substance abuse problem. Most tribal and urban Indian health programs in California offer, at least, some form of outpatient substance abuse services. The types of services that are generally available include substance abuse evaluations, individual substance abuse counseling, group counseling, case management, referral for residential care, and aftercare. Additionally, a client can be referred for mental health evaluation and treatment, if necessary. Most of the substance abuse providers are certified with a nationally, and/or state-recognized certifying body, and have several years of experience. In the case of an adolescent, the outpatient substance abuse treatment programs are a crucial part of the YRTC Network. Every youth that is funded through the YRTC Risk Pool for residential treatment, is first evaluated by, and then referred by an outpatient substance abuse program. They also provide aftercare for those youth who have successfully completed residential treatment.
For more information on the outpatient substance abuse department nearest you visit the Health Programs section of our website. | <urn:uuid:4079f899-0e38-4cb3-b988-56ae65a33963> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ihs.gov/california/index.cfm/clinical-management/behavioral-health/substance-abuse/outpatient-substance-abuse-programs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941226 | 222 | 1.90625 | 2 |
I work with everything from small local businesses to Fortune 100 and FTSE 100 companies and one of the things I do find is that all sizes of company are trying to do something about security. Sure, the extent to which a small company can implement some security controls is limited by budget, but there certainly isn't a 100% correlation with big corporates doing it better than small companies.
Often small financial companies (150 employees say) are the best at this - implementing full information lifecycle management functionality including secure code development all the way through to secure destruction at end of life. For OWASP's top ten, there is nothing there that is out of reach of a company of this size. What it will come down to is what there motivation is:
- If they are regulated, they will do what is required to pass audit
- If they store personal information they will try to make sure they meet data protection requirements wherever they are
- If they hold valuable intellectual property they will place controls to protect it | <urn:uuid:bcb05f88-f2af-4e2b-ac46-ce2849210c29> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/20995/how-do-small-businesses-handle-web-app-security/21054 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957186 | 205 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Virgil Ivan Grissom (3 April 1926 – 27 January 1967), more widely known as Gus Grissom, was one of the original NASA Project Mercury astronauts and a United States Air Force pilot. He was the second American to fly into space. Grissom was killed along with fellow astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee during a training exercise and pre-launch test for the Apollo 1 mission at the Kennedy Space Center. He was a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross and, posthumously, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
- If we die we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us, it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life. Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because in the final analysis, only man can fully evaluate the moon in terms understandable to other men.
- On the dangers and importance of the mission of going to the moon in "Gemini : A Personal Account of Man's Venture Into Space (1968) by Virgil I. Grissom
- Gus Grissom - I Knew Him
- Indiana Historical Society tribute to Gus Grissom
- Detailed Biographies of Apollo I Crew - Gus Grissom - NASA
- NASA biography
- Grissom page at Astronaut Memorial Foundation
- Spacefacts biography
- Roadside America review of Grissom Museum
- Virgil Ivan Grissom at Arlington National Cemetery | <urn:uuid:a898340a-fe78-4899-af56-d3fc8ecd40b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gus_Grissom | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922824 | 312 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Fellow program in management may provide a research background for a Ph.D degree. Fellow programs are mostly part time, taking only one or two aspects. In academic world they have less value. But may be in some business organisation they may have high esteem. Ph.D is awarded by a university after successfully completeing a research in the given field. It requires complete data of research, and comparison of findings with other contemporary findings. This comparison takes time. | <urn:uuid:0406b435-fb6b-4d29-b008-ec5176955610> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://qna.rediff.com/questions-and-answers/which-iim-offer-operation-management-course/15625328/answers/15282320 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956497 | 92 | 1.75 | 2 |
With the 2011 Indianapolis 500 Mile Race celebrating its 100th anniversary, I believe Indianapolis residents owe a thank you to Speedway founders Carl G. Fisher and James A. Allison.
Before the inaugural running of the Indianapolis 500 on May 30, 1911, Indianapolis was a bucolic city with very little to distinguish it. When the founders built the track on a 320 acre parcel outside of the city limits, the Speedway was about five miles northwest of the city’s center. The Speedway would eventually fulfill Carl Fisher’s stated goal of a proving ground “to establish American automobile supremacy.” The result also helped grow the city’s manufacturing base.
Fisher’s vision for grand ventures was first demonstrated when he and Allison obtained the rights to manufacture and market compressed acetylene headlight systems for automobiles in 1904. This firm, known as Prest-O-Lite, would become the cornerstone for their many automotive ventures. Today, an outgrowth of Prest-O-Lite is Praxair Surface Technologies, which employs more than 450 people at the Speedway Main Street site.
By 1911, Indianapolis claimed 11 operating automakers, with names like American Underslung, Cole, Empire, Ideal, Marion, Marmon, New Parry, National, Overland, Premier, and Waverley. This concentration of manufacturers attracted the supporting ancillary machine shops and businesses. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler went on to build operations in Indianapolis.
James Allison built a new shop for the Indianapolis Speedway Team Company on Main Street in Speedway to prepare a fleet of race cars in late 1916. This venture provided the genesis for the Allison Engineering Company. When World War I erupted, Allison committed his shop resources to war production for crawler-type tractors, superchargers, and master models for the Liberty aircraft engines. In 1929, a year after Allison died, General Motors Corporation purchased the company. Under General Motors, the operation produced aircraft engines, transmissions, precision bearings, and superchargers. Its descendant companies, Allison Engine Company and Allison Transmission are headquartered in Indianapolis. Combined employment at these plants totaled over 11,000 people in the late 1980’s, making them one of the city’s largest employers.
These companies spawned a number of local machine shops to supply additional services to supplement Allison operations. Skilled machinists and tool makers moved to Indianapolis to work in these shops. I know my father moved to Indianapolis in the mid-1930’s to work in various machine shops and retired with over 25 years at Allison.
Thank you to Carl Fisher and James Allison for your grand vision with these manufacturing endeavors and the creating the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which drew people to our great city for employment and enjoyment. | <urn:uuid:0f2e7d5c-749b-413b-931e-5c1a5404d209> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.autogiftgarage.com/carculture/tag/new-parry/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936683 | 560 | 1.976563 | 2 |
John Beddington, UK Chief Scientific Adviser
As the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, I sit at the interface of Government's engagement with its science advisers. I firmly believe that if Ministers and independent science advisers are to develop and sustain effective working relationships, their having respect for one another's roles and responsibilities is critical, and that this in turn should be underpinned by mutual trust.
This need for mutual trust is set out in the Government's recently published Principles of scientific advice to Government, and has drawn some comment.
Clearly, the extent to which mutual trust exists in any relationship is not easily quantifiable nor is it amenable to legalistic definition. I am convinced, however, of the need to recognise its importance. That trust is a key element of effective working in this area, and should be protected, is a view shared by departmental Chief Scientific Advisers across government, and importantly, by the Chairs of many Scientific Advisory Committees that provide expert and independent advice to government across the full spectrum of policy areas.
Michael Brooks, consultant
Earlier today I put out a call to Skeptics in the Pub, Leicester - a rationalist discussion group based in the British city of that name. With a general election due next month, I wanted to know if there was any interest in someone standing against David Tredinnick, the current MP for the Leicestershire constituency of Bosworth, on a science ticket.
Tredinnick is a believer in the powers of astrology and is a champion of homeopathy. In itself, that's not unusual: I know many people who have similarly irrational beliefs. The difference is, I'm not paying to indulge their irrationality.
Keith Gull is a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences
Last week the author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg gave a phenomenal Wilkins lecture to a rapt audience at the Royal Society.
In his preamble, Bragg commented on his appreciation of the massive influence of a particular teacher on his ambition to study at Oxford. He then introduced the 90-year-old, who was in the audience, to all-round applause.
An abiding memory and recognition of the influence of a teacher on our careers is deep in the hearts of many of us. Good teachers change lives.
However, a report from a study I chaired on behalf of the Academy of Medical Sciences has voiced concern about the growing disengagement between research and teaching in many higher education institutions over the past few years.
Roger Highfield, magazine editor
In the looking-glass world of Westminster, words mean what politicians say they do - no more and no less.
Today we had a master-class in the dark art of political obfuscation, first in a government announcement on independent advice, then in the details of the Budget.
Let's deal with the second first, ending with some helpful pointers describing the many ways that politicians like to leave the electorate dazed and confused.
Stuart Clark, contributor
Yesterday the UK Space Agency was launched, to much excitement and enthusiasm. Forty million pounds was announced to set the whole thing up (that's about half the budget shortfall at the STFC that precipitated the astronomy and physics funding crisis about two years ago).
It will be located alongside the ESA offices in Harwell, Oxfordshire.
The UK space industry, we were told, supports 68,000 jobs directly and indirectly, and contributes £6 billion to the economy. The plan is to grow this over the next 20 years to create 100,000 jobs and contribute £40 billion a year to the economy. But largely absent from the morning's announcements was any mention of science.
In the UK, it seems space is about revitalising manufacturing industry now that we have lost faith in the financial sector to make the country prosper. It is not about science, astronomy or planetary exploration.
We were told also that space is an inspiration that draws children into the science. This is a lazy cliché. I agree that children tend to love space, but by continually promoting astronauts to children we marginalise the teenagers and young adults, who are the ones making critical choices that define their future careers.
Roger Highfield, magazine editor
Just in case the next government has any lingering doubts about the link between well-funded research and a vibrant economy, a select committee today warns that cuts in the science budget could be devastating.
Even though this link receives widespread lip service from politicians of all persuasions, scientists remain fearful that the axe is about to fall - just when overall Government funding on research has only recently recovered to what it was in 1986
The prime minister's Council for Science and Technology
warned a few days ago "that we need to avoid the UK research base undergoing either managed or neglected decline
In another influential report, the Royal Society
said that Britain risks seeing economic decline
, relative to the US, China, India, France and Germany, if it does not invest more in research.
Today, members of parliament in the cross-party Science and Technology Committee
issue another stark warning to government: commit to an increase in investment in science now
, or risk devastating British science and the economy in years to come through ill-advised spending cuts.
Martin Robbins is a freelance writer and edits The Lay Scientist
Science, technology, research and innovation drive much of British industry
. Their fruits clothe us, feed us, and transport to the work they provide. Almost everything you do today will in some way have been made possible by science.
On a grander scale, many of the greatest challenges we face - from pandemics to water security, obesity to global warming - are fundamentally scientific in nature.
Even "blue skies" research makes economic sense: the Apollo program, for example, paid for itself several times over.
Despite all these benefits, the UK's science budget still amounts to just one quarter of one percent of our GDP.
And yet the government - and its likely successors - seems bent on endangering the economy's dependence on innovation in order to shave pennies in the pound off spending, as Britain tries to cut the budget deficit created by the banking bail-out.
Nick Dusic is the Director of the Campaign for Science & Engineering (CaSE). CaSE runs The Science Vote blog.
There has been a huge push to put "the s word" - science - at the heart of political debate in the run-up to the UK general election.
Coordinated effort by science and engineering organizations has raised the public profile of science in Westminster. The challenge between now and the election is to show that there is a science vote right across the country.
We don't just want to improve the policies for science, mathematics and engineering, but also to ensure that the voters engage with them, because we believe these subjects will underpin a vibrant economy.
Jim Killock is executive director of the Open Rights Group
Peter Mandelson's Digital Economy Bill
is a complete mess.
We at the Open Rights Group believe the measures proposed by the Bill on copyright infringement constitute nothing less than a violation of human rights. But equally disturbing is its failure to take the complexity of internet usage into account - a failure which threatens the future development of the digital economy it supposedly safeguards.
The Bill - currently being debated by the House of Lords - assumes that the "threat" that copyright infringement poses to today's giant music and film companies is the only economic element of the web worth considering.
Nothing else seems to matter: not the government's stated objective of universal internet access; not the social and commercial benefits of new technology; and not the prospect of copyright enforcement being used to effect censorship.
James Wilsdon, director of science policy, Royal Society, London
For science policy wonks, yesterday was a red letter day.
We started early, with the breakfast launch of the Royal Society's report 'The Scientific Century'.
Over lunch, we digested James Dyson's call for an 'Ingenious Britain'.
And we ended the day with drinks, canapés and a heated two-hour debate between the Tory, Labour and Lib Dem science spokesmen, hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the House of Commons.
Throughout the day, the question on everyone's lips was how central science and innovation will be to the UK's economic recovery and long-term growth.
Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief
Exactly one year ago, President Barack Obama issued a memo pledging to remove political interference from science. His scientific adviser, John Holdren, was given 120 days to come up with a plan. But we're still waiting, and the Union of Concerned Scientists is ... well, concerned about the delay.
In a press release, the UCS complains that the Obama administration is "moving too slowly to establish badly needed reforms".
The UCS was a vociferous critic of the previous administration of George Bush, accusing it of censoring and distorting science to political ends, and appointing people to key scientific positions based on ideology, rather than technical qualifications. While Obama's 2009 memo suggested that many of the reforms urged by UCS would be implemented, the lobby group is becoming frustrated by the slow progress.
Hilary Leevers, Campaign for Science and Engineering
There has been a long and expectant wait for the Conservative party to outline its vision for research.
Now, at last, we have a glimpse of what is going through the mind of the party, thanks to a report commissioned by the leader, David Cameron, from the industrial designer James Dyson
, who is best known for his vacuum cleaner.
The report, Ingenious Britain
, is engaging and adds to the emerging consensus of where science and technology is heading.
Roger Highfield, magazine editor
Despite the economic gloom, scientists have chosen to come out of their ivory towers in the run up to the UK's forthcoming general election.
The scientific A-list, led by the Royal Society
, are as worried as hell and it seems they aren't going to take it any more.
By the time the election is called there will have been an unprecedented three debates - the last today (9 March) in the House of Commons
- between the science minister and his shadows.
A series of hard-hitting reports from people who are too eminent to be ignored has helped to force the three main parties to scramble for policies about the future of research.
The most recent and heaviest hitting salvo in this process is a Royal Society report
that warns Britain risks seeing economic decline, relative to the United States, China, India, France and Germany, if it does not invest more in research.
Britain will be "relegated from the economic premier league" if it cuts government funding of science, says the report.
Roger Highfield, magazine editor
If I had to pinpoint one issue that has caused the science minister the most misery it has to be the chronic problems of the Science and Technology Funding Council
, which has lurched from one financial crisis to another
These difficulties have both embarrassed the minister, Paul Drayson
, and enraged scientists; especially nuclear physicists, whose programme has been cut dramatically.
For some scientists, the simple solution is for Drayson to find another £50 million per year
from a total research councils budget of more than £3 billion.
But, of course, they don't have to deal with the hard-nosed Treasury during the worst recession for a generation.
And there is a general acceptance that from the moment it was created from two previous research councils, the STFC has suffered serious structural flaws
Roger Highfield, magazine editor
There is one simple science policy issue that has united the main political parties over the past three decades: how to squeeze more profit out of Britain's world-class science.
Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown and the prime ministers in between have been passionate about the central role that science should play in a modern economy.
So it comes as a surprise to see the chronic policy blunders identified by a recent report
from the University of Cambridge.
The shadowy Council for Science and Technology, the most senior advisory body of its kind, has signalled the need for greater investment in science. Nick Dusic, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, reports on the latest from the body that advises the Prime Minister.
This morning the UK government's Council for Science and Technology
(CST) published its response
to the prime minister's request for a Vision for UK Research.
The CST's vision is that the "UK research base will be successful and
globally competitive 20 years out." However, their next statement is the more telling, as it says "that we need
to avoid the UK research
base undergoing either managed or neglected decline."
The Prime Minister's response
to the report
was not encouraging, as he
only mentioned Labour's record of investment in the science base and did
not take the opportunity to
recommit himself to seeing through the 10-year Science and Innovation
, as he
did in a speech last year | <urn:uuid:584b6a9e-483f-4f8c-b4ca-8baf737be6bd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/thesword/2010/03/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955891 | 2,679 | 1.53125 | 2 |
NEAR EAST REPORT AIPAC'S BIWEEKLY ON AMERICAN MIDDLE EAST POLICY
Egyptians are scheduled to vote for the lower house of parliament, or People’s Assembly, from Nov. 28 to Jan. 10.
The Muslim Brotherhood, to be represented in the elections via the Freedom and Justice Party, is the most well-organized and well-funded political force in Egypt.
There are widespread concerns about the security and fairness of the elections amid ongoing violence and political instability in Egypt.
Parliamentary Elections in Egypt: A Preview
Nine months after they ousted President Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians will begin going to the polls this month to choose a new parliament. The elections for the 508-member People’s Assembly are scheduled to take place in three stages, starting on Nov. 28 and ending in early January. How these elections unfold and their results will be a crucial indication of where Egypt is heading in coming years.
Transitioning to an Elected GovernmentEgypt’s parliament was dissolved in mid-February by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took control after President Mubarak had stepped down. The military council promised to hold free, safe and fair elections within six months. “We want the whole world to know that the elections will be characterized by transparency and freedom, and we urge all sectors in the country to avoid any violation against the safety and security of our country,” said Assistant Minister of Defense Mamdouh Shahin, a member of the council.
However, elections for the lower house of parliament, or People’s Assembly, were postponed a number of times. The military council finally announced in late September that elections would take place from Nov. 28 to Jan. 10 and consist of three stages, each stage including 9 of Egypt’s 27 governorates. Adding to concerns about the security and fairness of the elections, the ruling body has banned international election observers. “Our judges will supervise the whole process and we refuse any foreign interference in our internal affairs,” said Shahin.
These elections are meant to end decades of what was in effect a one-party system and lead to the drafting of a new Egyptian constitution. They are to be followed by elections for the upper house of parliament—the Shura Council—beginning in late January, and presidential elections in late 2012 or 2013.
Vying for VotesOver 50 political parties have already declared their intention to participate in the elections and more are being established. These parties can be roughly divided into four categories: Islamist, leftist, liberal and revolutionary youth parties.
According to the polls and predictions of many pundits, the Islamist parties are set to become the dominant political bloc in Egypt’s parliament. First and foremost among them is the Freedom and Justice Party, which was set up in April as the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood is Egypt’s largest and most organized political force, having built a strong popular base by offering free social services to the poor. During the Mubarak era, it was allowed to operate insofar as the regime could present itself to Western governments as the only bulwark against the Brotherhood’s radicalism.
Although Freedom and Justice Party leaders had initially said they would contest only 30 percent of the seats in parliament, they recently announced that they would compete for more than half of the seats as part of an electoral alliance. The party calls for Islamic law to serve as the guiding principle for all political, social and economic issues.
In terms of foreign policy, the Freedom and Justice Party says the 1979 peace treaty with Israel should be “revised.” Its parent movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, opposes Israel’s existence as a matter of religious doctrine and has close ties with Hamas, an offshoot of the Brotherhood. Just last month, a Brotherhood delegation visited the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip for the first time in celebration of the prisoner swap between Hamas and Israel. “We came to participate in the joy at the release of brothers. We are proud of them,” said deputy Brotherhood chief Goma Amin. “Resistance proved itself.”
In addition to the Freedom and Justice Party, Islamists are also represented in the al-Wasat party, a relatively moderate offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Salafist parties. Salafists are hardline fundamentalists, who follow a literal and puritanical version of Islam. Some have preached hatred against Egypt’s Coptic Christians and have engaged in violence, and Salafist parties undoubtedly want to push for an Islamic state. “We’re always going to believe the Islamic way of life is better than democracy,” said Mohammed Nour, the spokesman for the Salafist al-Nour party.
Leftist parties endorsing socialism and Arab nationalism, primarily inspired by Nasserite policies, have existed in Egypt for decades. Many of these parties, such as al-Tagammu, or the National Progressive Unionist Party, and the Democratic Arab Nasserite Party, once had strong support from the working class, professional unions and intellectuals. However, they have seen their popularity decline due to an outdated image and accusations of complicity with the Mubarak regime.
Liberal parties, which include al-Wafd, al-Ghad (Tomorrow) and the Democratic Front, advocate a strong private sector in the economy and stress Western values of freedom, equality and human rights. Al-Wafd is an old, established party, having repeatedly challenged Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) in parliamentary elections and traditionally drawing the support of Egypt’s business elites and Copts. Al-Ghad is headed by well-known lawyer Ayman Nour, who ran against Mubarak in the 2005 presidential elections and was subsequently jailed for allegedly forging documents.
Despite the liberal orientation of these parties in social and economic matters, they share much of the foreign policy views of the more conservative and Islamist parties. In a recent interview, Nour called for a revision of the peace treaty with Israel. “For all intents and purposes, Camp David is over, because it is an old treaty and its terms must be improved in a way that will correspond with Egypt’s interests,” he said.
People who participated in the revolt against Mubarak have established a number of new youth parties. The most prominent among these is the liberal Free Egyptians Party, co-founded by Christian telecom mogul Naguib Sawiris. It supports free market policies, the separation of state and religion and other Western norms. Drawing on large financial resources and a well-oiled organization, the party claims to have recruited more than 100,000 members, including many prominent Egyptian figures.
Also polling well is al-Adl (Justice), a centrist party recently established by youth activists. The party has positioned itself between Islamists and liberals, arguing for a civil state but noting that there is no separation of religion from the state in Islam.
Independent candidates, who do not belong to any established party or are party members but decided to run independently, will also be competing in the elections. These include former members of Mubarak’s now disbanded NDP. Members of the NDP, some of whom retain political and economic clout, have also set up new political parties, such as al-Etihad (Unity) and the Egyptian Citizen Party.
A Test for DemocracyThe proliferation of political parties and the complex multi-staged system have left many Egyptians confused and uncertain about the elections. The parties themselves have added to the confusion, repeatedly forming and dissolving alliances over the past few months.
The ones who stand to gain the most from this disarray are the well-organized Islamists. Indeed, polls have repeatedly indicated that the Freedom and Justice Party is poised to win the largest share of the vote. Whatever the results, Egypt’s parliamentary elections will be a test for an Arab world claiming to seek democracy but still in a state of significant turmoil.
This is the first part of a series of articles dealing with Egypt’s parliamentary elections. The next article will discuss in depth the various parties’ positions on foreign policy issues. BACK TO TOP | <urn:uuid:9d37fb22-19b6-4d57-a5e3-4eda9f8dc207> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aipac.org/NearEastReport/20111128/NER_Egypt_Elections.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963959 | 1,679 | 2 | 2 |
At this page you can find a comparison table "CVS vs. SourceSafe". It is our vision, and of course you can consider it biased. Maybe it is really biased. We really like CVS. But we came to it not so long ago, and before we managed to create our SCC plug-in we used to work with SourceSafe.
Moreover, our main business is offshore software development. And first of all we should take our business goals into account. We choose CVS for our work and are satisfied with it, it fully meets our requirements (remote access to repository, branches, notification, bug tracking integration reliability and price). We are a small group, and that is why the first reason to select CVS was its price (almost zero). But now we consider that CVS satisfies all requirements to a Source Control system. And our SCC plug-in provides means for convenient work from IDE. So, why should you pay more?
||Access to repository
||CVS is really a client-server platform. It can be accessed remotely via VPN, LAN or public Internet. There exist several protocols: secure/not secure, with compression or without. Servers are available both for UNIX and for WINDOWS.
||VSS is not a client-server platform. It is a client-filesystem platform. Inside LAN one can use file sharing to access repository, but that is impossible for low-bandwidth connections because of large network traffic intensity. Source-off-site is a specific tool that can solve this problem, its price is 200$ for a single license.
||Repository structure is similar to the file structure stored by the repository. All files have the same names as in the file system with added .v extension. Each file contains full version of latest content with overhead RCS information. It is very easy to find and fix arising problems. Format of repository does not depend on access method (server or local). Thus, repository initially created as local can be easily upgraded to a server.
||Format and repository structure is not human readable or understandable. Files inside it have strange names like: abaaaaa.aaa and so on. Any small error or damage (by virus for example) can destroy the repository completely.
||CVS stores line diffs information for each revision. This means that adding of one line to file, adds only several lines to repository (including overhead information)
||The "Alin Constantin <email@example.com>" claims that VSS also stores diffs inside repository, even for binary files. However anyway total repository size is increasing in geometric progression. To check this just convert with vss2cvs tool source safe repository. It will be 1.5 - 3 times smaller with preserved history.
||Really true support for branches is provided, with ability to merge branches. It is very important to maintain release and development branches.
||No true support for branches is provided, except for the server share support when one file can exist in several projects.
||CVS is a Concurrent Versioning System. No server side support for reserved checkouts is provided. But reserved editing is possible with the client side support (not strict).
||CVS allows to set up integration with e-mail notification for code changes.
||With 3-rd party tools
||Access via WEB
||Several tools exist for accessing the source via web.
||Integration with issue/bug tracking tools
||CVS is standard de-facto for many IDE's by default. I.e. their built-in integration is provided. For IDE's integrated only with SCC API our plug-in provides the same functionality as VSS. Thus, CVS with our plug-in covers 90% of available IDE's.
||Only IDE's integrated with SCC API are supported.
||In addition to our plug-in, CVS has a wide range of GUI clients. Most of them are free and very powerful.
||VSS has its own VSS explorer with rather convenient UI for managing VSS repositories. No other management tools are available.
||CVS is an old system used by many developers. It works excellently. Only note that its development is still continued, and do not use alpha or beta versions. Use only "stable" releases.
||It is a Microsoft tool, however critical repository corruption is possible. | <urn:uuid:349acd8c-9108-4566-b664-3011c43bc6b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pushok.com/software/cvs-vsvss.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908134 | 906 | 1.671875 | 2 |
A Culture of Testing
Many schools test everything. They’re very proud that they put out the sign that the next four days are test days and they are proud of their grades, GPA’s, test rankings, scores, test preparation, test driven curriculum, stress relief programs, stress therapy dogs, everything.
It’s almost enough to get you to believe that rigorous testing is the key to success. Results, results, results.
Except they didn’t test the teachers’ creativity and integrity and they didn’t test the children’s resilience and character.
And they didn’t test for an innovative and creative culture that valued imagination, teamwork and global awareness.
And they didn’t test for joy. kindness, mutual respect, sense of purpose and student engagement.
The biggest assets of classrooms and schools weren’t tested, because they couldn’t be because by then they had been destroyed anyway.
Sure, go ahead and test what’s testable. But the real victories come when you have the guts to cherish, value, develop and nurture the untestable.This post coincides nicely with a tweet I sent out yesterday that:
It was retweeted 10 times.
I think this is telling.
There are a lot of people out there who are frustrated with an education system that simply sees students as test scores-in-waiting. A kid's body is not just a transportation device for their number two pencils.
I would wager a guess that those who retweeted this understand all too well what Linda McNeil of Rice University meant when she said:
Measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning.
If you, like me, want to influence change, consider picking up a copy of Juanita Doyon's book Not With Our Kids You Don't. She offers this:
Each of us involved in education has a point at which inappropriate or unfair policies collide with our conscience or our good sense. For parents, the call to activism can be the forty-pound backpack destroying our fourth grader's posture or district-mandated sock color for our eighth grader. For teachers, it can be the district crabbing about our students' test scores and requiring us to attend expensive yet worthless "professional development", while we're assigned thirty-four students per period, in an unheated portable with mold-infested walls. For administrators it can be idiotic standardized curriculum or lack of community involvement and support. Any educational concern is a worthy cause for action.
Like Josie, I too have taken ideas from Seth Godin and applied it to education. I have two challenges for all educators: | <urn:uuid:6d0a627e-8f76-4cdd-b3bd-804324ff0743> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.joebower.org/2011/01/culture-of-testing.html?m=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943695 | 556 | 2.09375 | 2 |
Hype around Valentine’s Day — what to wear, where to go, gifts to give — has just begun. If there’s no valentine in your life right now, you may be sick of the buzz already. Don’t get mad, get a plan.
Best option: Focus on someone other than yourself. February 14 is also V-Day, a global day of activism to end violence against women and girls. Launched 15 years ago by playwright Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), the effort involves activists–including women like you– in 160 countries. The website OneBillionRising.com offers all you need to create your own event or find one that’s already planned near you. (John Carroll U., perhaps?)
If you do sign up, what will you have to do on Valentine’s Day? Besides paying attention to premieres of related films and ads, the big clue is in the V-Day slogan: “One in 3 women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. One billion women violated is an atrocity. One billion women dancing is a revolution.” Yep. You’ll need to dance. Shake your moneymaker to remind the world it is, and will forever be, yours, and you want to keep it safe. Ms. Ensler explains,
“One Billion Rising is an appreciation, amplification and an escalation. When One Billion bodies rise and dance on 14 February 2013, we will join in solidarity, purpose and energy and shake the world into a new consciousness. Dancing insists we take up space. It has no set direction but we go there together. It’s dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive. It breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere at anytime with anyone and everyone. It’s free. No corporation can control it. It joins us and pushes us to go further. It’s contagious and it spreads quickly. It’s of the body. It’s transcendent.”
Valentine’s Day falls on a Thursday this year, a worknight for most of us. If it’s ‘just another night’ at home alone, you can still support the V-Day campaign by sharing critical data on Facebook and Twitter.
Otherwise, you can always spend the evening hooking up with friends, but do it for laughs, not man-bashing. You’ll probably want to get together at someone’s house, or yours, because every eating establishment from white tablecloths to rib joints will be full of couples. Get your carry-out fare early.
On TV, traditional choices won’t ignore the holiday, especially the sitcoms. Same old tropes: somebody’s really lonely, maybe the guy (Arrested Development, The Office); or the guys have dates but the girls don’t (Friends); or the women get in a catfight (Two & A Half Men); or the guy plans a spectacular date but something goes awry (Big Bang Theory).
Better to head for Redbox or Hulu. Or, OneBillionRising. | <urn:uuid:15ede90c-2176-4ded-9c9e-8949fe81ae23> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://clevelandheights.patch.com/groups/karen-malone-wrights-blog/p/bp--v-day-is-about-more-than-valentines | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929033 | 663 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Can exercise prevent osteoporosis? Plus, a handy excuse to skip the gym: Some people are actually allergic to exercise. Smart Fitness answers your workout queries.
Have an exercise question? To e-mail us, click here . We’ll post select answers in future columns.
Q: I’m a woman who’s worried about developing osteoporosis because both my mother and grandmother have it. But can exercise really prevent it, or is it pretty much inevitable if it runs in your family? And if exercise can help, what kind and how much?
A: A strong family history is a big risk factor for osteoporosis, which affects an estimated 10 million Americans, most of them women, like those in your family, says Dr. Felicia Cosman, clinical director of the National Osteoporosis Foundation and medical director of the clinical research center at Helen Hayes Hospital in West Haverstraw, N.Y. But it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily doomed to develop the brittle-bone condition or that there’s nothing you can do to help prevent it or reduce its severity.
Along with avoiding smoking and excessive drinking, getting good nutrition (including calcium and vitamin D) and in some cases taking osteoporosis medications, certain exercises indeed can help, Cosman says. “Weight-bearing exercise contributes to maintaining bone health.”
We reach our peak bone mass — the strongest our bones can be — in our 20s. So up until age 30, and particularly during childhood and adolescence, weight-bearing exercises such as jumping and running can help build stronger and stronger bones. After 30, studies show that weight-bearing exercise helps in another way — by preventing bone loss and therefore maintaining the bone strength that you already have.
Exercise must be weight-bearing to stimulate the bones to become strong and dense. Besides running and jumping, other examples of weight-bearing aerobic activity include racquet sports, dancing, basketball, hiking and high-impact fitness classes. Low- or no-impact activities such as cycling and swimming are good for all-around fitness, but they don’t help the bones.
Weight training, because it involves even greater resistance, challenges the bones more. A good starting point is a standard strength program, using free weights or weight machines, that targets all the major muscle groups with one to three sets of eight to 10 repetitions of each exercise. Over time, fitness experts say, it’s a good idea to periodically mix things up with different combinations of sets, reps and specific exercises.
Ideally, Cosman recommends, aim to do weight-bearing aerobic exercise at least three times a week for 30 minutes each time, and strength-training activities two times a week. She also advises older people especially to work on flexibility and balance to avoid bone-breaking falls. Statistics show that one in two women over age 50 will suffer an osteoporosis-related fracture, most commonly of the hip, spine or wrist.
Unfortunately, all of this exercise isn’t an absolute guarantee against osteoporosis. “Even if you do everything you can, you may not be able to stave it off,” Cosman says. “But you can help make it from getting worse.”
And it’s never too late to start.
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Q: Why is it that sometimes when I go running my skin will start to itch like I have poison ivy, to the point where I have to stop running?
A: Believe it or not, some people are truly allergic to exercise, says Dr. Jacqueline Eghrari-Sabet, an allergist in private practice in Montgomery Village, Md., and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
A rare condition called exercise-induced anaphylaxis can cause a person to experience a potentially deadly allergic reaction, just like the ones some suffer in response to peanuts, shellfish or bee stings. The symptoms can vary in severity and may not occur after every exercise session. In some cases, certain foods consumed prior to exercise may trigger it.
Another possibility, Eghrari-Sabet says, is a condition called cholinergic urticaria, in which pinpoint-size hives — and lots of itching — develop in response to rising body temperature and sweating during exercise.
You don’t mention hives or other symptoms, so “whatever it is, it’s probably a milder form of these more serious things,” she says.
Still, it’s a good idea to see an allergist to figure out the problem and make sure you’re not at risk for a more severe reaction. A doctor may suggest trying allergy medications to try to lessen the problem.
To determine if the culprit is cholinergic urticaria, a specialist may recommend exercising without heating up the body — such as with swimming — to see if the problem persists. If it doesn’t, a new exercise routine may be in order.
© 2013 msnbc.com Reprints | <urn:uuid:8cee6984-4eb1-4823-bcb1-a68beb248479> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25012390/ns/health-fitness/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933163 | 1,224 | 2.703125 | 3 |
A Reader posted a review at 2008-07-11 01:15:11.
The book is typical of Jane Austen's style, character developement at its best and at the same level, possibly Jane Austen at her best. All Jane Austen's novels reflect situations happening in her own life and situations relating to the time itself. Her ideas of feminism and the like are obviously way before her time and she must be applauded for this. Generally an enjoyable book with highs and lows, a little long winded but as with everything you have to give it a chance. Jane Austen books tend to be long winded and you have to get into them to enjoy them, if you don't like interpretting old language or dont understand it then this book is not for you at all! I suggest reading pride and Prejudice before this/ | <urn:uuid:4758cf15-aa0b-4cc0-af1c-705538b756b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://weread.com/review/Sense+and+Sensibility+(by+Jane+Austen)/1361177 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965492 | 172 | 1.757813 | 2 |
“The systems that are commercial today are limited to about 565 °C—that’s the molten salt tower plants,” says Mehos. “The tower and optics themselves can hit higher temperatures, but you’re limited by the salt temperature right now.” The new materials can work at temperatures up to 1,200 °C.
Improving the reliability of solar power will also be key to making solar power competitive with fossil fuels. Without storage, the amount of solar power that can be installed on the grid is limited, since utilities need to provide backup generation, or build extra transmission lines, to deliver power from other areas when solar power output drops. So far this isn’t a problem, since solar power accounts for only a small part of the power on the grid. But it could be a serious issue within the decade in places such as California, where renewable energy requirements are leading utilities to install large amounts of solar power.
In the current heat-storage design, salts are heated up above their melting point, up to their highest working temperature (565 ⁰C), and then stored in a large insulated tank. The salt is pumped through a heat exchanger to generate steam, and then kept in another insulated storage tank just above its melting point to keep it from freezing.
The first material Halotechnics plans to bring to market is designed for use in existing solar-thermal plant designs. It operates at the same temperature as the current molten salts, but will cost about 20 percent less. Salts currently cost about $1,000 a ton, and a typical plant uses 30,000 tons of salt, so this could save millions of dollars. Halotechnics plans to test the material in a pilot-scale plant for six months starting this summer and then license the formula for other companies to produce.
Two other materials—one an improved salt mixture, and the other a form of glass—can operate at greatly increased temperatures, reducing the amount of storage material needed and potentially improving efficiency.
“Without an amazing ability to screen samples, it’s an intractable problem. That’s what we’re trying to do with our high-throughput technique,” says Justin Raade, CEO of Halotechnics.
Whereas conventional molten salts melt at 300 °C and can operate up to 565 °C, Halotechnics has developed a molten salt that has the same melting point, but can operate up to 700 °C. The material is being tested for long-term compatibility with the steel pipes and containers used in storage systems, and the company plans to start pilot tests in 18 months. While current materials limit solar-thermal plants to turbines that are about 42 percent efficient, this material could be paired with steam turbines that are 48 percent efficient. A storage system that will work with this material is being developed as part of an NREL project that’s part of the SunShot Initiative.
The last material is a form of glass that melts at 400 °C (typical window glass melts at about 600 °C) and can operate up to 1,200 °C. It could be used to heat up air to drive a gas turbine, with the leftover heat used to drive a steam turbine, much as is done in a natural-gas combined-cycle plant. Such a system could be about 52 percent efficient using existing turbine designs. (Natural-gas combined-cycle plants can reach 60 percent efficiency, but the natural gas burns at temperatures higher than 1,200 °C.)
Eventually, the materials could perhaps even enable a new form of renewable fuel for vehicles. At 1,200 °C, the glass could drive some of the key chemical reactions needed to make fuels such as hydrogen and gasoline made from water and carbon dioxide.
Operating at such high temperatures, however, will bring engineering challenges, including finding relatively inexpensive materials to contain the molten glass. Commercialization of this technology could be many years away. | <urn:uuid:428627da-960b-48e8-9f74-a7a47be7c864> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.technologyreview.com/news/427190/cheap-solar-power-at-night/page/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940091 | 820 | 3.328125 | 3 |
Why isn’t Arizona the number one location in the United States with solar installations? It seems odd in a state where we have sunshine most every day of the year; we still have very few roofs sporting the very fashionable solar panels. Why? In the past, the price of residential solar installation was just not affordable. With the recent introduction of Federal and State Tax Credits and rebates from utility companies, solar for your homes is starting to make good financial sense. More and more home owners are now understanding the value proposition of going green with solar versus the investment. Yet, many consumers are still waiting for better rebates, which in the Phoenix metro area are unlikely since both APS and SRP just lowered their rebate amounts in early 2010. Consumers also are waiting for the efficiency to get better. Those consumers could be in for a long wait. While, it is true that solar panels are becoming more efficient, their has been no significant improvement in efficiency over the last decade. Any finally, many consumers believe that just like other new technologies, the price of a solar installation is going to go down. That is a possibility, but the question is when, if, and by how much. You can move towards energy independence today with the installation of solar on your home and take advantage of the current tax credits and utility rebates. Why not now? | <urn:uuid:4c28eb79-9add-48e9-8192-4c47305a4416> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.arizonasolargurus.com/Solar-Power-Now.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969052 | 272 | 2.125 | 2 |
In these logic and language oriented times we often leave behind the benefits and powers that our ‘right-brain’ and its ability to imagine can bring us. In recent times sports coaches have been using the power of imagination to increase the skills and abilities of athletes. These same techniques can benefit us in many ways in our lives.
The brain doesn’t know the difference between an event that is real and one that is vividly imagined. This can be used to train the brain and affect the body. In fact it is happening all the time without us really being aware of it. Let’s start to use this feature of our brain/body connection for our own good.
The brain likes full featured ‘inner movies’. Bring all your senses into your imaginings to increase their effectiveness. This includes your physical senses, imagining the smells, sounds, textures and even tastes of your visualization. But also it includes the sensory features of our inner world, our feelings. Ensure that you imagine the good feelings that you want to go along with the skill or event you are creating in your mind’s eye.
Brain events follow pathways. The more you think or feel about something, the more ingrained that particular pathway in the brain becomes. Get skilled at new habits and new ways of thinking by moving out of old ‘thought pathways’ and creating new ones that fit the life and feelings you want to have. Deliberately wear a groove in your new desirable pathways with regular visits.
1) Vision games – tell the eyes and brain what you want
Most vision improvement activities include a portion where the eyes are closed and we ask the vision student to vividly imagine the object of their attention. This gives the cells of the retina a chance to clear and refresh themselves. Most importantly, imagining the object with clarity, bright colour and detail tells the brain where we want it to go in its function.
It’s after the eyes closed part of vision activities that students notice the most difference in their acuity and/or get ‘clear flashes’! Make sure you are giving full time and attention to the eyes closed and visualizing parts of your eyesight activities.
2) Decreasing the stress of events – use the brain to train the body
We often allow ourselves to imagine the things that can go wrong, with the subsequent physical stress reactions this brings. Our hearts start to pound, our stomach to hurt, muscles tense up. And it’s not surprising that in this state things can easily go wrong or overwhelm us with stress. Let’s reverse this process by intentionally imaging things going well.
When doing martial arts drills or kicks I now take a few seconds to clearly imagine what my body is going to do. If I don’t do this I have often made mistakes. Every time I vividly imagine what I am going to do, it happens easily and I don’t get caught by ‘thinking too much’ while my body is moving.
Thinking about an upcoming plane trip has had me tensing up all over! After sitting myself down and clearly imagining the whole trip in detail, with everything going smoothly, I can now think ahead to my travel without feeling my mind and body going into stress overload. I know that when the time comes to get on the plane my body and brain will remember the feeling that ‘it’s all ok and going smoothly’ and I will stay reasonably relaxed as the events happen.
3) All senses are go! – use the powers that you have
When we create an image in our mind, the more complete it is the more effective it will be. Our inner world is comprised of the information we receive and how we respond to that. Even though the vast majority of sensory input in humans comes in through the eyes, our other senses still have a dramatic effect on our subconscious.
Use this to fully inform your visualizations and make them as powerful as they can be. You can use real objects to inform your senses then take this information with you. When you want to improve your reading ability, you imagine white to increase the contrast with black print. Find pictures of white objects and landscapes to inform your conscious mind, then bring those images back in your visualizations.
Bring in the smell of snow, the warmth of a white rabbit’s fur, the softness of cotton balls, the taste of vanilla ice-cream.
4) Train the brain
We often think that we are helpless in the face of our brain function. But the brain is an amazingly changeable and flexible device that will receive training gladly. While there are commonalities in what the brain does in different parts of its anatomy, modern medicine has begun to realize that brain function is not fixed and can be changed. This is illustrated by specific functions being learned in wholly different areas of the brain after the original area of that function is damaged.
The really astonishing thing is that we can have input into what our brain does. One of the inherent tools we have for this is deliberate visualization, and deliberate thinking and feeling. If you feel sad much of the time, this means there are sad pathways grooved into your brain function. Electrical signals are sucked into those pathways and flow along them to their predetermined end, and the process starts all over again.
Try this experiment; whenever you have a recurring feeling you don’t enjoy, such as fear, immediately stop and notice the feeling of being in a rut (give attention to this only the first few times). Then imagine a new pathway and vividly visualize a feeling of happiness and lightness, with images and full sensory input. It might be sitting on the grass with the warm sun and a feeling of being loved and safe. Imagine it fully for 30 seconds.
Do this every time the feeling of fear comes up, whether as tension in your tummy or anxiety about an event or person. Notice that as you do this over and over again, it becomes easier. Notice how it starts to become automatic and you are no longer trapped in the old fear pathway, but instead easily flow along the pathway of support and reassurance! | <urn:uuid:502d0587-1a89-4f28-97c8-cc09dd08d7f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.janetgoodrichmethod.com/2011/08/16/power-up-your-imagination/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955734 | 1,255 | 3.0625 | 3 |
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Viper’s bugloss ( Echium vulgare), also known as blue devil, or blue weed, has bright-blue flowers and grows to a height of about 90 cm (35 inches). It is a bristly European plant that has become naturalized in North America. Purple viper’s bugloss ( E. lycopsis, or E. plan tagineum), from the Mediterranean, is similar but is larger-flowered and shorter, with softer...
What made you want to look up "viper's bugloss"? Please share what surprised you most... | <urn:uuid:2500f468-f511-4857-9e1b-99a9a8a12dec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/629752/vipers-bugloss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924831 | 161 | 2.625 | 3 |
|Home > Employment > How to Apply|
Each individual must submit an application during the open application period in order to participate in the testing process. Applicants will be notified of testing dates, time and location.
Entry-Level Firefighter testing is conducted by the City of Seattle Personnel Department, Fire Exams Unit. Testing currently includes a written exam and two oral board interviews. During the testing season, exam workshops are offered by the Fire Exams Unit.2011 Written Exam Study Workshops
2011 Oral Board Orientation and Tips
There are no specific textbooks required to study for the Written Exam. Written Exam Workshops will be provided for applicants prior to the exam. The workshops give candidates an opportunity to take a mock exam and to explore aspects of this particular testing process. Each session is taught by firefighters that are familiar with the written test procedures.
The written examination takes one day to complete. The components of the written exam are as follows:
The study period format will be as follows: The instructions for the study session are read aloud by a test monitor. During the study session, each applicant is given two-and-one-half (2.5) hours to study a variety of printed materials, including printed text, line drawings, written instructions, and pictures. These study materials are the basis for the aptitude test which is administered during Part II.
During the study session (Part I), you may take breaks. Please note, however, that these breaks will shorten the amount of time that you will have for studying.
Candidates are allowed to make written notes about the study materials during Part I; however, these notes must be written on paper provided by the test monitor. Also, each applicant must turn in his/her notes to the test monitor at the conclusion of the study session. You will not be allowed to use these notes or any study materials during the exam period.
For the exam session, instructions for the test are read aloud by the test monitor. The test requires that applicants read printed materials and record their answers on an optically scanned computer sheet. Applicants are required to use a pencil to record their answers. Applicants will have one-and-one-half (1.5) hours to complete the written examination.
The questions on the examination are drawn directly from materials provided during the study session. You must learn the study materials presented during the study session to do well on the examination.
Note this important instruction: You are not allowed to take the exam (Part II) if you did not attend the study session (Part I).
ORAL BOARD INTERVIEWS
Candidates who successfully complete the Written Exam will be notified by mail of the date, time, and location of the first Oral Board Interview Exam. Oral Board Orientation and Tips are available for download.
The Oral Board Interview is a formal business interview that allows the Personnel Department to learn more about the candidates' skills, qualifications, background, and interests.
Candidates who pass the initial oral interview will be invited to take a second oral interview.
Candidates who pass all portions of the examination process will be placed on a ranked eligible list according to performance on the oral interview exams.
The Personnel Department's role is to establish and eligible list of candidates who pass both the written exam and both oral board interview.
Final ranking on the eligible list includes Veteran's preference for qualified candidates per Washington State Law (RCW 41.04.010). Veterans must submit a long-form DD214 which indicates the nature of the discharge in order to receive Veteran's preference points. Preference points are only added to passing scores.
The top 25% of candidates on the eligible list are referred to the Seattle Fire Department for Pre-Employment Screening.
Questions about the testing process, including questions regarding the application process, test dates and Veteran's preference should be directed to the Fire Exams Unit via email to Colleen.Lafferty@seattle.gov or by phone at (206) 615-0581.
Last Modified: May 16, 2013 | <urn:uuid:fd4918c1-c4c4-4f4e-84cb-59e9d254bf10> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.seattle.gov/fire/employment/ffjob_apply.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929789 | 828 | 1.820313 | 2 |
This Week: Algeria, Clinton, and North Korea
The RCMP in Algeria, Hillary Clinton on Benghazi, more threats from North Korea, and David Cameron wants to reconsider the EU.
This week at OpenCanada.org, we’ve been tracking the fallout from reports that two Canadians were among the hostage takers at the Algerian gas field. The Algerian Prime Minister, Abdelmalek Sellal, made the claim at a press conference earlier this week. So far, the Canadian response has been cautiously ambiguous: “We have no substantial information at the present time on these particular individuals, but obviously we will continue to work with the government of Algeria to find out more about this particular matter,” the prime minister told reporters. RCMP officers were sent to Algeria to get to the bottom of things.
In America, soon-to-be-former U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was grilled by two congressional committees in one day over just how much the U.S. government knew about the who was behind the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again,” Clinton told Senator Ron Johnson.
Meanwhile, North Korea was once again rattling their saber at the world. The country said it would conduct further rocket launches and a nuclear test that would specifically target the United States. The threats were denounced by the White House as “needlessly provocative.”
In other nuclear news, warnings of a nuclear attack were sounded in Kashmir. Officials in the Indian-controlled region were encouraging residents to prepare shelters, food, and water in case of nuclear war. A number of deadly clashes between India and Pakistan over the disputed region heightened tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals.
And this week’s election in Israel left Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a significantly weakened position, launching much speculation over what kind of coalition might emerge to run the country. | <urn:uuid:123ecff7-9e47-46de-bf68-d501397bef9f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://opencanada.org/features/blogs/dispatch/this-week-algeria-clinton-and-north-korea/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970524 | 460 | 1.546875 | 2 |
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HEPA filters can remove at least 99.97% of airborne particles 0.3 micrometers (µm) in diameter. Particles of this size are the most difficult to filter and are thus considered the most penetrating particle size (MPPS). Particles that are larger or smaller are filtered with even higher efficiency.
HEPA filters are composed of a mat of randomly arranged fibres. Key metrics affecting function are fibre density and diameter, and filter thickness. The air space between HEPA filter fibres is much greater than 0.3 μm. The common assumption that a HEPA filter acts like a sieve where particles smaller than the largest opening can pass through is incorrect. Just as for membrane filters, particles so large that they are as wide as the largest opening or distance between fibres can not pass in between them at all. But HEPA filters are designed to target much smaller pollutants and particles are mainly trapped (they stick to a fibre) by one of the following three mechanisms:
Diffusion predominates below the 0.1 μm diameter particle size. Impaction and interception predominate above 0.4 μm. In between, near the 0.3 μm MPPS, diffusion and interception predominate.
The initial filter air flow resistance and final filter air flow resistance are typically measured as pressure drop across the filters.
The original HEPA filter was designed in the 1940s and was used in the Manhattan Project to prevent the spread of airborne radioactive contaminants. It was commercialised in the 1950s, and the original term became a registered trademark and a generic term for highly efficient filters. Over the decades filters have evolved to satisfy the higher and higher demands for air quality in various high technology industries, such as aerospace, pharmaceutical processing, hospitals, healthcare, nuclear fuels, nuclear power, and electronic microcircuitry (computer chips).
Today, a HEPA filter rating is applicable to any highly efficient air filter that can attain the same filter efficiency performance standards as a minimum and is equivalent to the more recent NIOSH N100 rating.
Nuclear industry application
HEPA filters must be correctly installed in a filter housing or frame to achieve proper results. In the Nuclear Fuels and Nuclear Power Generation industries, these housings are sometimes referred to as filter trains. Filter Housings are usually arranged in an array with 24 inch by 24 inch by 11½ inch deep filters (Size # 7, DOE-STD-3020-2005) having a nominal capacity of 1500 cfm (0.7 m³/s) each (see the DOE Nuclear Air Cleaning Handbook).
A good general reference for Nuclear Facility HVAC design is Chapter 26 "Nuclear Facilities" found in the ASHRAE 2003 HVAC Applications Handbook.
HEPA filters are critical in the prevention of the spread of airborne bacterial and viral organisms and, therefore, infection. Typically, medical-use HEPA filtration systems also incorporate high-energy ultra-violet light units to kill off the live bacteria and viruses trapped by the filter media. Some of the best-rated HEPA units have an efficiency rating of 99.995%, which assures a very high level of protection against airborne disease transmission.
Many vacuum cleaners also use HEPA filters as part of their filtration systems. This is beneficial for asthma and allergy sufferers, because the HEPA filter traps the fine particles (such as pollen and dust mite feces) which trigger allergy and asthma symptoms. For a HEPA filter in a vacuum cleaner to be effective, the vacuum cleaner must be designed so that all the air drawn into the machine is expelled through the filter, with none of the air leaking past it. Also, because of the extra density of a HEPA filter, the vacuum cleaner requires a more powerful motor to provide adequate cleaning power.
|This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "HEPA". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.| | <urn:uuid:a281571b-9c2c-4ad4-9b9a-018f4e8dbf12> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/HEPA.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926083 | 883 | 2.90625 | 3 |
Mark Kenber, CEO, The Climate Group, on climate policy and the low carbon economy
- 07 June 2011
Orginally published in Planet Earth magazine, June 2011.
Mark Kenber, CEO, The Climate Group, shares his views on carbon markets, low carbon economy and climate policy with Sheetal Vyas, in India's Planet Earth magazine, June 2011.
His experience spans international groups and is founded on a solid 15 years work in the field of climate change and international climate policy. Mark Kenber, CEO of The Climate Group, has also advised UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in the joint policy initiative Breaking the Climate Deadlock (2008-2009). The initiative resulted in a series of high-level reports outlining the economic and technological rationale for a global climate deal and its key components. A carbon markets expert, Mark Kenber also co-founded the Verified Carbon Standard (formerly Voluntary Carbon Standard) (VCS), which interestingly now a recognised kitemark for the US$ 400-million voluntary market.
SV: It’s a difficult task convincing people that the global climate is changing. Following the failure of the two most hyped climate summits (at Copenhagen and Cancun respectively), there seems to be more scepticism associated with the term climate change. How do you see it?
MK: Belief in climate science and the coming impacts has not diminished globally, despite the disappointment in Copenhagen and the challenges made to the scientific basis for climate change. There is certainly doubt about the ability of the UN process to deliver the much-needed global agreement to build on the Kyoto protocol but Cancun showed that there is still interest and commitment from the overwhelming majority of governments.
Similarly, more countries than ever from both the developed and developing world are implementing domestic climate strategies that are marrying the need to prevent dangerous climate change with the recognition that many lowcarbon policies have significant social and economic benefits.
SV: What has been the role played by the Climate Group in spreading awareness? How far have you succeeded?
MK: The Climate Group has based its work on creating a plausible, viable and desirable vision of what a low carbon future might look like for the world. Amongst other ways we have done this is by providing evidence from cities, states, regions and corporate entities that it is not only possible to reduce emissions way beyond what is demanded by current policy but it is possible to do so in a way that reduces costs, increases profits and revenues and creates jobs.
Given that the debate over climate change and climate change policy in particular has focussed in the past on how to share the burden or cost of action, we have made a point of showing that this is not about cost or burdens but rather about the opportunities that derive and can be harnessed from the shift to a low-carbon economy.While this work is clearly ongoing and forms the basis of our Clean Revolution campaign, if we consider the change in the way that climate change is discussed since we started our work in 2004, I think that it is fair to say that we have been fairly successful.
Our reports Carbon down, Profits up began to shift the way governments thought about what was obviously a false dichotomy between environmental action and economic growth and the plethora of initiatives around green growth, low carbon development, clean industrial and energy revolution is at least in part due to the work of the group.
SV: Though promoted as a success, the package of deals at Cancun, underlined a failure. What do you think was the main reason why a deal failed?
MK: It would be wrong to say categorically that Cancun was either a success or failure. While it clearly failed to agree the binding international agreement envisaged in the Bali action plan and expected at Copenhagen, given the disappointment of a year earlier and the real risk that the UN Climate process might collapse, Cancun did manage to bring countries back together and maintain some hope for an ambitious agreement in the future. Much more is obviously necessary but Cancun did for the first time lead to international agreement on the 2C temperature goal, recognition that current efforts are not sufficient and agree a number of concrete actions on technology, finance and adaptation. The GOI and Minister Ramesh played an important role in making this happen.
SV: What plan of action do you think the UN should take to ensure that every country, especially the big emitters, agrees to substantial emissions cut, because amicable discussions across the table have failed to produce results that can be acknowledged?
MK: Global action will necessarily require agreement between nation-states; nation-states are where sovereignty, legitimacy and policy jurisdiction lies and the UN has no power of its own to impose and enforce agreements. So, a negotiated agreement will be essential: while industrialised countries must take the first step and raise their ambition levels as a precursor for action by others, a new agreement must also build on existing commitments and targets
and look at how collaboration can raise the collective level of ambition.
SV: Have climate change and global warming become dirty words, considering the amount of doubt and misrepresentation of data that’s been witnessed in the recent times?
MK: In some countries it might appear so, but I think that in almost all the nations of the world people are still and increasingly aware of the threat posed by climate change. Concerns around data provided on climate change, particularly by the University of East Anglia and the misinformation about glacier melting in India, have been investigated by a number of independent expert panels.
These reviews have shown that underlying climate science is still robust and the evidence we have seen in the last 12 months suggests that it is increasingly so. Therefore, I think that the uncertainty last year will prove to be just a blip and both governments and people increasingly will be driven by their concerns for climate change to take greater action and put policies in place.
SV: The India’s Clean Revolution report shows how a low-carbon economy could actually help India to survive. However, the country’s role in the recent climate talks has been more or less indicative of its dependence on a fossil-fuel based economy. Do you see such a change happening?
MK: The shift to a low carbon economy will not be something that happens overnight. However, it is not only desirable from the perspective of the global climate, India’s energy security, provision of energy access and balance of payments, but also achievable and perhaps the only way to guarantee India’s long-term prosperity. The key thing now is to develop a medium and long-term strategy and provide clear policy signals to support them.
SV: Recently, EU climate change commissioner Connie Hedegaard succeeded in increasing the emissions cut target from 20 per cent to 25 per cent. Why do you think other negotiators have failed in similar attempts?
MK: The Climate Group is absolutely convinced that increasing the ambition levels of the European climate policy makes sense not only from a climate change perspective for Europe, the world and as a spur for greater ambition in international climate negotiations, but also for the European economy.
Analysis has shown that the 20 per cent target that is already in force can be met by current action alone and to a large extent will be costless. The 30 per cent target, while incurring some short-term cost, will put Europe on a road to low carbon innovation, create export opportunities for its high value-add businesses and also reduce costs in Europe, as energy and other resources are used more efficiently and more productively.
As a net importer of energy, saving on import bills for energy, for fossil fuels and in particular reducing its reliance on fossil fuels from unstable areas of the world can only be good for Europe’s climate security, national security and its economy. Clearly all policy measures that imply a change, especially structural change, will run into opposition and it is the potential losers who often shout louder than those who look set to win, especially when winners come in the medium and long term.
However, the evidence will suggest that even for those who think they will be adversely affected by increased ambition in the European climate policy will find that there is an overwhelming benefit for all sectors of business and the economy.
SV: Economists and analysts in some parts of the world have predicted a slow death for the carbon market. Recent reports also talk of banks pulling out of the carbon market. How is the carbon market set to fare in the future?
MK: It is clear that the uncertainty over the future of climate policy and the failure of industrialised governments outside of Europe, to put in place
binding national targets backed up by emissions trading schemes, has weakened to a certain extent the push for a global carbon market that seemed so strong only a few years ago.
This uncertainty has obviously reduced the price of carbon credits in the international market and has led to uncertainty for investors who are using carbon pricing as the basis for investment into low carbon technologies and projects. However, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme is committed to continue through to 2050 with a downward line in the carbon cap which would increase the ambition of the target.
We are seeing discussions around emissions trading still on the table in Australia, in New Zealand where it has already been implemented, in Japan, at state level in the US and also in a number of developing countries. For example, China is discussing using market mechanisms as outlined in its recent “12th Five Year Plan”, while India is about to introduce its “Perform, Achieve and Trade Energy Efficiency Trading Scheme” and similar measures are being discussed elsewhere. So I think that the carbon market will continue in the future.
Many believe and evidence suggests that markets remain the lowest cost and most efficient way of driving emissions reductions. I think the fact that the voluntary carbon market is still growing, underpins the enthusiasm for carbon markets. While they will not be sufficient on their own to address climate change, I believe that carbon markets will remain a key part of the low-carbon policy tool box used by many governments. For this reason I think that carbon trading is set to continue and will strengthen going forward.
SV: Do you think that reforming the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) tructure would be of any help?
MK: Yes. The project-by-project approach of the CDM will continue to be useful for small, less developed countries, but for larger emerging economies a more strategic approach is needed that supports market transformation at the sectoral level and generates far larger flows of capital into low-carbon
technologies is needed.
SV: What future do you forsee for the global economy, when placed against climate change?
MK: The only future for the global economy that will ensure long-term sustainable prosperity is the lowcarbon development path embodied in the Clean Revolution. A high-carbon path may sustain growth in the short term, but it is not compatible with long-term sustainable prosperity. This is as true of India as anywhere else in the world. | <urn:uuid:8f4084b3-3897-4151-b0d3-3a00cea1779f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theclimategroup.org/what-we-do/news-and-blogs/Mark-Kenber-CEO-The-Climate-Group-on-climate-policy-and-the-low-carbon-economy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956619 | 2,251 | 1.734375 | 2 |
A child dubbed ‘turtle boy’ because of a giant mole that covered his back like a shell, can now live a normal life thanks to a British surgeon.
6 year old Didier Montalvo, from Colombia, had the rare condition Congenital Melanocytic Nevus. There was a chance the growth could turn malignant but Didier’s mother Luz could not raise the money for the operation.
The family were also booted from their rural village as the superstitious residents said Didier’s condition was due to being conceived during an eclipse.
They feared he was touched by evil forces which meant he could not attend school or be baptized. ‘I want to grow up,’ Didier said.
‘But the mole won’t let me.’
But thanks to leading plastic surgeon Neil Bulstrode, who operated on him FREE after hearing of his story, Didier can now grow up like a normal kid. | <urn:uuid:043469bf-0da9-4300-99f3-e9879006b416> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://justkhaotic.com/2012/04/black-news/turtle-boy-gets-surgery-that-will-let-him-be-a-normal-childhood/ | 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 | 0.986242 | 204 | 2.203125 | 2 |
New research on a little-known historic Chinatown in downtown Oakland is opening a hidden door on Chinese community life on California's urban frontier after the Gold Rush and providing a rare chance to preserve buildings and artifacts.
An archeological survey being conducted as part of a major redevelopment project near City Hall will catalog possible artifacts from the former Chinatown site at San Pablo Avenue and 20th Street. Activists are excited about the dig and hope that any significant finds might be put on permanent display.
The survey builds on documentary research by UC Berkeley scholars Anna Naruta and Kelly Fong. Naruta, an archaeologist, and Fong, who has roots in Oakland's Chinese American community, are interested in the pioneer Chinese who gathered in small enclaves and struggled to become integrated in the decades before the centralized Chinatown of today developed.
The researchers' work has struck an emotional chord not only in Oakland's Chinese American community but also among other cultural groups in the city.
"There's something about buried history that's about human suffering that brings out the compassion in people," said Anne Huang, executive director of the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. "It has elicited very emotional responses from our community members.
"I've had a very emotional reaction to this buried history, and I'm anxious to know what we can recover from this site," she said.
Naruta and Fong's work shows that Chinese residents were rousted from place to place in the boomtown that was Oakland after the transcontinental railroad linked the two coasts.
But despite official racism that sought to save the best land and the best jobs for people of European stock and push those considered undesirable to the fringes, Chinese immigrants were able to grow with the city and achieve a measure of assimilation with other groups, the research shows.
"The integration of the Chinese community with the rest of the community is the one thing that keeps returning to me in my research," said Naruta, a post-doctoral student at Cal. "When we get into the primary research, we see people living together, working together."
Naruta and Fong's work is significant because it provides a fresh cultural viewpoint on a story that had been highly colored by the anti-Chinese sentiments reflected in the official record of the period between the Gold Rush and the early 20th century.
Their documentary evidence that the Chinese sustained a business district on San Pablo Avenue at 20th Street and spread elsewhere in Oakland as the city developed seems to contradict the bald racism of contemporary accounts of the Chinese, such as an 1875 Oakland Tribune story calling for board of health action on the Chinese-quarter "stink hole" that the paper claimed was plaguing a city enjoying rising property values.
Racism against the Chinese was part of the economic and social struggle that went on in a rapidly expanding America at the end of the 19th century, Naruta said. "It seems like one of the stories they were leading with was, 'Don't blame the robber barons, blame the Chinese laborers,' " she said.
"There are some striking similarities" to our own time, she said.
Naruta and Fong say the little-known San Pablo Avenue Chinatown shows an important side to the city's Chinese heritage and should be memorialized as the neighborhood undergoes a new era of change. The San Pablo Avenue-20th Street Chinatown is within the boundaries of a redevelopment project that is set to transform nine city blocks uptown from City Hall into a new neighborhood with shops and 2,350 condos, apartments and student housing units.
Among the oldest and culturally richest historic buildings in the redevelopment area are two wood-frame storefronts on San Pablo Avenue dating to the 1880s. Naruta and Fong say they are valuable because they housed a tailor shop and a laundry in what was by then a long-established uptown Chinatown.
"We're trying really hard to save these buildings," Fong said.
Naruta, in a recent letter to the city's Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board, said the buildings represent early 20th-century social life and commerce "and provide a window into the long history of an integrated, multi- ethnic Oakland."
She has proposed that the structures be relocated and made part of a permanent site devoted to the neighborhood's Chinese heritage. Although no decision has been made by the city or the developer, Forest City Residential Inc., the site would display a sampling of any artifacts that may be unearthed in an upcoming archaeological survey.
"I have no idea what we're going to find," said Allen Pastron of Archeo- Tec, the consulting firm hired to conduct the survey. "We certainly have a plan in place to find anything that's there and deal with it appropriately. The public is very interested in this, and that is an interest we not only appreciate but certainly have encouraged."
Naruta and Fong's research builds on a 1982 book, "The Chinese of Oakland: Unsung Builders," and a 1974 dissertation by Cal geography student Willard T. Chow.
a Christian minister who started a crusading Chinese newspaper in San Francisco in the first years of the 1900s.
Chew moved his family to Oakland after the 1906 earthquake and would have been a contemporary of the merchants of the uptown Chinatown. "They had to have a European-American friend buy their house," Naruta said. "That was the law then."
The Chinese who settled in San Francisco and Oakland had been driven from the gold fields by the bigotry and racial violence of other miners, according to an historical summary by Archeo-Tec. They gathered in fishing encampments and later built larger villages in farming areas. One of these was at what is now 16th and 17th streets and Telegraph Avenue.
From the work of Edward Chew, Naruta learned that the Telegraph Avenue Chinatown burned down in 1867. The fire occurred at a time when city officials, anticipating the economic boom that would follow Oakland's role as the Pacific terminus of the transcontinental railroad, had decided to extend a gas- lit Broadway and lay out streets east of 14th Street. In 1869, the city built a horse-car line from the waterfront to the Broadway-Telegraph Avenue intersection.
The city refused to allow the Chinese to rebuild after the fire, Naruta said. Instead, they were given a spot on the old Spanish road, San Pablo Avenue, on the marshy outskirts of town.
With the uptown area in line for redevelopment, Naruta knew that these secondary sources hinted at a compelling, timely story. But could she back it up with primary documents?
Fong, a Cal University Medal finalist with a 3.974 GPA in her senior year, stepped up to do the digging. Working at the National Archives in San Bruno and the Oakland History Room at the city's main library, she pulled 1870 census records, uncovered a Wells Fargo business directory from 1872 and reviewed fire-insurance and business partnership records.
Fong, 22, who will pursue her archeological studies at UCLA in the fall, was motivated in part by her concern that the biases in 19th century documentary history are a reflection that few Asian Americans have contributed to the field of archaeology.
She pieced together a picture of a Chinese neighborhood that established itself after the 1867 fire. The neighborhood resisted the harsh immigration policies of the time and a second eviction threat after the city decided to move City Hall uptown.
"Once they decided to build the new City Hall," Naruta said, "all of a sudden Chinatown was too close again."
It's clear from Naruta and Fong's evidence of the persistence of Chinese names in neighborhood records that the attempt to sweep aside uptown Chinatown didn't immediately succeed. But eventually the Chinese district vanished and Oakland's Chinese community concentrated at 8th and Webster streets -- the only Chinese neighborhood, Archeo-Tec says, that survived 150 years of persecution and relocation.
Naruta hopes that archaeological evidence from the site clearing for the new development will solve the mystery of the fate of Oakland's uptown Chinatown.
"How did it end?" she asked. "In what manner were they evicted?" | <urn:uuid:4fbda5ac-e3ad-459d-9a03-f945fec9c7f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-New-twist-in-roots-of-Chinatown-2618601.php | 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 | 0.971456 | 1,665 | 2.9375 | 3 |
HealthDay - Trial Set to See if Drug Can Prevent Alzheimer's
Researchers are preparing to test an experimental drug in people genetically primed to develop Alzheimer's disease. The best-scenario hope is that the drug will lead to a way of preventing the progressive brain-wasting disease, and to a better understanding of its destructive processes. Experts on Alzheimer's disease welcomed the announcement of the drug trial. "This strategy is our best chance of success at Alzheimer's disease," said Dr. Sam Gandy, associate director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and director of Mount Sinai's Center for Cognitive Health, in New York City. "The main challenges are how to identify who is on their way to [Alzheimer's disease], how early we need to begin prior to symptoms, and how long we will have to run the trial before we can see whether the drug delays onset."
- Dr. Sam Gandy, Professor, Neurology, Psychiatry, Associate Director of the Mount Sinai Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Learn more: http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/05/15/trial-set-to-see-if-drug-can-prevent-alzheimers | <urn:uuid:bb6efe59-d591-4776-ac82-bbdfe88d6047> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://icahn.mssm.edu/research/institutes/brain-institute/news/healthday---trial-set-to-see-if-drug-can-prevent-alzheimers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.905636 | 263 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Did You Know?
Facts, Figures & Folklore
March 17 : 03 days till Spring begins
Did you know that Spring Training — one of the quintessential markers of springtime — is nearly as old as baseball itself?
The first spring training game likely took place in New Orleans in 1870 between the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the Chicago White Stockings. By 1900, spring training had become a well-established ritual, which for more than a century has graced small towns throughout southern Florida and Arizona.
Ah, spring. The snow fades away, the temperatures warm, and the days grow blissfully longer. The lovebirds are happily cooing in their new nests; and the daffodils and tulips are blooming. This year, get yourself ready to spring into springtime with our fun-filled spring trivia.
We’ll be presenting a new “Did You Know?” fun fact each day as we countdown to Spring on March 20th! So stop by again tomorrow. | <urn:uuid:1c3f50ce-7b27-45ab-afb4-9df1b2e2b434> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.holidays.net/index.php/2009/03/17/did-you-know-countdown-to-spring-0317/ | 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 | 0.949868 | 207 | 2.625 | 3 |
You will see a greater benefit to your diet with ideas on controlling your appetite. By learning a few simple ways to control your appetite, you will avoid overeating. We have some great ideas to get you started and begin to see changes in this area of your life.
If you aren’t already drinking plenty of water, then you should start now. Your body can get confused sometimes and make you think you’re hungry when you are actually thirsty. Many beverages contain too much sugar, which are not good for your body, especially if you are trying to substitute it for water.
If you want to keep your appetite under control, don’t deprive yourself of the foods you love the most. Pizza, ice cream and even chocolate are included in this idea. The trick is to only eat your weakness foods every now and then, and limiting your servings. If you try to remove them from your diet completely, however, you’ll find yourself constantly craving them. Lots of people struggle with maintaining a balance between eating too much and not enough. Allow yourself to indulge in your favorite foods once in a while, but don’t overdo it. To be successful in your diet, you must learn that deprivation of everything good won’t get you anywhere.
You will find that some foods will actually help you control your appetite better. Soups and salads are the way restaurants usually start you off, and it’s a good idea to follow this practice at home as well. Hot soup, such as a vegetable or chicken broth is not only good for you, it will cause you to eat less of the main course. You can also find this to be the case with salads. It’s just better to start your meal this way rather than eating an appetizer. You’ll eat less of the main dish and feel full as well as have leftover for the next day.
We have become accustomed to foods high in fat, salt and sugar. This makes it even harder if we aren’t exercising enough to try and burn off the calories we’ve had. As you develop healthier eating and exercise habits, you’ll find that your appetite is naturally brought under control.
There are many people who easily control the strong appetite impulses by using any good appetite destroying natural pills like Phen375. It is fairly overwhelming for individuals who are busy with quite a lot of daily activities to follow up with strict diet plan. It is easy for the busy individuals to use natural weightloss pills like Phen375 in thoroughly managing their weight loss program. Even after all efforts, if you are still fighting to control your appetite, it is good for you to have a shot at Phen375 fat loss pill. You may check out the Phen375 Reviews to learn more about this diet pill.
Hope this article has given you some insight on how to easily reduce your body weight with simple appetite control techniques. You may also checkout the Phen375 Reviews video to find more about the diet pills that may help you in checking the appetite. | <urn:uuid:e491f4d0-5907-4d6a-a223-e4a69bfeeb28> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fastfatfreedom.com/fitness/dieting/helpful-guidelines-for-curbing-your-appetite | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961436 | 621 | 1.890625 | 2 |
By Dr. Mercola
Depression may be a neuropsychiatric manifestation of a chronic inflammation in your gut
Treating gastrointestinal inflammation may help improve depression and related diseases
By optimizing your gut health and levels of inflammation with probiotics, fermented foods, vitamin D and omega-3 fats, you may be able to relieve symptoms of depression and other neurological diseases
An increasing number of clinical studies have shown that treating gastrointestinal inflammation with probiotics, vitamin B, vitamin D and omega-3 fats may also improve depression symptoms and quality of life by attenuating proinflammatory stimuli to your brain
Recent studies have shown that inflammation may be involved in the pathogenesis of depression. In fact, some research has demonstrated that depression is frequently associated with gastrointestinal inflammations and autoimmune diseases as well as with other ailments in which chronic low-grade inflammation is a significant contributing factor.
It is possible that depression could be a neuropsychiatric manifestation of a chronic inflammatory syndrome. And the primary cause of inflammation may be the dysfunction of the “gut-brain axis”.
According to a study reprinted on the website Green Med Info:
“… [A]n increasing number of clinical studies have shown that treating gastrointestinal inflammations with probiotics, vitamin B, D and omega 3 fatty acids, through attenuating proinflammatory stimuli to brain, may also improve depression symptoms and quality of life. All these findings justify an assumption that treating gastrointestinal inflammations may improve the efficacy of the currently used treatment modalities of depression and related diseases.”
The notion that inflammation in your gut could be linked to your symptoms of depression may sound far-fetched, but it actually makes perfect sense when you understand the intricate connection between your brain and your digestive tract.
Perhaps the simplest example to use is getting butterflies in your stomach when you’re nervous, thus your thoughts, i.e. brain, are manifesting symptoms in your gut. But another route of connection is via low-grade inflammation, which is a significant contributing factor to numerous diseases that often occur alongside depression, and may, in fact, be manifesting your depressive symptoms.
Is Depression the Result of Chronic Inflammation?
A recent review has pointed out several mechanisms by which gastrointestinal inflammation may play a critical role in the development of depression.
Depression is often found alongside gastrointestinal inflammations and autoimmune diseases as well as with cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, type 2-diabetes and also cancer, in which chronic low-grade inflammation is a significant contributing factor. Thus researchers suggested “depression may be a neuropsychiatric manifestation of a chronic inflammatory syndrome.”
Research suggests the primary cause of inflammation may be dysfunction of the “gut-brain axis.” Your gut is literally your second brain — created from the identical tissue as your brain during gestation — and contains larger amounts of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is associated with mood control.
It’s important to understand that your gut bacteria are an active and integrated part of your body, and as such are heavily dependent on your diet and vulnerable to your lifestyle. If you consume a lot of processed foods and sweetened drinks, for instance, your gut bacteria are likely going to be severely compromised because processed foods in general will destroy healthy microflora and sugars of all kinds feed bad bacteria and yeast, as well as promote systemic inflammation.
An increasing number of clinical studies have shown that treating gastrointestinal inflammation with probiotics, vitamin B, vitamin D and omega-3 fats may also improve depression symptoms and quality of life by attenuating proinflammatory stimuli to your brain.
What this all boils down to is that chronic inflammation in your body disrupts the normal functioning of many bodily systems, and can wreak havoc on your brain. But it appears inflammation may be more than just another risk factor for depression; it may in fact be THE risk factor that underlies all others. Although this refers to postpartum depression, the inflammatory response is the same in its impact on all forms of depression.
Published in the International Breastfeeding Journal, researchers stated:
“The old paradigm described inflammation as simply one of many risk factors for depression. The new paradigm is based on more recent research that has indicated that physical and psychological stressors increase inflammation. These recent studies constitute an important shift in the depression paradigm: inflammation is not simply a risk factor; it is the risk factor that underlies all the others.
Moreover, inflammation explains why psychosocial, behavioral and physical risk factors increase the risk of depression. This is true for depression in general and for postpartum depression in particular.
Puerperal women are especially vulnerable to these effects because their levels of proinflammatory cytokines significantly increase during the last trimester of pregnancy — a time when they are also at high risk for depression.Moreover, common experiences of new motherhood, such as sleep disturbance, postpartum pain, and past or current psychological trauma, act as stressors that cause proinflammatory cytokine levels to rise.”
This is Why Sugar is Also a Major Factor in Depression
There’s a great book on this subject, The Sugar Blues, written by William Duffy more than 35 years ago, that delves into the sugar-depression link in great detail. The central argument Duffy makes in the book is that sugar is an extremely health-harming addictive drug, and that simply making that one dietary change — eliminating as much sugar as possible — can have a profoundly beneficial impact on your mental health. He even advocated eliminating sugar from the diet of the mentally ill, stating it could be an effective treatment in and of itself for some people.
It’s become increasingly clear that one route by which sugar is so detrimental to your mental health is because sugar consumption triggers a cascade of chemical reactions in your body that promote chronic inflammation. Further, excess sugar and fructose will distort the ratio of good to bad bacteria in your gut, which also plays an integral role in your mental health. Sugar does this by serving as a fertilizer/fuel for pathogenic bacteria, yeast and fungi that negatively inhibit the beneficial bacteria in your gut.
For instance, recent research showed the probiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus was found to have a marked effect on GABA levels in certain brain regions and lowered the stress-induced hormone corticosterone, resulting in reduced anxiety- and depression-related behavior. But if you consume a lot of processed foods and sweetened drinks (which are typically fructose-heavy), your gut bacteria are likely going to be severely compromised and so is your mental health! So the dietary answer for treating depression is to severely limit sugars, especially fructose, as well as grains.
It’s worth noting that sugar can also lead to excessive insulin release that can lead to hypoglycemia, which, in turn, causes your brain to secrete glutamate in levels that can cause agitation, depression, anger, anxiety, panic attacks and an increase in suicide risk.
So radically reducing your sugar intake, especially fructose, to less than 25 grams per day will be one of the most powerful interventions for dealing with depression, as well as fighting chronic inflammation and supporting healthy gut bacteria. Consuming more than 25 grams of fructose a day will clearly push your brain biochemistry, and your overall health, in the wrong direction.
Relieving Gastrointestinal Inflammation May Ease Your Depressive Symptoms
We discussed the importance of limiting sugar and fructose, which is one of the primary ways to treat gastrointestinal inflammation, above. You will also want to be sure your gut is regularly “reseeded” with good bacteria, or probiotics, which are the foundation of a healthy gastrointestinal tract.
My recommendations for optimizing your gut bacteria are as follows:
Fermented foods are still the best route to optimal digestive health, as long as you eat the traditionally made, unpasteurized versions. Healthy choices include lassi (an Indian yoghurt drink, traditionally enjoyed before dinner), fermented raw (unpasteurrized) grass-fed organic milk such as kefir, various pickled fermentations of cabbage, turnips, eggplant, cucumbers, onions, squash and carrots, and natto (fermented soy).
If you regularly eat fermented foods such as these that, again, have not been pasteurized (pasteurization kills the naturally occurring probiotics), your healthy gut bacteria will thrive.
Probiotic supplement. Although I’m not a major proponent of taking many supplements (as I believe the majority of your nutrients need to come from food), probiotics are definitely an exception. I have used many different brands over the past 15 years and there are many good ones out there.
If you do not eat fermented foods, taking a high-quality probiotic supplement certainly makes a lot of sense considering how important they are to optimizing your mental health.
Probiotics have a direct effect on brain chemistry, transmitting mood- and behavior-regulating signals to your brain via the vagus nerve, which is yet another reason why your intestinal health can have such a profound influence on your mental health, and vice versa. Two other important factors to treat gastrointestinal inflammation and also help relieve depression are:
Omega-3 fats: These not only regulate inflammatory processes and responses, but also positively influence outcome in depressive disorders. So if you are currently struggling with depression, taking a high-quality, animal-based omega-3 fat supplement like krill oil daily is a simple and smart choice.
Vitamin D: Most people are not aware that vitamin D deficiency is associated with inflammation and depression. One previous study found that people with the lowest levels of vitamin D were 11 times more prone to be depressed than those who had normal levels, so you will want to be sure your levels are in the healthy range by getting proper sun exposure or using a safe tanning bed. As a last resort, you can also take a high-quality vitamin D3 supplement, but make sure you have your levels monitored if you choose this route.
There’s a wealth of evidence showing gastrointestinal involvement in a variety of neurological disease. With this in mind, it should also be crystal clear that nourishing your gut flora with good bacteria is extremely important, from cradle to old age, because in a very real sense you have two brains, one inside your skull and one in your gut, and each needs its own vital nourishment.
Here is a list of our links. | <urn:uuid:9eec8292-09ac-4397-a3d1-9142a23b55fa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://docakilah.wordpress.com/category/news/page/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940687 | 2,133 | 2.484375 | 2 |
May 1st, International Workers' Day, commemorates the historic struggle of working people throughout the world, and is recognized in every country except the United States, Canada, and South Africa. This despite the fact that the holiday began in the 1880s in the United States, with the fight for an eight-hour work day.
In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions passed a resolution stating that eight hours would constitute a legal day's work from and after May 1, 1886. The resolution called for a general strike to achieve the goal, since legislative methods had already failed. With workers being forced to work ten, twelve, and fourteen hours a day, rank-and-file support for the eight-hour movement grew rapidly, despite the indifference and hostility of many union leaders. By April 1886, 250,000 workers were involved in the May Day movement.
The heart of the movement was in Chicago, organized primarily by the anarchist International Working People's Association. Businesses and the state were terrified by the increasingly revolutionary character of the movement and prepared accordingly. The police and militia were increased in size and received new and powerful weapons financed by local business leaders. Chicago's Commercial Club purchased a $2000 machine gun for the Illinois National Guard to be used against strikers. Nevertheless, by May 1st, the movement had already won gains for many Chicago clothing cutters, shoemakers, and packing-house workers. But on May 3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works Factory, killing four and wounding many. Anarchists called for a mass meeting the next day in Haymarket Square to protest the brutality.
The meeting proceeded without incident, and by the time the last speaker was on the platform, the rainy gathering was already breaking up, with only a few hundred people remaining. It was then that 180 cops marched into the square and ordered the meeting to disperse. As the speakers climbed down from the platform, a bomb was thrown at the police, killing one and injuring seventy. Police responded by firing into the crowd, killing one worker and injuring many others.
Although it was never determined who threw the bomb, the incident was used as an excuse to attack the entire Left and labor movement. Police ransacked the homes and offices of suspected radicals, and hundreds were arrested without charge. Anarchists in particular were harassed, and eight of Chicago's most active were charged with conspiracy to murder in connection with the Haymarket bombing. A kangaroo court found all eight guilty, despite a lack of evidence connecting any of them to the bomb-thrower (only one was even present at the meeting, and he was on the speakers' platform), and they were sentenced to die. Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolf Fischer, and George Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887. Louis Lingg committed suicide in prison, The remaining three were finally pardoned in 1893.
It is not surprising that the state, business leaders, mainstream union officials, and the media would want to hide the true history of May Day, portraying it as a holiday celebrated only in Moscow's Red Square. In its attempt to erase the history and significance of May Day, the United States government declared May 1st to be "Law Day", and gave us instead Labor Day - a holiday devoid of any historical significance other than its importance as a day to swill beer and sit in traffic jams.
Nevertheless, rather than suppressing labor and radical movements, the events of 1886 and the execution of the Chicago anarchists actually mobilized many generations of radicals. Emma Goldman, a young immigrant at the time, later pointed to the Haymarket affair as her political birth. Lucy Parsons, widow of Albert Parsons, called upon the poor to direct their anger toward those responsible - the rich. Instead of disappearing, the anarchist movement only grew in the wake of Haymarket, spawning other radical movements and organizations, including the Industrial Workers of the World.
By covering up the history of May Day, the state, business, mainstream unions and the media have covered up an entire legacy of dissent in this country. They are terrified of what a similarly militant and organized movement could accomplish today, and they suppress the seeds of such organization whenever and wherever they can. As workers, we must recognize and commemorate May Day not only for it's historical significance, but also as a time to organize around issues of vital importance to working-class people today.
As IWW songwriter Joe Hill wrote in one of his most powerful songs:
This article written and distributed by: email@example.com | <urn:uuid:82387f42-b001-4cd1-b53a-1a7e74b23185> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/mayday.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978583 | 936 | 3.65625 | 4 |
Saturday, July 26, 2008
’s leading natural tourist attractions and environmental education facilities The Wye Marsh Wildlife Centre was the host to a Ministry of Natural Resources announcement this past week. The Wye Marsh has developed winter snowshoeing and summer canoe Eco tours. The announcement concerned the awarding of more than ¼ of a million dollars from the Species at Risk Stewardship Fund to 10 volunteer projects located north of Ontario . The recipients included a number of regions across Toronto Ontario from Georgian Bay to Haliburton and the Kawarthas. Each of the regions offer significant (Photo: Wye Marsh Docks and Canoes) outdoor recreational activities, many of which are dependent upon clean fresh water, and a healthy environment. In order to appreciate the environment and what an endangered species might look like, it ii imperative to have a sound education program. The MNR has taken a significant step forward in identification and support for our environment. A secondary but equally important aspect of this funding is economic, as it will indirectly support of the expanding Eco Tourism industry. See Eco Tourism Related Getaways and Nature Adventure Packages. | <urn:uuid:de334d13-3857-45e6-9fe9-190ed2a7312d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://400eleven.blogspot.com/2008_07_26_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948519 | 225 | 2.3125 | 2 |
We Recommend Commercial Shipping Addresses
Entering a commercial shipping address instead of a residential address is better for the environment because it is a more fuel-efficient way
to get the package to you. Commercial addresses often allow the truck
drivers to save miles on delivery distances and allow more deliveries
per gallon of fuel.
Minimize Use of Air Shipping
We all love the convenience of air shipping (and traveling), but the environmental costs are significant. Airplanes emit more greenhouse gases per mile than ground transportation (trucks, trains, bikes). From a carbon emissions perspective standard ground shipping to a commercial address is optimal.
Order with a friend
The biggest, heaviest item that gets delivered is the truck that drives
to your door, not the package they leave for you. It only makes sense
to gets as many items as possible in each delivery to save the fuel cost
per item. Split an order with a friend or family member to reduce the
impact of the delivery.
Our shipping boxes are sturdy - but not always pretty:
We have recently increased our efforts to re-use all intact shipping boxes from incoming returns and exchanges. So don't be surprised if your shoes arrive in an 'experienced' box. We want the contents to be perfect but the appearance of the box . . not so important.
Producing a Greener Catalog
In order to reduce our environmental footprint, Footwise improved the way we utilize our paper resources. At Footwise we print on Forest Stewardship Council-certified 10-30% post-consumer waste recycled paper (Mixed Sources).
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This lesson plan will explore the wide-ranging debate over American slavery by presenting the lives of its leading opponents and defenders and the views they held about America's "peculiar institution."
Popular sovereignty allowed the settlers of a federal territory to decide the slavery question without interference from Congress. This lesson plan will examine how the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 affected the political balance between free and slave states and explore how its author, Stephen Douglas, promoted its policy of popular sovereignty in an effort to avoid a national crisis over slavery in the federal territories.
This lesson will examine the economic, military and diplomatic strengths and weaknesses of the North and South on the eve of the Civil War. In making these comparisons students will use maps and read original documents to decide which side, if any, had an overall advantage at the start of the war.
How were party politics reflected in the campaign of 1828? What were the positions of the fledgling Democratic Party and its opposition?
More Americans lost their lives in the Civil War than in any other conflict. How did the United States arrive at a point at which the South seceded and some families were so fractured that brother fought brother?
A complex series of events led to the Civil War. The lessons in this unit are designed to help students develop a foundation on which to understand the basic disagreements between North and South. Through the investigation of primary source documents —photographs, census information and other archival documents—students gain an appreciation of everyday life in the North and South, changes occurring in the lives of ordinary Americans, and some of the major social and economic issues of the years before the Civil War.
The Civil War erupted after a long history of compromises and sectional debates over representation, federalism, tariffs and territories. Though many of the political differences are beyond the scope of the intermediate curriculum, students can use their analysis of archival documents to begin to appreciate the differences between the North and South and the changes afoot in the United States that contributed to the developing conflict.
Before you begin to teach this unit, review the suggested activities and familiarize yourself with the websites involved. Select, download and duplicate, as necessary, any documents you want the class to use.
For the census activity in Lesson 3, either the teacher or students will need to keep a calculator at hand.
You may wish to provide students with a copy of the Document Analysis Worksheet, available through the EDSITEment resource The Digital Classroom, to guide them as they review the documents in this unit.
The purpose of this lesson is to prepare students with background information for understanding the causes of the Civil War. You can find information on the causes of the Civil War, accessible through a link from the EDSITEment resource The Internet Public Library.
In September of 1787, the delegates to the Convention in Philadelphia presented their work to the American public for ratification. The proposed Constitution marked a clear departure from the Articles of Confederation, which had essentially established a federal “league of friendship” between thirteen sovereign and largely independent states. Under the newly proposed plan of government, the union between the states would be strengthened under a national government that derived its authority—at least in part—directly from the American people rather than purely from the state legislatures. And under the new Constitution, the people would be represented equally in the House, regardless of the state in which they lived—unlike the Articles of Confederation, according to which the Continental Congress equally represented the states. In other words, the proposed Constitution would make the United States a nation of one people rather than a loose confederation of states.
The proposed Constitution, and the change it wrought in the nature of the American Union, spawned one of the greatest political debates of all time. In addition to the state ratifying conventions, the debates also took the form of a public conversation, mostly through newspaper editorials, with Anti-federalists on one side objecting to the Constitution, and Federalists on the other supporting it. Writers from both sides tried to persuade the public that precious liberty and self-government, hard-earned during the late Revolution, were at stake in the question.
Anti-federalists such as the Federal Farmer, Centinel, and Brutus argued that the new Constitution would eventually lead to the dissolution of the state governments, the consolidation of the Union into “one great republic” under an unchecked national government, and as a result the loss of free, self-government. Brutus especially believed that in such an extensive and diverse nation, nothing short of despotism “could bind so great a country under one government.” Federalists such as James Madison (writing as Publius) countered that it was precisely a large nation, in conjunction with a well-constructed system of government, which would help to counter the “mortal disease” of popular governments: the “dangerous vice” of majority faction. In an extended republic, interests would be multiplied, Madison argued, making it difficult for a majority animated by one interest to unite and oppress the minority. If such a faction did form, a frame of government that included “auxiliary precautions” such as separation of powers and legislative checks and balances would help to prevent the “factious spirit” from introducing “instability, injustice, and confusion … into the public councils.”
In this unit, students will examine the arguments of Anti-federalists against and Federalists for the extended republic that would result from the new Constitution. They will become familiar with some of the greatest thinkers on both sides of the argument and their reasons for opposing or supporting the Constitution. They will learn why Anti-federalists believed that a large nation could not long preserve liberty and self-government. They will also learn why Federalists such as James Madison believed that a large nation was vital to promote justice and the security of rights for all citizens, majority and minority alike. Finally, students will see the seriousness of the question as one that both sides believed would determine the happiness, liberty, and safety of future generations of Americans.
Review each lesson plan. Locate and bookmark suggested materials and links from EDSITEment-reviewed websites. Download and print out selected documents and duplicate copies as necessary for student viewing.
These Text Documents contain excerpted versions of the documents used in the activities, as well as questions for students to answer.
Analyzing primary sources:
If your students lack experience in dealing with primary sources, you might use one or more preliminary exercises to help them develop these skills. The Learning Page at the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress includes a set of such activities. Another useful resource is the Digital Classroom of the National Archives, which features a set of Document Analysis Worksheets.
Our political problem now is “Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave, and half free?” The problem is too mighty for me. May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.
—Abraham Lincoln to George Robertson, August 15, 1855
In this unit, students will trace the development of sectionalism in the United States as it was driven by the growing dependence upon, and defense of, black slavery in the southern states. Initially seen as contrary to freedom but tolerated in order to produce the U.S. Constitution, by the 1830s the "peculiar institution" found advocates who saw it as a "positive good." Its expansion into Missouri, southern outrage over federal tariffs, and westward expansion into new territory produced a volatile and persistent debate over slavery that increasingly threatened to divide the American union. By 1860, the nation found an old Democratic Party split over the right to extend slavery into federal territory, and a new Republican Party nominating an anti-slavery, though not abolitionist, president. When Abraham Lincoln's election produced no national consensus to settle the matter of slavery's future, a southern "secession" sealed the fate of the Union.
What characterized the debates over American slavery and the power of the federal government for the first half of the 19th century? How did regional economies and political events produce a widening split between free and slaveholding states in antebellum America? Who were the key figures and what were their arguments regarding the legitimacy of slavery and the proper role of the national government in resolving its future in the American republic? This unit of study will equip students to answer these questions through the use of interactive maps, primary texts, and comparative biographies.
Upon completing the lessons in this unit, students should be able to do the following:
Review each lesson plan. Locate and bookmark suggested materials and other useful websites. Download and print out documents you will use and duplicate copies as necessary for student viewing.
Download the blackline masters for this lesson, available here as a PDF. Print out and make an appropriate number of copies of any handouts you plan to use in class.
Each activity in this unit of study is designed for use as a stand-alone lesson, comprising three forty-five minute class periods. Taken all together, the lessons provide an overview of the causes of sectionalism that led to the American Civil War. Since available time and curriculum needs vary by classroom, the following guidelines for use are provided:
Another approach you can use is to skim each lesson plan to see what specific activities each offers and choose only those that suit specific course objectives and content. Each lesson plan indicates how best to streamline that lesson's content and will suggest essential versus more rigorous treatment of a given subject.
Whether it be called the Civil War, the War between the States, the War of the Rebellion, or the War for Southern Independence, the events of the years 1861-1865 were the most traumatic in the nation's history. The secession of the southern states, and President Lincoln's decision to prevent them forcibly from leaving the Union, triggered a conflict that would see fighting on battlefields as far apart as Pennsylvania and Texas, Missouri and Florida, and would leave nearly a million Americans on both sides dead or wounded. Indeed, casualties in the Civil War exceeded those of every other war in which the United States has ever participated, combined.
But the sheer costs of the war were matched by its importance. It was fought over two basic questions-whether it was legal under the U.S. Constitution for a state to leave the constitution, and whether the practice of chattel slavery was consistent with the nation's founding principles. The Union victory established that the answer to both questions was no.
This curriculum unit will introduce students to several important questions pertaining to the war. In the first, they will examine original documents and statistics in an attempt to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each side at the start of the conflict. The second addresses the two turning points of the war-the concurrent battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg-as well as the morality of the Union's use of "total war" tactics against the population of the South. Finally, in the third lesson students will examine a series of case studies in Abraham Lincoln's wartime leadership; by using primary sources they will be asked to assess whether, based on his performance during his first term of office, he deserved a second.
Review each lesson plan. Locate and bookmark suggested materials and links from EDSITEment-reviewed websites. Download and print out selected documents and duplicate copies as necessary for student viewing. Alternatively, excerpted versions of these documents are available as part of the downloadable PDF, such as this one for Lesson Plan One.
Download the Text Documents for each lesson, available as PDFs, such as this one for Lesson Plan One. This file contains excerpted versions of the documents used in the first and second activities, as well as questions for students to answer. Print out and make an appropriate number of copies of the handouts you plan to use in class.
If your students lack experience in dealing with primary sources, you might use one or more preliminary exercises to help them develop these skills. The Learning Page at the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress includes a set of such activities. Another useful resource is the Digital Classroom of the National Archives, which features a set of Document Analysis Worksheets. Finally, History Matters offers pages on "Making Sense of Maps" and "Making Sense of Oral History" which give helpful advice to teachers in getting their students to use such sources effectively. | <urn:uuid:9c46a65f-c178-4f17-8d69-bd9d5f162827> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://edsitement.neh.gov/category/subject-areas/history-and-social-studies/themes/economic-transformation?page=9 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955135 | 2,546 | 4.375 | 4 |
We live in a crime-ridden country and we read horror stories on many newspaper front pages daily. We read of guard dogs that are poisoned, or people lured away from home by means of some elaborate scheme, or people attacked while they were sleeping.
Sometimes there is just nothing you can do to prevent being the target of a crime, but usually there is quite a bit you can do in order not to attract the attention of the casual opportunistic criminal.
To people living in the big cities, many of the following tips are already second nature. Just see it as a refresher course. You only need to read the paper to see there are still people who break these rules. You need to slip up just once to become a target. Be on your guard.
Be ATM-wise. Don't draw large sums of cash in view of strangers. You would be astonished to see that there are people who still do this. Don't get involved in conversations with anyone at ATMs – a request for assistance is often a prelude to being robbed. Avoid deserted ATMs at night (not least because of the bombing risks) and try not to go alone to an ATM machine. Never count money in the street. It might be worth your while to drive around until you find one where there is a security guard on duty. ATMs inside bank buildings or in shops or at garages are much safer than ones on the streets. If you don't already do all these things, count yourself lucky if you haven't been robbed.
Hide your briefcase. Driving around with a wallet or a briefcase on the passenger seat is inviting a smash-and-grab incident. Put it out of sight, either in the boot or under the seat, while you are driving. The same goes for handbags, laptops or shopping bags. Don't leave these things in the boot - a recent TV programme showed it takes only 8 seconds for a professional thief to get into a locked boot.
Always lock your car. Whether you're in it or not, it is a good idea always to keep the doors locked and windows closed. Most city dwellers do this automatically, but if you're visiting from out of town, you might not realise how crucial this is. It has been known to happen that strangers get into cars at traffic lights or nab things out of unlocked cars - even if you have only stopped for two minutes to post a letter. Leave nothing in your car, empty the cubbyhole and leave it open so that prospective robbers can see there's nothing in there. It is also not safe to leave things under the seat, even if they are out of sight.
Invest in armed response. A sign in front of your house naming your alarm company and armed response company will put off many a prospective burglar. There are those who are expert enough to circumvent any security system, but this usually does not include the chancers wandering around the neighbourhood. Test your alarm regularly and make sure that the telephone or radio connection to the security company is working properly.
Know where your kids are. You must be able to reach them or know where they are at all times. Teach them not to go anywhere else without telling you first. Also drill them in not accepting lifts or sweets from strangers and to be home before dark. They need to know they can phone you in any crisis. If they have cellphones, drill it into them that these should never be switched off.
Don't employ anyone off the street. OK, your gardener's been on leave for three weeks and the place is a jungle, so no wonder you're tempted by the jobseeker at the gate. Just don't do it. Only take people who have come through personal recommendation or who have contactable references. It's hard on honest people who are really just trying to make a living, but you simply cannot take the chance. Not even in small towns. Even in 2012 one reads of people who still do this and pay a very high price for it.
Beware of parking garages. Yes, they are safer than open air parking lots or street parking, but there are also opportunities for hijackers, rapists or bagsnatchers to lurk behind pillars or down stairwells. Especially late at night, parking garages can be frightening places. Try never to go there alone. Ask the security guard to accompany you if there is one.
Be aware of your surroundings. Get into the habit of checking who is in your vicinity when you are walking in the street. Or when you get home at night. If there are unknown people lurking in your street, drive past, but don't open your gates while they are still there. Wait until the street is clear, and then go into your home. Be aware of strangers in the vicinity. And don't talk on your cellphone in the street if at all possible. If you have a security company, get them to escort you to your door - that's what you pay for. Use it.
Things that go bump in the night. If you hear a noise in the house at night, for heaven's sake don't investigate on your own. Get out if you can and summon help. A cellphone next to your bed is always a good idea, especially if you predial the emergency number. Have a portable panic button at hand. Security gates on your bedroom door may also be an idea, especially if you live in a high-crime area, or on a farm or smallholding. Call for help - don't try and be brave.
All that glitters. Avoid wearing expensive jewellery when in public places such as shopping centres. Expensive watches or cellphones, it will make you a target of muggers. In short, hide the bling. Really fancy cars can also attract unwanted attention.
Use your security devices. There's no point in having security gates or fancy doors and not locking them. Or having perimeter alarms and not switching them on. Once you have these things, use them. Many a burglar simply wanders in through an open kitchen door. Just because the door is not visible from the street, doesn't mean it's safe to leave it open.
(Picture: Masked man with gun from Shutterstock)
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Ancient meteorites tell tales of early solar system
Scientists at London University's Imperial College have gained a new insight into the earliest days of our solar system through a new analysis of some of the oldest, most primitive, metorites found on Earth.
The meteorites, all of which date back to the earliest days of the solar system, and predate our planet by a substantial period, are almost devoid of the so-called volatile elements, such as zinc, sodium, and lead, as is the upper mantle of Earth.
The nebula around the proto-sun would initially have been relatively rich in these elements, which leaves astronomers to puzzle over the question of when and where did these elements go?
The researchers propose that volatile depletion - the process by which these elements were knocked out of the matter that condensed to form the planets - must have been one of the first things to happen when our solar system was forming. Not only that, but they suggest that this process, whatever it was, could well be an inevitable part of planetary formation, and not just a local phenomenon.
Scientists have known for a long time that volatile depletion must have been an early process, but have not been able to say if it ocurredas the planets were forming, or some time later.
"Studying meteorites helps us to understand the initial evolution of the early Solar System, its environment, and what the material between stars is made of," Dr Phil Bland, from Imperial's Department of Earth Science and Engineering, who led the research, explained. "Our results answer one of a huge number of questions we have about the processes that converted a nebula of fine dust and gas into planets."
The researchers based their conclusions on an analysis of around half of the 45 primitive meteorites around the world. The work has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. ® | <urn:uuid:9152dd59-7cd9-4c4d-868f-de467219a89e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/20/meteorites_solar_system/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964492 | 383 | 4.03125 | 4 |
Phone Calls They Can Brag About
Try this idea by Diana, a 4th Grade Teacher, in Sulpher Springs, TX to build rapport with families.
Here’s an idea that’s a bit of a twist on the old favorite of calling home to offer families good news about their child. I make regular calls home in order to invite parents to tell me something special about their children.
I also encourage the parents to brag about their child to friends and family and to give the child a special treat for being so wonderful. Then, I have each child report to the class about their parents bragging, the treat they enjoyed as a result of their efforts, and my phone call home.
Read more great articles from the December Newsletter by clicking on the links below: | <urn:uuid:2cff68a4-f12c-4798-8a35-114ce6a09a6a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.reallygoodstuff.com/phone-calls-they-can-brag-about/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97203 | 160 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Technology is reaching increasingly into smaller businesses, with farming soon to gain its own bespoke mobile payment and management system, being showcased by Green Edge Technology at last week’s AITEC banking and mobile money conference.
Now in its final phase of development before roll out, mKulima Banker is targeted at farmers with cellphones.“We will launch in May,” said Lucy Kirui, Chief Executive Officer of Green Edge Technology.
According to Emmanuel Mutai the project manager “it’s a mobile tool for rural farmers,” and is due to be trialed with 100,000 farmers in Kericho in dairy and tea farming. The farmers are part of the savings and credit societies (SACCO) of Ndege Chai and Kapsoit.
The technology will enable farmers, through the SACCOs, to buy farm inputs, apply for loans, budget, schedule farming seasons, transfer money to bank accounts and apply for advances. The system will initially run on internet enabled phones, but will be followed by a version to run on “lower end phones without internet,” said Mutai.
However, according to Lucy Kirui, farmers who invest in high end internet enabled phones will in the long run save on costs, as using web technology to run the applications is cheaper than using short message services (SMS). “Such a phone is only Sh2600,” she said. Also for the SACCOs it means they won’t pass costs to farmers when sending out financial statements.
The system has several parallel segments: mobile banker, SACCO banker, farm input purchaser, farm planner and Agrovet Mechanizer. Through the mobile banker, farmers will be able to transfer money between banks, monitor the build up of their savings, access records of farm produce and apply for advances.
All the processes will be real time without delays. So far, Green Edge has partnered with 5 local banks to facilitate transactions from mobile phones to banks.
Through mKulima SACCO Banker, the SACCO’s the farmers belong to will be able to disburse funds to their mobile phone wallets as well as access loan and advance applications requests from farmers. Local mobile payment systems like Orange Money, Yu Cash, M-Pesa and Zap will provide the conduit for farmers to get their payments.
The system will also allow farmers to order inputs from Agrovet Shops and pay for them via their mKulima bank segment. Transactions will be easy to monitor, as will delivery receipts on getting the inputs. From the Agrovets end, the shops will be able to monitor product orders and deliveries, advertise new ones to their farmer clients and process farmers payments.
To manage farm information ,the software has an application dubbed mKulima Farm Planner, where farmers will be able to schedule dates for artificial insemination, land preparation, weeding and harvest.
mKulima Banker was one of many mobile applications for businesses showcased at this year’s AITEC conference, in a flourishing of local development that is now set to put East Africa at the vanguard globally in the technological tools available to its businesses.
Written By James Karuga for African Laughter
Newer news items:
- M-Calc gives local weather solutions to up outputs - 13/06/2012 14:04
- JK aims to increase loans to rural farmers six-fold - 06/06/2012 08:42
- Agricultural growth slowed 2011 on drought - 22/05/2012 13:45
- Rice farmers cut costs and seed loss with plastic drum planting - 05/04/2012 13:14
- Farmers turn wild fruits into a money spinner - 01/03/2012 13:45
Older news items:
- 1000 farmers plant indian miracle tree - 01/03/2012 13:18
- Aloe vera adds up as precious weed - 01/03/2012 12:44
- Kakamega farmers scoop top global awards for growing wild plant - 01/03/2012 12:41
- Clones promise route to kplc pole market - 01/03/2012 12:26
- New study places livestock among drivers of economy - 01/03/2012 12:09 | <urn:uuid:2c7957ff-61f6-4999-9b1a-0d0bd1fb1e77> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://farmbizafrica.com/index.php/hopemenu5/22-finance/175-farmers-to-go-mobile-to-buy-inputs-and-budget | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914019 | 892 | 1.625 | 2 |
Wicca laughed. She had already asked herself that question and with the same eager anxiety as the young woman opposite her. You could tell your Soul Mate by the light in their eyes, and since time began, that has been how people have recognized their true love. The Tradition of the Moon used a different process: a kind of vision that showed a point of light above the left shoulder of your Soul Mate. But she wouldn't tell the girl that just yet; she might one day learn to see that point of light, or she might not. She would get her answer soon enough.
"By taking risks," she said to Brida. "By risking failure, disap- pointment, disillusion, but never ceasing in your search for Love.
As long as you keep looking, you will triumph in the end."
Sent from my BlackBerry®
powered by Sinyal Kuat INDOSAT | <urn:uuid:52fcf0fe-173d-4c97-85df-7cafb273fce5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rentamarito.com/2011_01_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985415 | 186 | 1.554688 | 2 |
White's Morgan Village neighborhood has "less money now, less resources," he said. "Just less people working. It's a great challenge."
The recession pushed Camden deeper into poverty. But Camden has been on a downward spiral since the 1969 race riots, when thousands of residents fled to the suburbs.
The Inquirer spoke to national poverty experts, and more than a dozen residents, entrepreneurs, clergy, employees, and volunteers in the city to assess the decline of a city in Philadelphia's shadow.
"I don't think there's an example in American history that has the poverty level that Camden has," said Alan Berube, deputy director at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program in Washington. "It's a question of whether Camden can function again."
What some experts call the city's vicious cycle is kept spinning by high unemployment, failing schools, a depleted tax base, and violence so bad even some longtime advocates are beginning to despair.
Camden closed out 2012 with a record 67 homicides - a per capita rate four times higher than Philadelphia's. In January, Camden's 2011 crime rate landed the city at the top of the CQ Press' annual "most dangerous" city ranking.
Yet amid the poverty and gunfire, 77,000 people still call the city home: single parents struggling to make ends meet; teachers and firefighters who have found affordable housing; and idealistic young professionals, whose presence and investment could turn the city around.
All share the concern of raising a family in a troubled city.
"Safety and education. To the extent those are missing, it will make it very hard to get investments" in Camden, said Paul A. Jargowsky, director of the Center for Urban Research and Urban Education at Rutgers University's Camden campus. "People who end up staying are people who can't afford to leave."
Despite Camden's bleak statistics, investors such as Philadelphia developer Carl Dranoff and KIPP charter school have plans to revitalize Camden. Anchor institutions Rutgers-Camden, which has about 6,500 students, and Cooper University Hospital are expanding their footprints and their missions to try to lure back the middle class.
"If Camden had another 30,000 residents, all of its problems would be solved," Dranoff said.
So far, however, progress is slow.
Dealing to pay the rent
Charles Shambry, who earns less than $17,916 a year - the national poverty threshold for a household of three - babysitting and cleaning houses, is one of the thousands of Camden residents whose prison record makes finding a job difficult.
He has applied unsuccessfully to fast-food restaurants and gas stations.
Growing up in Camden with 16 brothers and sisters, Shambry has been dependent on food stamps for much of his life. His father owned an auto-repair shop but struggled to make enough to pay rent for the business and home and provide for 19 people.
At 13, Charley Shambry was impressed by his girlfriend's brother's drug-dealing lifestyle and joined him in North Camden. It was quicker cash than working at his father's repair shop.
After throwing a Molotov cocktail at a Burlington County house as part of a friend's revenge plot, Shambry, then 16, was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Once he returned home, he detailed cars, but when that got slow, he sold marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. "I had to sell to pay rent," he said.
Decades later and having pledged not to sell drugs again, Shambry, 45, is again unemployed, still unskilled, and trying to raise his 15-year-old twins, Charley Jr. and Estelle. Shambry splits his rent with his brother in Bergen Square, one of the roughest sections of the city, and babysits part time.
"Jail ain't where it at no more," he tells his son.
Charley Jr. goes to Camden County Technical Schools and Estelle to Camden High. Both have mentors and are involved in after-school activities. Shambry wants them to go to college and not end up as he did.
On a recent rainy morning, while the twins were in school, Shambry had the oven open and set at 350 degrees. His heat was turned off after he couldn't pay his bill.
"It was getting a little cold in here," he said as he watched over his 2-year-old niece and nephew sleeping on the couch.
"Wild, wild west'
Sometimes in Camden, even a job does not guarantee shelter and food.
Tangela Edwards, who heads one of Camden's 5,800 single-mother households, is raising her 11-year-old son, Da'Ron Moss, in public housing.
Because of a lack of jobs in Camden, she drives to Mount Laurel to work as a contract administrator at a BMW dealership, where she earns $28,000.
"What I make doesn't really cover it," said Edwards, 36, who does not qualify for food stamps and turns to pantries when money runs short.
Having a car is extremely expensive in Camden, where theft rates drive insurance up. She pays $263 a month to insure her 2009 Chevrolet Cobalt.
Edwards grew up in Camden's Parkside neighborhood, where drug dealers frequented the corners. But the current violence, she said, is worse than it had ever been. People are desperate and fend for themselves.
"It's like the wild, wild West out here," she said, adding that she keeps her son indoors. "With everything going on outside, I don't want him to get caught up with that stuff."
After school, Da'Ron attends White's Woodland Community Development Corp. Literacy Program, where he gets a snack and does his homework. He recently received a scholarship to Settlement Music School, where he takes clarinet lessons. He also is involved with youth football and basketball.
The city has hundreds of outreach and education programs through churches and nonprofit groups. Edwards and Shambry head families among the few that have the discipline to keep their children involved, organizers say.
Camden's statistics are stark: Nearly one resident in five is unemployed. Camden's high school graduation rate dropped from 56 percent in 2011 to 49 percent last year. Some experts say that if it took the city 50 years to get this way, recovering could take decades.
Camden firefighter Andy Delgado, 32, was born and raised in the city. Though many of his friends have moved to the suburbs, he decided to buy a house in East Camden.
"I live like a king," he said, thanks to the low cost of living in Camden. He paid about $48,000 for his three-bedroom house, which had been part of a rehab project by St. Joseph's Carpenter Society, an East Camden nonprofit redevelopment group.
His 6-year-old daughter goes to Davis Elementary School and is doing well, thanks, in part, to her stay-at-home mother, who helps with homework.
"I plan to stay in the city but maybe not too much longer," Delgado said, citing frustration with city leadership.
He wishes city grant money would go toward adult education and job programs to help employ Camden residents so they could similarly provide for their children.
"A lot of city grant money goes to the hospitals and waterfront. . . . None of it benefits citizens," Delgado said.
The money that does trickle down to the city's nonprofit agencies doesn't go very far, those involved say.
"We have tons of programs, but people are asking for jobs and housing," said Judyann McCarthy, senior program director of adolescent counseling at the Center for Family Services in Camden. She worked to match the Shambry twins with mentors and after-school sports leagues. "Right now, it's really tough. Basic needs need to be met."
Keith Benson sees the effects of poverty in his classroom at Camden High, where he runs a career readiness program. Many of his students' parents are unemployed; some are homeless.
"It's hard to get kids to focus when they are in survival mode," said Benson, 32, who advocates for more social services in the schools and more jobs in the city.
Benson, one of the few Camden High teachers who live in the city, grew up in Cherry Hill and graduated from Moorestown Friends School. After earning a bachelor's degree at Rutgers-Camden in 2003, he decided to stay in the city.
His 9-year-old daughter lives with her mother in the city's fairly stable Parkside neighborhood. She attends Cooper's Poynt School in North Camden and loves it. So far, she is excelling.
Once she gets to middle or high school, though, Benson might rethink living in Camden, he said.
He would not be alone.
"Camden was produced, in a sense, by people leaving," said Rutgers' Jargowsky. "It's a vicious cycle. The worse it gets, the more people leave."
For years, developers have worked to restore Camden's appeal to the middle class, but success has been elusive.
Philadelphia's Dranoff made his initial investment on the Camden waterfront in 2002 with the idea that he would transform various parcels into a "village" of housing and retail.
A decade later, only the Victor Lofts apartment building on Market Street is completed. Radio Lofts next door remains a shell undergoing environmental cleanup before its promised transformation into luxury condominiums.
Dranoff says he remains confident that the waterfront's attributes, including a direct view of the Philadelphia skyline, will attract people and businesses.
"People want to make investments," he said. "They are hoping for a Camden turnaround."
The hope is that employees or students at the "Meds and Eds" such as Rutgers-Camden, Cooper University Hospital, and the recently opened Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, will live nearby and "spread over time" into adjacent neighborhoods, Jargowsky said.
A big impediment to restoring Camden's middle class is the city's struggling schools, said Maria E. Yglesias, cofounder of the Newark-based development company M&M, which is building housing near Cooper University Hospital.
Families have told Yglesias that if there were a guarantee of getting their kids in a charter school, "they wouldn't think twice about moving to Camden," she said.
KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy renaissance school hopes to open in the area near Cooper Hospital in 2014. Camden has nine charter schools now, with at least three in the pipeline to open in 2013.
A new condo building opened in 2011 on New Street with hopes of attracting hospital employees to the one- and two-bedrooms units, ranging from $117,000 to $143,000. Eight of the 14 one-bedroom condos await buyers.
Most buyers interested in M&M projects have been families with roots in the city or who work in Camden.
"Bringing in the middle class is the best thing that can happen to Camden," Yglesias said. ". . . They are more demanding because they are more educated and will demand more from the city."
Now, according to figures provided by the employers, only about 10 percent of Cooper Health System's 4,500 employees and of Rutgers-Camden's 1,100 employees live in the city. Just more than 1 percent of Campbell Soup's 1,300 employees live in Camden.
Rutgers-Camden graduate students and Cooper Medical School students favor the Victor building, where one-bedroom apartments start at $1,025, about $400 less than a one-bedroom rental in Center City Philadelphia. The building is at least 90 percent occupied, Dranoff said.
The exodus of residents over the last two decades has left the city with too little revenue to deliver basic services. It now relies each year on 70 percent of its budget from state aid.
Dranoff attributes Camden's "temporary" troubles and slow growth to instable government over the last decade when Camden went from a corrupt mayor to state takeover and back to local control.
"The city has done a great job despite the negativity," he said.
Real estate investor and landlord Joseph Caruso, who has sunk $20 million into the city, among 270 units including three housing complexes, does not share Dranoff's optimism: "You need a hole in your head to invest in the city," he said.
Caruso, who also has property in Florida, Tennessee, and other states, bought his first Camden property in 1992 when he was right out of Rutgers-Camden Law School and thought Camden had hit bottom. Nothing comes close to Camden's dysfunction, he said on a recent tour of his holdings in his white Range Rover.
"The city's issue is a jiggly doorknob on my property but not the illegal junk yard across the street," he said, pointing to an overgrown lot strewn with metal objects and trash.
When Caruso started investing in Camden, 10 percent of his housing stock was Section 8 low-income rental assistance; now his housing stock is 95 percent Section 8.
"The problem is if anyone can actually pay rent, they don't want to live in Camden," Caruso said.
For some idealistic young professionals, however, Camden has a certain small-town charm. Plus, houses are affordable.
When Sonia Rivera-Perez was ready to purchase her first home in 2008, she found Philadelphia's prices out of reach. Familiar with Camden from her days as a Rutgers student, she found a great deal: $214,000 for a new rowhouse in the Cooper Grant neighborhood.
"Coming from Philly to living in my neighborhood, it's like living in the suburbs," said Rivera-Perez, 30.
During the week, Rivera-Perez commutes to her job in Trenton as a budget analyst for the state. On the weekends, she and her live-in boyfriend go out in Philadelphia.
Harvard University graduate Kathryn Ribay, 28, "fell in love with the city" in 2006 while working for Teach for America, where she also met her husband, Randy, 29..
"For me, it has a lot of that small-town feel without . . . cows around," she said.
Just before getting married in 2008, the couple purchased a home in the city's Fairview section for $95,000. A few months later, the couple went to Harvard University, where each attained a master's degree in education.
When they returned to Camden, they could not find teaching jobs in the city. Kathryn ended up at nearby Collingswood High and Randy at Boys' Latin Charter School in Philadelphia.
Kathryn was appointed to the Camden Board of Education in 2011. The couple are involved with a community garden, and they try to support local businesses, even one of the few artists who has stuck around Camden.
Sometimes, though, their nights at home are interrupted by random popping noises. "This is a game we play: firecracker or gunshot?" Randy Ribay said.
For now, the Ribays feel at home in Camden, but they "do have those conversations" of what might happen when they have children.
"I'd like to say, 'Yes, of course, we'll stay,' but . . . I don't know if that will change when I have kids," Kathryn said.
Rivera-Perez expressed the same concern: Education "would definitely be a factor" in remaining in Camden.
Based on student academic-achievement scores, 23 of the district's 26 schools ranked last year among the 75 worst-performing in New Jersey.
One of Camden's biggest cheerleaders, Msgr. Michael Doyle of Sacred Heart Church, says he doesn't blame people who leave to raise their children elsewhere.
"Camden isn't worthy of having children grow up in," said Doyle, 78. "It's a huge injustice to children, and you only get one childhood."
Doyle's increasingly bleak outlook arises out of three decades of witnessing the effects of government and social policies that concentrate poor in urban areas. The last 20 years have been especially "ferocious," with the prevalence of drugs and crime that follow, he said.
"I would have more hope if you would take drugs out," Doyle said. "It's a national tragedy."
Hope drew Shawn Burke to Camden six years ago; lack of progress drove him out to Collingswood in 2011.
"There was a sense of community and a sense of Camden going somewhere," Burke, 27, said.
Burke bought a new rowhouse in 2006 not far from Rutgers-Camden while he was an undergraduate at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
In 2009, he opened a real estate firm on the 200 block of Market Street, which had been vacant for many years, and worked to develop the block. He served on various boards and call-to-action groups.
"As Camden does, it sucks you in," Burke said.
Five years later, discouraged by an unsuccessful run for City Council in which he encountered what he called poor government choices and hopeless residents, Burke gave up.
"The city is literally falling apart, and they are worried about bringing in Bobby Flay and office space. . . . It's like, am I on Punk'd?" Burke said. "Camden is the only place that will attract yuppies and other artists and in two years drive them out."
Contact Claudia Vargas
at 856-779-3917, cvargas@ phillynews.com, or follow on Twitter @InqCVargas. Read her blog, "Camden Flow," at www.philly.com/camden_flow. | <urn:uuid:974c1f1f-58eb-49fd-ba94-a776f7cf2a14> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.philly.com/2013-02-11/news/37022119_1_poorest-city-woodland-avenue-presbyterian-church-camden-fights | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977398 | 3,702 | 1.679688 | 2 |
How can you stay healthy on your trip?
The best way to stay healthy on your trip is to plan before you go. If you are planning to travel to another country, see a doctor at least 6 weeks before you leave so you will have time for vaccines (immunizations) that you may need to get ahead of time.
Also ask your doctor if there are medicines or extra safety steps that you should take. For example, people who have heart failure may need to take shorter flights with more stops to avoid long periods of sitting. Or someone visiting Africa may need to take medicine to prevent malaria.
Where can you get the best information?
You can use the Internet to find general travel health information. Just make sure the information is up-to-date and from a reliable source. You can also find out if there are any problems with disease outbreaks in the places you will be visiting. Try these websites:
If you are taking a cruise, you can find your ship's sanitation inspection scores on this website: www.cdc.gov/nceh/vsp.
Find out where you can get the best medical care in the region you are visiting. The U.S. State Department's website, www.usembassy.gov, lists every U.S. embassy worldwide and lists some doctors and medical facilities in those countries.
If you are traveling out of the country, take along the phone numbers and addresses of embassies in the areas you will visit. They can help you find a doctor or hospital. Find out if your insurance company will cover you. You may need special travel health insurance.
Which immunizations and medicines will you need?
Check with the nearest travel health clinic, your regional health department, or your doctor to see what kind of vaccines you should get. In the United States, most state health clinics can give you travel vaccines, some medicines, and healthy travel tips. If your state health clinic does not give vaccines for travelers, ask if there is a clinic nearby that does.
Hepatitis A vaccine is recommended for most people traveling to developing countries. Hepatitis A (or Hep A) is one of the most common diseases found in returning travelers. You can easily prevent hepatitis A by getting the vaccine.
Make sure that all routine shots are up-to-date for you and your children. These shots can protect you from diseases such as polio, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, and rubella, which are still a problem in some developing countries.
If your doctor has told you that you should have the pneumococcal vaccine (to prevent complications of pneumonia) or a flu vaccine because of your age or a health condition, it is important that you get those vaccines before you leave.
The yellow fever vaccine is now required for travelers who plan to visit countries in South America and Africa where the disease is active.
You may need to have the typhoid fever vaccine, especially if you are traveling to an area where the risk of typhoid fever is high. These areas include Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. The nearest travel health clinic or health department will have the most recent recommendations.
You may need other vaccines, depending on where you are going, how long you will be there, and what you plan to do while you are there.
What precautions should you take while you travel?
Before you go, find out about the places you plan to visit. Is the water safe to drink? Do mosquitoes or other bugs carry disease? Is there air pollution? Will you be at a high altitude that could make you sick? Is it safe to swim in pools, lakes, or the ocean? Could you get heat exhaustion, sun stroke, or a sunburn?
Basic safety can prevent some illnesses:
Getting a disease on your trip is probably what you think about when you hear about travel health. But it is important to know about other ways you can be hurt. Many travelers are hurt in car accidents. If you must drive, learn about local driving customs, such as driving on the left side of the road. Travel during daylight when you can. Always use seat belts. If you use hired drivers (such as in a taxi), don't be afraid to ask your driver to slow down or to drive more carefully.
What if you get sick while you are traveling?
Diarrhea is the most common illness to strike travelers. Traveler's diarrhea is most common in developing countries where food and water are not as safe.
Traveler's diarrhea most often begins quickly with watery diarrhea, vomiting, cramping, and a low fever. Many doctors recommend trying to eat as normally as possible. If you are vomiting, try to drink water or other clear fluids. Watch for signs of dehydration, such as a dry mouth and dark-colored urine. If possible, drink rehydration drinks to replace lost fluids and electrolytes. Most cases of travelers' diarrhea get better in 1 to 3 days without treatment. But see a doctor if diarrhea lasts longer than 7 days, or if you have a high fever, blood or mucus in your diarrhea, or signs of dehydration.
If you become seriously ill while traveling, your country's embassy or consulate can help you find medical care. If you become ill with a fever or flu-like illness while traveling in malaria-risk areas, get medical help right away.
Should you see a doctor when you return?
If you were healthy during your trip and you feel well when you return home, you probably do not need to see a doctor.
If you were sick with a fever or severe flu-like illness while traveling, see your doctor when you get home. Also, if you get sick with a fever or severe flu-like illness for up to 6 months after coming home, see your doctor. Tell your doctor the places you visited and whether you think you may have gotten a disease. Many diseases do not show up right away, and some can take weeks or months to develop. Many travelers who get malaria don't have symptoms until they get home.
Other symptoms to watch for after you come back home include:
Frequently Asked Questions
eMedicineHealth Medical Reference from Healthwise
To learn more visit Healthwise.org
© 1995-2012 Healthwise, Incorporated. Healthwise, Healthwise for every health decision, and the Healthwise logo are trademarks of Healthwise, Incorporated.
Find out what women really need.
Pill Identifier on RxList
- quick, easy,
Find a Local Pharmacy
- including 24 hour, pharmacies | <urn:uuid:96bab14f-b6d7-45d3-8160-845dcf0613ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.emedicinehealth.com/travel_health-health/article_em.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943471 | 1,349 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Baseball's Stan 'The Man' Musial dead at 92
MLB legend dies from natural causes
He was simply "The Man."
Stanley Frank Musial made a name for himself as one of baseball's best hitters of all time on the field, as well as one of its greatest, most dignified ambassadors off it.
And now "Stan the Man" is gone. Musial died at his Ladue, Missouri, home surrounded by family, the Cardinals said in a statement. According to a post on his Twitter page, which is maintained by his grandson Brian Musial Schwarze, Musial died at 5:45 p.m. (6:45 p.m. ET) Saturday of natural causes.
He was 92.
"We have lost the most beloved member of the Cardinals family," said William DeWitt Jr., the club's chairman. "Stan Musial was the greatest player in Cardinals history and one of the best players in the history of baseball."
The Pennsylvania-born Musial transitioned from a lackluster pitcher to a stellar slugging outfielder, according to his biography on the National Baseball Hall of Fame's website.
The left-hander had a batting average above .300 17 times during his 22-year career -- all played with St. Louis -- and earned three National League Most Valuable Player awards, as well as three World Series titles. The only blip came in 1945, in the thick of World War II, when he left baseball to join the U.S. Navy.
After the 1963 season, Musial retired with a .331 career batting average and as the National League's career leader in RBI, games played, runs scored, hits and doubles. He has since been surpassed in some of those categories, but he still ranks fourth in baseball history in total hits, behind only Pete Rose, Ty Cobb and Hank Aaron.
He also stood out for his grace and sportsmanship -- having never been ejected once by an umpire. In his retirement ceremony, then Major League Commissioner Ford Frick referred to Musial as "baseball's perfect warrior, baseball's perfect knight."
In 1969, Musial was elected on his first try into the Hall of Fame, calling it "the greatest honor of the many that have been bestowed upon me."
During and after his playing career, Musial developed a special relationship with the St. Louis fan base, who knew him simply as "Stan the Man."
A bronze statue of him stands outside Busch Stadium, which is located in Musial Plaza along Stan Musial Drive.
He continued with the organization for more than 25 years after his playing days ended, serving as vice president and general manager.
And Musial was active in the community, contributing to causes such as the USO, the Senior Olympics, the Boy Scouts and Covenant House.
"I have no hesitation to say that St. Louis is a great place in which to live and work," he said in his Hall of Fame induction speech. "We love St. Louis."
His fans returned the favor, revering him for his play as well as his character and commitment to the area.
"Cardinal Nation will never be the same. Rest in peace Stan 'The Man' Musial, the best Cardinal there ever was," wrote one woman, by the name of Elise, on Twitter.
Musial also stood tall outside eastern Missouri. He served between 1964 and 1967 as chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
In 2011, President Barack Obama bestowed upon him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
"Stan matched his hustle with humility," Obama said then. "Stan remains, to this day, an icon, untarnished; a beloved pillar of the community; a gentleman you'd want your kids to emulate."
Lillian, Musial's wife of 71 years, died last May -- a longlasting marriage that some people, online, called as admirable as anything that happened on the diamond.
Stan Musial's passing spurred an outpouring of condolences and praise. Commissioner Bud Selig described him as "a Hall of Famer in every sense" and "a true gentleman," former pitcher Curt Schilling called his life "a clinic in respect, integrity and honor," and current Cardinal Matt Holliday said it was "an honor to the same uniform."
The messages from fans were no less heartfelt.
Wrote Jason Lukehart, on Twitter: "In a week that's shown the dangers deifying athletes, Stan Musial's death reminds me that once in a great while, there's a man worthy of it."
Copyright 2013 by CNN NewSource. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:59432a5d-0a8a-4d1d-8aac-d5096c3a3455> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ksbw.com/news/sports/Baseball-s-Stan-The-Man-Musial-dead-at-92/-/5739990/18202162/-/view/print/-/f5viskz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982284 | 974 | 1.78125 | 2 |
The Certificate Program in Native American Indian Studies
(CPNAIS) offers students a structured understanding of historical
and contemporary issues affecting the Western Hemisphere's First
Nations. Students will learn how these issues are embedded in the
long histories of Native peoples and their most recent interactions
with Europeans and Africans. Those completing the requirements for
the Certificate will gain a more sensitive understanding of the
unique cultures rooted in this hemisphere. Students will also develop
a greater appreciation for the indigenous peoples of eastern North
America The program will encourage on-campus roles for visitors
from Native communities, supervise student outreach to Native communities
and Native related institutions, and enhance the knowledge of students
going on to post-baccalaureate education and service. The curriculum
is drawn from University of Massachusetts at Amherst course offerings
supplemented by courses offered at the four colleges (Amherst, Hampshire,
Mount Holyoke, and Smith). The Director and participating university
faculty and staff will guide students in creating a coherent and
culturally diversified undergraduate experience.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst Certificate Program in Native American Indian Studies Tribal Historian in Residence
The Tribal Historian in Residence at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was developed by the Native American Indian Studies (CPNAIS) Program in order to host a tribal elder on the campus for a specified duration. A residency for a tribal historian was conceptualized for the purpose of providing a research opportunity for an organized tribal group either historically situated in Massachusetts or in “New England” generally, or having historical contact or being descended from tribal entities elsewhere whose members relocated to this region. CPNAIS asks tribal groups to designate a tribal historian for this residency, even if that individual is known to the staff of CPNAIS or has been informally approached to be considered for the Residency by the Director of CPNAIS. CPNAIS selects the particular tribe at its own discretion, but does not act upon extending an invitation without the endorsement of tribal leadership and consultation with the Massachusetts Office of Indian Affairs.
The fundamental criteria for the tribal group is that it be organized as an active political and cultural entity irrespective of being recognized by the state or federal government, or if having no such recognition, that it be acknowledged as an historic tribe in Massachusetts, New England, or its state’s Indian Country. The substantial resource in the W.E.B. DuBois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the supplemental resources offered by other libraries in the Five College consortium (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges) amply serve users with their holdings in colonial era documents, New England Federal Census enumerations, and books and serials. Within two hours drive are various archives and repositories. The Tribal Historian Residency is thus principally useful to tribes in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. | <urn:uuid:c1b898d9-7359-4d03-8169-db3b6fa17a9d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.umass.edu/nativestudies/Logo.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924177 | 590 | 2.203125 | 2 |
Free Data Recovery software
What is it?
The Rescue Remix is an Ubuntu-based linux operating system that runs from a cd. Booting from a "live" cd does not require that your computer's hard drive be used. The Remix contains the very best free and open source data recovery and forensics software currently available.
What is Free-Libre Open Source software?
Free-Libre Open source software is computer software whose source code is available under a license that permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. That license gives the end user the right to use it freely for private or commercial use. When distributing modified FLOSS, you must pass on the modified source code. This protects the developer's work from unfair exploitation by others, while allowing the source code to be released to the community.
FLOSS is often developed in a public, collaborative manner. In contrast to FLOSS, freeware is not the same thing. The free in "free-libre" stands for the freedom to use the software and to be able to modify and redistribute it. Those freedoms allow people to collaborate and improve the software. Freeware, however, does not protect those rights and so it typically is not software of as high quality.
FLOSS licensing means that the software will always be free. Freeware makes no such promise, in fact freeware applications usually do not stay free of cost for long. The FLOSS business model is one of services and support. For example, the most popular web server on the internet is Apache and it is free-libre open source software.
FLOSS supports a big part of the IT industry and represents a multi-billion dollar business. The ability to obtain, use, and cutomize world-class software without prohibitive fees and licensing makes FLOSS an excellent choice in the computer services industry.
Is it easy to use?
The Rescue Remix does not currently use a graphical interface. It uses a text interface.
The unix shell interface is the most powerful way to use a computer. The flexibility of the command-line is unserpassed. To implement a graphical (point and click) interface would restrict the usefulness of the software.
That being said, if someone were to create an interface that would not sacrifice useful features and performance, it would become part of the Ubuntu-rescue-remix. For the time being, there is no such interface and only the best software for the job is included with the Rescue Remix.
To get easy-to-use, step-by-step instructions to help solve your data-recovery problems, feel free to use the Data Recovery Forum.
It's really free?
You are legally entitled to obtain and use this software for any purpose. You are entitled to share this software with anyone. To redistribute the software, you must make it available under the same conditions under which you have obtained it.
There is no other version of this software. The free version has 100 per cent functionality, unlike most of the other free (demo-only) data recovery software.
Well, how can it be free? What's the incentive for writing free software?
Software developers can take existing free and open software, extend it and make it do new and interesting things, and then pass it on. The incentive for doing this is that people will pay for the service of having new code written or simply having the software perform a task.
For example, data recovery is a service, not a product. It makes more sense to charge clients for the service of recovering their data than to charge for the data recovery product. Just like there is more value in paying my barber to cut my hair than to buy scissors and ask my spouse to do it. I could change my car's oil myself, too, but I pay someone else to provide that service because there is greater value to me in doing that.
Who put this together?
Each individual software application has it's own development team of people. The Rescue Remix is a project supported by:
If you are able to help out, you are welcome to join the Rescue-Remix team! | <urn:uuid:dc27f2c4-1a6d-4cdc-baa5-a5d9d88819ef> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/About | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936232 | 863 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Head shrinking belts, Japanese womens latest fad!October 1st, 2008 - 6:45 pm ICT by ANI
London, Oct 1 (ANI): Fashion conscious women in Japan are increasingly taking to cosmetic belts to shrink their heads.
The five-pound belt can be worn around the head while sleeping.
The makers of the Small Face Make Belt, called as the Kogao Meiku Beruto, claim that it will help in shrinking the size of the heads over time.
Meanwhile, the men have also opted to go for a shrinking change and have been buying a gadget to make their mouths smaller.
The machine, which costs 4 pounds and is called a Tex Mex Slim Mouth, looks like an extendable gum shield.
The machine is said to train mouth muscles if used for three minutes a day.
The craze for the wacky gizmos is sweeping Japan, and it was noticed by the international trend-spotting firm Cscout, which highlighted the inventions.
The Japanese have a very clear idea of how they want their faces to look, the Sun quoted CScout boss Michael Keferl as saying. (ANI) | <urn:uuid:25d13182-f3c3-48be-81a9-65c6913d0414> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sports/head-shrinking-belts-japanese-womens-latest-fad_100102421.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966344 | 239 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Brantley County dates to 1920 when the state legislature sliced and then combined parts of Charlton, Pierce and Wayne counties. Historians speculate that the county owes its name to either prominent landowner, Benjamin Daniel Brantley, or his son and U.S. congressman, William Gordon Brantley. Nahunta, the county seat, is not an Indian name, as one might guess. It was a timber stop on the railroad labeled N. A. Hunter Siding. The railroad men dubbed it "Nahunta." | <urn:uuid:52fd954c-5c39-475b-8f86-d6184a01c338> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://georgia.gov/cities-counties/brantley-county | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936572 | 107 | 2.796875 | 3 |
The Trabasack story appeared in the Dravet Syndrome UK’s Spring Newsletter, highlighting how their son was the main inspiration behind the product and how it was developed with his and the needs of others living with Dravet and similar syndromes in mind. The product has since been developed further and has a multitude of users with many different needs.
What is Dravet Syndrome?
A life limiting, genetic condition that causes severe epilepsy, learning disability and global developmental delay in childhood. The seizures are usually hard to treat and do not respond well to epileptic drugs.
This Year’s Event
Many fantastic speakers have been confirmed for this year’s event, including Dr Charlotte Dravet herself as the guest of honour. Other speakers include a range of specialist consultants from hospitals across the UK including Alderhey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool and Yorkhill Hospital in Glasgow. Professor Mark Reese and Doctors Chung and Thomas from Wales Epilepsy Research will also be joining the other speakers at the event.
A range of interesting and essential topics will be discussed in depth including advancements in research, the value of early intervention, alternative treatments including the Ketogenic Diet and much more. There will be also a chance to hear of updates on many of the research projects currently funded by Dravet Syndrome. Anyone with a personal or professional interest in the area can attend the event, with both professional and family tickets available.
Who are Dravet Syndrome UK?
Dravet Syndrome UK is the leading UK charity which works to improve the lives of both adults and children living the Dravet Syndrome and other related sodium channel epilepsies. They achieve this in a number of ways from special events like the conference, to fundraising, medical research and providing support to families and individuals who require it.
The charity has three main aims to advance education, to fund research and to promote health and the Trabasack team are keen to support these goals in any way possible.
Dravet Syndrome is described as a severe form of epilepsy and can cause further issues including difficulty in the development of language, motor skills and social skills.
The second annual conference is sponsored by Nutricia and the Dravet Syndrome Foundation and the Trabasack team will be amongst many attendees and exhibitors.
Trabasack at the Family and Professional Dravet Conference 2012
Trabasack will have and exhibition display stand where product information and the new Media Mount, switch and toy mount will be available to purchase. The full range of Trabasacks and accessories will be on the stand. The most popular one for Dravet children is the Curve Connect http://www.trabasack.com/
For more info and tickets visit http://sensoryplaytray.com/
There are still tickets available up to Friday 2 November. | <urn:uuid:07f7e322-2056-4139-b438-b4bf213369eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prlog.org/11941387-trabasack-attends-dravet-conference-2012-for-family-and-professionals.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946982 | 586 | 2.046875 | 2 |
Verification Methodology for Heterogeneous Hardware/Software Systems
SAVE Project Report, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, January 2000.
Modern electronic systems are constituted by heterogeneous elements, e.g. hardware/software, and are typically embedded. The complexity of this kind of systems is such, that traditional validation techniques, like simulation and testing, are not enough to verify the correctness of these systems. In consequence, new formal verification techniques that overcome the limitations of traditional validation methods and are suitable for hardware/software systems are needed. Formal methods require the system to be represented by a formal computational model with clear semantics. We present a Petri net based representation, called PRES, which is able to capture information relevant to embedded systems. This report also explores an approach to formal verification of embedded systems in which the underlying representation is PRES. We use symbolic model checking to prove the correctness of such systems, specifying properties in CTL and verifying whether they hold under all possible situations. This coverification method permits to reason formally about design properties as well as timing requirements. This work has been done in the frame of the SAVE project, which aims to study the specification and verification of heterogeneous electronic systems.
[AEP00] Luis Alejandro Cortes, Petru Eles, Zebo Peng, "Verification Methodology for Heterogeneous Hardware/Software Systems", SAVE Project Report, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, January 2000. | <urn:uuid:f1a6f3d2-694c-4e60-ba61-ce7f503c05ce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ida.liu.se/labs/eslab/publications/PAP.shtml?ARTICLEDB=../publications/pap/PAP.txt&EMAILDB=../publications/pap/EMAIL.lst&EXTRADIR=../publications/pap/db&exact=SAVE99b | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922334 | 306 | 1.648438 | 2 |
By PBN Staff
PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island lost “most” of the economic momentum it experienced in the first two quarters of 2011; growth nearly halted in the second half of the year, according to a briefing released Friday.
The Rhode Island Current Economic Indicator, released by Bryant University and the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, increased 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter at an annualized rate.
The increase roughly matched in third quarter increase, but was significantly lower than the 2.6 percent in the second quarter.
According to the leading economic indicator measure – which projects two quarters ahead – set the economy’s growth rate at a 0.9 percent annualized rate.
“The current and leading economic indicators demonstrate that Rhode Island’s economic woes have been very difficult to overcome and that the recovery path will not be smooth or straightforward,” the briefing said.
“If the pace of growth does not accelerate soon, employment creation will idle and unemployment will remain high in 2012,” it added.
Although Rhode Island lagged in the fourth quarter, the state benefited from the improving New England and national economies.
The U.S. gross domestic product increased at an annualized rate of 2.75 percent in the fourth quarter, compared to 1.8 percent in the third quarter. New England’s economy grew at an annualized rate of 2 percent in the fourth quarter, compared to 1.8 percent in the third quarter.
Rhode Island has been lagging behind regional and national economic growth has been a decade-long pattern, the briefing said. “[The trend] must be reversed in the short term if the state is to provide an economic environment in which both residents and businesses can thrive.”
Employment declined in most sectors in the second half of the year; the only secotor to buck the trend was construction, which “continued its unexpected recovery” increasing at an annualized rate of 23.7 percent in the fourth quarter, compared to the increase of 6.3 percent in the third quarter.
Real total wages and salary disbursements increased 1.2 percent in the fourth quarter, as seasonally adjusted initial unemployment claims decreased 2.5 percent.
General sales and gross receipt taxes – a proxy for the state aggregate demand – increased at a seasonally adjusted rate of 1.7 percent in the fourth quarter compared to a 0.3 percent increase in the third quarter. | <urn:uuid:528a7ad9-b358-43dc-98af-c2273a273100> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pbn.com/RI-economy-stalls-in-second-half,65294?category_id=31&list_type=most_viewed&sub_type=stories,packages | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952895 | 508 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Size: This 7.43-acre tract consists of two parallel pineland parcels connecting the City of Coconut Creek's urban greenway trail system. The site, adjacent to the county's Helene Klein Pineland Preserve and Saw Palmetto Natural Area, buffers visitors from busy Hillsboro Boulevard and showcases the C-5 canal. This trio of natural areas, although separate and distinct, is critical for migratory birds for refuge, forage, and resting during long migration routes, as well as a habitat for nonmigratory bird species.
Habitat: This site consists primarily of mesic flatwoods, often seasonally wet but considered an upland natural community with mostly sandy soils and hardpan top layer. The protected natural area is representative of the pine flatwood communities once common in this region prior to urban development. The bisecting C-5 canal provides a freshwater component to the landscape and introduces additional wildlife to the pineland community.
Vegetation: The characteristic tree seen at this site is the South Florida slash pine, with mixed understory of saw palmetto, American beautyberry, and a variety of native pineland grasses. Dead slash pines, called "snags," are critical for several of woodpecker species, and birders love these areas for the chance they offer to see these active and often vocal birds.
Wildlife: Resident and migratory birds such as the great horned owl, pileated and red-bellied woodpecker, belted kingfisher, great egret, great blue heron, anhinga, several species of hawk, osprey, mottled ducks, and various wood warblers can be seen at West Creek. Among the freshwater fish documented in the canal are alligator gar and largemouth bass. Nearly 15 species of butterflies are prevalent throughout the site and commonly seen from the greenway.
Amenities: The site is accessible to pedestrians only, with parking available at nearby Helene Klein Pineland Preserve or, slightly farther away, at Hillsboro Pineland Natural Area, both managed by Broward County Parks and Recreation Division. A six-foot-wide paved trail - part of the Coconut Creek multiuse greenway trail system - runs through the southern end of the property and features a 100-foot-long pedestrian bridge that crosses the C-5 canal. Interpretive signs, benches, and a large, shaded gazebo are provided for leisurely wildlife observation and resting along the greenway. Vantage points are especially good along the bridge, and visitors are encouraged to bring binoculars. This section of the greenway is referred to as the Long Pine Greenway. Wildlife observation is encouraged, although bicycles, inline skates, skateboards, and motorized vehicles are prohibited on the trails. As with all natural area sites, pets are not allowed.
EcoAction Days (October through May): Volunteer workdays help keep our natural areas clear of garbage and invasive plants. They're held on the fourth Saturday of the month from 9 a.m. to noon. Closed-toe shoes are required, and long pants and long sleeves are suggested. Volunteers are encouraged to bring their own gloves, hats, sunscreen, insect repellent, and drinking water. Ages 13 to 17 must have a parent or guardian's signature on the registration form prior to participating. Volunteers under the age of 13 may participate, but only if accompanied by a parent or guardian. High school students can use the hours from these workdays toward their required community service hours. Check the volunteer Web page for the latest workday registration form. Preregister by calling Quiet Waters Park at 954-357-5100.
A Little History: Although West Creek Pineland is representative of a typical mesic flatwoods habitat, it was undoubtedly changed forever by the introduction of the intricate South Florida canal and ditch systems in the early 1900s. In 1912, three years before Broward County was carved out of Palm Beach and Dade counties, the location of the future natural area was owned by the land development company Palm Beach Farms. Ownership of both the east and west parcels that now make up the site changed hands several times from the 1950s to the 1980s, as the general area became increasingly developed. Both parcels were purchased separately by Broward County in 2004, through the 2000 Safe Parks and Land Preservation Bond program. Florida Communities Trust, a state land acquisition grant program, was also a funding partner in the purchase of West Creek.
The natural area is accessible from Broward County Transit Routes #14, #31, and #48.
West Creek Pineland Natural Area
4800 W. Hillsboro Blvd., Coconut Creek, FL 33073 | <urn:uuid:f4df67e2-a3a3-4b40-99b5-34c79dfa43bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://co.broward.fl.us/Parks/WestCreekPinelandNaturalArea/Pages/Default.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941003 | 961 | 2.28125 | 2 |
A H Mackmurdo (1851 - 1942)
Made by Colinson and Lock
Carved and painted mahogany, leather upholstery
Museum no. W. 29-1982
A.H. Mackmurdo designed this chair in 1881. It was produced in the following year by his newly formed Century Guild, the first of those loose associations of craftsworkers mentioned above. The flowing swirling pattern in the back precedes Art Nouveau design by more than ten years. The difference is that, flame-like and contorted though this pattern may be, it is a decorative panel set in a rather simple chair in an eighteenth-century style. In an Art Nouveau chair, the whole frame would have writhed in sympathy with its back.
Art Nouveau design is remarkable for the way in which the pattern explores, describes and envelops the total structure. Where Arts and Crafts use flower patterns in surface decoration, Art Nouveau make decorative use of the whole plant. | <urn:uuid:7861c8f4-4d12-4552-a1c8-117fea854961> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/7809 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937185 | 209 | 2.359375 | 2 |
Nov. 13, 2003 Researchers have developed powerful new techniques to see in unprecedented detail how blood-forming cells develop in zebrafish. The scientists have used this system to transplant blood cells with fluorescent "tags" so they can observe how the cells restore the blood system in mutant zebrafish that do not have any red blood cells.
The techniques may be helpful in learning how bone marrow transplants reconstitute the immune systems of patients whose immune cells have been destroyed by chemotherapy during cancer treatment.
The researchers, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Leonard Zon, published their studies November 9, 2003, in Nature Immunology. Zon and colleagues from Children's Hospital Boston collaborated on the studies with researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles.
"The zebrafish is a fantastic organism for developmental studies because the embryos are completely transparent," said Zon. "You can watch under a microscope all the organs form within twenty-four hours in the blood system. And you can watch the heart pump blood cells through the vasculature." Furthermore, the blood-forming systems of fish and mammals still have much in common despite the fact that the two groups diverged about 450 million years ago.
Although zebrafish are excellent models for genetic studies, there have been two major obstacles that prevented researchers from using the fish to study blood formation, said Zon. Researchers had difficulty distinguishing individual cell types and they could not transplant genetically altered cells into the blood system of the zebrafish. Zon and his colleagues have now cleared both hurdles.
The researchers used flow cytometry, a technique that rapidly separates individual cells according to their optical properties. In one set of experiments, the researchers found that they could separate distinct populations of red and white blood cells based on their light-scattering characteristics. The scientists exploited this property to study the characteristics of blood cells in mutant fish that were known to have defects in blood-cell formation.
"This surprising property of zebrafish blood cells proved to be a tremendous advantage for us because now we can use this technology to examine some of our mutant phenotypes," said Zon. Zon and his colleagues have already used the technique to reveal that carriers of particular mutations – which were previously thought to have normal blood cells – do in fact have aberrant blood formation.
In the next series of experiments, the researchers inserted genes for either green or red fluorescent proteins into the fish, to distinguish blood cells according to their characteristic fluorescence. "We've been able to put expression of these two fluorescent proteins into distinct blood cell populations, and to use those to visualize how the transplanted cells will actually behave when they're put back into easily visualized animal," said Zon. "We believe that this ability to be highly selective about which populations of blood cells we're analyzing constitutes a tremendous advance for the field."
Zon and his colleagues next used their fluorescent-tagging method to follow the progress of transplants of tagged blood cells into bloodless zebrafish mutants that lack a functioning blood-forming, or hematopoietic, system. After the cells were transplanted, the researchers could easily see precisely how the transplanted cells "rescued" the mutants by restoring their hematopoietic system.
"In our most elaborate experiments, we produced donor fish in which the white blood cells had green fluorescent protein and the red blood cells had red fluorescent protein," said Zon. "Thus, we could follow the course of each of these types of cells as they reconstituted the hematopoietic system of the mutant fish. We found that these mutant animals, which normally died in only days, lived for many months with green fluorescent blood cells.
"We've been able to do a marrow transplant on fish," said Zon. "We find it particularly exciting that we can now watch how these cells home in on the blood-forming organs immediately after the transplant." The ability to track blood-forming cells and to transplant them, said Zon, will enable the researchers to analyze in detail the cellular defects in mutant fish and to manipulate the mutants to determine which genes are malfunctioning. Such studies will have implications for both basic understanding of blood formation and for the machinery that drives immune-system reconstitution in transplantation, said Zon.
"It's possible using our ability to distinguish and manipulate stem cells to gain a better understanding of the factors that regulate stem cell number and their ability to differentiate into a particular type of tissue," said Zon. "Our hope is that by using the techniques we've developed, we can learn how to enhance stem cell production for human transplantation.
"These findings will also enable better understanding of how marrow transplantation reconstitutes the hematopoietic system in cancer patients whose blood and immune systems were ablated by high-dose chemotherapy," said Zon. "Currently, our understanding of where transplanted cells go, how they home to the blood-forming units, and how they differentiate and proliferate is a complete black box. In the clinic, we transplant marrow stem cells, and they go off somewhere into circulation and set up home, and we only know they've been grafted because the patient's immune system begins to respond."
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Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead. | <urn:uuid:11577b6e-13bd-4098-ba92-81677c441616> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031113064456.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951176 | 1,116 | 3.625 | 4 |
A casual encounter in Greenland has an American pro-life activist gritting her teeth.
I was in the Arctic Circle, in Greenland, for some R&R and to learn about polar explorations. Having fallen in love with a pair of child's sealskin slippers, I was poised to buy them.
"You are from the United States, no?" the woman behind the counter asked in her nicest ever tour-guide voice. "It is one country you cannot bring in the skin of the seal."
Seeing my confused look, she explained, "It is, how you say, a populist law, only made in U.S." She paused to make sure there was no offense. "It is not fair law. We use every part of the seal and throw nothing away."
I remembered seeing foot-long strips of seal meat drying as they hung from porches on tiny colorful family homes for Greenlandic winter consumption and for their husky sled dogs laying around lazily in the summer sun. I recalled the stench wafting from the seal tanning factories on the harbors of tiny settlements, where warm outerwear was produced. It left me with little appetite.
"It is the baby seals that the U.S. tries to protect," said a fellow tourist, a Dane, chiming in on the conversation. I immediately remembered learning about the baby seals in a PBS documentary.
The tour guide responded gently with a question: "But in America you can take the knife to the Inuit not born, no?" As she caressed her midriff behind the kiosk, I saw that she was pregnant.
Inuit. At a lecture I attended by and about Arctic people, I learned that Inuit is another word for human being. I wondered if Greenland is like other European countries, struggling to maintain replacement levels of population. One tiny settlement of 150 that we visited boasted that they had 27 elementary children, whom they claimed as a cherished resource.
Her obvious reference to abortion rights left me dumbfounded. As a pro-life activist, didn't I come to the Arctic Circle to get away from debates like these?
I mumbled under my breath, "Don't go there with me."
S'kuse me?" she said.
"I said I don't think that is right either-killing babies of any sort, seal or human. It's just that in our country one has a choice to believe if a baby is human or not human." I realized how utterly ridiculous that sounded only after I had said it.
"The baby seal is not human, yes? This is my choice to believe, no?" I really set myself up for that one.
This young bright woman should be doing something other than selling souvenirs.
But the Dane once again came to my rescue: "I think it is the clubbing of seals that the U.S. opposes." (Please God; don't let her ask me if clubbing a baby seal is less compassionate than scraping a human fetus from the womb with a curette.)
The conversation goes from bad to worse. "Ah. If we kill seals with the gun it would be, how do you say, political? Like the U.S. bombs in the war?" (Note to self: Vacation in Antarctica next year.)
"Actually all of these killings are wrong," I replied. That's me, the moralistic American.
"But some killings you can do. Because you can choose in America, no?"
I was slow on the uptake. I began to understand the posters I saw hanging on Greenland's public buildings that read "Avoid Cultural Prejudice," featuring two mocking Greenlanders in sealskin coats holding a young calf and the words "Save the baby veal."
I slithered away, writing in my head a sequel to The Ugly American, starring myself.
This article appeared in the January 2011 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 76, No. 1, page 37). | <urn:uuid:3ed9d4ef-8df8-4c5d-8b09-3c53c31e8edd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.uscatholic.org/node/5497/privacy | 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 | 0.969132 | 825 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Speaking specifically about 32-bit Windows variants, they have had support for more than 4GB of RAM since Windows 2003 variants (and you can also get a kernel hack for Windows 7 to allow you to use all of your RAM in 32-bit). However, this comes at a cost, as you outlined in the first part of your question.
In a 32-bit operating system, the size of a pointer (memory address) is the same as the word length of the CPU, 32-bits, which allows (as you mentioned) a 2^32 = 4GB memory space. Windows also takes a "virtual memory" approach for applications, so each application has it's own memory space.
Since each pointer is only 32-bits wide, each application's pointers can only address up to 4GB of memory, even though the system can support more then 4GB of RAM. As far as I know, this is the only caveat to using more than 4GB of RAM in a 32-bit operating system. In total, you can have many applications using more than 4GB of RAM combined, but any one particular process can only allocate/access up to 4GB.
Back to your question, let's say you have a program that uses 2GB of RAM. If you have 10 instances of this program, that's 20GB. All 8GB of your RAM will be used up, as well as another 12GB of the pagefile. So yes, under 32-bit operating systems, it is more than possible to use up this memory.
if this 32-bit OS machine has 2GB RAM and 2GB page file, increasing
the page file size won't help the performance. is this true?
Increasing the pagefile size will usually not increase performance (unless your RAM and pagefile are set to the absolute minimum, or set so low your computer constantly thrashes). It will, however, prevent your computer from running out of (virtual) memory. Whenever anything needs to be purged to the pagefile, you're already taking a huge performance hit (since the hard drive is orders of magnitude slower then your RAM). | <urn:uuid:6192e75b-3b93-4043-83d8-1cd609c5a611> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://superuser.com/questions/367490/can-a-32-bit-os-machine-use-up-all-8gb-ram-20gb-page-file | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952459 | 436 | 3.15625 | 3 |
(USA Today) States are sharply divided on how — or whether — to implement the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act after it was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels on how his state will approach the Affordable Care Act: “Absolutely no decision has been made to establish a state-based exchange.”
The health care law was enacted in March 2010, but its two major expansions of health coverage don’t begin until January 2014.
One is the creation of health care exchanges — government agencies or non-profit groups that will organize and oversee a private market for buying health insurance. The exchanges will offer a choice of certified health plans from which individuals and small businesses can choose. | <urn:uuid:2a844c84-4adf-4255-90f1-af5169d71e92> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/how-each-state-will-approach-health-care-act/?cat_orig=health | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974755 | 148 | 1.585938 | 2 |
All children need a connection with their peers. For those on the social fringe, school brings frequent reminders of their rejected status -- difficulty finding a partner for a collaborative activity, being chosen last for a team activity, finding few classmates to play with at recess, sitting alone at lunch.
Beyond the effect such isolation has on a child's self-esteem, it also can have a marked impact on his school adjustment. Not only is the isolated child denied the opportunity to learns the skills necessary to develop and maintain friendships, his schoolwork can also be affected as his attention drifts to social concerns. It isn't surprising that children who feel isolated from their peers tend to have increasing social and academic problems as they get older.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Figure out why the child is isolated. Find time to observe the student in different settings, such as lunch, recess, and gym. Talk with the child's parents and previous year's teachers. You even might speak discretely with an observant and trustworthy student. The information you get could help you determine if the student's difficulties are related to shyness, bossiness, aggressiveness, appearance, or hygiene issues.
Coach the student in social skills. Try to raise the student's social intelligence by talking with him privately; offering specific guidance about social situations he is likely to encounter. With young children, you might start with such basic skills as making eye contact, joining in activities, or asking others to play. Suggest such simple icebreakers as "Would you like to play a game with me?" If he is comfortable, encourage the student to role play some common social situations. Give him ideas for topics to talk about with classmates. And, of course, make sure to lavish praise on him (privately if you think he will be embarrassed by public recognition) when you see him demonstrating good social skills.
Arrange social interactions with classmates. That might call for you to put on your social director's hat and orchestrate the student's peer involvement. Find activities in which he can interact with other students successfully, and situations that involve him with peers who are likely to be accepting. For example, you might ask a couple of sensitive and mature students to invite him to play during recess or join them at their lunch table. Or you might split the class into four or five groups for an academic activity, perhaps having them meet outside of class to complete a project. That could help the student foster relationships with classmates. When students pair up in class, assign him to a student who is likely to relate well with him. You might even play matchmaker by identifying a classmate with similar interests and an accepting manner who could become a buddy to the isolated student.
Help classmates recognize the child's strengths and talents. Talk with the student or his parents to learn about his interests, hobbies, and talents. Find a way to bring those to the attention of the class in a natural way. If he excels on the computer, invite him become the class troubleshooter. If he is a good math student, ask him to demonstrate a challenging math problem. If he is an ESL student, have him talk to the class in his first language. In that way, other students might come to see him in a new light.
Organize a lunch club. If you have students who are isolated from their peers, consider grouping those students together during lunch and recess. Tell them the only requirement for being a member of the lunch club is that they be kind to one another. You might suggest an organizing activity for the group (playing board games or doing art projects, for example).
Encourage the student's parents to foster peer relationships. You might suggest to the parents other students they could invite over. Give them ideas for how to structure such a visit to enhance its success, including inviting only one child at a time and providing an appealing activity for the first visit. Also, suggest to the parents that they involve their child in community activities at which he is likely to do well. | <urn:uuid:6daf4a22-2957-41ea-af9f-7e4c639a3f2d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/shore/shore054.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979785 | 809 | 3.8125 | 4 |
Will the US get 'squatters' rights' to the atmosphere?
Navroz K. Dubash
25th November, 2009
India has a substantial part to play in a climate deal, but failing to acknowledge historical responsibility is akin to giving the US 'squatters' rights' to the atmosphere
U.S. climate politics loom large on the global stage. The twists and turns of Senate deliberations have long been a favored topic for the world's 'Climaterati'.
But as India's Prime Minister makes his inaugural visit to Washington this week for his first formal meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama, it is worth recalling that other countries have complex climate politics, too. India has been invoked frequently as an obstacle to U.S. climate politics, second only to China, making it vital to explore these dynamics further if we are to get constructive movement on the global stage.
It may be surprising to discover that a variety of stances on climate change exist in India, which make consensus on domestic politics a challenge. For some, the climate negotiations are seen as no more than an economic containment strategy by the West. These growth-first stonewallers argue that even if climate change is real, the objective should be to maximize growth so that India can better handle the impacts. Until then, the country should not compromise.
For others, the effort to prioritize environmental sustainability and equity is stronger. These progressive realists are growth critics and, although keen to generate action on climate change, they are deeply cynical about the global negotiations. With the belief that these discussions sideline core concerns of equity, they call on India to take aggressive climate measures, but to do so domestically, de-linking these from the global process.
Others believe that India should take on ambitious emission reduction measures and throw its weight fully behind a global climate deal. These progressive internationalists argue that doing so will help shift the global debate forward and spur matching action in other countries. Since climate impacts will disproportionately affect India's poor, they suggest that a pro-poor approach is also a pro-climate regime approach.
For advocates of a global climate deal, the good news is that the influence of growth-first stonewallers has waned in India. The bad news, however, is that the center of gravity in India lies firmly with the progressive realists, who shy away from engagement in global climate politics, rather than with progressive internationalists, who seek to embrace it.
Unlocking progressive climate politics in India, and hence globally, will build confidence in a far more progressive global, and particularly U.S., climate politics. Yet we are still far from this point, and three major issues get in the way.
To begin with, industrialized countries signal bad faith by making their commitments toward climate action conditional on similar commitments by developing countries. Americans, for example, should be reducing their emissions because they are responsible for 25 percent of carbon dioxide emissions released in the past 50 years.
Suggesting responsibility for past emissions carries politically unpalatable overtones of an ecological debt; however, arguing for no responsibility is effectively granting Americans squatter's rights to the atmosphere. In addition, the 1992 Earth Summit bargain required rich nations to 'take the lead' in reducing emissions, but the United States has not done so.
Now, economic competitiveness is being used as a basis to challenge the 1992 compromise itself. Doing so sends a dangerous signal that moral arguments have no role in shaping the climate regime and that national expedience will regularly trump global deals. These are both extremely dangerous signals to send, in climate as in other world affairs. To get more action from India, we need to see more unconditional action from the United States.
Room to grow
Secondly, Indians fear that there is insufficient understanding of their continued development burden at home. India is growing rapidly, yes, but starting from a very low base. Just under a third of Indians live on less than $1 a day, and 77 percent live on less than $2 a day. Most surprising, less than 1 percent of Indians (or 10 million people) are middle class by American standards-that is, they consume more than $13 a day. To be sure, within this top 1 percent there is an emergent and problematic class of oligarchic super-rich, and India has a moral obligation to spread the benefits of growth more equally. But by discounting India's continued development burden when allocating climate responsibilities, the industrialized world is hiding behind India's narrow rich class.
Thirdly, India also gets insufficient credit for what it already has done and is doing to shift to a low-carbon economy. The country uses less energy per unit of GDP than the United States and half as much as China. Electricity prices for industry and gasoline prices in India, when adjusted for purchasing power, are four times U.S. prices, creating incentives for further improvements. India has recently publicized a slew of new measures and is discussing legislation to give teeth to these efforts. Collectively, this amounts to a substantial down-payment.
Room for improvement
None of this is to suggest that India cannot and should not do more to contribute to a constructive global climate regime. Indeed, as the fourth largest aggregate emitter of greenhouse gases worldwide, India must be far more creative and visionary about creating a low-carbon future. Because of the vulnerable poor in India and elsewhere, the country must better integrate its domestic actions into a strong global climate regime. Climate negotiators have to be as vigorous about championing emissions equity within India as they are about advocating equity across nations. And it would help its negotiation stance if India better managed the tensions of being simultaneously an aspiring power and a poor society.
But the three irritants described above enable stonewallers and realists to portray any further climate efforts by India as a futile strategy of appeasement. Far from leading, U.S. emissions in 2005 were 16 percent above their 1990 levels, and the United States continues to signal its intent to displace the climate burden onto societies far more disadvantaged. Progressive internationalists in India and elsewhere have gone as far as they can to move their own societies and polities in favor of progressive climate politics. To move any further, India needs a positive and adequate signal of intent from the United States.
Navroz K. Dubash is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India.
This article is a product of Eye on Earth, Worldwatch Institute's online news service. For permission to reprint Eye on Earth content, please contact Julie Diamond at firstname.lastname@example.org
Gathuru Mburu: Kenya has already had a Green Revolution
Forget trying to grow hybrid maize - Africa already has all the crops, storage systems and knowledge that it needs to grow itself out of poverty
Half India’s land degraded: agro-chemicals partly to blame
Deforestation, wind erosion and poor farming practices blamed for deterioration of soil as the real costs of the Green Revolution are measured
India could halve emissions growth...but at a price
Growth in India's carbon emissions could be nearly halved by the year 2030 through the use of known practices and technologies, according to a new report from McKinsey & Company
India announces groundbreaking solar plan
India is set to embark on the country's largest solar endeavour - increasing solar capacity from 3 megawatts to 20 gigawatts by 2020
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The New York Times has an article today on the pros and cons of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) being attached to products in supply chains and in stores. A couple of highlights.
Tags with the technology known as radio frequency identification, or R.F.I.D., transmit a digital response when contacted by radio signals from scanning devices. Older versions of the technology have been around for decades, but now major manufacturers and retailers and the Defense Department are pushing to speed the development of a new version that could be read by scanners anywhere in the world, making it cheaper and more efficient to track the flow of goods from global suppliers to consumers.
The Defense Department expects to issue a statement in the next few days calling on suppliers to adopt the new version of the technology by 2005. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. made a similar announcement in July when it said it was requiring its top 100 suppliers to place tags with the new technology on cartons and pallets shipped to its stores by the end of 2004.
The Department of Defence. A government mandate for doing business with that part of the government. One doesn’t have to be cynical, here. There are obvious reasons why the DoD needs and wants this technology that have nothing to do with taking away people’s privacy. (It simply allows them to run their logistics better, and potentially to keep track of what is going on on a battlefield). However, these are not the sorts of people I expect to want to put protections in place that safeguard my privacy, either.
Ms. Albrecht and other critics say that companies and government agencies will be able to monitor what people read or where they assemble from radio tags embedded in their books or woven into clothing. Unlike bar codes, which cannot be scanned unless a laser has a direct line of sight to them, the radio tags can be read through walls, and multiple tags can be read in an instant.
“R.F.I.D. certainly has value in the supply chain and in inventory management,” said Beth Given, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. But she added that “there are so many potential issues once it gets beyond the point of sale that consumer protections need to be written into law.”
And thus we once again hit the usual quandry. There are potential benefits, very real ones, in adopting these sorts of technologies. And yet the privacy and surveillance implications are such that if we adopt them we give up a lot of privacy and hand the information to governments and large organisations almost automatically. Once again, what needs to be said is that it is possible to design such technologies so that the benefits are there and the privacy violations are not, or at least so that the privacy violations are transparent and we are informed when they are happening. But to build such safeguards in, these issues have to be discussed at the very beginning, by which I mean right now. And on the whole it isn’t happening. Do I actually expect to see such safeguards put in place. Well, to tell the truth, no.
(Link via slashdot). | <urn:uuid:e766ce45-b8e2-4444-9f92-50776b5c6633> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.samizdata.net/2003/09/the-new-york-times-on-rfid-tag/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964334 | 637 | 2.25 | 2 |
Gus Solomon II
Bill Long 10/11/04
Earliest Days (1906-1945)
In situating Gus Solomon firmly in the life of Portland and Oregon in the first half of the 20th century, Dr. Stein has provided a helpful context in which to understand the man who was judge during the second half of the century. Three points he makes about the "first half" of Solomon's life are worth mentioning.
When you say that someone is from a Jewish background, it really doesn't tell you much. It may explain some things about temperament and commitment, but you have to dig more deeply below the surface of the person's life. Gus Solomon was the son of Eastern European immigrant Jews who came to America in the 1880s/1890s. I think that says a lot right there. The Eastern European countries were Romania (father) and Russia (Ukraine--mother), and the legendary hardships, persecutions, pogroms and exclusions of Jews from those lands shaped his consciousness. But, his sentiments were also shaped by the fact that he wasn't a German Jew and therefore was exluded not simply from Portland high society but Portland Jewish "high" society.
The leading Jewish families of German extraction in Portland at that time, the Meier's and Frank's, were from the same religion as Solomon, but their social experience was so different as if to suggest another universe. In addition, the Eastern European origin led to experiences of discrimination both in high school, college, law school and in his being unable to secure a job in a prestigious Portland law firm after law school. Resentment, no doubt, was a real and living reality for him all his days, and it probably explains his later treatment of attorneys who argued before him. Nevertheless, he made it to the top, the pinnacle of his profession, despite the fact of this odious discrimination. He thus was sympathetic to plights of other disadvantaged groups, though seemingly merciless toward the lawyers who came into his courtroom.
Birth Date as Destiny
Two realities that determined his destiny were the date of his parents' immigration and the date of his law school graduation. His parents were born in the 1870s and came to the United States a full twelve (mother) to twenty years (father) before Gus was born. This is significant because when Gus was born his parents had already begun the process of assimilation to such a degree that Gus would never have an accent as he spoke English. Even so seemingly trivial a thing as an accent shapes destinies.
Second, Gus graduated from law school in 1929. He tried to find a job at the beginning of the Great Depression. Thus, the realities that shaped his understanding of law and his first experiences in it were those brought on by the Depression, the public power movement of the early 1930s and issues surrounding the communist party, syndicalism laws and the growing debate over free speech and the first amendment. Had he gone to law school a few years later, graduating possibly in 1935 (he attended both Columbia and Stanford), he would have graduated just as Roosevelt's New Deal was taking shape and would probably have ended up in one of the numerous federal bureaucracies that redefined the American political landscape. Instead, he was shaped by the hardscrabble reality of making a life in Portland, OR as a lawyer from a religious minority when very few jobs were to be had in law. This reality also contributed to the third point, to wit, his role in DeJonge v. Oregon, a landmark US Supreme Court case overturning Oregon's criminal syndicalism law as it related to DeJonge.
DeJonge v. Oregon
Dirk DeJonge was arrested in Portland on July 27, 1934 as a speaker at an orderly rally called by the Communist Party. At the rally, he did not counsel violence or overthrow of the American system. Nevertheless, the Oregon syndicalism law, passed after WWI, made it a crime to participate in a meeting called by a party supposedly teaching and advocating violent overthrow of the government. DeJonge was convicted at trial, and the Oregon Supreme Court upheld his conviction. Solomon was involved in the appellate process by virture of being a cooperating attorney with the ACLU. He then urged the ACLU (or a radical group, the ILD) to appeal DeJonge's conviction to the US Supreme Court. With the aid of Allan Hart, a recent Yale Law School graduate (recently deceased in his 90s), they unsuccessfully petitioned for rehearing with the Oregon Supreme Court but raised a federal issue in that petition that they then used to ask for a hearing with the US Supreme Court. The gambit succeeded, and DeJonge's case was heard by the Court at the end of 1936. Though Solomon wrote the brief, the case was argued by national ACLU counsel, Osmond Fraenkel. Within a month after the case was heard, the Supreme Court unanimously (with Stone and Harland not participating) invalidated the statute as applied to DeJonge. Peaceful assembly for the discussion of a lawful issue is illegal under the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.
Dr. Stein's illumination of this case's background and Gus Solomon's role in it is a contribution to scholarship both on Solomon's life and of this significant US Supreme Court case.
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It may not be terribly surprising that many of us find our moods dipping over the course of the day, and that by nightfall we light up again. Or that our moods are perkiest on weekends, regardless of which days our weekends fall on (i.e., Fridays and Saturdays in the United Arab Emirates).
What's of note, according to an analysis of 2.4 million tweets in 84 countries by researchers out of Cornell, is that these mood trends hold steady across cultures and borders, hinting at some sort of deeper trend whose basis is in being human, not in belonging to a particular people or place.
"We saw the influence of something that's biological- or sleep-based; regardless of the day of the week, the shape of the mood rhythm is the same," Scott Golder, a doctoral student of sociology, said in a news release. "The difference between weekdays and weekends has to do with the average mood, which is higher on the weekends than the weekdays. Even in the face of different social and cultural demands, the results are consistent across days."
Twitter opened its data doors to the researchers via a public interface, and researchers processed the incredible volume of data at the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing's Web Lab.
While other tweet-based mood studies have used small, homogenous groups of U.S. undergrads, resulting in inconclusive data, this one was so large, with observations made on an hourly basis, that the team is reporting on its findings in the journal Science with high confidence.
"We've never had the opportunity to measure behavior in this way before," Golder says. "Digital traces of online activity let us do social science in a new way, and to ask questions we've always wanted to ask. How do entire societies work? How are relationships patterned? We're starting to get the data to answer these questions."
Beyond investigating mood trends at certain times of the day or on certain days of the week, the team also looked at whether daylight influences mood patterns. (They are, after all, in Ithaca, N.Y.) What they found is that the amount of daylight doesn't influence mood as much as whether the days are getting shorter or longer. So nine hours of daylight in the spring may produce different moods than nine hours of daylight in the fall.
The researchers have also created the Web site timeu.se to allow users to enter keywords, such as "traffic," "sex," and "fishing," to analyze how behaviors, in addition to moods, are distributed throughout the day. | <urn:uuid:0ca185ae-215d-425b-9068-66a60a4e0fc3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-20117368-247/millions-of-tweets-reveal-global-mood-trends/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960983 | 532 | 2.4375 | 2 |
March 11, 2013
March 11 will make the second anniversary of the triple catastrophes that occurred in Japan: the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima. Over the last two years people are asking whether the Fukushima nuclear disaster is worse than what occurred in 1986 in Chernobyl.
December 28, 2011
Broken and collapsed buildings remain in every neighborhood. Men pull oxcarts by hand through the street. Women carry 5-gallon plastic jugs of water on their heads, dipped from manhole covers in the street. Women carry 5-gallon plastic jugs of water on their heads, dipped from manhole covers in the street.
August 29, 2011
The North Anna Nuclear Power plant reactors are located about 10 miles from the epicenter of the 5.8 earthquake that shook Virginia on August 23. The plant is built to sustain a 6.2 magnitude earthquake, but this does little to comfort those who live close by.
August 17, 2011
As one of his first measures in office, Brazilian Defense Minister Celso Amorim plans to conclude Brazil’s participation in the notorious United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). Various sectors of the Brazilian government, including Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, agree with Mr. Amorim, who says that the important thing now is to formulate an exit strategy. This story has now been translated into French and Spanish; the translations follow the English version.
April 10, 2011
“I was at his (President Aristide’s) house, we heard a roar of shouts of joy, and then over the walls people started coming in, pouring into the courtyard of the house when they saw the car. People were accompanying the car as many as three miles from the airport to his house,” relates Pierre Labossiere of the jubilant welcome that greeted the Aristides on their return to Haiti ending seven long years of exile for them and brutal repression of the people they had to leave behind. Pierre tells the story of the Haitian people and how their never-say-die spirit continues to inspire the world.
February 5, 2011
The return of Jean Claude Duvalier, “Baby Doc,” to Haiti as a free man was excruciating to veterans of the struggle that overthrew the 30-year dictatorship. The traumatizing symbolism of Duvalier’s return at Haiti’s weakest hour is an insult to the dead and an assault on the living.
December 14, 2010
One of the stories least reported has been the one about Haitians organizing for themselves. This is one woman’s story of how she, her family and the people in the various communities in which she works came together collectively to care for each other’s needs and how that struggle has become the foundation of a new movement of the poor for change in education and the material lives of women and men – a struggle for dignity.
November 26, 2010
Obama denounced the recent “elections” in Burma as “neither free nor fair.” The Haitian “elections” are also neither free nor fair. The largest party, Fanmi Lavalas, is excluded, as it has been in every election since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in 2004; 1.3 million earthquake victims are displaced; and cholera has already taken 1,600 lives.
November 20, 2010
Haitians say protests are the inevitable outcome when troops who have occupied Haiti for five years with seeming impunity have introduced a deadly, misery-multiplying disease.
November 15, 2010
Nicolas Rossier conducted an exclusive interview with former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in forced exile in Johannesburg. Aristide concludes: “We are poor – worse than poor because we are living in abject poverty and misery. But based on that collective dignity rooted in our forefathers, I do believe we have to continue fighting in a peaceful way for our self-determination, and if we do that, history will pay tribute to our generation.” Rally for democracy in Haiti and Aristide’s return Wednesday, Nov. 17, 5 p.m., Montgomery & Market, San Francisco.
November 8, 2010
The threat of the recent cholera outbreak in Haiti has been intensified by Hurricane Tomas. The already bad sanitary conditions combined with the flooding from the hurricane is expected to cause the infection rate to jump.
November 1, 2010
Cholera, a “disease of poverty” caused by lack of access to clean water, has spread to Haiti’s capital city of Port au Prince. At a small, desolate camp of ripped tents nearby, a gleaming water tank is propped up on bricks. But it’s empty.
October 25, 2010
The cholera epidemic has killed 250 Haitians and over 3,000 more are infected and may die. This cholera is caused by drinking dirty, toxic water. According to Haiti’s health minister, cholera “can kill in three hours because once the diarrhea starts it doesn’t stop.” | <urn:uuid:d26ac235-e592-4f34-b5d1-a0c03574b3eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sfbayview.com/tag/earthquake/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955232 | 1,070 | 1.992188 | 2 |
US-UK Alliance Remains Stronger Than Ever
Working together to make a powerful difference in world affairs, United States of America and United Kingdom today reaffirmed stronger alliance in the 21st century.
In his remarks with Foreign Secretary William Hague after their meeting in London, Secretary of State John Kerry says one thing that binds the United States and Great Britain is a special relationship, a partnership of the heart.
"And in the 20th century, our countries fought for freedom side by side, and fought for survival together in war." - Mr. Kerry
Mr. Kerry points out that both countries thrived together in peace and stood together time and time again in order to meet the world's great challenges.
In the 21st century, Mr. Kerry says both countries face new and a more complex set of challenges, but together, it is absolutely clear that US-UK partnership remains stronger than ever.
Full Agenda discussed by US and UK
According to Mr. Kerry, both discussed a very full agenda that reflects the many benefits and the relationships that bring both of our peoples and the world together, from countering terrorism to creating jobs to advancing shared values.
"And that is no small endeavor or commitment." - Mr. Kerry
Both countries discussed historic agreement in its beginnings and that is to start the work on a U.S-EU transatlantic trade and investment partnership to grow prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, and the President of the United States, Barack Obama, wave from the South Portico Balcony alongside their wives, Samantha and Michelle in March 2012. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
"It is no secret that we both face economic challenges." - Mr. Kerry
However, Mr. Kerry explains that Europe freestanding alone is the largest economy in the world.
And when UKs join that together with the United States of America, they have a powerful ability to be able to affect the rules of the road and to be able to raise standards and, most importantly, create jobs for all of their people.
Europe is already America's largest trading partner, and this agreement will create more jobs, spur additional investment., he added.
Both countries also discussed the responsibility that both share to support fragile democracies across the world, across the Maghreb, from Libya to Tunisia and beyond.
Mr. Kerry notes that it is in US mutual interest to see that these fledgling democracies flourish.
On Syrian Crisis
Ronald Reagan with close ally and personal friend, Margaret Thatcher at Aspen Lodge, Camp David, 1984. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
He reiterates that the Assad regime has rained down rockets on Aleppo in recent days, and that is just the latest example of Assad's brutality.
Both countries condemn this indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians, and we condemn it in the strongest terms.
"And it is just further evidence that Assad has to go." -Mr. Kerry
Mr. Kerry cites US is grateful for UK's effort to help dial up the pressure on the regime, for their contributions of humanitarian aid, and for hosting the transition conference last month.
Both countries also pledged to continue to work closely to address the growing humanitarian crisis, and to support the Syrian Opposition Council.
Both countries are coordinating with the Syrian Opposition Coalition, and both are coordinating with the UN, and with others in order to help get relief to the victims who need that help.
On Iran's proliferation activities
According to Mr. Kerry, both US and UK discussed discussed on a couple of occasions Iran's nuclear program and P-5+1 talks with Iran that take place in Kazakhstan.
"As we've said again and again, an Iran with a nuclear
weapon in that region, and given all that has happened, is simply unacceptable." - Mr. Kerry
He notes both US and UK have stated that Iran will not obtain a nuclear weapon.
He adds President Obama has been crystal clear about this and both countries repeatedly made clear, the window for a diplomatic solution simply cannot by definition remain open forever.
"But it is open today. It is open now. And there is still time, but there is only time if Iran makes the decision to come to the table and to negotiate in good faith." - Mr. Kerry
Both countries are prepared to negotiate in good faith, in mutual respect, in an effort to avoid whatever terrible consequences could follow failure.
"And so the choice really is in the hands of the Iranians, and we hope they will make the right choice." - Mr. Kerry
US-UK partnership in Afghanistan
Both countries also discussed also their partnership in Afghanistan.
"I want to thank all of the people of Great Britain, who I know have been patient and carried this enormous challenge with a certain degree of restraint, and obviously with a great degree of commitment." - Mr. Kerry
The US is grateful for the sacrifices of British people and the contribution of their remarkable troops.
He says both countries need to continue to remain in close coordination as both tackle the very important upcoming transition.
Both countries affirms that 2013 will be an important year for Afghanistan, where U.S. and UK troops continue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder.
On Middle East Peace Process
According to Mr. Kerry, both countries share a vision of two states living side by side in peace and security for Israel and Palestine.
"Today, we talked about how we can support the two parties reaching that end, because frankly that is the only way to achieve a lasting peace." - Mr. Kerry
Both countries are attach to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Both agree that there is no more urgent foreign policy priority in 2013 than restarting negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
Both countries also assert that the region and the world can't afford the current dangerous impasse in the peace process; for if they don't make progress very soon, then the two-state solution could become impossible to achieve.
Long history of partnership
With the long history of partnership and collaboration, the United States and Great Britain have made countries both stronger, and made the world more stable and secure.
Mr. Kerry says they meet with a special commitment to the effort to do their work to make the world yet safer and more stable and a place of greater opportunity and peace for all peoples.
"So we look forward to strengthening this relationship in the years to come." -Mr. Kerry
Mina Fabulous follows the news, especially what is going on in the US State Department. Mina turns State Department waffle into plain english. Read more stories by Mina Fabulous. Contact Mina through NewsBlaze.
Related World News News | <urn:uuid:f017e728-ede9-47ab-b3dd-ccd9334fdeb2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newsblaze.com/story/20130227082348mina.nb/topstory.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942791 | 1,365 | 1.773438 | 2 |
So What is ADHD?
An individual is diagnosed as having ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, (also referred to as ADD) when they exhibit behaviours that are characterized by inappropriate levels of inattention, distractibility, impulsivity and restlessness or hyperactivity. All of these symptoms may not always be obvious or present since they can be modified either by family situations, coping mechanisms developed during childhood, personality, intelligence and so on.
Very simply put, the characteristics must have been present since early childhood, have negatively impacted various life areas (school, work, relationships, etc.) and must not be accounted for by other situations.
ADHD characteristics are neuro-biologically based and they often change as the individual gets older. You do not out-grow ADHD even though the behaviours or symptoms may not be exhibited in the same manner or with the same intensity.
Although the term ADHD is a label, it is an important label. For the ADHD characteristics define who you are and how you see the world. Therefore, it's important to understand that a diagnosis of ADHD is just the first step in a process of discovering who you are!
Undiagnosed individuals or those who choose to avoid working on themselves often experience the following:
- low self-esteem
- academic failure
- alcohol and substance abuse
- obsessive-compulsive behaviours
- job, relationship and marital failures
- inappropriate and high risk behaviours including gambling and sexual addictions
Here are some myths about ADD.
All individuals with ADHD are hyperactive
Three subtypes of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder are now recognized.
However, while hyperactivity is "external" and easily observable, many individuals with ADHD have "internal" hyperactivity which is generally experienced as restlessness or anxiety.
Someone with ADHD just needs to be medicated
Although medication is important, it's only part of the treatment plan. Medication alone is usually inadequate.
Add your own comment
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Wednesday, May 22, 2013
- Unlike the flattening or even declining rates of HIV infection among nearly all other communities, the epidemic among gay men globally is rapidly expanding.
But according to new research, the reason for this fast expansion is biological, not behavioural, thus countering some of the core priorities of traditional AIDS funding.
“The trajectory of HIV epidemics among MSM” – men who have sex with men – “is expanding virtually everywhere we look, in low-, middle- and high-income countries, and across all regions,” Chris Beyrer, a professor of international health, told a panel discussion here on Thursday.
“Much of this comes down to a fundamental biological reality: it’s not about gender but about the gut.”
Beyrer, who contributed to a recent groundbreaking special issue of The Lancet, the British medical journal, on HIV in MSM, says that researchers have found that the HIV virus is far more efficiently transmitted through the gut, hence leading to a far higher transmission probability in anal sex, for either a man or a woman – around 18 times more likely than through vaginal transmission.
Further, because gay men can switch sexual roles in a way that is impossible among heterosexual couples – acting as both the acquisition and transmission partner – the efficiency of transmission among MSM networks appears to be far higher than previously understood.
In a hypothetical MSM group in which men did not alternate their sexual roles, Beyrer reports that HIV incidence could be reduced by up to 55 percent.
“The network-level effects are really trumping the individual level,” he says. “So, people who have modest individual-level risks but who are having sex in high-risk networks and communities have very high lifetime acquisition risks.”
Taken together, the ramifications of these two findings are startling. These two factors, the new research suggests, account for a full 98 percent of the difference between HIV epidemics among MSM and heterosexual populations.
“What this means is that all the things that we had been focusing on – multiple partners, behaviours, etc. – only explain about two percent” of new infections, Beyrer says. “We have got to have programmes that are more responsive to the actual realities of transmission – focusing on the tail of the problem is unlikely to have the impacts we’d like to see.”
Rethinking donor priorities
The policy implications of these new findings are both clear and significant, for both Western and developing countries. In 2011, after all, the developing world for the first time spent more on AIDS – 8.6 billion dollars – than did rich donors.
At the 19th International AIDS Conference, held in July here in Washington, the U.S. government, backed by numerous organisations, set a formal goal of an “AIDS-free generation”. Yet according to this new data, such a goal will be impossible without a significantly larger focus on new and existing interventions tailored specifically for those communities experiencing this continued expansion of HIV infections.
While the administration of President Barack Obama, which provides the single largest tranche of AIDS funding in the world, is generally lauded for bringing about an increased focus on MSM-related issues, those who contributed to the Lancet research papers are calling on the international community to increase MSM-related HIV funding five- to tenfold.
The researchers note that, worldwide, just 10 to 20 percent of this community have access to any targeted HIV prevention.
“This biological reality is fundamental to how we need to be thinking about doing prevention, suggesting that just behavioural strategies are not going to be sufficient to curb HIV epidemic among MSM,” says Patrick S. Sullivan, a professor of epidemiology.
“But we also can’t say that we need more research before acting. Using a package of the tools we have today, we estimate that we could avert about a quarter of new HIV infections among MSM in the next 10 years.”
One lesson for national governments and donors is that funding for fighting HIV “needs to be following the epidemic”, says Chris Collins, the director of public policy at the Foundation for AIDS Research here in Washington. “There is clear evidence from around the world that there is a real mismatch between funding for HIV among gay people and their piece of the pie in the overall epidemic.”
Two issues that many advocates have highlighted as having received insufficient international focus have been, first, the sensitisation of public-health practitioners and, second, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trangender) rights more generally. Both of these issues, researchers say, are central to the hope of continuing to make progress against the AIDS epidemic.
“Around the world, health-care professionals are not sufficiently equipped to provide support for individuals who are not heterosexual,” says Kenneth Mayer, a visiting professor of medicine with the Harvard Medical School. “This is a substantial structural problem and is really impeding an effective response to the AIDS epidemic – health-care providers are a big missing piece of the puzzle.”
Health and rights
Ultimately, the single most important structural issue in this regard is almost certainly the continued social and legal hurdles faced by gay people around the world.
This includes outright criminalisation in 30 African and 10 Caribbean countries, a factor that frequently leads governments to justify a lack of investment in prevention while further exacerbating the lack of self-agency experienced by many LGBT people around the world.
Some advocates are increasingly suggesting that this and the broader issue of ensuring an enabling environment be viewed not just as a human right but also as a critical issue of public health.
Chris Beyrer suggests that, to a certain extent, this understanding is being undermined by an international funding priority that feeds billions of dollars into AIDS research but a relatively miniscule amount into strengthening global LGBT rights.
Still, he points out, the issue of HIV overall has largely fallen to the side for the single most important constituency in the anti-AIDS movement – the LGBT community itself.
“If you look at the data, I think our failure right now is with young MSM, those under 18 and those 18 to 26 years old,” Beyrer warns.
“We need a community reinvigoration. People today have strong mobilisation around marriage equality and the issues that really matter to the community, but right now HIV is insufficiently on the short list – and we have to get it back.” | <urn:uuid:83ace2b4-305f-49e4-921f-a66181bd1f80> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/09/fresh-research-on-hiv-urges-new-approach-to-gay-men/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951134 | 1,358 | 2.328125 | 2 |
(Providence, Rhode Island) – Our prayers this week are with the families of those Americans who died in the Mideast violence. It seems insignificant – even petty – to talk about politics at a time like this, but it is true that everything that happens in our world has some sort of political consequence or fallout. These tragic events are no exceptions. Here are some observations for this week:
“Mideast Unrest” – I have been asked numerous times this week whether the murders of the U.S. Ambassador and others in Libya, as well as the general turmoil in the Mideast, will change the outcome of the election. So far, polls don’t show much change. In truth, it is probably too soon to really know. If the violence subsides quickly and things stabilize, it helps the incumbent, President Obama. If things get worse and more chaotic and it looks as if U.S. influence is nil, the advantage swings to Governor Romney. Remember that in 1980 people supported President Carter a long time for his handling of the Iran-hostage crisis, but eventually grew frustrated and weary and turned to Governor Reagan. Of course, that situation had a whole year in which to percolate. This latest crisis comes just over seven weeks before Election Day.
“50 Days” – Monday begins the 50-day countdown to Election Day. President Obama continues to hold a 3.1 percent lead in the Real Clear Politics composite poll. After Mitt Romney got a 3-point bounce from the GOP convention, the Democrats got a bounce-back from their convention. The bad news for Republicans is that Romney seems to be gaining little traction in the nine battleground states. He leads in only one - North Carolina. He is barely behind in Iowa and Virginia and possibly can take both. Still, that’s not enough to open the White House doors. On the other hand, President Obama’s approval rating still peaks around 47 percent. If that’s his ceiling, the remaining undecided voters could swing the election to Romney. But these numbers are about the same as three weeks ago, before the conventions. My conclusion: Right now it’s Obama’s election to lose.
“Poll Discrepancies” – The latest Rasmussen Poll, taken Saturday, has Mitt Romney up by two points; but the latest Gallup Poll from Saturday has Barack Obama up by four points. Yes, there is a margin of error; but what else might explain the differences? Well, a lot has to do with the screening questions. For example, one pollster can simply call three hundred adults and say: “Who will you vote for in November, Obama or Romney?” Other pollsters ask more probing questions, such as “Are you registered to vote this year?” and “Did you vote in the last election?” Such prequalifying questions can identify what are known as “likely” voters, making that poll a more accurate predictor.
“How Much is a Gallon?” – Crude oil hit a four-month high this week at $117 a barrel. Prices at the pump are now over $4.00 per gallon in many places across the U.S. And turmoil in the Mideast often means higher oil and gas prices, too. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the fault of the U.S. President or not. If prices continue to trend higher – just as with unemployment numbers – it’s never good news for the incumbent. What had not been an issue can quickly become one at the 11th hour.
“Rhode Island Voter ID” – I continue to be surprised at how vehement the arguments are from the left that voter ID laws should be overturned. Indeed, the laws are being challenged in many states, except for one. Rhode Island, which is arguably the most liberal state in the nation and is dominated by a strong Democratic party, also passed a voter ID law. It has been used twice this year and is being phased in with full implementation by 2014. The state is issuing free IDs to all who need them; and those who don't yet have their IDs can vote by provisional ballots (subject to later verification). Few if any problems have been reported. It’s interesting that a Democrat-led initiative is working here, but Democrats are fighting similar laws in other states. Maybe they should just copy our version of the law and be done with it. Good political ideas are often “borrowed” from someone else who did it first!
We always welcome your questions, comments and opinions. Just click the comment button at www.MarkCurtisMedia.com. | <urn:uuid:eb9232d7-91fd-46ae-ae21-65ec75c825fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://markcurtismedia.com/blogs/mark-curtis/2012/sep/16/sunday-political-brunch-september-16-2012 | 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 | 0.967359 | 973 | 1.5 | 2 |
Have a plan. And practice it – especially for reality.
That is the top advice for school districts from security and education professionals across Michigan.
A two-month MLive Media group investigation found shortcomings in how the way many K-12 schools conduct state-mandated emergency drills.
Reporters found schools that skipped fire, tornado and lockdown drills, as well as drills that must be done when many students are at recess or on break. They also identified schools that did multiple drills in a day, or too many too late in the year to be of much help.
More than 400 schools were checked in 100 districts, including traditional K-12 schools, charter groups and private schools. One or more of the shortcomings were identified in two out of three public districts and private groups.
But just doing the drills isn’t enough to protect students, professionals say. Here is the best advice from several in the field.
Thomas Mynsberge, of Critical Incident Management.
Staff is the first line of security and must react properly, said Mynsberge, president of the Bay County-based company.
Mynsberge, a former police officer, works with 250 schools around Michigan. He trains teachers, custodians, secretaries and administrators to prepare for violent and other emergency situations. His advice:
• Early each semester, schools should conduct one of two required lockdown drills. Waiting until the end of the year defeats the purpose.
• Priority is on lockdown drills, as students and staff are less familiar with them than fire drills.
• Mynsberge’s plans have varying levels of locking down schools, such as “secure mode” – say when a gunman has robbed a nearby bank - where schools operate normally but with a higher level of security and awareness.
• Create a uniform plan across Michigan to ensure all law enforcement officials and schools know what to do.
“Everybody has to know how to work together immediately,” he said. “A unified response could make Michigan premier in the nation.”
Yvonne Brantley, Michigan State Police community service trooper
Michigan State Police have 23 community service troopers to assist districts with lockdown procedures and other safety measures in case of an active shooter, she said. Her advice:
• Schools should have lockdown procedures for both outside and inside threats.
• Staff members need to practice different scenarios “to learn where mistakes can be made and how they can be corrected,” she said. “Do the drill differently. Contact the police to work with them.”
• Practice what you preach. Brantley said she won’t allow students to let her into a building from a side door, even if they recognize her.
• Teachers must build relationships with students to solve problems before they become bigger. “Kids can stop a whole lot of problems,” Brantley said, adding students can recognize when their peers could become violent.
Rick Crepas, of Emergency School Safety Systems
If training is haphazard staff won’t be able to perform at top level when every second counts, said Crepas, president of the new Kalamazoo company. “Five seconds can make a huge difference,” said the former police officer.
Crepas works with schools in the Kalamazoo area to plan and practice for emergency situations, including both violence and weather. His advice:
• School officials must take seriously the fact violence can happen. While active shooters are rare occurrences, if bullets start flying, “That’s not the time to know that it can.”
• Windows are often weak links. Proper security include protecting schools from weather hazards such as wind, tornadoes and everyday actions such as vandalism.
Kyle Guerrant, Michigan Department of Education school support services director
Guerrant works with schools on preventative efforts to take care of situations before they become violent events.
• Training for staff and students, mental health services, in-school social workers are ways schools can keep a safe environment for students.
• Drills are important not only because of a violent event in the school, but because of possible events near the school. “That’s when you see schools implementing it more often,” Guerrant said.
• Go to Michigan.gov/safeschools for a sample security plan and resources for students, teachers and parents to deal with traumatic events. | <urn:uuid:e8b90597-a12a-4c80-b634-4d88549371ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2013/03/safety_experts_to_schools_prac.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968746 | 916 | 2.0625 | 2 |
[wingide-users] Execute with Output to an Editor Window
support at wingware.com
Tue Jan 9 12:08:33 MST 2007
On Tue, 9 Jan 2007, Michael Foord wrote:
> > The editor doesn't have any facility for hot spots now and there
> > isn't any point<->text position conversion in the API now so
> > you'ld be stuck going through the API to call GTK and Scintilla
> > calls to get the point and convert it to position, etc. If you
> > have access to the Wing sources, there is related code in the
> > src/edit/editor.py file (search for _from_point and point_).
> That *sounds* a bit brittle to me (subject to API changes).
Yes, reaching into the sources means you don't get any
guarantees, although much of this is unlikely to change.
> I was browsing through the sources and couldn't *easily* work out which
> classes these objects were. Thinking about it now, accessing the
> '__class__' and '__module__' attributes of the objects would have been a
> good idea.
Everything is in bin/wingapi.py in your Wing installation (the
source of this file is included w/ the regular install).
Sounds like we need to make that clearer as well...
More information about the wingide-users | <urn:uuid:53e167d6-0143-40ac-bd67-f545eba5afd6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wingware.com/pipermail/wingide-users/2007-January/004011.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933063 | 308 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Atlanta, Georgia – 3/18/2013 – Giant Screen Films and D3D Cinema are on a mission to educate. This is not your typical scholarly pursuit, however, as their goal involves traveling to remote regions and helping to empower and inspire young people in communities affected by a tornado’s destructive power. Luckily, this group brings extraordinary tools to the task at hand, including a nationally-recognized storm-chasing specialist, some of the world’s leading tornado researchers, steel-clad custom weather vehicles and a 10,000 lumen, remarkably rugged DPI projector.
The project is supported by a National Science Foundation grant, awarded to produce a film titled Tornado Alley. The documentary features filmmaker Sean Casey, star of the television series Storm Chasers, and the researchers of VORTEX2, the most ambitious tornado research mission ever undertaken, in their attempts to collect footage and unprecedented data from the heart of a tornado. Enlisting a mobile Doppler radar station, a number of custom-built vehicular juggernauts fortified to withstand remarkable winds and debris, and custom-created weather measurement devices, the group patrols the traditional ‘tornado alley’ of the central U.S. in search of the perfect storm.
More than simply a thrill-seeking pursuit, the captivating chases depicted in the film are critical attempts to discover the dynamics and the habits of such an extreme weather system—secrets that could improve warnings and save lives. After all, the goal of the film is to help audiences understand and appreciate the nature of severe weather and the work of storm chasing scientists. But in developing the film and its educational outreach, producers at Giant Screen Films realized that there was a distinctly human side to the story that needed further attention.
Tornado Alley was produced for and exhibited in large-screen, permanent theaters found in the science centers and museums of metropolitan cities. Basically, in the exact opposite environments of where tornadoes are actually present. These museum partners have the resources and expertise to build on the film’s content, planning special programs, hosting scientists, and creating meaningful learning experiences. But the project team recognized that the communities most affected by severe weather—and perhaps the best places to inspire future generations of scientists—were largely rural, remote, and lacking informal learning environments like science museums. The production team decided to propose an innovating outreach strategy to the National Science Foundation: using a traveling digital 3D projector, the project would deliver the Tornado Alley experience to communities across the heartland.
In late 2011, the NSF-funded Tornado Alley outreach program began visiting remote regions throughout the central U.S. The American Red Cross and FEMA have also helped bring their expertise in safety and preparedness to this program, while other partners including the United Way, Boys and Girls Clubs, and the Missouri Mathematics and Science Coalition have helped identify communities interested in hosting the team. Deborah Raksany,vice president of development and partnerships at Giant Screen Films, explained, “The goal of the outreach program is to create an immersive theater experience, and an intimate, in-person learning experience, in communities that lack traditional educational resources.” Raksany continued, “We hope that the opportunity to connect with people who are passionate about understanding severe weather gives these communities a forum to explore their experiences, and perhaps provides the inspiration for some young people to join the research efforts that will save lives in the future.”
The mobile experience includes one of the fortified vehicles, advanced weather measurement devices, key personnel from the film and a staging-grade TITAN dual-lamp 1080p 3D projectorfrom Digital Projection International (DPI). During these presentations, an abbreviated version of the 3D film is shown, followed by insight and discussion. “At sites that are underserved or in the process of recovery from a weather event, traditional classroom tools—let alone a film projector—are resources that can’t be taken for granted. In those cases, a 3D film is a special addition to the experience,” explained Raksany. Attendees also get hands-on interaction with the mobile Doppler studio and fortified vehicle.
Scott Fauteux, senior operations and support manager for D3D Cinema, is tasked with setting up a functional screening environment in every new location, regardless of the environment and lack of resources available. “DPI’s TITAN projector was chosen for its high brightness, rugged design and compatibility with all types of 3D.” The fact that the TITAN runs on 110v power also expands the flexibility and durability inherent in the display. “Thanks to the TITAN’s brightness, I’ve turned warehouses, outdoor spaces, and even the sides of buildings into functional viewing spaces.” Raksany elaborated on Fauteux’s comments, stating, “The nature of ‘cinema’ is changing rapidly, and we’re excited to realize that it’s now possible to deliver an immersive, inspiring experience almost anywhere with the right tools.”
With support from the National Science Foundation and a network of community partners, the project has held events across the heartland, with screenings at a diversity of venues, from schools and community centers to warehouses and home improvement stores, What each event has in common is the opportunity for learning, exchange, and in some cases, healing. Brian Crouse, executive director of the Missouri Mathematics and Science Coalition and vice president of education for the Missouri Chamber of Commerce, explained, “In places like Joplin, the story doesn’t end with the tornado that ravaged the city. People are rebuilding and strengthening the community in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Programs like the Tornado Alley outreach campaign, that bring inspiration and much-needed learning experiences to our young people, are a meaningful part of that recovery.”
To download accompanying photography, please click here: http://www.digitalprojection.com/news/zips/TornadoAlley_photos_0313.zip
- ENDS -
For further information and story photography, please contact:
Michael Bridwell, Director of Marketing
Digital Projection Inc.
About Digital Projection International
Founded in 1989, Digital Projection International (Digital Projection) has been instrumental in the development and application of Digital Light Processing™ technology by Texas Instruments for projection systems. Digital Projection International introduced the world’s first 3-chip DLP® projector in 1997, and has since delivered expert system engineering and world-class customer services, thus maintaining its position as a digital imaging pioneer.
Digital Projection International’s groundbreaking projection research and development has garnered the admiration of industry professionals around the world. This has earned the company many awards, including two Emmy® Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Digital Projection remains the first and only projector manufacturer to win the coveted award.
Today, Digital Projection International manufactures and distributes an extensive line of ultra high-performance 3-chip and single-chip DLP® projection systems. These projectors are the reference standard for demanding applications such as large-venue, live-event staging, fortune 5000, education, medical and scientific research, command and control, digital cinema, commercial entertainment, worship and elite home cinema. | <urn:uuid:72d359a2-00df-42d5-b04f-c335465ed1a8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://livedesignonline.com/science-film-and-rugged-av-combine-empower-tornado-affected-regions | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931546 | 1,510 | 2.421875 | 2 |
Twitter, the biggest microblogging tool around, decided to change their policy to applications and it’s making it hard to OSS developers create applications that can be as good as the other applications.
First, let me explain what is the problem they are trying to solve, how they are trying to solve and how this will make the life of OSS developers harder.
How things work today?
Today, applications can use the Basic Auth, which send your username and password to Twitter, which checks and, on success, returns your messages, direct messages, post your update and so on. The flaw in this is that someone could be “listening” to your communication and easily guess your username and password. Or you computer could get hacked, attackers could just retrieve the file with your password. And then, one day, you wake up and see some of your updates saying, for example “Buy viagra” or “I liek cocks”; not good.
Solving the password stolen problem with OAuth
To solve the problem of someone stealing your password, Twitter decided to embrace OAuth for two reasons: First, you store an authorization token on your side and not your password, so if you your computer gets hacked, they still don’t have your password. Second, if one application misbehaves, you can remove its permission to post and you should be all good.
On top of that, for applications that are very very naughty, they can completely revoke your application access. Why? The logic behind it is that spammers don’t really care if their spammy applications are misbehaving, as long as they post spam all the day. It also makes the spammers life harder by forcing them to create accounts manually (which they do already) and applications manually, or a group of fake accounts could suddenly stop working ’cause one single application was revoked.
And where is the problem?
Basically, to avoid someone to listen to your communication and use your authorization token, the application must have an identification and a secret token, which is used to encrypt the authentication token and message signature. So, even if your computer is hacked and their stole your authorization token, they still can’t use it ’cause they don’t have the application secret and, that way, can’t sign the messages as being that application.
So Twitter said to all developers today: “Never share your keys! I”
And here lies the problem for open source developers: We were forced to chose amongst two options:
- First, we could follow Twitters idea and not share the application keys with the application itself. For a user to be able to use the application, then, they would have to register they application themselves, with another name. For an experienced user, it may be ok, but for users that simply want to read new messages, going all the way of registering an application, knowing if it is a desktop or a browser app, provide some URL and so on it’s too damn complicated. Most users would simply forget about, and think that their friend’s application, which is closed source, is way better.
- Second, we ignore Twitter’s recommendation and distribute our application with our keys. In this case, we can either suffer from someone taking those keys and spamming Twitter, thus revoking the application secret and letting our users without any access till we provide a new secret; greately reducing our users protection ’cause their authorization tokens can be easily exploited in case their computers get hacked; or, simply, Twitter decides that since we are providing our keys publicly, and that’s bad for the ecosystem (because of the two previous maybes) and revokes the application anyway.
In summary: Either we give applications with a terrible user experience or we have to bite the bullet and give our users an application with incredible reduced security for them (or that, one day, will simply stop working even if the community of users around it behaves nicely, just because someone took the keys and abused the system.)
Twitter came with a solution for open source applications that, basically, mimics the application registration thing: The application is marked by them as open source, so we would have access to another URL, which basically registers a new application with your application as template, gets a new application secret and identification, returns to you and then you keep using that from now on. So, in case the secret is hacked, only one application is compromised and only one application is blocked. But that won’t be available on the day they will kill the basic authorization. So there will be a gap where open source applications and their users will be completely vulnerable to attacks.
Personally, I hate this instance from them. With Mitter, I always aimed for a simple application that would be easy to use and secure, whenever possible. Their current position forces me to chose one in favour of the other. | <urn:uuid:a831d4ca-247d-4e90-9868-0aef176f43c9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://juliobiason.net/2010/08/06/twitter-making-it-hard-to-use-oss-apps-with-their-api/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947252 | 1,024 | 2.40625 | 2 |
Four years ago, the NHGRI launched an initiative to fund innovative research aimed at sequencing the entire human genome for $1,000. This would represent a tremendous savings from the current price of several hundred thousand dollars. Hagan Bayley, Ph.D., an expert in membrane protein engineering at the University of Oxford in U.K., was one of the grant recipients.
Dr. Bayley founded Oxford NanoLabs in 2005 to develop a technology that identifies individual molecules using nanopores. One use of this platform is to detect nucleotides as DNA strands are pulled through nanopores. This technology also can be applied to rapid, cost-effective, and highly sensitive kits for diagnosing human diseases and bioterrorism agents.
In May 2008, the company changed its name to Oxford Nanopore Technologies. “When we set the company up three years ago, many people did not know what a nanopore was,” says Spike Willcocks, Ph.D., director of business development. Now the potential of nanopores, which form naturally in some proteins, has become better known to people working in DNA sequencing and genomics.
The first reference human genome was sequenced in 2003 by the Sanger chain termination method. This complex process requires DNA amplification, fluorescent tags, and capillary electrophoresis to identify bases. The fixed costs of the labor, reagents, and analytical instruments limit the usefulness of this method for screening large numbers of people to make personalized medicine affordable.
Protein nanopores are an alternative to all that. A few thousand nanopores running in parallel would scale up the nanopore sequencing process, eliminating the costs of reagents and complex steps, according to Dr. Willcocks, thereby bringing the $1,000 price tag closer to reality.
Leveraging the Nanopore Concept
Protein nanopores occur naturally in proteins secreted by bacteria, such as alpha-hemolysin made by Staphylococcus. Dr. Bayley’s academic laboratory investigates how alpha-hemolysin lodges in a cell membrane, where it forms a barrel-shaped nanotube made up of intertwining polypeptide strands. Bacteria make nanopores to punch holes in cell membranes to obtain nutrients from or secrete toxins into cells. The hole passing through the middle of the tube is 1 to 2 nanometers in diameter. Once formed, the nanopores are remarkably stable and withstand high heat.
Dr. Bayley’s group discovered genetic and chemical ways to alter nanopore proteins to bind and interact with molecules without destroying the nanopores. “Their specificity is amazing,” Dr. Willcocks states. For example, nanopores can be designed to tell the difference between the right- and left-hand forms of thalidomide and ibuprofen.
Dr. Bayley applies the technology to recognize individual DNA bases by changes in electrical current as they pass through the opening of the nanopore and transiently bind to the inner surface. Because DNA bases are negatively charged, they can be electrophoretically driven through the nanopore structure. As they pass through, the bases block the flow of ionic charges, resulting in changes in electrical conductance. Each base generates different electrical currents, providing “a highly exquisite measurement of biological molecules,” Dr. Willcocks comments.
Potentially, the linear sequence of DNA can be measured from the sequential changes in conductance as a DNA strand moves through a nanopore. This type of single-molecule sequencing is reagent-free and rapid. “If you can move from chemical-based measurements to physical-based measurements, you can greatly reduce costs,” Dr. Willcocks reports.
The potential advantage of nanopores is that they can provide measurement of DNA at the molecular level without the time and cost of reagents, amplification, and labeling. The only processing step needed is the extraction of pure DNA from biological samples, and several companies sell kits for doing this.
DNA, however, moves naturally through nanopores incredibly fast—one million bases per second. Consequently, the resolution is poor, and single bases cannot be detected. Scientists at Oxford Nanopore Technologies are working to overcome this problem by using exonucleases bound to nanopores to slow the flow of DNA and better identify the four bases in DNA.
Exonucleases chop DNA into individual bases. When coupled with nanopores, exonucleases “can grab DNA and clip off one base at a time before passing through the detector,” Dr. Willcocks explains. Integrating exonucleases into nanopores reduces the flow to a rate of 10 to 100 bases per second. So far, scientists at the company have successfully coupled exonucleases to protein nanopores. “No one else has done this to date,” according to Dr. Willcocks.
Although using exonnucleases optimizes base detection, a single nanopore would be much too slow for sequencing work. So the research team is creating arrays of nanopores that work in parallel to detect thousands of bases per second. They place protein nanopores in lipid bilayers, set in individual microwells on a silicon chip, with electrodes placed across the bilayer. The technology has been scaled up to arrays containing more than 100 microwells running in parallel. “In theory, we should be able to combine thousands of nanopores together in a powerful platform,” Dr. Willcocks points out.
The same nanopore technology can be applied to the highly sensitive detection of a wide range of molecules including infectious agents and biomarkers for disease. Oxford Nanopore Technologies is in the early stage of developing a hand-held device to rapidly test for influenza including the lethal H5N1 strain. The nanopores are engineered to bind a complementary strand of RNA from the influenza virus, and the binding site can be designed to specifically detect particular mutants.
Another nanoprobe is being designed for Alzheimer’s disease, based on a newly discovered biomarker associated with neurodegeneration. In addition, the company received funding from the U.K. government to develop an anthrax detection kit based on DNA or protein biomarkers. “The nanopore platform can be readily applied to many different biomarkers,” notes Dr. Willcocks. | <urn:uuid:7eda083f-46c3-47e5-a3c6-2932b5b9b218> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.genengnews.com/gen-articles/company-touts-its-novel-sequencing-technique/2548/?kwrd=Nanotechnology | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930003 | 1,303 | 3.28125 | 3 |
The Kinect Fusion project turns Microsoft's body-sensing controller into a fully-functional 3D scanner for objects or environments.
Microsoft has officially gone public with its Kinect Fusion add-on for the Kinect for Windows platform: a system which allows users to easily and quickly create 3D models of real-world objects or environments.
Originally developed as part of an internal research project at the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, Kinect Fusion was never intended for public dissemination. When details of the software leaked out, however, the community of Kinect for Windows developers demanded access - and Microsoft promised that access at its BUILD 2012 conference last week.
Now, Chris White, senior programme manager for Kinect for Windows, has detailed exactly what Kinect Fusion can and can't do ahead of its inclusion in the Kinect software development kit (SDK) package.
Put simply, Kinect Fusion is a streaming system for the depth data received by the Kinect's 3D camera system. As the data is streamed from the cameras, it's combined into a 3D representation of an object or environment - and the longer the object is placed in front of the camera, the more accurate the model becomes.
'Kinect Fusion takes the incoming depth data from the Kinect for Windows sensor and uses the sequence of frames to build a highly detailed 3-D map of objects or environments,
' White explains in a blog post
on the subject. 'The tool then averages the readings over hundreds or thousands of frames to achieve more detail than would be possible from just one reading.
'This allows Kinect Fusion to gather and incorporate data not viewable from any single view point. Among other things, it enables 3-D object model reconstruction, 3-D augmented reality, and 3-D measurements. You can imagine the multitude of business scenarios where these would be useful, including 3-D printing, industrial design, body scanning, augmented reality, and gaming.
While White has not yet indicated a formal date for the inclusion of Kinect Fusion in the Kinect for Windows SDK, he has indicated that it will be available in a future release. | <urn:uuid:3ec2e95f-17ab-41a7-8acb-55c6a2f2b161> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/11/06/microsoft-kinect-fusion/1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921389 | 423 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Have you ever eaten something that tasted a little funny and then felt sick a couple of hours later? Maybe you had diarrhea or you threw up. If so, it sounds like you're familiar with food poisoning.
What Is Food Poisoning?
Food poisoning is caused by bacteria and, sometimes, viruses or other germs. They can get into the food we eat or the liquids we drink. We can't taste, smell, or see these germs (at least not without a microscope). But even though they're tiny, they can have a powerful effect on the body.
Once the germs that cause food poisoning get into our systems, some of them release toxins. These toxins are poisons (the reason for the name "food poisoning"), and they can give a person diarrhea and vomiting.
Most of the time, doctors use "food poisoning" to describe an illness that comes on quickly after eating contaminated food. People often get diarrhea or start throwing up within a few hours after being infected. The good news is, food poisoning usually goes away quickly too. Most people recover in a couple of days with no lasting complications.
In a few cases, food poisoning can be severe enough to require a visit to the doctor or hospital. When people need medical treatment for food poisoning, it's often because of dehydration. Getting dehydrated is the most common serious complication of food poisoning.
What Causes Food Poisoning?
When people eat or drink something that's contaminated with germs, they can get sick with food poisoning. Often, people get food poisoning from animal-based foods — like meat, poultry, eggs, dairy products, and seafood. But unwashed fruits, vegetables, and other raw foods also can get contaminated and make people sick. Even water can cause food poisoning.
Foods and liquids can be contaminated at lots of different points in the food preparation, storage, and handling process. For example:
Water that is used to grow food can become infected with animal or human feces (poop).
Meat or poultry may come into contact with infectious microorganisms during processing or shipping.
Foods can become infected with bacteria if they're stored at the wrong temperature or kept too long.
Cooks or other food handlers can contaminate foods if they don't wash their hands properly or they use unclean utensils or cutting boards when preparing food.
People with health conditions (like chronic kidney disease) or weakened immune systems are more at risk of getting ill from food poisoning than people who are in good health.
A number of microorganisms can cause food poisoning. Some of the most common culprits are:
Salmonella.Salmonella bacteria are the leading cause of food poisoning in the United States. These bacteria usually get into foods when they come into contact with animal feces. The main causes of salmonella poisoning are eating dairy products, undercooked meat, and fresh produce that hasn't been washed well.
E. coli (Escherichia coli).E. coli bacteria, too, typically get into food or water when they come into contact with animal feces. Eating undercooked ground beef is the most common reason why people in the United States get E. coli poisoning.
Listeria. These bacteria are mostly found in unpasteurized dairy products, smoked seafood, and processed meats like hot dogs and luncheon meats. Listeria bacteria also can contaminate fruits and vegetables, although that's less common.
Campylobacter. These bacteria most commonly infect meat, poultry, and unpasteurized milk. Campylobacter also can contaminate water. As with other kinds of bacteria, these usually get into foods through contact with infected animal feces.
Staphylococcus aureus. These bacteria can be found in meats, prepared salads, and foods made with contaminated dairy products. S aureus bacteria can spread through hand contact, sneezing, or coughing. That means the infection can be transmitted by people who prepare or handle food.
Shigella. Shigella bacteria can infect seafood or raw fruits and vegetables. Most of the time the bacteria are spread when people who prepare or handle food don't wash their hands properly after using the bathroom.
Hepatitis A. People mostly get this virus from eating raw shellfish or foods that have been handled by someone who is infected. It can be hard to pinpoint the source of an infection because people may not get sick for 15 to 50 days afterward.
Noroviruses. These viruses usually contaminate food that's been prepared by an infected handler.
How food poisoning shows up depends on the germ that caused it. Sometimes a person will start to feel sick within an hour or two of eating or drinking contaminated food or liquid. Other times, symptoms may not appear for a number of weeks. In most cases, symptoms will clear up within 1 to 10 days.
Most of the time, someone with food poisoning will notice:
nausea (feeling sick)
abdominal pain and cramps
headache and overall weakness
In rare cases, food poisoning can make someone feel dizzy, have blurry vision, or notice tingling in the arms. In very rare cases, the weakness that sometimes goes along with food poisoning will cause trouble breathing.
Certain types of infectious microorganisms, including Listeria and E. coli, can cause potentially dangerous heart, kidney, and bleeding problems.
When Should I Call a Doctor?
Most cases of food poisoning don't require medical attention, but some do. The most common serious problem that happens with food poisoning is dehydration. If you're healthy, you're not likely to get dehydrated as long as you drink enough fluids to replace what you've lost through throwing up or diarrhea.
Call a doctor if you have any of these problems:
vomiting that goes on for more than 12 hours
diarrhea with a fever higher than 101°F (38.3°C)
severe abdominal pain that doesn't go away after a bowel movement
bloody feces (diarrhea or regular poop) or bloody vomit
bowel movements that are black or maroon in color
a racing or pounding heart
You'll also want to let your mom or dad know if you start having signs of dehydration. They may want to call the doctor. Signs of dehydration include:
making little or no pee
lightheadedness or weakness
If you've recently been to a foreign country and start having diarrhea or other stomach problems, it's also a good idea to call your doctor.
Food poisoning (especially dehydration) can be more serious for people with weakened immune systems or health conditions. If you have a health condition like kidney problems or sickle cell disease, call your doctor as soon as you notice signs that could be food poisoning. Pregnant women should also let their doctors know if they get food poisoning as some germs can affect the unborn child.
A doctor will ask about what you have eaten recently, how long you've been sick, and what kinds of problems you're having. The doctor will also examine you.
In some cases, doctors may take a sample of your blood, stool, or urine and send it to a lab for analysis. This will help the doctor find out which microorganism is causing the illness.
Most of the time, food poisoning runs its course and people get better on their own. Occasionally, though, doctors prescribe antibiotics to treat more severe types of bacterial food poisoning. If dehydration is severe, some people may need to be treated in a hospital with intravenous (IV) fluids.
Taking Care of Food Poisoning at Home
Food poisoning usually goes away on its own in a few days. You can do a few things to take care of yourself:
Get plenty of rest.
Drink fluids to protect against dehydration. Electrolyte solutions work, but anything except milk or caffeinated beverages will do.
Take small, frequent sips to make it easier to keep the fluids down.
Avoid solid foods and dairy products until any diarrhea has stopped.
Avoid over-the-counter anti-diarrhea medications. They can make the symptoms of food poisoning last longer.
When diarrhea and vomiting have stopped, eat small, bland, low-fat meals for a few days so you won't further upset your stomach.
If your symptoms become serious or you start noticing signs of dehydration, contact your doctor.
To reduce your risk of food poisoning, follow these tips:
Wash your hands thoroughly and often, especially after using the bathroom, before touching food, and after touching raw food. Use soap and warm water and scrub for at least 15 seconds.
Clean all utensils, cutting boards, and surfaces that you use to prepare food with hot, soapy water.
Don't drink unpasteurized milk or eat food that contains unpasteurized milk.
Wash all raw vegetables and fruits that you can't peel yourself.
Keep raw foods (especially meat, poultry, and seafood) away from other foods until they're cooked.
Use perishable food or any food with an expiration date as soon as possible.
Cook all food from animal sources to a safe internal temperature. For ground beef and pork, this means at least 160°F (71°C). For solid cuts of meat, the safe temperature is 145°F. For chicken and turkey (ground and whole), it's at least 165°F (74°C). Cook chicken eggs until the yolk is firm. Fish generally is safe to eat once it reaches a temperature of 145°F (63°C).
Refrigerate leftovers quickly, preferably in containers with lids that can be snapped tightly shut.
Defrost foods in the refrigerator, a microwave, or cold water. Food should never be thawed at room temperature.
If food is past its expiration date, tastes funny, or smells strange, don't eat it. Remember:"When in doubt, throw it out."
If you're pregnant, avoid all raw or undercooked meat or seafood, smoked seafood, raw eggs and products that might contain raw eggs, soft cheeses, unpasteurized milk and juice, patés, prepared salads, luncheon meats, and hot dogs.
Don't drink water from streams or untreated wells.
If you get sick with food poisoning, it's a good idea to get in touch with your local health department. If they can pinpoint what caused the condition, they may be able to stop a potential outbreak and keep others from getting sick as well. | <urn:uuid:a5428d2e-4db0-496a-aa7b-53a6d1775ae9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kidshealth.org/PageManager.jsp?lic=60&dn=Nemours&article_set=84626&cat_id=20177 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950337 | 2,156 | 3.875 | 4 |
May 22, 1942
The headings in this speech did not form part of the original text.
Quite recently, a bishop wrote a letter to a great daily newspaper. His theme was the importance of doing justice to the workers. His belief, apparently, was that the workers are those who work with their hands. He sought to divide the people of Australia into classes. He was obviously suffering from what has for years seemed to me to be our greatest political disease – the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?
Now, the last thing that I would want to do is to commence or take part in a false war of this kind. In a country like Australia the class war must always be a false war. But if we are to talk of classes, then the time has come to say something of the forgotten class – the middle class – those people who are constantly in danger of being ground between the upper and the nether millstones of the false war; the middle class who, properly regarded represent the backbone of this country.
Defining the Middle Class
We do not have classes here as in England, and therefore the terms do not mean the same; so I must define what I mean when I use the expression "middle class."
Let me first define it by exclusion. I exclude at one end of the scale the rich and powerful: those who control great funds and enterprises, and are as a rule able to protect themselves – though it must be said that in a political sense they have as a rule shown neither comprehension nor competence. But I exclude them because, in most material difficulties, the rich can look after themselves.
I exclude at the other end of the scale the mass of unskilled people, almost invariably well-organised, and with their wages and conditions safeguarded by popular law. What I am excluding them from is my definition of the middle class. We cannot exclude them from problems of social progress, for one of the prime objects of modern social and political policy is to give them a proper measure of security, and provide the conditions which will enable them to acquire skill and knowledge and individuality.
These exclusions being made, I include the intervening range – the kind of people I myself represent in Parliament – salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on. These are, in the political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganised and unself-conscious. They are envied by those whose benefits are largely obtained by taxing them. They are not rich enough to have individual power. They are taken for granted by each political party in turn. They are not sufficiently lacking in individualism to be organised for what in these days we call "pressure politics." And yet, as I have said, they are the backbone of the nation.
The Historic Place of the Middle Class
The communist has always hated what he calls the "bourgeoisie", because he sees clearly the existence of one has kept British countries from revolution, while the substantial absence of one in feudal France at the end of the eighteenth century and in Tsarist Russia at the end of the last war made revolution easy and indeed inevitable.
You may say to me, "Why bring this matter up at this stage when we are fighting a war, the result of which we are all equally concerned?" My answer is that I am bringing it up because under the pressure of war we may, if we are not careful – if we are not as thoughtful as the times will permit us to be – inflict a fatal injury upon our own backbone.
In point of political, industrial and social theory and practice, there are great delays in time of war. But there are also great accelerations. We must watch each, remembering always that whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not, the foundations of whatever new order is to come after the war are inevitably being laid down now. We cannot go wrong right up to the peace treaty and expect suddenly thereafter to go right.
Now, what is the value of this middle class, so defined and described?
First, it has a "stake in the country". It has responsibility for homes – homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual. I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.
I have mentioned homes material, homes human and homes spiritual. Let me take them in order. What do I mean by "homes material"?
The material home represents the concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving "for a home of our own." Your advanced socialist may rave against private property even while he acquires it; but one of the best instincts in us is that which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours; to which we can withdraw, in which we can be among our friends, into which no stranger may come against our will.
If you consider it, you will see that if, as in the old saying, "the Englishman’s home is his castle", it is this very fact that leads on to the conclusion that he who seeks to violate that law by violating the soil of England must be repelled and defeated.
National patriotism, in other words, inevitably springs from the instinct to defend and preserve our own homes.
Then we have homes human. A great house, full of loneliness, is not a home. "Stone walls do not a prison make", nor do they make a house. They may equally make a stable or a piggery. Brick walls, dormer windows and central heating need not make more than a hotel. My home is where my wife and children are. The instinct to be with them is the great instinct of civilised man; the instinct to give them a chance in life – to make them not leaners but lifters – is a noble instinct.
If Scotland has made a great contribution to the theory and practice of education, it is because of the tradition of Scottish homes. The Scottish ploughman, walking behind his team, cons ways and means of making his son a farmer, and so he sends him to the village school. The Scottish farmer ponders upon the future of his son, and sees it most assured not by the inheritance of money but by the acquisition of that knowledge which will give him power; and so the sons of many Scottish farmers find their way to Edinburgh and a university degree.
The great question is, "How can I my son to help society?" Not, as we have so frequently thought, "How can I qualify society to help my son?" If human homes are to fulfil their destiny, then we must have frugality and saving for education and progress.
And finally, we have homes spiritual. This is a notion which finds its simplest and most moving expression in "The Cotter’s Saturday Night" of Burns. Human nature is at its greatest when it combines dependence upon God with independence of man.
We offer no affront – on the contrary we have nothing but the warmest human compassion – toward those whom fate has compelled to live upon the bounty of the State, when we say that the greatest element in a strong people is a fierce independence of spirit. This is the only real freedom, and it has as its corollary a brave acceptance of unclouded individual responsibility. The moment a man seeks moral and intellectual refuge in the emotions of a crowd, he ceases to be a human being and becomes a cipher. The home spiritual so understood is not produced by lassitude or by dependence; it is produced by self-sacrifice, by frugality and saving.
In a war, as indeed at most times, we become the ready victims of phrases. We speak glibly of of many things without pausing to consider what they signify. We speak of "financial power", forgetting that the financial power of 1942 is based upon the savings of generations which have preceded it. We speak of "morale" as if it were a quality induced from without – created by others for our benefit – when in truth there can be no national morale which is not based upon the individual courage of men and women. We speak of "man power" as if it were a mere matter of arithmetic: as if it were made up of a multiplication of men and muscles without spirit.
Second, the middle class, more than any other, provides the intelligent ambition which is the motive power of human progress. The idea entertained by many people that, in a well-constituted world, we shall all live on the State is the quintessence of madness, for what is the State but us? We collectively must provide what we individually receive.
The great vice of democracy – a vice which is exacting a bitter retribution from it at this moment – is that for a generation we have been busy getting ourselves on to the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the list of contributors, as if somewhere there was somebody else’s wealth and somebody else’s effort on which we could thrive.
To discourage ambition, to envy success, to have achieved superiority, to distrust independent thought, to sneer at and impute false motives to public service – these are the maladies of modern democracy, and of Australian democracy in particular. Yet ambition, effort, thinking, and readiness to serve are not only the design and objectives of self-government but are the essential conditions of its success. If this is not so, then we had better put back the clock, and search for a benevolent autocracy once more.
Where do we find these great elements most commonly? Among the defensive and comfortable rich, among the unthinking and unskilled mass, or among what I have called the "middle class"?
Third, the middle class provides more than any other other the intellectual life which marks us off from the beast; the life which finds room for literature, for the arts, for science, for medicine and the law.
Consider the case of literature and art. Could these survive as a department of State? Are we to publish our poets according to their political colour? Is the State to decree surrealism because surrealism gets a heavy vote in a key electorate? The truth is that no great book was ever written and no great picture ever painted by the clock or according to civil service rules. These are the things done by man, not men. You cannot regiment them. They require opportunity, and sometimes leisure. The artist, if he is to live, must have a buyer; the writer an audience. He find them among frugal people to whom the margin above bare living means a chance to reach out a little towards that heaven which is just beyond our grasp. It has always seemed to me, for example, that an artist is better helped by the man who sacrifices something to buy a picture he loves than by a rich patron who follows the fashion.
Fourth, this middle class maintains and fills the higher schools and universities, and so feeds the lamp of learning.
What are schools for? To train people for examinations, to enable people to comply with the law, or to produce developed men and women?
Are the universities mere technical schools, or have they as one of their functions the preservation of pure learning, bringing in its train not merely riches for the imagination but a comparative sense for the mind, and leading to what we need so badly – the recognition of values which are other than pecuniary?
One of the great blots on our modern living is the cult of false values, a repeated application of the test of money, notoriety, applause. A world in which a comedian or a beautiful half-wit on the screen can be paid fabulous sums, whilst scientific researchers and discoverers can suffer neglect and starvation, is a world which needs to have its sense of values violently set right.
The Thriving of the Thrifty
Now, have we realised and recognised these things, or is most of our policy designed to discourage or penalise thrift, to encourage dependence on the State, to bring about a dull equality on a fantastic idea that all men are equal in mind and needs and deserts: to level down by taking the mountains out of the landscape, to weigh men according to their political organisations and power – as votes and not as human beings? These are formidable questions, and we cannot escape from answering them if there is really to be a new order for the world.
I have been actively engaged in politics for fourteen years in the State of Victoria and in the Commonwealth of Australia. In that period I cannot readily recall many occasions upon which any policy was pursued which was designed to help the thrifty, to encourage independence, to recognise the divine and valuable variations of men’s minds. On the contrary, there have been many instances in which the votes of the thriftless have been used to defeat the thrifty. On occasions of emergency, as in the depression and during the present war, we have hastened to make it clear that the provision made by man for his own retirement and old age is not half as sacrosanct as the provision the State would have made for him if he had never saved at all.
We have talked of income from savings as if it possessed a somewhat discreditable character. We have taxed it more and more heavily. We have spoken slightingly of the earning of interest at the very moment when we have advocated new pensions and social schemes. I have myself heard a minister of power and influence declare that no deprivation is suffered by a man if he still has the means to fill his stomach, clothe his body and keep a roof over his head. And yet the truth is, as I have endeavoured to show, that frugal people who strive for and obtain the margin above these materially necessary things are the whole foundation of a really active and developing national life.
The case for the middle class is the case for a dynamic democracy as against the stagnant one. Stagnant waters are level, and in them the scum rises. Active waters are never level: they toss and tumble and have crests and troughs; but the scientists tell us that they purify themselves in a few hundred yards.
That we are all, as human souls, of like value cannot be denied. That each of us should have his chance is and must be the great objective of political and social policy. But to say that the industrious and intelligent son of self-sacrificing and saving and forward-looking parents has the same social deserts and even material needs as the dull offspring of stupid and improvident parents is absurd.
If the motto is to be "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will die, and if it chances you don’t die, the State will look after you; but if you don’t eat, drink and be merry and save, we shall take your savings from you", then the whole business of life would become foundationless.
Towards Individual Enterprise or Slavery
Are you looking forward to a breed of men after the war who will have become boneless wonders? Leaners grow flabby; lifters grow muscles. Men without ambition readily become slaves. Indeed, there is much more in slavery in Australia than most people imagine. How many hundreds of thousands of us are slaves to greed, to fear, to newspapers, to public opinion – represented by the accumulated views of our neighbours! Landless men smell the vapours of the street corner. Landed men smell the brown earth, and plant their feet upon it and know that it is good.
To all of this many of my friends will retort, "Ah that’s all very well, but when this war is over the levellers will have won the day." My answer is that, on the contrary, men will come out of this war as gloriously unequal in many things as when they entered it. Much wealth will have been destroyed; inherited riches will be suspect; a fellowship of suffering, if we really experience it, will have opened many hearts and perhaps closed many mouths. Many great edifices will have fallen, and we shall be able to study foundations as never before, because war will have exposed them.
But I do not believe that we shall come out into the overlordship of an all-powerful State on whose benevolence we shall live, spineless and effortless – a State which will dole out bread and ideas with neatly regulated accuracy; where we shall all have our dividend without subscribing our capital; where the Government, that almost deity, will nurse us and rear us and maintain us and pension us and bury us; where we shall all be civil servants, and all presumably, since we are equal, heads of departments.
If the new world is to be a world of men, we must be not pallid and bloodless ghosts, but a community of people whose motto shall be, "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." Individual enterprise must drive us forward. That does not mean we are to return to the old and selfish notions of laissez-faire. The functions of the State will be much more than merely keeping the ring within which the competitors will fight. Our social and industrial laws will be increased. There will be more law, not less; more control, not less.
But what really happens to us will depend on how many people we have who are of the great and sober and dynamic middle-class – the strivers, the planners, the ambitious ones. We shall destroy them at our peril. | <urn:uuid:07810a1b-5d9b-4ea4-9801-f4e5ebe93593> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://australianpolitics.com/political-parties/liberal/the-forgotten-people-robert-menzies-1942-speech | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971561 | 3,733 | 2.59375 | 3 |
The Muslim sacred month of Ramadan has begun, celebrating the revelation of Qur'an to the Prophet Muhammad. At such a time, I am especially grateful to TCS for allowing me space to develop my thoughts on the trope of the "Islamic Reformation." This concept is typically put forward as a brusque demand by ignorant Islamophobes, who claim a moral flaw exists within the faith itself, rather than an intellectual weakness afflicting the minds of some of its adherents. I also fear it has lately been adopted as a palliative by Muslim intellectuals too willing to answer non-Muslim criticisms in a non-Muslim idiom.
I have therefore, in prior TCS columns, offered a critical examination of Luther, the exemplar of the Protestant Reformation most typically held out as a model for emulation by modern Muslims, as well as the Reformation paradigm in general (see here, here and here). In the most recent of these commentaries, I noted that I was confronted by an American incensed that I would compare Luther to Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi cult, the state religion in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism, the most rigid, exclusionary, violent and repressive Islamic sect known in modern times, inspires the atrocities of Osama bin Laden as well as the beheadings ordered by the "shaykh of slaughter" in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The same American who reproached me over Luther was also irritated to find John Calvin compared with Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab in my work, which was no surprise considering how frequently we Americans are taught and retold that Calvin, the 16th century theocrat of Geneva, was somehow the father of our liberties. (It was perhaps appropriate, in a way, that my interlocutor was an attorney, and that this unpleasant experience came about during a legal proceeding having to do with Wahhabi depredations in America.) But a list of Calvin's prohibitions and punishments immediately calls to mind life under the religious authority of the Wahhabis in the Saudi kingdom. Calvin forbade music, oversaw the beheading of children for trivial abuse of their parents, and, in multiple instances, decreed death by stoning for adultery. Those who refer to Saudi Islam as medieval are wrong; they would better refer to Saudis as living under Reformation conditions.
The biography of Calvin also reminds us of another personality of the Protestant Reformation, who, although he died as a heretic, offers a stirring example for Muslims today. That individual was a theologian and medical researcher named Miquel Servet (1509/11-1553).
I first encountered the name of Miquel Servet 25 years ago. I was young, and was then still a man of the radical left. I spent a great deal of time in those years in Barcelona, the sentimental capital of the European revolutionary labor movement. From my first visit, I noticed a plenitude of "squares, streets, and delightful parks" (in the phrase of the Valencian neo-troubador Ausias March), named for Miquel Servet. Soon I learned that Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the official capital, considers him among its great civic heroes. I found Servet depicted as "a martyr for freedom" on an Art Nouveau poster produced by Catalan libertarians -- that is, members of the anarchist labor movement for which the city and region are justifiably famous.
Miquel Servet is a Reformation figure that should appeal to Muslims who want their religion freed from obscurantism, dogmatism, and oppression. His views reflect both intellectual independence and a curious commonality with some essential elements of Islam, and especially of Sufism, or Islamic spirituality. Born in a small village near Zaragoza, in Aragon, Servet was impelled as a youth to doubt the Christian doctrine of the trinity, which he saw as an impediment to the intellectual conversion of Jews and Muslims to the faith of Jesus (see biography at www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/michaelservetus.html). He seems to have excluded from his consideration the Spanish practice of effectively compelling the children of Isaac and Ismail to accept Christianity by force, and to have perceived that the complicated trinitarian system, which both Jews and Muslims reject, erected a mental barrier between the Christians and the others that could not easily be overcome. Above all, however, he was disturbed to find the idea of a three-in-one godhead absent from the Bible. But it is also of interest that both Servet and his great Catalan predecessor, Raimon Llull, on whom I previously wrote in TCS, were influenced by Islamic thought even as they sought to convert Muslims.
Servet went on to study law, to rebel against the wealth of the Roman church, to join in the tumult of theological controversy then common in Europe, and to publish a work titled On the Errors of the Trinity. He journeyed from Spain to Provence; then from Spain to Bologna, where he broke away and traveled to Basel, a Protestant redoubt. However, it soon became clear that the antitrinitarian views of Miquel Servet were as discomfiting to the new orthodoxy of Protestant reform as to the Catholic order. Simultaneously, he was made unwelcome in communities ruled by the former, and was actively sought for "questioning," i.e. torture, by the Spanish Inquisition. The latter institution sent Servet's own brother, a priest, to try to convince him to return to Spain, to certain death. The now-hunted dissenter adopted a false name, that of "Michel de Villeneuve," and studied mathematics and medicine in Paris, where he met the young Calvin in the early 1530s. Calvin came secretly to Paris to argue religion with Servet, but the latter, fearing exposure, failed to appear. Servet wrote that, like Jonah, he dreamed of escape as a sailor, or by coming to the New World.
He was nothing if not versatile in his capacity for personal reinvention, at least when it came to supporting himself. He labored as an editor in a French printing house, and in the work of publishing Ptolemy, the classic of geography, he became an expert and lecturer on that subject. Employment as an editor of the Bible helped him refine his theological views. After assisting in the production of medical volumes, he returned to surgical study. It was thus that he was credited with the first publication describing the role of the lungs in delivering oxygen to the bloodstream.
Some 15 years passed after Servet's acquaintance with Calvin, and, from Geneva, the latter became the foremost representative of the Protestant Reformation. Servet, living in France, initiated a clandestine correspondence with Calvin. Their relationship soon turned to aggravation and insult, and Servet printed some letters to Calvin in his key work, The Restoration of Christianity. Calvin denounced Servet to the Inquisition, and Servet apparently fled toward northern Italy, where he counted on finding friends and supporters. But he stopped in Geneva, and was recognized at a church service, and arrested. He was tried for heresy, based on his criticism of trinitarianism and his opposition to the baptism of children, which he considered a pagan ritual reminiscent of infant sacrifice in ancient society.
He was ordered burned at the stake by the Genevan authorities. Calvin recommended his beheading, as an act of mercy, but was rebuffed. All copies of The Restoration of Christianity were ordered destroyed; only three survived. Perishing in the flames, Servet was heard to cry out, "O Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have pity on me!" That is, he did not call upon Jesus as "the Eternal Son;" to him Jesus was a son of God as all humans are children of the creator.
Some Muslims will read this story and be tempted to imagine that Servet had secretly adopted Islam: the echoes of the faith of Muhammad are strong in Servet's arguments. Muslims respect, and Sufis love Jesus as a prophet, yet Muslims reject the claim that he had a divine nature. Repudiation of the trinity became the foundation of Unitarian Christianity, but denial of Jesus's status as God's son is also the most important distinction between Christianity and Islam. Servet's theology encompassed another viewpoint shared with Muslims -- refusal of belief in original sin.
The Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography points out that Servet's view on original sin influenced the founders of Unitarianism in Poland and Transylvania. Accusations in Poland that these Christians, known there as Socinians, had "fallen back into Judaism," led to burning at the stake. Transylvania, an independent principality, was accused of having entirely abandoned Christianity. The local predecessors of Unitarianism declared "God is One," as Jews affirm in the Shema Yisrael ('Hear O Israel, Our God is One God') and Muslims in the Shehadeh ('I affirm there is One God, I affirm Muhammad is his Prophet').
But both territories stood on the frontier of the Ottoman empire for 150 years, beginning at the time of Servet's martyrdom. Islamic conceptions of religion had a way of penetrating these borderlands, and in fulfillment of Servet's yearning for a Christianity that could encompass Jews and Muslims by abandoning trinitarianism, some inhabitants of Transylvania advocated a universal religion uniting all faiths (see www.theuufellowship.org/_sermons/001203.htm). Even later Unitarians, including Deists (the creed embraced by Thomas Jefferson), were accused of having converted to Islam.
Ibn ul-Arabi, the greatest shaykh of Sufism, also envisioned a single religion reconciling all believers in one God. Could Servet have been a secret Sufi? There is a moment during his trial in Geneva that, for a Sufi like me, produces the classic "shock of recognition" -- but as if in a mirror. Servet believed that all of Creation is of the Creator; as the Catalan dissident put it, "[it] is my fundamental principle that all things are a part or portion of God and the nature of things is the substantial spirit of God." This doctrine is similar, but not identical, to that known in Islam as "unity of being," or wahdat ul-wujud, which is especially dear to the followers of Ibn ul-Arabi. In classical Islam, all things are one as divine creation, although they do not share divine essence.
But Calvin despised any expression of this concept, and at the trial of Servet he shouted, "What, wretch! If one stamps the floor would one say that one stamped on your God?" I was further affected in reading these words, by the recollection of a Sufi parable. It is said that a narrow-minded Muslim cleric confronted a Sufi, and demanded to know if the mystic truly believed in God. The Sufi replied, "the God you worship is beneath my feet."
There are differing versions and interpretations of this parable; some say it teaches that God is the same as his creation. And some say the Sufi stood on a golden coin, and meant that religion was no more than a means for the cleric to gain power. It is said the Sufi was seized and executed for blasphemy.
Miquel Servet may be relevant to Muslims as a Christian who was also a model of true religious reform, of unfettered inquiry, of achievement in science, and of the harmony of the monotheistic faiths, as well as of belief in the unity of all things. He died a martyr and is remembered, if at all, only by Unitarians; meanwhile, the cruel, bloodthirsty Wahhabis who call themselves Reformers of Islam also like to claim the title of Unitarians, which to Western ears sounds especially absurd.
As I reread the life of Servet, I was also reminded of Sufis who have touched me personally. In the recent confrontation I have mentioned, with an enraged defender of Luther and Calvin, I had to listen to repeated denunciations of Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, shaykh of the Naqshbandi Sufis in America, and one of the great Islamic teachers of our time, as a cultist; of Sufis as believers in the summoning of demons, and similar inanities. But that colloquy took place here in America, where neither Kabbani, nor I, nor any other Sufi or Muslim reformer should face the punishments meted out in Saudi Arabia, or in Geneva a half millennium ago. Yet believers in God's love and its transmission through religion must still face the inquisitions and libels of "official" reformers and bigots, and will doubtless have to face them forever. In such moments, inspiration may be found in the lives of many men and women of faith, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian. | <urn:uuid:918e6f46-1f87-4654-a98c-910a1217db16> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2004/11/a-mirror-for-muslim-reformers.html | 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 | 0.973069 | 2,710 | 2.328125 | 2 |
A World Without Books
by Joseph DiCristofano
Thoreau once wrote, “A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.”
Reading a book is a personal journey. A cerebral quest where each page is a signpost that maps out a destination bound between two covers. The dreams, neurosis and nightmares of men and women are put to page to nourish the soul, enlighten and tap into that mysterious reservoir of waking dreams. In effect, books are conduits to the eternal.
I have often wondered if, in a way, books are humanity’s penance for all the transgressions against the planet, life and each other—cathartic for the author and ink-pressed prayer beads for the bibliophile. The written word is a personal message shared by many, a celebration in self-cognizance and shared-cognizance. Each time we peer into a book, we have faith that the mystery behind the tale will unfold in an engaging way and eventually come to a conclusion that will leave a mark upon us.
Taking books out of the equation would be like plucking the petals from every rose that ever grew in the entire world or splashing Van Gogh’s paintings with tar. A world without books would be a monochrome world and undeniably signal the end of one of the most personal methods to share and absorb information. It would be a grievous step towards snuffing out free thought and the profoundly positive effects of imagining.
What would a world without books evolve into? I shudder just thinking about the idea.
It could possibly be an overly oppressive world like in Orwell’s bleak classic, 1984, or a world of sensationalized misinformation—a world of self worship—with people disinterested in everything save instant gratification like in Huxley’s, A Brave New World. Both are nightmarish, yet we see social characteristics that both masterpieces warned us about in regards to xenophobia, government control, faddism and misdirection through reality television, biased news reports etc. I have always attributed my ability to see beyond the fluff, past the smoke and mirrors, beyond the veil, to books.
During the modern era, there have been several discoveries that, perhaps, should have heralded the end of the book: the radio, the television, video games and the all-powerful World Wide Web. I bet that even in third world countries, where illiteracy is the norm, one of these other media assets has made a mark of some kind. For a solid century, books have teetered on the cusp of obsolescence.
Yet here we are.
Since I first read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child, I have always appreciated the power of narrative. Whether to inspire, instill moral dogma, or entertain, storytelling’s influence on the human psyche, is without a doubt, one of the most powerful forces within the realm of human experience. Stories teach, without being oppressive; lie, without being deceitful; inspire, without intoxicating; trigger emotions, without breaking hearts or rending souls. From Beowulf’s epics to Shakespeare’s works to Cormac McCarthy’s, apocalyptic adventure, The Road and so on – sound narrative will continue to enlighten, add color to reality and remind us of the finest and vilest of human qualities. Take away books and we lose this.
We must never forget, and thanks to the men and women who are inspired to scribe their ideas down in the hopes of creating a potent connection, we never will.
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Genre - Horror / Dark Fantasy
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