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Floodwaters hold steady, damage estimated in billions
Floodwaters are holding their level in northeastern Australia, having inundated thousands of homes and shutting down mines and businesses. Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said Wednesday it was an unprecedented disaster that would cost billions.
AP - Floodwaters in an inundated city on Australia’s northeastern coast held steady below their predicted peak on Wednesday as exhausted residents were warned they would face a long wait before the churning, muddy mess dries up.
Residents of the waterlogged city of Rockhampton were hopeful the river had swelled to its highest level, with the mayor saying the community appeared to have been spared any further damage. Water from the overflowing Fitzroy River has already swamped 200 homes and 100 businesses, while flooding elsewhere in northeastern Australia has forced thousands to evacuate.
“It looks like it may have stabilized,” Mayor Brad Carter said.
More than a week of pounding rains that started just before Christmas left much of northeastern Australia under a sea of water that is making its way through river systems toward the ocean.
Around 1,200 homes in Queensland have been inundated, with another 10,700 suffering some damage, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said Wednesday. Four thousand residents evacuated from their homes in the flood zone, which spans an area greater than France and Germany combined.
The deluge has ruined crops, closed most of the state’s lucrative coal mines and caused “catastrophic” damage to Queensland’s transport systems, Bligh told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
“This is a disaster of an unprecedented scale and it will require an unparalleled rebuilding effort,” Bligh told reporters in Brisbane, where officials held an emergency meeting on Wednesday to sort out recovery plans for the 200,000 people affected by the deluge.
Until the waters dry up, it won’t be clear what the cost of the flooding will be, Bligh said. But the price tag is expected to reach into the billions, she said.
“If you count everything from the cost to homes, the home rebuilding effort, public infrastructure rebuilding effort and economic loss, I think we’re well above $5 billion territory,” Bligh said.
Floodwaters have made it impossible for 40 of the state’s coal mines to operate, ministers said at the emergency Cabinet meeting.
“It’s going to take some months for some mines to be back to full operation,” Resources Minister Stephen Robertson said. “We earn ‘round about AU$100 million ($100 million) a day exporting coal to the rest of the world and exports have been significantly restricted by the impact on infrastructure.”
In Rockhampton, a city of 75,000, about 500 residents were evacuated as the Fitzroy River rose and overflowed this week. There were fears it would climb higher Wednesday, but even if the waters levels hold, residents face a long wait before things return to normal, officials warned.
“These water levels will be consistently high for a long period of time and these levels could stay for 24 hours before they start to drop,” Queensland police Acting Assistant Commissioner Alistair Dawson said.
In other parts of the state, some flooded communities were beginning to dry out. In the town of Theodore, which evacuated all 300 residents last week, specialists arrived in helicopters on Wednesday to check the safety of power, water and sewage plants, county Mayor John Hooper said.
Officials were still trying to determine when it would be safe to allow residents to return. One problem: an influx of venomous snakes, flushed from their habitats and searching for dry ground amid the waters.
Rockhampton residents have also reported seeing higher than usual numbers of snakes, Mayor Brad Carter said. Saltwater crocodiles were another worry for people entering floodwaters, as the predators have been spotted from time to time in the Fitzroy River, Carter said.
“There’s a lot of snakes _ and I mean a lot,” Rockhampton resident Shane Muirhead told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “Like, every hundred yards (91 meters) you will see a snake, and they’re just everywhere.”
In the southern Queensland town of St George, nursing home residents evacuated and residents toiled in the rain to build levee banks ahead of floodwaters expected to peak next week. The town was devastated in March by another flood, and residents were worried the latest onslaught of water would cause even more damage.
“People see the floodwaters coming down and say, ‘That’s my life about to be covered in silt again,”” Senator Barnaby Joyce, a St George resident, told Australia’s Sky News. “People are thinking ... we’ve got no money, no crop, we’ve really got no future.”
Floodwaters began building before Christmas, following an unusually wet summer in the tropical region. Rains have eased, and water levels have been dropping in some Queensland communities, but it may be a month before the floodwaters dry up completely. Swollen rivers and flooding have killed 10 people in Queensland since late November, police say.
Despite the devastation, Carter said the residents of Rockhampton were keeping their spirits up.
“We have a very resilient community,” Carter said. “They’re holding up very well. Many of the people that live in these low-lying areas have been through these flooding events before.” | <urn:uuid:7d4aa3a2-9013-4ed3-93b2-d8f7ec74758b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.france24.com/en/20110105-floodwaters-hold-steady-damage-billions-australia-queensland | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966639 | 1,148 | 2.109375 | 2 |
Lebanese protesters demonstrate at a Starbucks in
in a Coffee Cup
By Christopher Dickey
26 June 2002
The Arab boycott of American products wont
do much economic harm. But it is a powerful symbol of new grass-roots
activism in the Middle East
It took a couple of minutes for the Saudi newspaper editor to notice
that his 21-year-old daughter was standing outside the Starbucks
window. Veiled, as most women are on the street in Jeddah, she was
gesturing furiously for him to come talk.
He excused himself from his majlis, as he calls his morning coffee
klatsch with friends. How could you? his American-educated
daughter demanded. The editor was a little puzzled. Dont
you know, she scolded, that the CEO of Starbucks is
a terrible Zionist? Actually, the editor hadnt given
it much thought. Promise me, said his daughter, youll
never drink coffee here again. And so, since April, the editor
has been finding his cappuccinos elsewherethough he admits
he still misses Starbucks.
These days, such scenes are common throughout the Arab and Islamic
world, and Starbucks is only one of the targets. Since last spring,
any product identified with the United Statesand therefore
with American support for Israelmay suddenly find itself unwanted
by consumers in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Indonesia and Lebanon. Arabs
have long seen themselves as Marlboro men. No longer. McDonalds
and KFC also have taken hits. In the supermarket, all you
hear people talking about is whats made in America, and not
to buy it, says one Saudi housewife.
The boycott of U.S. goods, at once trivial and massive, populist
and postmodern, is unlike any other grass-roots political movement
the Muslim world has ever seen. And its a remindereven
as President Bush calls for democratic elections as a condition
for a Palestinian statethat when people really learn to speak
out, they may not say what the United States and its friends want
A veteran U.S. official in the region recently drafted an extraordinary
memo that tried to put the phenomenon in perspective for American
businessmen as well as his superiors in Washington. For the
first time (maybe ever) the least-enfranchised elements of a harshly
repressed society feel that they as individuals can make a difference,
says the memo, privately e-mailed to executives and diplomats with
interests in the Middle East and obtained by NEWSWEEK. They
feel that even a 5-year-old child has an opportunity to do something
meaningful, and can influence domestic and international events.
Details about which American products to boycott are spread with
lists posted on the doors of mosques, to be sure, but also on Web
sites and even through the little digital text messages that teenage
boys and girls send each other from mobile phones. Everyone
is wired now, as the U.S. official puts it. Popular sentiment
for the boycotts is built in the media, with Arab satellite television
stations showing graphic footage of Israeli violence in the occupied
territories. The images inflame the commonly held opinion that poorly
armed Muslims are under ferocious attack by an enemy using American
guns, American helicopters, American jet fighters. The effect is
an emotional and visual conflict reaching to the heart of
the identity of every citizen as an Arab or a Muslim, says
Yet the anti-everything-made-in-America sentiment on the ground
in the Arab world is distinct from organized efforts by Muslims
in the United States to focus the issue on Starbucks, even if the
diatribes of one sometimes feed the other. On the American Muslims
for Global Peace and Justice Web site, for instance, Starbucks
CEO Howard Schultzs support for various Jewish charitable
organizations and his warnings about rising anti-Semitism around
the world are denounced as fueling an already tense situation
by using inciteful [sic] language to legitimize Israels
Schultzs spokespeople emphasize his interest in finding a
peaceful solution to the conflict. Starbucks is deeply saddened
by the current events in the Middle East, says Peter Maslen,
president of Starbucks Coffee International. With business
partners worldwide, Starbucks believes it is important to embrace
diversity as an essential component in the way we do business and
treat each other with respect and dignity. Other Schultz defenders
claim to detect a more prosaic motive behind the American boycott.
One Starbucks competitor, Caribou Coffee, with 185 outlets in the
United States, sold 87.8 per cent of its capital to Bahrains
First Islamic Investment Bank in December 2000.
The Bahrain bank lists among its guiding principles: Above
all, ensuring that all activities conform to Islamic Shariah [religious
law], which means, in the financial context, not paying or
receiving interest, and not investing in companies that manufacture
or sell alcoholic beverages. Conservative syndicated columnist Debbie
Schlussel notes in the New York Post that among members of the banks
religious advisory board is the controversial cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi,
who defends our brothers and children in Al-Aqsa and the blessed
land of Palestine generously sacrificing their blood, giving their
souls willingly in the way of Allah. Schlussel claims that
in the war on terrorism, choice of coffee may be definitive.
(Schlussel, whose Townhall.com online biography describes her as
having unique expertise on radical Islam, professional sports
and a host of other political, social and pop culture topics,
fails to note that Al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa, or religious edict,
approving the American war in Afghanistan. Hes often been
cited by the Bush administration as a supporter of the war on terror.)
A representative of First Islamic in the United States says Al-Qaradawi
is resigning from the advisory board in July. Were not
a political institution, and we dont believe political statements
by an outside advisor should be attributed to us, says David
Crosland, executive director of the banks U.S. affiliate.
Boycott promoter Raeed Tayeh of American Muslims for Global Peace,
for his part, has said he never heard about the Caribou connection
until Schlussel brought it up on a Fox News shoutfest.
This sort of talk-show tempest-in-a-coffee-cup misses the point,
according to people in the Middle East. The boycott is about popular
expression in societies where theres been little or none.
And questions of corporate ownership are not the issue, its
the power of the symbols that counts. American consumerism is part
of the Arab dream, or has been, even in places like Gaza. Hatred
for the Israeli occupiers there is as intense as anywhere in the
world. Yet until a few weeks ago, enormous billboards along the
main highway in Palestinian-administered areas advertised cigarettes
with THE BIG TASTE OF AMERICA. Now, even that dream is fading and
many people would rather do without. Palestinian political scientist
Marwan Bishara likens boycotting to fasting, Its like
a soul-cleansing thingI wont smoke Marlboros today.
The boycotts economic impact on the multinationals is slight,
and the effect on the U.S. economy is negligible, at least so far.
According to Charley Kestenbaum, commercial counselor at the U.S.
Embassy in Riyadh, American exports to Saudi Arabia may decline
from $6 billion to $4 billion in 2002, but that has at least as
much to do with slumping oil prices and slowing growth as with the
boycott. A typical franchise fee to the parent companies of fast-food
outlets is about 4 percent of revenues. The merchants who get hurt
are local suppliers of beef for McDonalds, or cream for Starbucks
coffeeand the local people who used to work behind the counters.
Nor are the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon likely
to be swayed by Kuwaitis foregoing their KFC. But in a political
culture where individuals feel helpless, this new collective action
is reassuring. I believe in any form of passive resistance,
says Samar Fatany, a radio journalist in Saudi Arabia and mother
of five. We have to put the message across that we are angry.
The boycott has taken on a sociopolitical momentum and importance
way beyond the issue of supporting Palestine itself, says
the memo by the U.S. official. The regimes have tolerated
this grass-roots boycott as an alternative to resorting to violence
or civil disobedience. I wonder what this will lead to for future
domestic or foreign-policy issues when the people disagree with
their political leadershipsthe Pandoras box of civil,
political activity has been opened irrevocably.
U.S. critics of the Saudis and the Arab world have focused
on the religious intolerance and the lack of democracy, the
memo concludes. Few things are more democratic than popular
actions of nonviolent political expression through economic activity.
We should be standing back and applauding the obvious long-term
positive implications of the emergence of a social activism unthinkable
only a few years ago in this region. That it exists at all is where
we want these societies to go. That it is directed at the U.S.A.
is our problem. | <urn:uuid:ef301a0e-df09-49b7-808c-19ebcbebc2f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-news-0154.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941277 | 1,993 | 1.65625 | 2 |
The most iconic American image of Thanksgiving is Norman Rockwell’s ‘Freedom from Want’, which is the likely reason many of us are reminded of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, which prompted Rockwell to memorialize them in paint for posters and Life magazine. It was, of course, his January 6, 1941 State of the Union address in which he outlined his plans for lend-lease to aid the British against Nazi aggression.
It was a speech designed to trumpet putative American democratic values abroad, and it worked with Congress: not long after the speech, they passed and funded the program; you know the rest about the US swinging into full-scale production of planes and tanks and other weapons.
But in the speech, he spoke of the core values of democracy that are either missing entirely or have been so tarnished that when we speak of them, they sound revolutionary.
“Certainly this is no time for any of us to stop thinking about the social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world. For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.
The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:
Equality of opportunity for youth and for others,Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.
The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.
These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.”
On this Thanksgiving day, as high as one in four Americans are without jobs, and millions more of us are sliding into poverty. Congress is intent on destroying our social safety programs. The agencies that were originally designed to keep us secure are now being turned against us as we make a now-or-never effort at restoring our democracy and adherence to our Constitution and the Rule of Law. Read the rest of this entry → | <urn:uuid:0366aaa7-230f-44b8-a555-a017ca2a94f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://my.firedoglake.com/wendydavis/tag/chales-dickens-christmas-carol-ignorance-and-want/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969293 | 459 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Straw House by Brenett, Kim, Lucretia and Omney
We belong to Montana's Crow Nation. We love our reservation, but there aren't enough houses. We need to find a cheap way to build durable homes. There's straw all over the place, so we did some experiments to see if straw bales could be used to build a house.
What did we do?
We grabbed three building materials for our test: a plain straw bale, a straw bale covered in stucco and a cinderblock. First, we tested each block with a blowtorch and checked for burning, cracking and melting. Then we tested each sample to see if it was a good insulator by placing a thermometer on the back and heating the front with a blowtorch. Finally, we stuck a cloth in each of the blocks and let them soak in a stream for an hour to see if they were waterproof.
What did we find out?
We found out that straw alone burned right away and wasn't waterproof, but it was a pretty good insulator. The cinderblock was fireproof and waterproof and didn't transfer heat at all. Straw with stucco didn't burn, either. Plus, it was waterproof and didn't transfer heat. So we concluded that straw with stucco could make a durable, affordable building material. We'll use this method to build our reservation's new community center. Raise the roof! (By the way, our science project won the Bayer/National Science Foundation's National Championship Award!)
- Structures come in lots of shapes and sizes. Build a bridge out of 100 toothpicks and glue that can support 10 lbs of weight without breaking. Design different shapes in your bridge, like triangles, squares or diamonds and compare how well the shapes hold up under pressure!
- Study your own home to learn more about how different construction materials are used. Find parts of your home made of glass, plastic, metal, wood, rock and concrete. Why were these materials used in some places and not others? Why are some of the pipes in your home made of metal, while others are plastic? Figure out why the materials' properties make it a good choice for that part of the home.
- Use this technology investigation as a science fair project idea for your elementary or middle school science fair! Then tell us about it! | <urn:uuid:3f036a00-c525-46c1-9f4c-3f6a7a88174b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pbskids.org/dragonflytv/show/strawhouse.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961687 | 487 | 3.359375 | 3 |
Giving Back on the National Day of Service
05:30 PM EDT
Today, the First Family kicked off Inauguration weekend by participating in the National Day of Service, helping out with some school improvement projects at Burrville Elementary in Washington, DC.
President Obama asked Americans around the country to take part in the National Day of Service to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday falls on Inauguration Day this year. The President and First Lady asked that we all remember the importance of giving back and looking out for others – both central to Dr. King’s work – as we celebrate this weekend.
“This is really what America is about,” President Obama said. “This is what we celebrate.” He said that this Inauguration is “a symbol of how our democracy works and how we peacefully transfer power, but it should also be an affirmation that we’re all in this together and that we’ve got to look out for each other and work hard on behalf of each other.”
The First Lady echoed his sentiment.
“We have to remember that the reason why we’re here, why we’re standing here, why we’re able to celebrate this weekend is because a lot of people worked hard and supported us,” she said. “And we’ve got a job to do. And this is a symbol of the kind of work that we need to be doing for the next four years and beyond.”
Vice President Biden and Dr. Biden also took part in a service event today, helping other volunteers at the DC Armory assemble care packages for troops. | <urn:uuid:fad2e234-baec-4d87-82d3-0f25138663fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/01/19/giving-back-national-day-service | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952924 | 352 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c2009.
xv, 252 p. : map ; 25 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 223-235) and index.
In the years immediately following the Civil War - the formative years for an emerging society of freed African Americans in Mississippi - there was much debate over the general purpose of black schools and who would control them. "From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse" is the first comprehensive examination of Mississippi's politics and policies of postwar racial education.The primary debate centered on whether schools for African Americans (mostly freed people) should seek to develop blacks as citizens, train them to be free but subordinate laborers, or produce some other outcome. African Americans envisioned schools established by and for themselves as a primary means of achieving independence, equality, political empowerment, and some degree of social and economic mobility - in essence, full citizenship. Most northerners assisting freed people regarded such expectations as unrealistic and expected African Americans to labor under contract for those who had previously enslaved them and their families. Meanwhile, many white Mississippians objected to any educational opportunities for the former slaves. Christopher Span finds that newly freed slaves made heroic efforts to participate in their own education, but too often the schooling was used to control and redirect the aspirations of the newly freed. (source: Nielsen Book Data) | <urn:uuid:1039d358-8133-47ce-a169-4e992fdd08e6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/8003700 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958698 | 274 | 3.65625 | 4 |
Christmas is coming early for cable operators that are eager to encrypt the basic TV service tiers in all-digital systems.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set Dec. 10, 2012 as the effective date for new rules that effectively lift a ban that has prevented MSOs from locking up their basic TV services. The Commission voted in favor of the new rules on Oct. 12, but they could not take effect until 30 days after publication of the order in the Federal Register, which took place on Nov. 9. (See Cable Cleared to Encrypt Basic TV Tiers .)
Cable operators fought hard for the rules, claiming they will reduce basic TV service theft and cut down on truck rolls because MSOs will gain the ability to activate and deactivate customers remotely and reduce expensive truck rolls.
But there are some caveats. Operators taking advantage of the new rules must provide affected customers with a set-top box or a CableCARD for free over a specific time period.
The top six U.S. incumbent MSOs also agreed to provide the technology necessary to let IP-based retail devices, such as the Boxee box, decrypt and display channels in their basic TV lineups. Devices such as Boxee's have historically obtained those signals in unencrypted form -- something called "clear QAM." (See Boxee, Cable Spar Over Video Encryption and Boxee CEO Now a Friend of Big Cable?)
Early on, it's expected that most of the operators subject to the retail device condition (Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications Inc., Charter Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp., and Bright House Networks) will support it by supplying customers with a new type of Digital Terminal Adapter (DTA) with home-networking capability that can decrypt the basic TV signals and shuttle them along to the retail device. The rules also establish the groundwork for retail suppliers to license and embed the decryption technology.
Why this matters
The date gives cable the official go-ahead to lock up their basic TV tiers in all-digital systems, and will accelerate development activity on a new type of DTA that can work in tandem with a wide range of IP-based video devices sold at retail.
— Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Light Reading Cable | <urn:uuid:28a83a05-67ee-40f4-a81e-3615e66caaca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lightreading.com/tv/new-cable-video-security-rules-to-get-real/240143697 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939139 | 469 | 1.507813 | 2 |
While it’s only one of many research areas being pursued at Johns Hopkins Medicine, stem cell research is making great strides in many labs across campus, from our formal stem cell center, the Institute for Cell Engineering to the Kimmel Cancer Center to the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Whitaker Institute — exciting things are happening.
As co-hosts of the 2009 World Stem Cell Summit we are proud to share a taste of the latest research.
Read more about these tiny cells and their potential and learn how Johns Hopkins researchers are answering these questions:
- How do stem cells stay stem cells?
- How are stem cells coaxed to become specific cell types?
- How are adult cells and adult stem cells being used for therapy?
- How do we keep track of stem cells and what do they look like
- How do we deal with the ethical and safety issues around human stem cell research and therapy? | <urn:uuid:02454020-abad-4934-b4a4-41c2fc7f3354> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/stem_cell_research/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941427 | 188 | 2.546875 | 3 |
In a commentary on Forbes, Alexandre Padilla — an assistant professor of economics at the Metropolitan State College of Denver and a research fellow at Reason Foundation — details some of the legal problems that will arise as a result of Los Angeles’ new condom ordinance. He writes:
Condoms undeniably help lower the risks of HIV infection. But that doesn’t mean the government should mandate condom use in adult movies–and it certainly doesn’t mean that such regulation is a good idea. For one, the adult film industry would have to make every performer an employee to satisfy the California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, better known as Cal/OSHA, laws. This would be detrimental: California’s anti-discrimination laws prohibit requiring an HIV test as a condition of employment; therefore the adult film industry’s current testing process, in which every performer is tested for HIV monthly, would be illegal. Nor would adult film producers be allowed to “discriminate” by refusing employment to HIV-positive performers. As a result, untested and HIV-positive performers would be able to work in the industry, raising the risks of HIV outbreaks–particularly since condom breakage or slippage can occur.
Over at the Huffington Post, David Groshoff, law professor and Business Law Center director at Western State University College of Law, writes about the larger implications for the ordinance:
Last month the L.A. City Attorney, Carmen A. Trutanich, sued Weinstein and four others, stating (paragraph 14) that the proposed ordinance is unconstitutional and (paragraph 17) that attempting to obtain this judgment now, rather than post-election, “is necessary to avoid the needless and wasteful expenditure of public resources made in connection with a measure which the voters have no power to adopt.” The cost could be more than $4 million of taxpayer money in a cash-strapped city and state.
In its editorial this week supporting Weinstein’s efforts, the Los Angeles Times claimed that this proposed regulation was similar to banning smoking in restaurants to protect workers in the service industry. But smoking or inhaling secondary smoke was not the primary condition of the compensation arrangement for those working in restaurants. Here, however, having unprotected sex is the condition of the compensation arrangement. As a result, one would expect the contracting parties to negotiate the risk/reward balance, with barebacking performers receiving significantly greater compensation than safe-sex performers. And assuming that consenting adults are reasonably informed decision makers, people should be left to make their own bodily decisions, free from government interference and “enforcement.”
In this age of [insert adult website name here]tube.com, nearly anyone can be a “producer” of for-profit “adult films” simply by uploading homemade videos and requiring that people pay to view those videos. Weinstein’s initiative could quickly make those people — queer, straight, or anywhere in between — criminals.
Header image by William Wootton. | <urn:uuid:35564e2e-1087-45dd-834d-81c3e4f4ddad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sexandthe405.com/los-angeles-condom-ordinance/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948885 | 621 | 1.65625 | 2 |
An Illinois judge on Thursday agreed to combine two separate lawsuits brought to challenge the state ban on gay marriage. The two suits brought by the ACLU of Illinois and the gay rights group Lambda Legal, challenge Cook County Clerk David Orr and others for not extending marriage licenses to same-sex partners.
However, the one major issue that is not resolved is who is going to defend the state against the two plaintiffs.
Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan office – both of whom would normally handle such issues – have publicly stated that the state's 16-year-old ban on gay marriage is indeed unconstitutional and that they refuse to defend the measure.
"I took an oath when I was sworn in to defend the Constitution of the state of Illinois and I believe that's what I'm doing," Alvarez said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I'm not going to defend something I believe is in violation of the Constitution."
Legal analysts say the unprecedented move by the two government legal offices is similar to the strategy adopted by President Obama directing the U.S. Department of Justice not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.
The government's refusal to defend DOMA has even prompted the U.S House of Representatives to retain their own legal counsel. The Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group has asked a judge to hold off on ruling on a pending lawsuit in Connecticut until justices in Massachusetts decide if they are going to rule a separate DOMA issue.
DOMA was enacted and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 as a result of Hawaii's consideration of same-sex marriage, which is now legal in six states and the District of Columbia.
The two suits in Illinois claim that Orr and the Cook County Clerk's office violated the rights to due process and equal protection under the Illinois Constitution by refusing to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
"As the defendant, I totally agree with the plaintiffs," Orr told reporters last week when asked to respond to the lawsuits.
The Thomas More Society, a legal group organized to protect life, marriage and religious liberty issues, last week announced it was going to petition the court to allow their attorneys to defend Illinois' marriage laws. However, that petition has yet to be filed.
Peter Breen, executive director and legal counsel for the Thomas More Society, told The Christian Post last week that the state's refusal to defend its own laws is a "slap in the face" on the citizens of Illinois.
"It would be unfortunate if a state court rules that same-sex marriage violates our state's Constitution without a single word being uttered in defense of the issue," said Breen. "That is precisely what could happen unless our legal team is allowed to defend what we believe the majority of Illinois citizens – with the votes of both Republican and Democrat legislators have said – believe and that is marriage is between a man and a woman."
A new Associated Press-GfK survey found that in spite of President Obama's recent announcement in support of same-sex marriage, it did little to move public support in one direction or the other.
The poll found that Democrats and liberals were supportive of the president's position and that conservatives and Republicans were as equally opposed to same-sex marriage. Overall, 42 percent of respondents opposed gay marriage, 40 percent approved of it and 15 percent were neutral on the issue. | <urn:uuid:a39a77eb-3875-4fc9-b5bd-76d986de260a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.christianpost.com/news/judge-agrees-to-combine-same-sex-marriage-lawsuits-in-illinois-77114/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976346 | 687 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Highlights from Mr. Adnan Oktar's interview on 08 April 2011
A9 TV, 8 April 2011
Islam is the most rational, logical and consistent religion. It can be understood right away. There is nothing we need to ponder at great depth, it is perfectly clear. It can be understood as soon as one looks. Paradise, hell, the hereafter, why we are in this world, everything is set out with excellent emphases and clarifications. We have to specially research belief in the hereafter in the Torah, and it is not easy to find. There is even a debate as to whether there is any such belief at all. But Islam is not like that, it is completely accessible. Paradise and hell are described with complete clarity. Christianity has the belief in the Trinity (may Allah forbid). Not even a five-year-old would do such a thing. Allah is obviously One. How can you have three Allah? (May Allah forbid) Can a human being be Allah? (May Allah forbid) They regard the Propjet Jesus (as) as Allah. May Allah forbid. That is most peculiar indeed. Allah says that the sky will almost be torn apart by such words. No right thinking person would be a Christian because he would see that this is illogical. Christianity is constantly on the retreat in Europe. If you tell an intellectual, a rational young person at university, that a human being who eats and sleeps and prays to Allah “is in fact Allah,” that person will doubt your intelligence. A human being who eats, sleeps, prays to Allah, speaks of the oneness of Allah, seeks refuge in Allah and beseeches Allah. “What is this person?” you ask. And they reply, “Allah.” May Allah forbid. You have thus ruined that person. That is why irreligion has grown so much in Europe. The way of the dajjal was already looking for a pretext, and it has been given a most excellent one. They have ruined people and inflicted suffering on them for no reason; for hundreds of years they caused people to be irreligious and troubled. What need is there for such words? Just say that Allah is One. Allah is obviously One. Why make statements that not even a five-year-old would believe and that will just terrify him? Is this a sign of love? The Prophet Jesus (as) himself would be most uncomfortable with that. He is most uncomfortable. That is the issue he will emphasize most when he comes. But we must prepare the way for Jesus the Messiah to appear. Prayer is most important in the coming of the Mahdi (as) and of Jesus the Messiah (as).
Prayer is most important for the coming of Hazrat Mahdi (as). Muslims must pray all over the world; O Lord, permit the Mahdi (as) to appear to us, show us the Mahdi (as), they must say. In that event, destiny will work in that case, destiny will work in that direction. That is a law of Allah. They keep deceiving Muslims by saying Hazrat Mahdi (as) will never come, that the Mahdi is a collective personality, that he has entered someone else’s soul, that he will come in 570 years’ time or that he will come 600 years later. But Muslims are unaware of this. They are unaware that the dajjal (antichrist) is deceiving them. A great many of them have already fallen under the influence of the dajjal, but are unaware of it. Satan constantly deceives Muslims into thinking they cannot bring about the dominion of Islam, that they are weak and helpless, that they love this world, that they do not want the Mahdi (as), that Hazrat Mahdi (as) will obviously not be coming any time soon and that they cannot understand such a complex subject.
31- When Our messengers came with the good news to Abraham, they said, ‘We are going to destroy the people of this city. Truly its inhabitants are wrongdoers.
32- He said, ‘Lot is in it.’ They said, ‘We know very well who is in it….”
Because the angels came at Allah’s command. Of course, they know very well. The angels will obviously know who is who when somewhere is to be destroyed. And they come accordingly.
“…We are going to rescue him and his family – except for his wife. She will be one of those who stay behind’.”
Although she is the wife of a prophet she is perverse, abnormal. The woman’s behavior is not normal. But if there is a true person in a city, a great guide, Hazrat Mahdi (as), that place will not be destroyed. There is another verse of the Qur’an in which Allah tells our Prophet (saas) “Allah would not punish them while you were among them.” This other verse refers to the same thing. No community containing Hazrat Mahdi (as) will be destroyed. Terrible catastrophes such as earthquakes take place. Even prophets may have very peculiar wives. Like the Prophet Noah (as). She was sick, not normal at all.
33- “When Our Messengers came to Lot, he was distressed on their account,”
He was probably tachycardic. His blood pressure may have shot up. He was therefore “distressed.” The blessed prophet was distressed. There was trouble in his heart. Trouble can arise in the heart when one’s blood pressure goes up.
“They said, ‘Do not fear and do not grieve’.”
It is an obligation. One, he must not fear. Two, he must not grieve. High blood pressure stems from fear and grieving. When a person experiences extreme fear, his blood pressure immediately shoots up. His blood pressure also goes up when he is sad, and his cholesterol will also rise. Many deaths are known to be caused by sudden fear and sorrow. Cholesterol also rises way above normal under extreme stress. Blood cholesterol rises in a moment. That is a very dangerous state of affairs. Blood pressure rises unbelievably high. That is why Allah says that “fear and grieving” is unlawful. Muslims must neither fear nor grieve.
“We are going to rescue you and your family – except for your wife;”
Nothing will happen. They will try and kill and set traps for Hazrat Mahdi (as) in the End Times, but nothing will come of it. We will spare you and your family. Nothing will befall Hazrat Mahdi (as) and his own followers. That is what it indicates, that is what the family alludes to. To Hazrat Mahdi (as) and his followers.
“she will be one of those who stay behind.”
She will be separated from you, Allah says. Then Allah will send her affliction.
34- "We will bring down on the inhabitants of this city a devastating punishment from heaven because of their deviance.”
Because they engage in what is sinful and unlawful.
At the end they will have a horrible appearance. They will be covered in blood. The whole environment will be repellent. Allah says that is how He will devastate them.
35- We have left a Clear Sign of them behind for people who use their intellect.
What is this? Archeology. Because Allah says remains are left behind. Whom is He addressing? He is addressing us. We can see all the remains when we look at Sodom and Gomorrah. People were burned and devastated. They were petrified. Their buildings burned. We look at the buildings and we can see how it happened, the walls of their houses. They put pictures of all the sins they committed on the walls of their houses. Those pictures are still there. While people were burned and petrified below. The matter is quite clear when those pictures and the burned people are put together. What does the verse say? “We have left a Clear Sign of them behind for people who use their intellect.” Where it happened. What does clear mean? A sign we can easily understand. Go and look. Look and you will understand. The pictures are quite clear. The walls of the houses are full of them. Immorality of all kinds. Then we look at the people. The pictures are quite clear. Then we look at the people – burned and petrified, the meaning of these verse is clear when you put them both together.
36- And to Madyan We sent their brother Shu‘ayb,
Shu’ayb. The word means a small community. Shu’ayb is also used for the Mahdi (as). A small community with 313 members. Shu’ayb is one of the Mahdi’s (as) nicknames.
“he said, ‘My people, worship Allah”
Be devoted to Allah and admit His oneness. Love Allah, and give thanks to Allah. “and look to the Last Day.”
In other words, hope to be resurrected and to go to paradise.
“and do not act unjustly on earth, corrupting it.”
Do not produce corruption. Do not be caught up by Darwinist, materialist, atheist or other such perverse ideas. Espouse the truth and be good and honest.
37- “But they denied him so the earthquake seized them and morning found them lying flattened in their homes.”
A huge earthquake.
Allah says there were standing but then fell down. He says He killed them.
38- And [We have devastated] ‘Ad and Thamud – it [their condition] must be clear to you from their dwelling places!
Allah says go and look and you will understand. And when we look we see people uncovered by archeological digs. Has the meaning of the verse come out? Yes. Allah says go and look.
“Satan made their actions seem good to them”
They do wrong, but they seemed good to them because satan dressed them up.
“and so debarred them from the Way.”
Many people are currently being kept from Islamic Union. They are being kept from Turkish-Islamic Union. They are being prevented from awaiting Hazrat Mahdi (as). If you say he will come in 570 years’ time, how can you expect people to strive for Islamic Union or Turkish-Islamic Union? They will not.
“even though they were intelligent people.”
Allah says they knew perfectly well. They knew the truth. But they ignored it.
65- “He is Lord of the heavens and the earth and everything in between them, so worship Him and persevere in His worship.”
Someone worships but is not determined in worship; only up to a point. There are many people who pray and then give it up. They worship but suddenly stop. They get to 40 or 45 and then go astray. Allah says we must “persevere in worship.” One must be determined right up to one’s last breath.
“Do you know of any other with His name?”
means there is no other god.
66- “Man says, ‘When I am dead, will I then be brought out again alive?’
67- Does not man recall that We created him before when he was not anything?”
That is the main reason for people’s doubts in the test throughout the course of history. There could be no test if they did not say that. That is the fine detail in the test. People do all kinds of wrong things because they imagine they will not be brought back to life. Then they look and say; “Oh dear, the promise was true. We really are resurrected,” What did you think? Did you exist before? You were nothing. You came into being later. That does not surprise you, so why should resurrection surprise you? He Who does that once, will do it again. Why should He not? The whole problem is doing it once. If a factory makes one pencil it can easily make a hundred. Man thinks that He Who created the world cannot create it again. But why should He not?
Prayer is also very important to the coming of Jesus the Messiah. It is a very great blessing. It is something very exciting. Insha’Allah, when Jesus the Messiah (as) comes, he will call all Muslims to prayer. There will be great joy at the coming of Jesus the Messiah. But before that, the Imam Mahdi will call on all Muslims to pray intensively. Allah will in fact send the Prophet Jesus (as) even if he really dies. Allah makes even the most unlikely things happen if prayed for. For example, the Companions of the Cave entered the cave and spent some 300 years asleep. It might even have been much, much longer, it is not clear. A person would normally die over 300 years, but they did not. Under the influence of prayer. Allah makes it His instrument. For example, a dead person is resurrected 300 years later. An elderly person has a child, a barren woman has a child. The whole world system revolves around prayer. I am now trying to life the effect of negative prayer. Because there is intense negative prayer. Without realizing it, a great many of our Muslim brothers are praying negatively, for shaytan to reign. Someone says, “The Mahdi will come in 570 years’ time.” That gives satan 570 years in which to maneuver. He is saying satan can do what he likes for the next 570 years. Another teacher says, “He will come in 1000 years’ time.” That is telling satan he is at liberty for the next 1000 years. Are they aware of that? No. They thing they are doing good.
Allah prepared Sultanahmet Square and Haghia Sofia for Hazrat Mahdi (as) and the Prophet Jesus (as) centuries beforehand. That area was also prepared for them. The infrastructure was prepared for them and the treasure underground was prepared for them. And the relics below the ground. Topkapı Palace was also prepared for them. And the relics in Topkapı Palace. For what? For the way of the Mahdi and the coming of Jesus the Messiah. Huge cypress trees are waiting for them. The great Salahaddin Mosques are waiting for them. This whole lovely city is waiting for them. The wisdom in Allah’s making Istanbul so lovely and giving it to the Turks is that it is a preparation for the way of the Mahdi, insha’Allah.
This marvelous state of affairs of the End Times is still continuing. This is the first time there has been such an economic crisis, and it is growing all the time. It is spreading across the world, like a cancer. This is a major event of the time of Hazrat Mahdi (as). It is explicitly described in the hadiths. It is not at all out of sight. Everyone can see it and it will continue to grow in the years ahead. Until 2014. Since the way of the Mahdi will be stronger in 2014, the prosperity of the way of the Mahdi will begin to emerge and things will become easier. Things will be different because there will be a return to faith. | <urn:uuid:73623b0b-31c5-4980-85c4-a09b8fbc367e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://harunyahya.com/en/Highlights-from-Adnan-Oktars-talk-programs/41419/Highlights-from-Mr-Adnan-Oktars-interview-on-08-April-2011 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975466 | 3,255 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Wegmans Opens Door to Organic Farm
For the first time in four years, Wegmans opened its fifty-acre Organic Farm near Canandaigua Lake to the media for tours and an update on progress on its sustainable and organic produce growing practices.
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"When we started this, we kind of thought it was good for the environment; less trucking from California, no pesticides, no artificial fertilizers,” said Danny Wegman.
The 50-acre research farm near the shores of Canandaigua Lake was initially intended to develop best practices in organic and sustainable farming and share them with the 80-store grocery chain’s 500 suppliers.
Five years later, Wegmans’ view of organic produce has evolved.
"Today, I'm not sure that some larger farms in the area using some automation that we're learning about ourselves might not be a more customer friendly approach. It has to be affordable or it’s a waste of time. We don't want to just serve the elite,” said Wegman, Wegmans CEO.
Wegmans believes the key to great tasting organic produce is the soil, and its constantly looking for that perfect concoction of compost.
Wegman said simple growing practices like companion planting with herbs like basil, garlic or even marigolds to keep the bad bugs out and laying down black sheets of plastic to keep the weeds down are making a big difference.
"One of the biggest challenges when you don't use pesticides is weeding. It’s a killer literally in terms of backaches. Tremendous amount of work,” said Wegman. “There's a machine that pokes holes in the plastic and puts water in the hole."
Wegmans also uses drip irrigation and covercropping, on the organic farm that helps supply its Canandaigua and Pittsford Stores and restaurant Next Door Bar & Grill.
The number of hoop houses are also multiplying on the property. Wegman says the plastic greenhouses extend the organic growing season so Wegmans can produce year round.
“It’s a journey, it’s a constant learning, and I'm thrilled with what I see and I think the opportunity to produce organics much more efficiently in the future."
Organic produce is the fastest growing segment in Wegmans food markets. While Wegmans would not release financials, it said organic produce has seen double digit growth year after year for the last five years.
"The main thing we're trying to do is really make great tasting produce so people consume more, and we think that if people consume more produce, they'll be healthier and have a better life and again that's what our mission is at Wegmans." | <urn:uuid:d1f7cd08-cb56-423c-9405-43b61ccab4e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rochester.ynn.com/content/top_stories/594722/wegmans-opens-door-to-organic-farm/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938888 | 604 | 1.929688 | 2 |
By Amy Hoak
December 13, 2007
According to the most recent outlook from the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, those who heat their homes with heating oil could see heating costs rise 25.6 percent this winter, compared with last winter. Those who use propane could see their costs rise 20.2 percent, and those who use natural gas could see a 10.7 percent rise.
Those estimates could change with the weather, said Jonathan Cogan, energy information specialist at the Energy Information Administration. A warmer-than-expected winter could drive costs down, while a colder one could boost them up even more. But people who aren't willing to gamble with Mother Nature might want to consider home improvements that will help keep costs down this year as the weather gets chilly.
Sometimes the hardest part about making those improvements is deciding how to select and prioritize the projects, said Maria Vargas, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency spokeswoman for the government's Energy Star program.
To help, Energy Star recently released an online tool, the Energy Star Home Advisor, which can help homeowners decide which improvements to make by entering in information including ZIP code, how the home is heated and the home's type of water heater. A link to the tool can be found on the Energy Star Web site,http://www.energystar.gov .
Remember, too, that some projects are eligible for federal income tax credits if they're done before the end of the year, said Ronnie Kweller, spokeswoman for the Alliance to Save Energy, a Washington, D.C.-based group that supports energy efficiency.
The maximum tax credit is $500, she said. There are qualifications and rules for each improvement; homeowners can get a credit for 10 percent of insulation materials, for example. Other improvements eligible for credits include exterior window and door replacements. Seehttp://www.ase.org/taxcredits for more details.
The credits take some of the sting off of the upfront price of the improvements, Vargas said.
"People look at the first price tag and say 'What does it cost?'" Vargas said. They often don't look at the "hidden price tag," that is, what the savings will be after the improvement is made to the home, she added.
That said, it often doesn't require a fortune to cut down on heating bills. The following five improvements can make noticeable differences in home heating costs.
1 Seal air leaks and insulate. One of the simplest and most inexpensive ways to cut down on costs is to seal any air leaks that are in the home, Vargas said. The biggest leaks are often in the basement or crawl space.
And savings can be significant: Add up all the leaks in the average American home, and the draft let into the home is the equivalent to leaving a window open all year long, she said. In fact, homeowners can shave off 10 percent of their annual energy bills just by air sealing their homes and adding insulation in areas such as attics and crawl spaces, Vargas said.
While some homeowners may feel comfortable doing this project on their own, others might want to hire a professional to do the work, Vargas said. Professionals also might find leaks that homeowners wouldn't find on their own, she added.
Note: Materials including caulk and blanket insulation are eligible for the federal tax credit, but labor costs for installation are not, Kweller said.
2 Seal duct work too. Make sure that heat isn't escaping through the duct work, Vargas said. Sealing and insulating ducts will likely require the help of a professional, but in some cases it could improve the efficiency of a heating and cooling system by 20 percent or more, she said.
Well-sealed duct work is especially important if a homeowner is considering the replacement of their heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. "You can buy an efficient unit ... but if there's inefficient duct work, that's a waste of money," she said.
3 Get a programmable thermostat. Programmable thermostats might cost $100 at a big box store, but they'll save a homeowner about 10 percent on heating and cooling bills and will likely pay for themselves in a year, Kweller said. The device conveniently will turn down the heat during the hours that no one is at home, and turn it back up before people return -- so that homeowners return to a warm house.
Remember, however, that the thermostat must be programmed correctly for it to actually cut down on costs, Vargas reminded. She estimates the device could shave $150 off of the average homeowner's energy bills.
4 Little things add up. Other small ways to cut down on heating costs include keeping the furnace filters clean, setting the water heater to 120 degrees and considering a water heater blanket for added insulation, Kweller said. Doing laundry in cold water instead of hot water can also save about $70 a year for the average family that does about seven loads of laundry a week, she added.
5 Let the sun shine in. Finally, don't dismiss the power of sunlight in heating the home, Kweller added.
"It's as simple and free as opening the blinds and shades and curtains on the sunny side of the house during the day," she said. | <urn:uuid:c6e88966-740f-47a1-8280-c7517f0cd618> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sunny1015.com/wnsn/lifestyle/chi-0712110364dec13,0,7873604,print.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959426 | 1,091 | 2.15625 | 2 |
Fort HealthCare Diabetes Education Program
Through a multi-disciplinary team of healthcare professionals knowledgeable in all aspects of diabetes care, the Diabetes Self-Management Education Program is an excellent way to:
Fort HealthCare’s Diabetes Education Program is recognized by the American Diabetes Association, assuring that you receive the best, most up-to-date diabetes management information.
Fort HealthCare Diabetes Education classes are presented through group and individual sessions, and educational information is also shared through ongoing support and outreach through free monthly presentations of the Diabetes Education Series offered at Fort Memorial Hospital. The Diabetes Education Series welcomes anyone to attend, whether you or a family member or friend is affected by diabetes, or just for interested parties.
Talk with your physician about attending the Fort HealthCare Diabetes Education Series. For more information, contact the Diabetes Educator at (920) 568-5247, or via email at firstname.lastname@example.org or email@example.com.
What is Diabetes?
Virtually all food a person eats is converted into glucose before it enters the blood stream. With the help of insulin produced by the pancreas, glucose is taken into cells to be used as energy.
Type 1 diabetes develops when the pancreas becomes unable to produce insulin because the immune system destroyed the beta cells of the pancreas.
Type 2 diabetes, representing 90 to 95 percent of all cases, is typically caused by a decrease in insulin production, and the cells becoming less efficient at using insulin (insulin resistance). Although the pancreas continues to produce insulin, it is not enough to keep blood glucose levels in check. Type 2 diabetes is more likely to be inherited than type 1. Risk factors include obesity and a sedentary lifestyle.
Gestational diabetes is high blood sugar (diabetes) that starts or is first diagnosed during pregnancy. Pregnancy hormones can block insulin from doing its job. When this happens, glucose levels may increase in a pregnant woman's blood.
Pre-diabetes means your blood sugar level is above normal but not high enough for a diagnosis of diabetes. | <urn:uuid:6390be68-d7b6-4e78-a97a-802e0bff6c3e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forthealthcare.com/diabetes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91285 | 435 | 2.578125 | 3 |
How big is the present? Classic theories of perception all essentially assume that 'now' is some instantaneous slice of time, and that the task of perception is to reconstruct the flow of experience from the snapshots provided by, for example, the eye. But phenomenologically, our experience clearly occurs over time, and it is not clear how you can reinsert time into a perceptual system that detects static slices (in the same way it is not clear how you can uniquely recover the third spatial dimension from a 2D retinal image). In other words, perceptual experience is 4 dimensional - three spatial and one temporal - and we are supposedly creating this from a series of two (spatial) dimensional snapshots.
It's been a good day for this sort of thing; shortly after my last post I came across this blog post via Gizmodo. It describes the curious case of Neil, who cannot see colour but who has learned to hear it, via a camera that encodes colours as sounds.
NPR has a cute little animation (via BoingBoing) about the story of writer Howard Engel. Engel suffered a minor stroke which left him unable to read words, but he could still write (and read what he wrote for a short period, before it faded into incomprehensibility).
Fascinatingly, he has taught himself to read again using touch. By tracing a letter with his finger (or eventually with his tongue on the roof of his mouth or back of his teeth) he could identify it; he's fast enough now with his tongue that he can read about half of the subtitles in a foreign movie!
So far, Gibson has explained how invariant structure can emerge from changes in perspective (see here and here). How he gets down to the real problem. What are the consequences of this structure for the ambient optic array. What is it that I see, as a perceiver, that specifies things about the environment?
I'm just back from the 11th European Workshop on Ecological Psychology and I have a few posts about things that arose there. Ecological psychology is, reassuringly, in better empirical form than I had been thinking; there are still people doing things badly, but plenty going after things as carefully as they should be, with due attention to issues of information. So that was good.
There was one talk by John Wann on the neural control of steering in driving tasks. I like John a lot, and respect his work - he's a very careful experimentalist and not at all susceptible to fads in psychology, and his work has always included detailed use of perceptual information in sensible ways. He has recently been involved in some fMRI versions of his steering studies with a post-doc trained in imaging, and he presented this data to the conference.
I left this part of Chapter 4 as a separate post because the end discusses a problem, the problem of two minds, in some detail and it made sense to split it out. This section ties Gibson to James again by highlighting how his ecological optics can solve a problem within radical empiricism, demonstrating that they are, indeed, connected in interesting ways. This will also segue a little back into dispositions, although only briefly; I've been doing some digging and, as I suspected, the philosophical discussion of what dispositions are has moved on since Turvey (1992). Over the next little while I'll be attempting to read some of the philosophy literature, with the help of a philosopher friend of mine, with the goal of producing some papers for the philosophical and eco-psych communities. | <urn:uuid:90a6a174-ad78-444e-8874-6382cf1ba062> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2010_06_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974603 | 722 | 2.125 | 2 |
Heart Transplant Patients Show Increased Risk of Skin Cancer
December 29, 2009 - Among the 312 heart transplant patients at the Mayo Clinic who researchers followed for 19 years, nearly half developed skin cancers during follow-up, particularly squamous cell and basal cell carcinomas, according to a study published in the December issue of Archives of Dermatology.
The study, led by Jerry D. Brewer, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., found a total of 1,395 new skin cancers developed, of which 89 percent were squamous cell carcinomas and 11 percent were basal cell carcinomas.
Researchers identified an association between the use of the immunosuppressant mycophenolate mofetil (CellCept) (HR 2.74, P=0.001) and an increased risk for basal cell carcinoma.
Increased age at transplant was a common risk factor (10-year HR 2.57, P<0.001 for squamous cell carcinoma and 10-year HR 1.77, P<0.001 for basal cell carcinoma). Developing herpes simplex viral infection after transplant (HR 2.90, P=0.01 for squamous cell carcinoma and HR 3.38, P=0.01 for basal cell carcinoma) was another common risk factor.
The study found that incidence increased with time from transplant with cumulative rates of any skin cancer 20.4 percent at five years and 37.5 percent at 10 years.
Rates increased similarly for various types of cancer. Five, 10, and 15 years after transplant, a total of 15.4 percent, 32.3 percent, and 38.2 percent of patients had squamous cell carcinoma; and 10.3 percent, 19.2 percent, and 31.6 percent developed basal cell carcinoma.
The cumulative incidence rates of a second squamous cell carcinoma were 44.0 percent, 67.4 percent, and 75.9 percent at one, three, and five years after the first squamous cell carcinoma.
Cumulative rates of developing basal cell carcinoma were 36.7 percent, 54.7 percent, and 65.9 percent at one, three, and five years after the first basal cell carcinoma and reached 98.1 percent within seven years. | <urn:uuid:b1b45ffc-be59-4b25-ae18-898e4f3197cf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dicardiology.com/article/heart-transplant-patients-show-increased-risk-skin-cancer | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94478 | 476 | 2.109375 | 2 |
||1He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury; 2and he saw a poor widow put in two copper coins. 3And he said, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; 4for they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all the living that she had."
||41And he sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the multitude putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. 42And a poor widow came, and put in two copper coins, which make a penny. 43And he called his disciples to him, and said to them, "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. 44For they all contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living." | <urn:uuid:086e52c1-e13c-4511-8f0b-be7dce08062f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.katapi.org.uk/katapiNSBunix/Psgs/RSVByKFmToPP.php?KFm=303021001.00&KTo=303021004.00&KFm1=302012041.00&KTo1=302012044.00 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986057 | 193 | 2.234375 | 2 |
Hiandinata, Nancy (2008) The Adjacency pairs and the reasons of disjointed adjacency pairs of Marlin and Dory in "Finding Nemo". Bachelor thesis, Petra Christian University.Full text not available from this repository.
This thesis deals with the adjacency pairs and disjointed adjacency pairs. In this research, the writer wanted to know what adjacency pairs and disjointed adjacency pairs occured in "Finding Nemo". The writer used Adjacency Pairs theory explained by Sacks (1967) and Speech Acts theory explained by Austin and Searle as supporting theory. The writer took the conversation between Marlin and Dory in Finding Nemo?s script. The writer divided the adjacency pairs into two parts, that is, the well-responded adjacency pairs and not well-responded (disjointed) adjacency pairs. Because the writer only analyzed the disjointed adjacency pairs, she found out that there are some reasons from Dory for her not-well response (disjointed) action toward the first pair, like short term memory loss, stubbornness. Also, there are some reasons for Marlin not to respond well, like negative thinking, focuses on other thing. The writer concluded that disjointed adjacency pairs are still acceptable as long as it can be understand.
|Item Type:||Thesis (Bachelor)|
|Uncontrolled Keywords:||conversation, adjacency pairs, disjointed second pairs|
|Date Deposited:||23 Mar 2011 18:48|
|Last Modified:||31 Mar 2011 20:12|
Actions (login required) | <urn:uuid:58caeead-f93a-4c4f-b54b-dec49498483e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://repository.petra.ac.id/537/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.900349 | 356 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Photo Courtesy of Prensa Obreros Zanon
While many workers around the world are worried about downsizing, lay-offs and how to protect their jobs, workers in Argentina have come up with their own solution to business closures – Occupy, Resist and Produce. Many factories, like the Zanon Ceramics plant, have been running without bosses for almost a decade. In response to a financial crisis in 2001 that wrecked Argentina’s economy, workers decided to occupy their workplaces and start up production without bosses in order to safe-guard their jobs.
Zanon Ceramics, now known as FASINPAT (Factory without a boss), has re-defined the basis of production: without workers, bosses are unable to run businesses; without bosses, workers can do it better. As the largest recuperated factory in Argentina, and occupied since 2001, the Zanon ceramics plant in the Patagonian province of Neuquén now employs 470 workers.
This month, the FASINPAT collective is a step closer in winning permanent control of the factory. The provincial government presented a bill in the provincial legislature for the expropriation of the factory. If this bill is passed, and it looks favorable, it would mean a solution to the workers’ long standing legal woes.
Since the plant began production under worker control in 2002, they have faced numerous eviction threats and other violent attacks. The government has tried to evict them five times using police operatives. On April 8, 2003, during the most recent eviction attempt, over 5,000 community members from Neuquén came out to defend the factory.
In a press release, the worker collective said that the legislature received the bill was a positive step. “The historic progress we made today was the result of a hard fight. The collective struggle and mobilization of Worker Self-management, along with the workers in this country, community support and international recognition has made this possible.”
In 2001, Zanon’s owners decided to close their doors and fire the workers without paying months of back pay or indemnity. Leading up to the massive layoffs and the plant’s closure, workers went on strike in 2000. The owner, Luis Zanon with over 75 million dollars in debt to public and private creditors, fired en masse most of the workers and closed the factory in 2001—a bosses’ lockout. In October 2001, workers declared the plant under worker control. The workers camped outside the factory for four months, pamphleting and partially blocking a highway leading to the capital city Neuquén. While the workers were camping outside the factory, a court ruled that the employees could sell off remaining stock. After the stock ran out, on March 2, 2002, the workers’ assembly voted to start up production without a boss. For more than eight years, FASINPAT has created jobs, supported community projects and shown the world that we don’t need bosses.
Luis Zanon´s debts of over $70 million are still outstanding, while many of the creditors want their money back, pushing for the eviction and foreclosure of the ceramics plant. The current bill presented in the legislature would mean that the state would pay off 22 million pesos (around $7 million) to the creditors. One of the main creditors is the World Bank – which gave a loan of 20 million dollars to Luis Zanon for the construction of the plant, which he never paid back. The other major creditor is the Italian company SACMY that produces state of the art ceramics manufacturing machinery and is owed over $5 million.
Omar Villablanca, a worker at Zanon said that the workers are most concerned about providing job continuity – safeguarding the 470 jobs that the factory without a boss have created and maintained since 2001. He stressed that FASINPAT needs a formal long-term legal solution in order to survive as a competitive business in a faltering economy.
“The state needs to make laws so that workers can work. In eight years we haven’t asked the state for anything other than an expropriation law,” said Jose Luis Paris, another worker from FASINPAT.
Economic Crisis Grips Argentina
Argentina is in a better position than other Latin American nations in the face of the deepening global crisis. From 2003 to 2007, Argentina enjoyed a high economic growth rate, between 8 and 9 percent. However, with the global economy in recession the nation’s growth has come to a halt, and it is expected that Argentina will see a drastic drop Gross Domestic Product in 2010.
Many independent analysts expect that the global recession will affect Argentina’s real economy, that’s to say industry and employment rates will suffer from the crisis, rather than the financial sector which already took a major blow in 2001. Those who benefited from Argentina’s economic recovery of course are now those who are using this crisis as an excuse to downsize and lay-off workers.
The current government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has bolstered that unemployment has gone done from the staggering numbers post-2001 crisis. Many of those jobs are subcontracted and underpaid. Official unemployment statistics, which have been under fire for being conveniently inaccurate, report unemployment at 8 percent. However, many independent analysts say that the actual rate is much higher. Eduardo Lucita, economist from Economists of the Left said that analysts don’t have exact numbers because many of the firings are of workers without formal contracts and can’t be tracked. “Argentina has already had a crisis in the financial sector in 2001. The current crisis is directly affecting Argentina’s real economy. Since October, there are more than 50,000 people who are now unemployed. There have been mass firings, lay-offs and pay cuts.”
Workers Paying for the Crisis
In the failing economy, the jobs at FASINPAT are more important than ever. But the government seems to have all but forgotten that the recuperated enterprises and worker cooperatives provide nearly 20,000 jobs for Argentina, while the government has failed to provide a long-term legal solution to the workers without bosses or subsidies that standard businesses regularly have access to.
Another factor in the struggle at FASINPAT is the lack of subsidies for the cooperative. Sales have dropped by 40-50 percent since 2008 due to a radical slow-down in the construction industry nationally.
“Because of the drop in construction, we aren’t producing as much,” says Paris. In 2006, the plant produced 400,000 square meters of ceramics per month, today that number has gone down to 150,000 square meters per month. The cooperative has had to shut off some of the ovens and shorten production shifts. On top of this drop; the workers controlling the factory have had to face sky-rocketing energy prices. The workers pay over 300,000 dollars a month for electricity and gas. And for Paris, the workers should not have to pay more than other businesses do: “Many industry leaders get government energy subsidies up to 70 percent. We want to buy directly from the gas companies to lower our costs or receive subsidies that we are entitled to.”
Many of the 200 worker controlled businesses and factories in Argentina are being affected by the crisis. But unlike their capitalist counterparts, the worker cooperatives are taking any measure possible to avoid laying off workers, something which they are opposed to doing.
“We aren’t like the capitalists. You can’t throw workers out like they are lice,” said Candido Gonzalez, a veteran worker from Chilavert worker occupied print factory in Buenos Aires, one of the first occupied plants after the 2001 crisis.
During the Argentina’s financial crisis in 2001, he occupied his workplace and fought until he and his fellow workers won legal recognition. Now that business is slowing down, many assemblies at the worker occupied factories would rather accept collective pay cuts, than their fellow workers lose their jobs.
When Capitalism Fails – Occupy, Resist and Produce
Capitalism has taken a turn for the worse, spinning itself out of control into a downward spiral which many are characterizing as the second depression of the century. And during this crisis, there are going to be winners and losers. The winners? Most likely big business and banks receiving bailout plans. The losers? The millions who are facing unemployment, dropping wages and inflation.
“During a capitalist crisis, when the businessmen and governments are trying to unload all their responsibilities onto the workers of the world, Zanon under worker self-management, is a clear example of how workers can come out of this crisis,” say the workers at FASINPAT.
Since late 2008 there have been several new factory takeovers in Argentina. Many workers from the newly occupied factories say that their bosses saw the crisis as the perfect opportunity to clear their debts by closing up shop, fraudulently liquidating assets, firing workers and later re-start production under a new firm.
“[However] Many companies are still open because they are afraid of the recovered factory phenomenon; we have to keep them scared,” said Paris from Zanon. In almost all of the newly recuperated factories, the workers suggest that the owners had no real reason to close up shop – meaning that the businesses had production demand. I have heard workers on numerous occasions say that during the crisis, the bosses are taking advantage of the situation of a recession.
The worker controlled factories and businesses occupied after 2001 may not be by themselves a social revolution, but the example of worker self-management has helped many workers today facing the possibility of losing their jobs with the idea that they can occupy their workplace in order to defend their rights as laborers. Nearly 10 factories have been occupied since 2008. This may be a sign that workers are confronting the global financial crisis with lessons and tools from previous worker occupied factories. Strategically, the previous worker occupied factories have been fundamental in providing advice of all kinds, including legal, political, production and moral.
For many at the recuperated enterprises, the occupation of their workplace meant much more than safe-guarding their jobs, it also became part of a struggle for a world without exploitation.
“The recuperated enterprises are working to change society. We are changing the way of working, working without exploitation and show workers that we can function without bosses,” says Jorge Suarez from Hotel BAUEN, an operating worker occupied hotel in down town Buenos Aires.
Argentina’s worker factory takeovers reflect a strategy of workers defending their rights and taking hold of their own destiny. Hard times require desperate measures – and one measure may be for workers to occupy, resist and produce.
Marie Trigona is a writer, radio producer and filmmaker based in Argentina. She can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:690427c4-fc54-406a-88d7-b55628dcdb4a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rogerhollander.wordpress.com/tag/argentina-world-bank/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96626 | 2,268 | 2.84375 | 3 |
I'm looking to rotate an object (probably going to be an LED lighting system) at 60RPM.
I'm familiar with using Arduino, but haven't had any experience with RC electronics.
Should I be using an ESC and somehow program it to maintain this speed on a normal servo motor? Also is this relatively low speed possible? I'd say as long as it is accurate to about 20 RPM and doesn't go lower than 60RPM it would be fine.
This one is better.
Ah wow thanks Mike. :)
Also currently trying the mod to make the servo into a simple continous rotation motor, with any luck running it directly from 6V could do the trick.
If I have a continous rotation servo, and run it off a PWM controller, would it maintain the same speed even if the battery runs down a little? I'm thinking it wouldn't, as the PWM tells it 'how much of maximum speed and which direction' to run.
I don't believe I said there were two.
Ok will look at regulated power sources.
You can get relatively cheap optical encoders (about 30$) that give your Arduino the rotational speed. Simply take the desired speed, subtract the current speed and multiply that by some suitable constant. Output that to PWM and it should work. (the most basic PID controller is this)
If you want it really cool you could probably use some diodes and a voltage regulator to create a burshless power transmitter, but the slip ring would be a lot easier I think.
I am using continuous rotation servo for 'Yaw' control of my camera gimbal. I am using it for stabilization around a setpoint/ target angle, using PID's.
If I give a target of say 60 degrees, the servo should adjust its speed in such a way as to make it to 60 degrees (in a circle of 360 degrees).
The AHRS system gives a DCM Yaw output from [-180 to 180], i.e. 0 to +180 degrees and sudden transition to -179 and goes to 0 in the reverse direction.
The problem I am facing is this transition around the boundary from +180 to -179. If my target angle is say 170 degrees, once it nears 170 degrees the servo speed reduces and when it reaches 170, the velocity becomes zero to a standstill. Having the same 'Target angle' if the orientation of board is such that yaw output is 180 and then a slight change in orientation cause a sudden change to -179 (This is a difference of almost 180 - (-179) ~= 360). The servo speed reverses from relatively slow to fast, due to this vast difference to compensate.
Is there a workaround? or a method to compensate for this problem? This is not there in the code. Any help is appreciated. | <urn:uuid:e25c7044-f53b-4f15-98f2-0fee9f8b3d6f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/rotating-object-at-60rpm?commentId=705844%3AComment%3A901708&xg_source=activity | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939353 | 595 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Nicole Perlroth, Forbes Staff
I cover venture capital, start-ups and edit the Forbes Midas List.
[Editor's Note: This post was written by Bryan Roberts, a PhD and partner at the venture capital firm Venrock, in response to House Republicans' efforts to repeal the healthcare reform act, or the Affordable Care Act (ACA). What he has to say is worth your attention.]
Virtually everyone agrees that our healthcare system is unsustainable in its current form. The impact of escalating healthcare costs combined with mediocre value created for each dollar spent has finally entered the national consciousness. Over the last 30 years, there have been amazing advances in our abilities to combat human disease and equally impressive innovation within information technology that has changed the way we live, yet there has been staggeringly little application of innovation to the efficiency of our healthcare system.
No one should be surprised by this situation. Healthcare in America is provided, and paid for, by the transaction – per office visit, per surgery, per x-ray – with little visibility into performance, efficiency, quality or cost. We pay for volume and, as in any industry, people who are paid by the widget will seek to produce more widgets at ever increasing prices. Why has it worked this way? It is easier to measure transactions than outcomes. Until recently, the system has lacked both the information technologies and political will to advance a better model.
Our simplistic, static and misaligned incentive system has succeeded at one thing in addition to gobbling up ever increasing amounts of US GDP: stifling creativity. For years entrepreneurs have turned their attention to other challenges, and not unreasonably. There has been no incentive for change in the system – patients did not pay; providers were driven by volume; employers were focused on other parts of their businesses. So who would be compelled to adopt an entrepreneur’s innovation? No one. So they went on to create enormous advances, efficiencies and value in the internet, software and China to name a few.
The stage is now set for this all to change. A confluence of forces is propelling the healthcare information technology and services sector from an uninteresting backwater to a central topic of conversation in start-up and investment circles. A major catalyst for this dramatic reversal has been the Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka “Healthcare Reform”). Cutting through the political grandstanding, the ACA will create enormous new opportunities for entrepreneurship and innovation in healthcare.
Perhaps those in Congress who favor repeal of the ACA have not fully digested the law, or perhaps they don’t actually understand the demonstrated economic power of innovative technology start-ups over the last 30 years. But from Silicon Valley, failure to wholeheartedly endorse, implement and nurture the ACA, and its downstream innovations, would be rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory. The ACA encompasses multiple provisions designed to enable and nurture approaches that can shift the payment (and therefore incentives) of healthcare providers from “pay for volume” to “pay for value” approaches. Examples of innovative approaches include:
The net result of the ACA is a rising tide of innovation and venture creation that has the opportunity to save lives, save money, help transform our health system for the better and create many jobs. . Healthcare IT/services is gaining dramatic traction in the garages, dorm rooms and tree houses of talented, creative people who are seeking to create businesses to change the world because, at long last, there is a compelling business case to do so. All of this, at a time when America is seeking every means possible to improve its economy, employment and global competitive advantage.
It would be a shame to repeal, or even diminish support for, the ACA and thereby derail the efforts, and potential success, of the one economic sector of the US that has outshone and outcompeted the rest of the world for 30+ years – our entrepreneurs. | <urn:uuid:29a9c697-fb08-42e0-afd6-79aa306f4ed6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/sites/nicoleperlroth/2011/01/19/healthcare-reform-rhetoric-vs-reality/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95697 | 798 | 1.703125 | 2 |
AT&T's government lobbying has a long and fairly sordid history. Before taking you inside our investigation of AT&T's recent anti-net neutrality lobbying (and the charges of "astroturfing" being thrown around), let's take a stroll down memory lane.
It was 1976, and a House subcommittee was considering a bill called the Consumer Communications Reform Act. The proposed law, heavily backed by AT&T, would have made the then monopoly even more of one by effectively declaring its long distance system America's "official" service. The bill clearly targeted a competitor: MCI's new microwave tower network, just being rolled out across the country. For days, Capitol Hill had been deluged by workers, priests, police chiefs, mayors, and anybody else Ma Bell could round up to support the legislation.
Then Representative Tim Wirth of Colorado walked into the hearing room. He saw that it was packed with people. Wirth asked the first panelist, an AT&T executive, to identify his colleagues. Five minutes later the man was still reading out names.
"Will everyone associated with AT&T just stand up?" an exasperated Wirth finally asked. The entire room rose. Everyone started laughing.
As it was then, so it is now. It should be no surprise to anyone that, as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposes new net neutrality rules, AT&T Senior Vice President Jim Cicconi has sent out a e-mail to the company's entire managerial staff urging them to deluge the FCC's new discussion site with anti-net neutrality comments. The memo includes recommended talking points:
"The 'net neutrality' rules as reported will jeopardize the very goals supported by the Obama administration that every American have access to high-speed Internet services no matter where they live or their economic circumstance," Cicconi warns. "That goal can't be met with rules that halt private investment in broadband infrastructure. And the jobs associated with that investment will be lost at a time when the country can least afford it."
Fair enough; AT&T doesn't like the idea of network neutrality rules. But the company has long been accused of going well beyond such overt lobbying. It's also said to be a master at creating fake grassroots enthusiasm—so-called "astroturf" campaigns—often using small minority and civil rights groups as pawns in its government affairs chess game. Those charges are now being made once again, and Ars investigated the issue.
Avoiding tentative conclusions
Jobs, jobs, jobs. That was the line in 1976, and that's the line being toed by everybody from state Attorneys General to town council selectmen. If there's one thing that both the pre- and post-breakup AT&T is good at, it's corralling huge numbers of people—workers, politicians, non-profits, ministers, whoever—into carrying the telco's water on the latest hot topic, and the telco isn't adverse to spreading lots of scratch around in return.
Take those 72 Democratic representatives who wrote to the FCC last week urging the FCC "to avoid tentative conclusions" on net neutrality "which favor government regulation." A Washington Post analysis says that all but two of them took a combined $180,000 in AT&T campaign contribution money, plus plenty more from Comcast and Verizon.
And that's just the beginning of the money trail. To appreciate the vast influence that AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon enjoy, check out the AT&T Foundation's 2007 tax returns as an example: it has pages and pages of non-profits, charities, support groups, and community centers that receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in telco largesse.
Thumbing through the return, it's easy to come to simple, "follow-the-money" conclusions about some of the filings which the FCC is now receiving. Take the go-slow on net neutrality commentary filed in late September by the Hispanic Technology and Telecommunications Partnership (HTTP) and 19 other civil rights groups. Their statement warns that net neutrality policies could inhibit investment and "leave disenfranchised communities further behind." The coalition describes themselves as having a common purpose, serving communities "that are among the most severely impacted by a lack of access to technology." And indeed the list includes signers from venerable organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).
But the groups signing the letter have something else in common: financial support from AT&T (and sometimes Verizon and Comcast). These advocates don't hide this. For example, the website of one of the signers, the Japanese American Citizens League, says "Website made possible by the generous sponsorship of AT&T." 100 Black Men lists AT&T as a "partner" and "sponsor" of the group. AT&T Foundation's 2007 tax returns show that 100 Black Men received $100,000 that year and $75,000 in 2006.
Similarly, the NAACP, which also signed the statement, lists AT&T and Verizon on its Centennial Event sponsors page. LULAC's website indicates that it received a $1.5 million Technology Access Grant from AT&T. Comcast Foundation's records indicate that it gave the LULAC Institute $60,000 in 2007. And in 2006 the AT&T Foundation gave LULAC numerous grants to support computer education centers across the United States.
And some of these groups have even more direct ties to the telcos. The Asian American Justice Center's Advisory Council includes Anne H. Chow, listed as "AT&T Chair" on the group's website. In 2006, AT&T identified her as a senior vice president for the company. Her AAJC bio says that Chow "played a key role in the AT&T/SBC merger with overall responsibility for the Sales and Marketing integration planning effort."
Wrong side of the divide
But when we spoke with HTTP's Sylvia Aguilera, it was obvious that there was more than money doing the talking here. We asked her straight out if AT&T or one of the other big ISPs put her group up to writing the letter. No, she replied, it was she who had initiated the action. HTTP's worries about net neutrality stem from concerns that the policy could slow down investment in ISP rollout, she explained, an area where many Latinos are finding jobs. We also asked AT&T whether they had a hand in the statement, but received no reply.
Ironically, while pro-neutrality activists see astroturf in all this, Aguilera sees something similar in the net neutrality movement. An HTTP analysis calls it "dominated by mainstream consumer advocates and the technology and telecommunications policy elite, groups that are least familiar and least equipped to discuss the perspectives of communities on the wrong side of the digital divide." We asked Aguilera which groups she was talking about. She wouldn't say.
But before you jump on that comment, consider the subject from the viewpoint of a blue-collar Latino, black, or white worker. Where would you have the best chance at finding employment--getting a staff position at everybody's favorite pro-neutrality company, Google, or supporting last mile lines for AT&T?
This kind of perception gap is not unique to net neutrality, either. In 2004, the Center for Public Integrity issued a report contending that many of the civil rights and women's advocacy groups who signed statements against "a la carte" cable programming, then supported by then FCC Chair Kevin Martin, received donations from the cable industry. (A la carte is the notion that consumers should be able to buy cable channels on an individual basis.)
The mentioned groups were quite upset with the report (especially when Martin cited it at an Aspen Institute Forum) because regardless of who they took money from, they sincerely thought that a la carte would make it harder for minority programmers to generate advertising revenue on cable platforms (few people would subscribe to tiny, minority-oriented channels, but they might watch occasional shows if the network was included in a broader cable package).
Similarly, the HTTP coalition takes exception to suggestions that its perspectives are telco-driven, even if some of its members do take telco money. A recent commentary by Art Brodsky of Public Knowldge didn't mention the HTTP group, but it did note that on the net neutrality question, many minority advocates, "for whatever reason—whether they believe what the Big Telecom companies tell them or not," appear to "land on policies that hurt their constituencies."
Brodsky's statement also wondered whether an upcoming anti-net neutrality ad signed by some of these groups is being directed towards Mignon Clyburn, the FCC's newest Democrat and an African-American woman.
Aguilera quickly published an indignant response to this post, denying the Clyburn suggestion. "We take genuine exception to the manner in which the author dismisses minorities' opinions as naively misinformed," she declared, the statement co-signed by NAACP Vice President Hilary O. Shelton.
And so net neutrality activists face a big challenge: convincing a wider range of stakeholders that uncertain new reforms will not jeopardize their stake in the present system. It is in those anxieties that AT&T and company find allies.
Do you have an estimate?
Still, while money doesn't explain everything, it doesn't explain nothing, either. For instance, media reform group Free Press pointed out to us the curious case of the Arkansas Retired Seniors Coalition. The group filed a letter (PDF) with the FCC that opposed network neutrality... but forgot to strip out the "XYZ organization" and replace the text with its own name. (Cue ageist "senior moment" joke here.) We've highlighted the odd text below:
The group appears to have left no discernible traces on the Internet, and no website could be found. Yet it cares enough about network neutrality to send a letter to DC that just happens to look like a template? It's unclear who was behind the letter, but it certainly looks like evidence of anti-neutrality forces rounding up an odd collection of allies on this issue.
So can net neutrality boosters overcome AT&T's counter-offensive? Absolutely... and in some of the same ways. Forty local grassroots groups just submitted a letter to the FCC supporting the agency's net neutrality proposals. The signers include the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, and La Asamblea de Derechos Civiles (Assembly of Civil Rights) of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The incumbent ISPs have deep pockets and decades of experience at this sort of fight, but there's always a possibility that lobbying too aggressively will backfire.
That's what happened in 1976. In his wonderful history of the breakup of AT&T, The Deal of the Century, Steve Coll describes the moment when the Consumer Communications Reform Act fell flat on its face. None other than the Chair of AT&T, legendary executive John deButts, was testifying on its behalf at a hearing. Then Congressman Wirth interrupted his speech.
"Do you have an estimate," Wirth angrily asked, "of what your lobbying activities for 1976 on this bill have cost?" About $600,000, deButts claimed.
"Have you gotten the kind of support and sponsorship you would like?" the Congressman continued. "Frankly, can you tell me how many people AT&T has working full time on this legislation?"
"I have no idea, sir, but it is very few, very few," deButts baldly replied. The hearing audience again howled with laughter, but this time against AT&T, not with it. deButts' answer killed the bill. "By swinging too hard," Coll observed, "the AT&T chairman had missed everything and had hurled himself out of the ring."
It's a mistake that AT&T might well make again as the FCC, backed by a solid pro-net neutrality majority, solicits comments from the public on its Internet non-discrimination proposals. | <urn:uuid:8c9da5dc-aa21-4a8f-8502-44904dcbc4fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/10/the-anti-net-neutrality-movement-is-it-just-about-att-money/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964904 | 2,493 | 1.90625 | 2 |
1898-The American steamer, Toledo with the barge Shawnee in tow, became water-logged 25 miles southwest of the station at Ship Canal, MI. Her crew boarded Shawnee and sailed to the canal. There they engaged the steamer D. F. Rose to tow Toledo in and the surfmen assisted to lay her on the beach near the piers. The keeper then telephoned for a tug and lighter, and upon their arrival all hands set to work until 11 p.m. saving about 1,000 feet of lumber. At this hour the wind came out west and the work had to be abandoned. Toledo broke up and became a total wreck on the 30th.
1986- Coast Guard officials signed the contract papers to acquire the H-60 series helicopter to replace the venerable Sikorsky HH-3F Pelicans.
1994-The crew of Coast Guard LORAN Station Iwo Jima decommissioned their station and turned it over to a crew from the Japanese Maritime Safety Agency. The turnover of all of the Northwest Pacific LORAN chain stations was arranged under a 1992 agreement between the U.S. and Japan.
(Source: USCG Historian’s Office) | <urn:uuid:5cc06b0d-d820-4fcb-8814-f76ae51364d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.marinelink.com/news/september-history-coast335671.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964235 | 249 | 2.96875 | 3 |
In the winter of 1954-55, State Department intelligence analyst Paul Kattenburg was in Saigon puzzling over the wisest course for U.S. policymakers.
France, with its army defeated at Dien Bien Phu and colonial ambitions in Asia at an end, was preparing to leave. The Eisenhower administration was stoking the ambitions of Ngo Dinh Diem to become president of an independent Republic of Vietnam in the area south of an armistice line drawn at the 17th parallel.
Kattenburg recommended that the U.S. give Ho Chi Minh's communist government in Hanoi $500 million to rebuild and forget about holding the line.
Kattenburg guessed the amount would be enough to win Ho's friendship, prying him away from China and the Soviet Union. Ho had looked for support from the U.S. starting in 1919, when he went to Paris hoping to see President Woodrow Wilson so he could argue the case for Vietnamese independence.
It was one of those moments that offered a fork in the road. They crop up many times in Fredrik Logevall's "Embers of War." Hindsight makes them tantalizing.
There are thousands of books about the Vietnam War. Many of them render harsh judgments on former Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and the military leadership they chose to lead the American war effort. Logevall offers "Embers of War" as a history of how it all began. The how takes some telling — nearly 800 pages, but it is very much worth the read, both for the story and the writing.
Logevall opens with an invitation to muse.
"Ho visited Boston and New York in 1913 and a few years later read Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. The United States, he came fervently to believe, could be the champion of his cause. (In the French nightmare, he was right.) In 1919, at the end of the Great War, with Wilson due in Paris to negotiate a peace 'to end all wars,' the unknown young nationalist set out to make his case. It's here that our story begins."
Vietnam was subordinate to concerns about peace in Europe in 1919. And in 1955, Ho Chi Minh was too bound up in communism during a global Cold War to win favor in Washington.
At first, only the French police were interested. By 1920, Ho was attending French Communist Party meetings. In Lenin's writings, he found a path for defeating colonial rule. When Germany rolled over France in 1940, Ho saw an opportunity to return home after more than 30 years abroad and begin the struggle for independence.
Ho recedes from the narrative as World War II and other global struggles inject themselves into Vietnamese affairs. President Franklin Roosevelt had no sympathy with French colonialism in Indochina. He wanted France to withdraw, as Washington vowed to do in the Philippines, once the Japanese were defeated.
Roosevelt also had little patience with Charles de Gaulle's attempts to overcome the humiliation of defeat and reclaim for France a role as a global power.
When Japan surrendered, Ho declared Vietnamese independence. De Gaulle felt that reclaiming Indochina was essential to French power. Roosevelt was dead, and Harry Truman was worried about communism in Europe. Truman offered no objection to de Gaulle's ambitions.
"It was a monumental decision by Truman in historical terms, and like so many that U.S. presidents would make in the decades to come, it had little to do with Vietnam itself — it was all about American priorities on the world stage," Logevall writes.
France fought for a decade, with more than 110,000 killed or missing. But the French came to deeply regret their early diplomatic success in Washington. While Dwight Eisenhower seemed OK with an armistice in Korea, he was not willing to support French efforts to reach a similar cease-fire in Vietnam.
A surprisingly hawkish Eisenhower came to the edge of full military intervention as France neared defeat in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. In a Cabinet argument with his treasury secretary, Eisenhower introduced the domino theory; the toppling of Vietnam to communism, he said, would lead to communist victories across Southeast Asia.
"Embers of War" has the balance and heft to hold hindsight's swift verdicts at bay. French and Vietnamese sources and accounts help inform the story, including some that describe how close Ho's forces came to defeat and how badly and cruelly they governed once they had taken over in the north.
This is an excellent, valuable book.
'Embers of War'
By Fredrik Logevall
Random House, 864 pages, $40 | <urn:uuid:5f6acbdc-1b8a-4049-afa9-11aeff054024> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-10-01/features/sc-ent-0926-books-vietnam-war-history-20121001_1_dien-bien-phu-vietnam-war-french-police | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97282 | 964 | 3.078125 | 3 |
As Douglas Wilson has pointed out from time to time, we often think that it is only sin that may have serious consequences rather than seeing sin as consequences. Sin is bad, and the consequences may be worse, but sometimes God gives us over to our sins. Sin itself is a judgment from God. In Romans 1, God gives men and women over to sexual perversity because they were sinfully confused prior to that. Sodomy is not merely a bad sin which will have horrific consequences. Sodomy is a judgment from God on a people who have turned away from Him, who have confused the creation with the Creator, who have lied and cheated and oppressed the weak and disobeyed their parents (see Rom. 1:28-32).
Similarly, adultery is a sin which God gives unfaithful husbands over to. It is not the sin of adultery that makes a man unfaithful. Adultery itself is God’s judgment on a man whom God is already angry with (Pr. 22:14).
Hosea says that abortion is also the judgment of God. When God was angry with Israel for her sins, He said that He would remember all her past sins and give her miscarrying wombs and dry breasts (Hos. 9:14). But God’s anger with Ephraim extends to the point that He says He will “kill the darlings of their womb.” (Hos. 9:16) Abortion is not merely a great sin that will lead to the judgment of God (though that is true enough). Abortion is itself a judgment of God; He is killing our little ones because of our wickedness. He is angry with us and He is causing our sins to be visited on us and on our children.
So what shall we do? Hosea says, “Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap in mercy; break up the fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord, till He comes and rains righteousness on you.” (10:12) And, “say to Him, ‘Take away all iniquity; receive us graciously, for we will offer the sacrifices of our lips… [God says] ‘I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely, for my anger has turned away from him.’” (14:2, 4) | <urn:uuid:c76bced0-9918-4d05-aeec-68db013539df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tobyjsumpter.com/bible-hosea/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974502 | 492 | 2.03125 | 2 |
black woman and a white man can marry
for love and settle in the United States and
live happily,” he said.
The theme of interracial marriage is
fundamental to the story, Andrews said.
Collins lets the marriage take place in
1865, when the idea was controversial.
“Most Americans couldn’t conceive of
such things, even in fiction.”
Andrews sees Collins as a pioneer. She
had to invent herself and her own writing.
She wanted to inspire readers to believe in
a future better than the past.
“I would want people to read these
[African-American] writers and see them
as the inspiration that they wanted to be
themselves to the people in their own
time,” he said.
The Curse of Caste originally was written in 31 chapters as part of a series for
The Christian Recorder, a publication of the
African Methodist Episcopal Church, a
major institution in the black community
Andrews and his co-editor worked to
provide a reliable version of the text. He
also wrote an introduction to the novel to
try to give readers some insight into what
Collins was thinking. And because The
Curse of Caste is unfinished, Andrews
wrote two endings for the piece: a happy
ending and a tragic one. The reader gets to
choose between them.
But Andrews has had to fight for The
Curse of Caste’s title as “first.” Harvard
University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.
contends Our Nig by Harriet Wilson, published in 1859, deserves that role in literary
Andrews says Our Nig is a work of
autobiography, following closely the events
in Wilson’s life, and therefore cannot be
called fiction. The Curse of Caste, on the
other hand, is written entirely from
Collins’ imagination, making it, he says, the
first work of fiction written by a black
Andrews is series editor of the North
American Slave Narratives, an online project that rescued all existing autobiographical narratives of fugitives and former slaves
up to 1920 from their crumbling forms by
putting them online.
He has written, studied, published and
taught literature on the black side of the
color line at universities across the country: in Texas, Wisconsin, Kansas, at Stanford
and at Carolina.
The study has claimed him, he said.
“In the early 1970s, when I got my first
job, there were very few people at the
time who thought there was any black
American literature.” He came to Carolina’s faculty in 1996, when the University was building a cohort of important
African-American literature scholars.
“I think UNC’s role in the South has
been for many decades to be a leader in
looking at the history and the culture of
the people of the South in a wide lens —
a lens that goes across ethnicities,” he said.
Andrews said his focus on African-American literature was not planned. They
didn’t offer the classes at Davidson College, where he got his undergraduate
degree. Jackson’s class was his first introduction to the history of black America
from the standpoint of important black
American leaders. How did they grow up?
What did they think about? How did they
assume leadership in the most important
realm of civil rights since 1865?
“As a Southerner, a white Southerner
who grew up in the segregated South, it
was tremendously informative,” he said. “It
— Laura Oleniacz
Cataloochee: A Novel (Random House,
2007) by Wayne Caldwell ’ 69. The author,
who won the Review’s fiction contest in
1999, chronicles three families in western
North Carolina as the Civil War ends.
Ending Poverty in America: How to
Restore the American Dream (The New
Press, 2007) edited by John R. Edwards ’ 77
(JD), Marion Crane and Arne L. Kalleberg.
The ideas of academics, journalists, neighborhood organizers and business leaders,
published in conjunction with the Center
on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC.
Kalleberg is a sociology professor at UNC.
The Foundation: A Great American Secret
(Public Affairs, 2007) by Joel Fleishman
’ 55. Insight and advice on what foundations can do to become more effective in
their missions and make more people
familiar with their work.
Le Grasse Escapade: A Novel, the Grasse
Caper (Vantage Press, 2006) by Cyrus D.
Hogue Jr. ’ 42. A French family seeks refuge
in North Africa from invading German
troops in World War II, where an American
Air Force officer devises a plan to
return their young daughter to
France and to recover the family’s hidden assets.
Ham Radio’s Technical Culture
(The MIT Press, 2007) by Kris-ten Haring ’ 95. Describes the
evolution of ham radio culture
— hundreds of thousands of tinkerers who built and operated
two-way radios and who thrived
on fraternal interaction.
Home: The Blueprints of Our
Lives (Collins, 2006) edited by
John R. Edwards ’ 77 (JD). A collection of 57 short essays on the
meaning and images of home,
some of the authors well known,
The New Brothers Grimm and
their Left Behind Fairy Tales (Mercer University Press, 2006) by David T. Morgan
’ 64. In this critical review of the popular
Left Behind series, the author suggests that
the theological premises set forth in the
series are at best dubious — at worst, theo-
logical snake oil.
The Race Beat: The Press, the
Civil Rights Struggle, and the
Awakening of a Nation (Alfred A.
Knopf, 2006) by Gene Roberts
’ 54 and Hank Klibanoff. A
chronicle of how Americans
awakened to the racial indignities
and injustice of the South after
World War II.
seeing beyond sight: photo-
graphs by blind teenagers (Chroni-
cle Books, 2007) by Tony Deifell
’ 91. Photographs and commen-
tary gathered in five years spent
teaching blind teens to take pho-
Southern Modernist: Arthur
Raper from the New Deal to the
Cold War (Louisiana State University Press, 2006) by Louis Mazzari. The
work of Raper, one of the most important
figures in the Southern regionalist movement in the New Deal era and a student
of Howard Odum at Carolina who graduated in 1924. | <urn:uuid:46909d30-c7c6-4fb4-8bd5-0df3958b63b3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.carolinaalumnireview.com/carolinaalumnireview/20070304?pg=108 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933137 | 1,461 | 2.640625 | 3 |
I have a lot of problems with beating the Epicycles levels in Osmos -- do you have any tips for transitioning orbits without wasting a ton of material?
I think there are a couple key ideas that help for transitioning orbits. First, the path visualization is very useful to have on. On the orbiting levels, I tend to eject material only forward and reverse of my direction (except for emergency/panic maneuvers). I think that's the most efficient way to increase/reduce the size of one's orbit. Also, it's usually easier to increase the size of the orbit than reduce it.
The best way I've found is to break out of your current orbit in an arc that intersects where the next attractor will be.
When you get close, decelerate enough to prevent hitting the wall.
Stabilize your orbit.
Check this page out. It includes tips and a video playthrough of the hardest Epicycles level. http://www.hemispheregames.com/2010/02/03/osmos-rage-part-4-roadside-assistance/ | <urn:uuid:cb3f2e47-bc74-4421-b984-1ca7f2371ce8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/617/osmos-hard-level-strategies/11194 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916019 | 226 | 1.648438 | 2 |
"People that weren't here really don't understand why we can't let this stuff go," said Walter Castle Jr., a survivor who suffered third-degree burns in his lungs, throat and bronchial tubes. "It's just very tough."
The anniversary of the blaze is Wednesday. The fire broke out when pyrotechnics for the rock band Great White ignited flammable packing foam that had been installed in the club as soundproofing.
During the ceremony, the names of the dead were to be read aloud and Gov. Lincoln Chafee and former Gov. Don Carcieri planned to make remarks. The Station Fire Memorial Foundation was to unveil its final plans to build a permanent memorial at the site where a makeshift memorial that includes handmade crosses, photos and mementos of the dead now sits.
The permanent memorial will include the name of each person who died and commemorate the survivors, first responders and those who helped care for families of the dead and survivors in the weeks and months after the fire. It will also include a gazebo.
Families were asked to remove personal mementos from the site. The items left behind will be buried in a capsule under what is now the parking lot. There will be no digging on the land under where the club once stood because of the fear of disturbing human remains.
While many of the materials and labor to build the memorial will be donated, foundation officials say they need to raise $1 million to $2 million to build and maintain it.
The foundation hopes to break ground in the spring. Construction of the new memorial could take longer than a year.
William Ferrara, who lost friends in the fire, attended the memorial service.
"Every day you just miss those who aren't here," he said. | <urn:uuid:ec767e3f-ec51-4fc6-a7b7-da7d7f2b3bb7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rn-t.com/bookmark/21741665 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971331 | 366 | 1.539063 | 2 |
There are lots of books and web sites and people who give advice on how to give good presentations. And if you give presentations (who doesn’t) it’s probably a good idea to learn as much as you can.
But even though there may be timeless principles on presenting a message, I think you’ll find that there are some new ideas that are challenging some of the old ones that have been around a while.
Check out this great post I found recently from Chris Brogan . It seems to match some of the other concepts I’ve heard from successful presenters lately.
For the interested student, other current masters of presentations are:
Learn something different and make your next presentation a smash hit. | <urn:uuid:ce1f4f65-a8e3-4ca0-9b7d-9723d0788d72> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://therexblog.com/2009/02/23/your-next-presentation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965844 | 150 | 1.585938 | 2 |
BOSTON – Sappi Fine Paper North America has announced the release of “eQ Journal 004,” an in-depth, myth-busting look at sustainable forestry. Grounded in facts and science, this edition of “eQ Journal” presents how sustainable forestry protects air and water quality, supports biodiversity of plants and wildlife and results in healthier forests.
This edition also challenges the assumption that the best thing for a forest is to leave it in its natural state. It illustrates that, in fact, sustainable forest management creates biodiversity in age classes which helps support a wide variety of bird and animal species, as well as the long-term vitality of the forest. To examine the true benefits of a well-managed forest, “eQ Journal 004” draws on thought-provoking expertise from Sappi foresters, an academician, a conservationist and a third-generation logger. This edition also shares insights from Hans Wegner, chief sustainability officer of National Geographic Society, regarding how his organization is supporting sustainable forestry.
“As a global leader in the forest products industry, we want consumers to understand the environmental, social and economic benefits of working forests,” said Laura Thompson, Ph.D., director of technical marketing and sustainable development, Sappi Fine Paper North America. “Sustainable forest management practices are utilized to help deliver on society's demands for wood products while preserving forest health and biodiversity.”
“eQ Journal 004” also reveals details about Sappi’s best practices at its mills in Cloquet and Skowhegan, Maine, including routine visits to harvest sites to ensure plans comply with Best Management Practices – criteria essential to securing chain of custody certification for the company’s products. To learn more about sustainable forestry initiatives at Sappi’s Cloquet Mill, watch “Taking the Guilt out of Paper.”
To request a printed copy of “eQ Journal 004,” visit firstname.lastname@example.org or call 800-882-4332.
Tags: carlton countyMore from around the web | <urn:uuid:4b136393-617f-4437-9cbc-33c2cda24613> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pinejournal.com/event/article/id/26545/publisher_ID/38/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917816 | 439 | 2.21875 | 2 |
Born in Salt Lake City on Oct. 13, 1921, Elder Hanks was a son of Stanley Alonzo and Maude Frame Hanks. His father was a prominent municipal judge who died when Elder Hanks was 2. His widowed mother reared six of the seven children to maturity. Elder Hanks was the youngest.
Elder Hanks returned from World War II to earn a law degree at the University of Utah. He and his wife, the former Maxine Christensen, are the parents of five children.
An author and compelling speaker, he also wrote the lyrics to one of the church's hymns, "That Easter Morn," was honored with the Silver Buffalo Award by the Boy Scouts of America and served as president of the Salt Lake Temple from 1982-85.
Asked in 1993 by Dennis Lythgoe of the Deseret News what he thought his epitaph could read, Elder Hanks was hesitant to answer but offered a few possibilities:
"A teacher affects eternity. (It's definitely the most fun I've ever had.)"
"We live on in the lives we have influenced for good."
"Through Christ he early caught a glimpse of what man might be. His generous investment as a teacher produced rich dividends in the lives of others."
"I know that thou canst do everything, and that no thought can be withholden from thee ... but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." — Job 42:1-6.
"I would have ended my last general conference address with Job but didn't have the time. I think these verses mean that Job sees that what he did pales beside that of the Savior. If I had anything on my epitaph, I would be happy with these verses from Job."
Funeral services are being planned for Aug. 13.
After receiving emeritus status, Elder Hanks became chairman of the Ouelessebougou Mali-Utah alliance group, which has supported a program of community service for a consortium of villages in Mali, West Africa.
In addition, he chaired the International Enterprise Development Foundation, which assists people in the Philippines and Third World countries in establishing small-business and other economic improvement efforts.
In April 1993, he received an honorary doctorate of Christian service as the main speaker at BYU's graduation.
Elder Hanks had also continued as a public speaker in his later years. For example, in 2002, he gave a talk titled, "I Do Not Do My Work in the Spirit of Benefaction but of Atonement" (a quotation from Albert Schweitzer), at Utah Valley State College in Orem.
He received BYU's David M. Kennedy Public Service Award in 1995. When he received that award, Ray Hillam, Kennedy Center associate and emeritus BYU faculty member. said, "The career of Marion D. Hanks has been a career of service. We cannot recognize all of his accomplishments. They are legion. However, the center wishes to honor Marion D. Hanks for his service in two specific areas: refugee work and rural and free enterprise development."
LDS-oriented Southern Virginia University in Buena Vista has also honored Elder Hanks with its Leader-Servant Award.
Elder Hanks was executive director of the Priesthood Department at the time he received emeritus status. He had also been executive director of the Correlation Department and chairman of the Communications Coding Committee.
As a youth, he won the Utah State Marble Championship, attended West High School and was offered a basketball scholarship to the University of Utah, but declined to serve a church mission.
His mission to the Northern States was cut short by World War II. He served in the Navy where he was group leader of 600 LDS servicemen.
On another assignment, while on an extended tour through the South Pacific, he was the only LDS member aboard a submarine chaser. Appointed acting chaplain by the ship's captain, he conducted weekly services, attracting many of the crew. He achieved the rank of first class petty officer.
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- Public invited to funeral services for... 9 | <urn:uuid:764eee11-dac4-43f1-80e4-919c8c578428> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700168670/LDS-Church-General-Authority-Elder-Marion-D-Hanks-dies-at-age-89.html?pg=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976716 | 1,021 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Ford Middle East to recall 80 cars in UAE
Inspection of front seat manual recliners has been ordered by Ford Motor Company in a worldwide recall of 33,000 cars.
April 26, 2010 9:19 by Katherine Azmeh
Ford motor company announced Friday a recall to investigate potentially faulty seat reclining mechanisms, that could “cause the seatback and headrest to move rearward during a crash, posing a risk of injuring passengers,” the Gulf News reported Monday.
The recall reportedly pertains to several of its models manufactured between December 2009 and February 2010 in plants in Mexico and Kentucky.
Models affected by the recall include the 2010 Fusion, Explorer, Sport Trac, Mercury Milan and Mountaineer, according to the report.
Vehicle owners in the UAE who are affected by the recall will be “contacted directly by Al Tayer Motors, the local distributor of Ford, Lincoln and Mercury, and its subsidiary in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain, Premier Motors,” the Gulf News said.
The recall was announced following the release of Ford’s regional sales figures, in which the manufacturer posted a 43 percent rise in GCC sales for the period – outpacing the average industry growth of around 5 percent, according to Ford’s director of Mid East sales, Hussain Murad. | <urn:uuid:a60d5d7a-5c11-4ffa-a07a-88c7478ce3ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kippreport.com/news/gcc-2/ford-middle-east-to-recall-80-cars-in-uae-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955221 | 270 | 1.554688 | 2 |
[ bookreviews ]
Here we have the best one-volume life of Washington, a book that should be kept in every law office and, indeed, in every home, for so few of us know the facts narrated in Joseph J Ellis's accomplished prose, so deftly written that the reader reads them with a bemused anxiety over whether Washington, against all odds, would succeed. Indeed, it would be the insensible reader who would not, at the end of the book, put it down without an unaccountable but real sense of sadness over Washington's death, the death of a person so strange to our present state of things.
In May 1754, the 22-year-old George Washington, leading a party of 40, together with warriors led by Seneca chief Half-King, attacked French soldiers in the Ohio Country. As their wounded commander, Jumonville tried in French to explain that he was on a peace mission, Half-King, fluent in French but favoring brevity, with one blow hatcheted the Frenchman's skull in two, pulled out his brain and washed his hands in it, shocking Washington. There followed in July a bloody battle at Fort Necessity where the French and Indians, led by the brother of Jumonville, thoughtfully administered a world class beating to Washington. In his formal surrender, Washington admitted responsibility for the assassination of Jumonville, thus triggering the French and Indian War.
In 1755, Washington, as aide to General Braddock, saw 900 British and Americans savagely killed by the French and Indians. Braddock, hastily buried by Washington, had warred against the Indians as if he were in the suburbs of Paris. Upon returning from the battle, Washington became "the hero of Monongahela" for rallying the survivors in retreat. Several years followed in which Washington created an elite colonial unit having the discipline of British regulars and the proficiency of Indian warriors. His discipline was simple: he hanged deserters and gave up to a thousand strokes to the drunk and the lewd.
Little is known about Washington's youth. His father died when Washington was 11. His mother, from whom in later life he was estranged, never praised him. Unfortunately, she lived into his second term as President, publicly deriding and harassing him. James Thomas Flexner, Washington's distinguished historian, thought her a shrew. Washington, with only the equivalent of a grammar school education, always felt inferior to those who had managed college degrees. As a young man, he was six feet three inches, 175 pounds, athletically built, and had gray-blue eyes. He was emotionally restrained and mentally enigmatic. Those who knew him noted the imperial effect of his height and silence. He was markedly fearless, had great integrity, and was profoundly ambitious. Obsessive about his property, he thought slavery wrong, but not wrong enough to move him to free his slaves during his lifetime. He was not an intellectual, and he was not religious, fixing his eye more to the earth than to the heavens.
At 26, he fell in love with Sally Fairfax but married instead Martha Custis, Virginia's wealthiest widow, who at 27 had 18,000 acres that Sally didn't have, a decision that should warm the heart of any managing partner. The acreage, says Ellis, positioned Washington at the top of Viginia's planter class. For his soldiering, he received royal land grants that at his death would constitute the core of his great wealth.
Angered in 1774 by Britain's punitive reaction to the Boston Tea Party, Washington, at 43, found himself in 1775 commander in chief of the Continental Army, sitting in a custom-made chariot, escorted into Philadelphia by 500 horsemen, and addressed as "His Excellency." If he failed, he would hang and his extensive property would be confiscated. He could not have foreseen the embattled dead at Long Island, Fort Washington, Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown and Saratoga; his depleted army, one-third shoeless, at Valley Forge, the snow red with the bloody feet of his men; the Continental Congress, useless as teats on a bull, without power to supply men or money; the hanging of unpaid soldiers in mutiny; soldiers eating their horses; the pillaging of farmers by starving soldiers; a hell sustained by his steel will.
Yet, as Ellis notes, it was at Valley Forge, and not Saratoga, that the war turned. The bread we eat in freedom was earned there by poor immigrants, 15 to 25 years-old, recently arrived from Ireland and England, indentured servants, former slaves, the landless, the castoffs, who, in their long hair, laughed as they decorated their uniforms with feathers and furs. They were so poor they didn't have between them the price of the shovel that would bury them.
The unknown god of perfect conjunctions suddenly appeared in October 1781, when Cornwallis was marooned in Yorktown, Virginia. With the essential help of the French fleet and French army engineers, Washington, after six years of hell, delivered a blow so decisive, Ellis points out, that Washington didn't realize at the time that the war was over. In 1783, the peace treaty having been signed, he dismissed offers of a kingship, surrendered his commission, and rode off in what Ellis, in his Pulitzer-worthy book, wittily describes as "the greatest exit in American history."
Unfortunately for Washington, he rode back. He chaired the constitutional convention and unanimously was selected president, not for his mind but for what he was in the public mind. No longer in the field, he was not prepared for the slophouse of politics where the hypocrite, the devious, the envious, the greedy and the intellectually pretentious constantly dine. In the struggle between Federalists and Republicans, he suffered reports that he was senile, naturally slow in mind, a dupe in a Federalist conspiracy, a British bribe-taker, and a puppet of Hamilton. Jefferson dismayed him by secretly paying newspapers to libel him. In the rage over the Jay Treaty, he observed, in earshot of shouted threats and insults, the principle of avoiding foreign alliances in the absence of the nation's self-interest.
The unyielding political strife drove the retired Washington into the great blunders of his life. He endorsed the idea of a provisional army in order to crush a perceived threat of Republican subversion and he gave his blessing to the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts.
Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, all agreed, Ellis tell us, that Washington was by far their superior. If so, it was because there was conjoined in him an ordinary man and an iron-willed leader who had marched into the mouth of hell with a ragbag army and then out of it with a nation. Who among them could have led those poor, young men whose bloody footprints were in the snow at Valley Forge, that "pathetically small collection of marginal men", writes Ellis, "the common soldiers of the Continental army." | <urn:uuid:2c577ae2-5fc8-4ea6-b967-b01537520f7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nthposition.com/hisexcellency.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983747 | 1,463 | 2.5 | 2 |
Letters to Doctor James Carmichael & Son
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- Pill Press and Mortar & Pestle (c. 1800s). The mortar and pestle have been tools of pharmacy for thousands of years.
Doctor Carmichael and his sons acted as their own pharmacists.
Many of their patients lived on estates or farms outside the city of Fredericksburg. Because traveling was time consuming for both the patient and doctor, frequently a letter was delivered to the Carmichaels’ office with a description of the illness and a plea for medicine. Upon reading the letter, the Carmichaels dispensed the appropriate medicine and sent the bearer (often a slave) back with the drug and instructions on its proper use.
If a family member determined the patient was extremely ill, the Carmichaels made a house call. In many letters, the authors urgently requested that one of the Carmichaels quickly ride to their plantation to tend to an ill family member or slave. The doctor who rode out to attend the patient carried his medicinal arsenal with him, either in a medical bag or saddlebag. After examining a patient and determining a course of treatment, he probably dispensed and compounded his own medications at the patient’s bedside. In the early nineteenth century, two to five ingredients were generally combined into one prescription. Carmichael possibly weighed out the necessary drugs using a handheld scale brought with him in his doctor’s bag. The mixture would then be administered as a pill, a powder (given dry or suspended in water), a water solution, a tea, or as a tincture (an alcoholic solution). Using a little soap, water, or gum arabic as a binding agent, the Carmichaels could individually hand roll a pill at the bedside.
- The Carmichaels kept abreast of medical developments by purchasing books through Thomas Dobson & Son, a publishing house located in Philadelphia.
Unlike modern physicians, doctors practicing in the early half of the nineteenth century lacked the scientific knowledge to treat many diseases effectively. Multitudes of minerals and botanicals were available, but the efficacy of the drugs was limited. Quinine for malaria, digitalis for dropsy, and opiates for pain relief were a few of the useful drugs that the Carmichaels employed. Other drugs in the Carmichaels’ doctor bags would include cathartics (laxatives), anti-diarrheal agents, emetics (to induce vomiting), caustics, and smelling salts.
- Quinine (Cinchona or Jesuits’ Bark)
Quinine was a necessary staple in the pharmacy of a Southern physician. Large doses were employed to combat malaria, one of the most common diseases in the antebellum South. The disease causes a pattern of chills (“agues”) and fever, also referred to in the nineteenth century as intermittent fever or bilious fever.
Mrs. Battaile has had an
attack of the ague & fever - You will
oblige me by sending by the bearer
a phial of Quinine.
yr. obt. Sert.
August 31. 1827
- Paregoric (Camphorated tincture of opium)
- Paregoric was used to relieve pain, as a sedative, and as an anti-diarrheal agent. Physicians frequently used it as a pediatric drug.
Novr 2nd. 1826
I shall be greatly obliged
to you to send by sam four ounces of castor
oil and two of paragoric for a sick baby
- Calomel (Mercurous chloride)
- Calomel had its origins in East Asia and was introduced into Western culture in the sixteenth century where its popularity as a cathartic quickly grew. Calomel was found in the physician’s bag as well as in a family’s own medicine cabinet. In the Carmichael letters, the frequent and varied uses of this drug are described. Calomel was given to slave children to expel worms, to adult slaves as a treatment for swollen eyes, to counteract dysentery in infants, and even to treat the ague and fever. However, there were severe side effects from taking calomel including soreness, inflammation, and recession of the gums.
My little child's bowels are very
much disordered, they have been so for several
days, his discharges are frequent & copious and
very green, he has taken Rhubarb & paregorick
and castor oil & chalk, he appears to be in
great pain when he has an evacuation
I will thank you to send me something
to relieve him, I had an idea of giving him
calomel but his mother was afraid, if you
recommend it he shall take it
James S. Maury
Rumford June 26th. 1823
the child is 3 mo: old
- Laudanum, an extract of opium, was used as a sedative and for pain relief. The Carmichaels and their patients recognized opium as an addictive drug. It is quite possible that Herndon Frazer’s wife was addicted to laudanum. Frazer writes, “my wife has taken the laudaneum[sic] until I believe her system is completely saturated with it.”
May the 19th 1828
My Wife is very Ill much
Worse than when you saw her. The
Bowell complaint very much increased
I will thank you to come down to see
her. Please bring a Phial of Laudenum
Yours very Respectfully
Louis W. Taliaferro
- Camphor (Camphora)
- Camphor is a white, brittle substance with a fragrant odor but a bitter, pungent taste. When opium failed, camphor was used to promote sleep. The Carmichaels also prescribed it to relieve fever.
Wood Land Feb.r 28.th 1826
If you possibly can you will confer a favour to
come and see Mr. Withers hip, it is very much swelled and
very painful, yesterday it look'd a littel purple but I have not
seen it this morning, also send another vial of the camphora
ted mixture as his fevers are very high. I apply to the hip
a poultice of Red Oak bark.
I remain Dr. Sir
Yours Very Respectfully
Elizabeth C. Withers
PS I should be glad if you
would ride out yourself and
see Mr. W.s. hip, as I prefer
your coming to your son's
- Epsom Salts
- Epsom salt, the popular name for magnesium sulfate, was a cathartic used to treat fevers, inflammatory disorders, colic, and constipation. It was considered effective and well tolerated by the stomach.
I will thank you to send me a bottle of best
Castor Oil and a pound of Epsom Salts, on the [Robert’s]
Account as his Negroes are frequently in want – pray don’t
23 Octr. 1829
Edward Jenner’s paper relating his success using cowpox to vaccinate against smallpox was published in 1798. In spite of the strong support of people like Thomas Jefferson, who personally vaccinated his slaves at Monticello, the American public was slow to accept this new method of protection against disease. In the time period of the Carmichaels, vaccination was practiced only in the face of an outbreak. In an 1828 letter written to the Carmichaels by Mary Skinker, she wrote they were in a “great state of alarm” hearing that their neighbors were infected with smallpox. She continued:
We wish you to come up, and vaccinate our Children & negroes, & pursue what course, you think best, to prevent this disorder from spreading through our family. I have had the small-pox, Mr. Skinker has been vaccinated, but the children did not take the vaccination, administered by you, when you were last here.
- Receipt from George & J.S. Keerl, June 7, 1820.
- The Carmichaels purchased the majority of their pharmaceutical supplies and instruments from George and J.S. Keerl located in Baltimore, Maryland. The items were shipped on schooners from Baltimore to Fredericksburg. [see receipt from George H. Keerl and J. S. Keerl, June 7, 1820] | <urn:uuid:e536fa43-19c2-4a7e-86c1-5f9ddd9a89b2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://carmichael.lib.virginia.edu/story/pharmacy.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968769 | 1,814 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Justice Done In Wisconsin As Supreme Court Delivers Victory To Governor Walker
The battle which began in January when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker took office and began the process of fixing the state's budget crisis by reining in the collective bargaining powers of the state's public employee unions was finally concluded Tuesday when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in favor of Governor Walker delivering a major blow to Wisconsin's public employee unions.
Wisconsin has for months taken center stage in the much larger battle over union concessions and collective bargaining rights as states all across the country face budget shortfalls. Wisconsin began drawing national attention when Governor Scott Walker, who took the oath of office in early January, proposed a state budget on February 11 which sought union concessions to help repair the state's $3.6 billion budget shortfall. Working closely with Republican state legislators, who have controlled both houses of Wisconsin's legislature since the 2010 midterm elections, Walker sought concessions from the unions that represent the state's public employees.
The public unions protested the budget austerity measures, but quickly conceded, accepting some of Walker's demands, agreeing for the first time to pay for a portion of the cost of their healthcare coverage and pension benefits. Walker pressed further, however, seeking an end to the collective bargaining powers Wisconsin's public employee unions have enjoyed for decades. This drew the attention of every union in the country, who claim collective bargaining as their right, and who view any reduction of collective bargaining powers as unequivocally unacceptable. Labor union across America joined the fray, with tens of thousands of union members descending on the Wisconsin capitol in protest of Walker's proposals.
Continued on the next page
Despite well coordinated protests by national unions and mainstream media coverage which was sympathetic to the union cause in an effort to sway public opinion in support of union members, Walker escalated by proposing legislation which sought the end of collective bargaining for state employee unions. Nationwide, unions fought back, sending out calls for union members to come to Wisconsin to join the protest. Tens of thousands did just that, with the street protests in Wisconsin reaching their peak on February 26, when 70,000 to 100,000 union protesters, many from out of state, descended on the capitol in Madison. | <urn:uuid:376863aa-be3e-4c40-ad73-743f0c8a42c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://technorati.com/politics/article/justice-done-in-wisconsin-as-supreme/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965066 | 439 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Sometimes archivists encounter the unexpected. While looking through an unidentified business record, I expected to see the usual debits and credits typically found in nineteenth century business volumes. The ledger, found in the Lynchburg (Va.) Courthouse, belonged to a group of volumes entered as an exhibit in some long ago settled court case. Only one of the volumes was labeled – with “A. J. Ledger” inscribed on its spine. This volume turned out to be A. J. Ledger C (Barcode 1097496), but it contained more than the financial activities of an unknown Lynchburg area merchant.
Amidst the notations of customer purchases and payments made in 1812, names were written in pencil at the bottom of pages – Charles B. Stewart, James Ellis, William H. McCune. Additional names and doodles were scribbled over the carefully organized ledger entries. Curious, I continued to thumb through the ledger and discovered it had been autographed by the 206th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry while the unit was on provost duty in Lynchburg, Va. The 206th was among the first to march through Richmond after it fell, and the troops were later sent to Lynchburg where they spent two weeks on provost duty.
Many members of the regiment signed their names in the ledger. Lieutenant Abraham E. Litz wrote an account of their march on Richmond in the … read more » | <urn:uuid:b8900412-8907-4929-885b-cd851f72daa3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.virginiamemory.com/blogs/out_of_the_box/tag/206th-pennsylvania-infantry/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971093 | 288 | 2.078125 | 2 |
None of us are totally free of fear. Especially financial fear.
Even if everything looks hunky-dory on the outside, we still might get those 3 a.m. panic visits. Is our business concept nothing other than a one-woman fantasy? Will that commission check arrive in time to pay the mortgage? Should we have listened to that guy who told us what investments to put into our 401k?
Cable news doesn’t help. Few of us are immune to the fear-mongering of the talking heads. (But remember, they have 24 hours a day to fill. And if the news isn’t catastrophic, how will they attract the viewers their advertisers demand?)
So, besides turning off your television, what else can you do to push through the financial fear?
First, look at what wolf you’re feeding. You’ve probably heard that wonderful Cherokee tale (if you haven’t, I wrote about it here), where the old man is teaching his grandson about the two wolves he has battling within him. One is riddled with negative characteristics and the other is the epitome of benevolence and kindness. The grandson asks which one wins the battle, and the old man says, “The one you feed.”
Your fears are no different. The ones you feed with thoughts and energy get larger. The ones you minimize or ignore shrivel up and die.
Second, get away from all naysayers. If you have a dream and that dream is bigger than someone else’s, what chance is there is of that person raining on your parade? Especially if (at least in their mind) your success will somehow affect their relationship with you… move you on to bigger and better things where maybe you’ll have less in common.
We hear enough doom and gloom in today’s economy. You don’t need to take on someone else’s bad vibes.
Third, let go of all potential regrets. It’s so easy to live in the shudda-cudda-wudda space, second guessing every decision you’ve made. But that’s a recipe for total brain-drain and energy depletion. Remember, every decision is a ‘Y’ … a fork in the road. And once a decision is made, you don’t get a do-over. But no one makes perfect decisions all the time. So if you make a bad one, let it go.
Learn from the consequences and then release what “might have been.” Truth is, you have no choice, so you may as well forgive yourself, make the best of it and move on. And by staying away from negative energy, you’ll find that fear has no way to latch on to your thoughts.
Fourth, find a couple of powerful mentors. You want to choose people who have been successful doing what you’re aiming to do. Not only can you shortcut your journey if they’re willing to guide you. They can also help you save time, money and energy by avoiding unnecessary pitfalls.
Once you find people willing to be generous with their time and knowledge, be sure to nurture the relationship. While to some degree we all function based on “what’s in it for me,” you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what nurtures them. It’s probably not what you think.
And fifth, get crystal clear on your vision and talk about it confidently. Nothing breaks through fear faster than confidence. And confidence comes from that inner knowing that you’re on the right path, headed towards something compelling… like a vision that you see in your mind’s eye in minute detail. Down to the smells and sounds. Down to the visceral level.
So imagine this:
If you have a clear vision which you talk about confidently, what chance do you think you have of attracting a couple of powerful mentors?
And if you have a couple of powerful mentors, what chance do you think you have of slicing through any momentary regrets?
And if you have no regrets, how long do you think you’re going to hang around all those naysayers?
And if you don’t hang around naysayers, what wolf do you think you’ll be feeding? | <urn:uuid:ac8feb09-f936-4b81-baff-f4534c49e5e2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.seniorcorrespondent.com/articles/2012/10/29/how-to-cut-through-financial-fear.509263 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948773 | 906 | 1.53125 | 2 |
How to Engineer Engineering Education
A workshop held annually at Bucknell University that offers engineering and science faculty and graduate students a hands-on experience to enhance their teaching by:
- Writing clear instructional objectives at appropriate cognitive levels
- Using active, cooperative & problem-based learning
- Teaching teamwork and problem solving skills
- Assessing learning outcomes
Previous Workshop Attendees Had these Responses
"Wonderful... Marvelous. This workshop was well worth my time. Several very practical examples and helpful practices were given to me in this week. The coaches practiced what they preached and did an excellent job in illustrating the principles."
"I have been to several workshops (5 or 6), this was the best I have been to. It was beyond my expectations."
Engineering and science faculty and prospective faculty (including graduate students) who are interested in designing their courses around important learning outcomes, making their classrooms more active, and incorporating problem solving and teamwork skills into their courses.
2013 Workshop Information
July 24-26, 2013
Workshop Tuition and Meals: $650 for applications received before May 15th and $700 for applications received after May 15th
On Campus Room ($150) is available but optional
(NOTE: Tuition is non-refundable after May 30.)
Bucknell University is located in Lewisburg, PA and is situated approximately 1 hour north of Harrisburg. Lewisburg is within driving distance of a number of major cities, including New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. For more information visit www.bucknell.edu and www.lewisburgpa.com.
Applications will be considered on a first come, first served basis. Applicants will generally be notified of their status shortly after the application is received.
Professor Michael Prince
Chemical Engineering Department
Lewisburg, PA 17837 | <urn:uuid:39638045-79f6-4514-b819-662092391a2d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bucknell.edu/x63126.xml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958194 | 374 | 2.046875 | 2 |
David and Joe are downstairs planning the layout for the cork ceiling…
There was math…
What does it all mean?
I have no idea.
Tags: cork, remodel
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on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 at 9:52 am and is filed under downstairs, randomness.
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Hi, I wound up on your blog while searching for copper trellises, saw yours under “trellis jealous” and now think I’ll copy your idea. What kind of end caps did you use to secure/tie the steel wire to the pipe and what is the best tool to cut the wire? Also, are there any tricks/tips for drilling through copper pipe (can you use a regular or masonry/tapcon drillbit)? Thanks!
Hi! Thanks for the question, sorry it took a while to get back to you.
The wire has matching ferrules that crimp on that are made of soft aluminum. They hold the wire from pulling through the pipes.
There is probably a dedicated crimping and cutting tool but I just used needle-nose pliers for the crimping and by-pass cutters (cut-anything scissors like EMTs use) for the cutting.
A regular twist bit will drill the copper pipe, it’s pretty soft. Make a little dimple with a nail where you want to drill so the bit doesn’t wander around on you.
Have fun with your project!
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Blog customized by | <urn:uuid:bfc75132-9da7-4d8f-86f3-34bfa60ed4bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mymodremod.com/?p=7073 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935503 | 357 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Timed to coincide with Valentine’s Day, the University of Science and Arts presents the Spring 2012 Festival of Arts and Ideas: Contemplating Beauty.
The concept of ‘beauty’ is one that has been a part of human culture since the dawn of history. The idea of what is beautiful has changed dramatically over the millennia. Join us as we take a look at this most fundamental of human concepts through the lens of multiple disciplines and perspectives.
Presenters include Dr. Brenda Brown, Dr. J.C. Casey, Dr. Jan Hanson , Dr. Jerry Hargis, Dr. Sean Kelley, Leah Oxenford, Dr. Allison Palmer (of the University of Oklahoma), Dr. Zachary Zach Simpson, Dr. Quan Tran and Dr. Stephen Weber.
The festival emcees this year are Hargis, Casey and Dr. Michael Nealeigh, vice-president for university advancement. The festival is sponsored by the USAO Foundation and received a generous endowment from the Masonic Fraternity of Oklahoma in 2011. The event is free and open to the public.
The second night of the festival will close out with a Valentine’s Day Dance featuring Joe and Donna Jobe Settlemires , Dr. Dan Hanson , Rhenada Finch, Rob Vollmar and a variety of guest singers. Bring your dancing shoes as the band plays a variety of swing, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and country and western songs to help you celebrate the Valentine’s Day holiday.
Each evening's festivities begin at 7:30 p.m. in the USAO Ballroom, located on the second floor of the Student Center in Chickasha. Refreshments will be provided.
As always, attending the Festival of Arts and Ideas provides free professional development points/hours for educators. Certificates will be available at the end of each night.
We hope that each of you enjoy the presentations and workshops as much as we have in preparing them. | <urn:uuid:07ce6a9a-0d87-4f00-8898-519cb1a76b0b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://usao.edu/festival-arts-ideas/spring-2012 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921895 | 406 | 1.507813 | 2 |
- Hydrazine sulfate is a chemical compound that has been studied as a treatment for cancer and certain side effects caused by cancer (see Question 1).
- Hydrazine sulfate may block the tumor from taking in glucose, which is a type of sugar that tumor cells need to grow (see Question 3).
- In randomized clinical trials (a type of research study), hydrazine sulfate did not make tumors shrink or go away. In some randomized trials, however, hydrazine sulfate was reported to be helpful in treating anorexia and cachexia caused by cancer. (See Question 6.)
- Hydrazine sulfate is sold as a dietary supplement in the United States. The US Food and Drug Administration has not approved the use of hydrazine sulfate as a cancer treatment, except in clinical trials (see Question 8). | <urn:uuid:7d51be21-0463-4134-8e8f-09b2a5466647> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam/hydrazinesulfate/patient | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96937 | 174 | 2.5 | 2 |
Mesothelioma takes decades to develop, but then progresses rapidly. Because the symptoms overlap with many other diseases and ailments, this aggressive cancer often escapes early detection. It is most commonly diagnosed in advanced stages, when treatment options are fewer and survival rates are grim.
Thus time is of the essence. As frightening and demoralizing as a diagnosis may be, every day counts in the diagnosis and treatment of mesothelioma. There are cutting-edge treatments that can eradicate the tumors, extend life or ameliorate the painful symptoms.
The lawyers of Gori Julian & Associates, P.C., excel at extracting compensation from employers and corporations responsible for asbestos exposure. On the front end, our primary focus is helping clients get a prompt diagnosis and access to the best medical care possible.
What to Expect in the Mesothelioma Diagnosis Process
If you or a family member has symptoms of asbestos disease, especially with a history of exposure, you should seek medical treatment without delay. A family physician is a good start, but he or she will not be able to verify a diagnosis of mesothelioma or asbestos lung cancer. We can help clients get referrals to oncologists or mesothelioma/asbestosis specialists.
The diagnosis protocol will depend partly on the symptoms and suspected stage of the disease. However, you can expect some or all of the following:
Medical history — A thorough review of the sources of known or likely exposure to asbestos, through past employment, military service or secondary exposure, going back as much as 40 or 50 years.
Physical examination — Documentation of the patient's symptoms, additional indications such as excess fluid in the chest cavity, general state of health and existing health conditions (comorbidity) that might affect treatment decisions.
In the initial physical exam or follow-up appointments, the doctor may order some or all of the following:
- Breathing tests — Blowing into a tube to gauge lung function
- Blood work — Blood samples to obtain a baseline CBC (complete blood count)
- Diagnostic scans — X-ray, CT scan, PET scan or MRI of the pleural cavity (chest) or peritoneal cavity (abdomen) to corroborate a diagnosis and to pinpoint location, size and spread of the tumors
- Biopsy — Excision of sample of lung tissue or pleural tissue to verify the diagnosis and identify the type of cancerous cells and stage of the disease. This may be a needle biopsy under local anesthetic or a surgical biopsy in which the patient's chest or abdomen is cut open and samples are taken directly from different areas.
- Bronchoscopy — Insertion of a flexible tube down the throat to visually inspect the lungs for scarring and fibroid masses (asbestosis) or tumors (cancer). The bronchoscope can also be used for biopsy.
- Chemical or microscopic analysis — Differentiating between types of cancer is critical to treatment. Advanced techniques allow the oncologist to determine if the biopsied mass is mesothelioma, lung cancer, another cancer or benign (non-cancerous).
All of these tests take a lot of time, especially if doctors have the patient wait for lab results. Plan to spend several hours if not the entire day at the clinic or hospital.
What if the Dreaded Diagnosis Is Confirmed?
A confirmation of mesothelioma is not itself surprising at this point. The shock factor is when patients and family members learn how far the disease has spread. Most patients are diagnosed at the later stages when treatments are limited.
- Stage I: The tumors are still localized in the mesothelium (chest wall). Surgical removal and all other treatments are viable, and survival rates are relatively good.
- Stage II: The disease has spread beyond the mesothelium to the lungs, diaphragm or pericardium (heart sac), but not to the lymph nodes. More radical surgeries may still be an option, and radiation and chemotherapy may be able to halt the progression and extend life.
- Stage III: The malignant cells have invaded the fatty tissues and lymph nodes of the chest cavity and abdominal cavity. Radiation and other therapies can slow but not stop the disease.
- Stage IV: The cancer has spread to other organs throughout the body and compromised major systems such as the heart, digestive tract and spinal cord. Treatment in this end stage is focused on making the person as comfortable as possible.
Nationwide Assistance and Representation for
People With Mesothelioma and Asbestos Disease
St. Louis area: 618-307-4085/Toll free in the U.S.: 888-362-6890
We are always available to help clients find doctors in their area who can diagnose asbestos diseases or connect with specialists at leading treatment centers around the United States that are pushing the frontiers of mesothelioma treatment.
Our attorneys have handled thousands of cases and obtained more than $1 billion on behalf of our clients. Based in Madison County, Illinois, we represent people throughout the United States. For a free case evaluation, please call our law offices directly or contact us online.Click Here for your free evaluation | <urn:uuid:cf94d6bd-e6cf-442f-86c3-6fd4c9b8f8c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gorijulianlaw.com/Symptoms-Diagnosis-Treatment-Options/What-to-Expect-in-Tests-and-Diagnosis.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923154 | 1,079 | 1.960938 | 2 |
This is one of those tricky ones where neither the sender nor I know much about it and yet it should probably be put to readers, in the hope they can throw some light on it.
Mark from Mayenne wrote:
One of the features of the British jury system is that it was set up to help ensure that nobs could not arbitrarily lock up an ordinary citizen.
On the one hand 12 of his peers have to find him guilty. On the other hand a jury has the right to find a defendant not guilty regardless of the evidence against him, if they think the nobs are trying to take the piss with a law that restricts the freedoms of the common man. They can thereby change the law. Not a lot of people know that.
This right has a special name though I don’t know what it is offhand. There is not much point my talking about it on my blog that is not widely read, but I’d think that if you mentioned it, word might spread.
It would seem to me to be within the libertarian remit of your blog to mention that the iniquitous laws now in place that restrict freedom of speech can be overturned by the ordinary citizen.
I live in hope of seeing a jury find someone not guilty who is in flagrant beach of this kind of law.
Can you give me some context, some specifics of this?
I don’t know much about this, but here is a website that describes the origins, in the case of William Penn that was the first situation in which this right was excercised, and that became part of the British constitution. http://prorev.com/juries.htm This link to the Guardian has some comment on a more recent case during the Falklands war. http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-26646,00.html
It would seem that it is well within a jury’s rights to find a defendant not guilty regardless of the evidence, if they do not feel inclined to do so. However I don’t know if this means that the law is permanently changed. But it certainly means that one doesn’t need to be lobbying politicians and civil servant; an education of the public would be enough.
I think that it means in the USA, the jury could find the wikkileaks soldier not guilty if they thought he acted in the public’s interest.
I’d agree but am a bit nonplussed how to find out much about it. It certainly should be explored and I’ll try to do so. Can any readers help out here?
A word about emails | <urn:uuid:ec162562-86b2-49ef-aa60-a6a955e2f24a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nourishingobscurity.com/2013/03/05/how-much-freedom-do-juries-have-to-act-undirected/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972142 | 555 | 2.09375 | 2 |
The reason this question is dead is because traditional Skinnerianism, which viewed rats and pigeons as furry and feathered black boxes, guided by simple principles of reinforcement and punishment, is theoretically caput. It can no longer account for the extraordinary things that animals do, spontaneously.
Thus, we now know that animals form cognitive maps of their environment, compute numerosities, represent the relationships among individuals in their social group, and most recently, have some understanding of what others know.
The questions for the future, then, are not "Do animals think?", but "What precisely do they think about, and to what extent do their thoughts differ from our own?"
MARC D. HAUSER is an evolutionary psychologist, and a professor at Harvard University where he is a fellow of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program. He is a professor in the departments of Anthropology and Psychology, as well as the Program in Neurosciences. He is the author of The Evolution of Communication, and Wild Minds: What AnimalsThink. | <urn:uuid:ad48f82b-2a49-4fc0-9a30-0507c510976b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.edge.org/print/response-detail/11992 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964985 | 209 | 3.25 | 3 |
What Is Raw Lacquer
Raw lacquer, is also named national lacquer or natural lacquer in China, which is an ivory or yellow liquid coating and artificially reaped from the lacquer trees. Raw lacquer can resistant acid, alkali, rust, moisture, radiation, high temperature, corrosion, etc. It has very extensive use, and is so called "the king of coating". Raw lacquer is used widely to paint arts &crafts, solid wooden furniture and building. The surface of the paint is clean, shining and durable; beautiful deep color shows unique oriental style. In industry, raw lacquer is an indispensable coating of cable, electric wires with paint to the ship, and it is also a widely used anti-corrosion coating and anti-rust coating in petroleum, chemical, and metallurgy industry.
Raw lacquer is a famous Chinese native product and traditional export. As early as the Han dynasty, lacquer and paint technology has spread to North Korea and Japan. According to experts, we have a long history in lacquer tree planting. The lacquer ware originated from more than 4,000 years ago. At present, lacquer trees distribute in many areas such as Shanxi, Hubei, Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Gansu province and Henan province, etc. Yunnan has been an important area of producing a big part of raw lacquer for a long time. It exported raw lacquer in the past, now mainly supply home. However, it is far from enough for the various domestic needs.
The main ingredients of raw lacquer include 60-80% urushiol, 10% laccase and other, 3-6% rubber, and 10-30% moisture. In addition, there are some other small organisms. If raw lacquer mixes with different pigments (such as gold powder, silver powder, cinnabar, titanium white, etc.), multicolor paint comes out.
Raw lacquer used in wooden furniture or woodware for thousands of years. It contributes beautiful appearance, good wearability and environmental friendly to the traditional Chinese furniture.
Raw Lacquer Used in Classical Chinese Furniture
Tags: Solid Wood Furniture , Lacquer Trees , Wooden Furniture , Lacquer , Raw
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. | <urn:uuid:419559da-1a73-4188-9b85-3a1accdd49fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.groundreport.com/Lifestyle/What-Is-Raw-Lacquer_1/2929159 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.915346 | 483 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Here’s a situation that sounds like the current one, but isn’t:
The president faces a weak economy and a split Congress, with some Republicans furious over the president’s endorsement of a plan to cut budget deficits with a combination of a tax increase and budget cuts.
“He is adamant that we are wrong on the tax increase,” wrote the president after meeting with one leading House Republican. “He is in fact unreasonable.”
The year was 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan and the congressman was Jack Kemp.
(Thanks to William L. Silber, a professor of finance and economics at New York University and the author of “Volcker, The Triumph of Persistence,” a new biography of Paul Volcker, for bringing this to my attention.) | <urn:uuid:20364263-b535-4b73-9f56-e4aaf65d963e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/23/the-unreasonable-tax-opponent/?ref=economy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94187 | 168 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Language Log has a great post looking at differences in empathy between males and females, and highlights a new study showing race differences as well.
The punchline is that it’s actually really hard to say whether either of these results reflect true differences because the samples tend to be unrepresentative of the population, and measures of empathy tend to be influenced by the social situation in which they’re taken.
They grab this paragraph from a review article on empathy measurement:
In general, sex differences in empathy were a function of the methods used to assess empathy. There was a large sex difference favoring women when the measure of empathy was self-report scales; moderate differences (favoring females) were found for reflexive crying and self-report measures in laboratory situations; and no sex differences were evident when the measure of empathy was either physiological or unobtrusive observations of nonverbal reactions to another’s emotional state.
This article is from way back in ’83, but more recent studies have tended to support the main idea that the overall difference between men and women in empathy is fairly negligible when behaviour, rather than self-report, is examined.
These sorts of social influences on experimental findings are known as ‘demand characteristics‘.
The classic example is an attractive female researcher asking men about penis size, but the effects can be quite subtle and only come to light in subsequent replications of the study (if at all!).
One of my favourite studies in this area looked at the supposed tendency for people who experience ‘sensory deprivation’ to have hallucinations and suffer severe emotional and cognitive impairment.
In 1964 psychologists Martin Orne and Karl Scheibe compared two groups of participants in a sensory deprivation experiment.
One group of participants was greeted by white coated researchers standing next to emergency equipment, were asked for their medical history and given serious looking tests, were told to report any strange sensory distortions and were informed that if they wanted to stop the experiment, they had to press a panic button.
The other group was greeted informally by researchers in casual clothes, weren’t given any medical checks, and were told to report their experiences freely as they occurred. To stop the experiment, they just had to knock on the window.
The actual sensory deprivation procedure was the same for both groups, but the participants given the formal medical introduction reported greater emotional disturbance, unusual experiences and mental distress. Furthermore, they tended to do much worse on the cognitive tests given afterwards.
While this didn’t ‘disprove’ any of the unpleasant effects of sensory deprivation, it did show that they are heavily mediated by expectation which is implicitly inferred from the testing situation.
Needless to say, this can affect any type of study, so scientists are always on the look out to see if it might be responsible for new findings. | <urn:uuid:f5e96c8e-2533-467b-abb8-73246c1297a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mindhacks.com/2008/03/26/demanding-sex-differences/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965004 | 581 | 2.328125 | 2 |
District 201 Report Cards
The Illinois School Report Card is a measurement of school performance administered by the Illinois State Board of Education.
Each public school district in Illinois, including special charter districts, must submit to parents, taxpayers, the Governor, the General Assembly and the State Board of Education a school report card assessing the performance of its schools and students. The report card is an index of school performance measured against statewide and local standards and provides information to make prior year comparisons and to set future year targets through the school improvement plan.
- Definition from Wikipedia | <urn:uuid:244b0219-91d4-4f0c-9b5d-a967d58c6a5b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bths201.org/index.php/bwmainmenu/bwreportcardmenu | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948857 | 110 | 2.84375 | 3 |
January 21, 2009 1 Comment
Bulls and goats have been slaughtered for the feast. Beer has been stockpiled. Movie screens and projectors were erected.
Across Kenya, neighbors engulfed in political violence only a year ago came together Tuesday to celebrate the U.S. presidential inauguration of Kenya’s favorite son, Barack Obama. Among the revelers will be Dr. Joseph Osoo, who was shopping at a Nairobi market for goat meat for his inauguration party. Osoo, who runs a clinic in one of Kenya’s biggest slums, recalled that at this time last year, he was stitching up machete wounds inflicted by rival party members in rioting that followed Kenya’s disputed election.
“Our election in Kenya really had problems with ethnicity,” he said. “America has shown that this doesn’t have to be that big problem. … Democracy can work.”
The celebrations have helped bring together Kenyans from different ethnic groups who were drawn into the country’s political violence last year. The struggling country of 38 million is proud to boast the birthplace of Obama’s father and it is hard to exaggerate the enthusiasm Kenyans feel for America’s new president.
The election of a black American president stands as a powerful symbol of unity on this continent, where many countries are still riven between competing ethnic groups and the older generations still remember the injustices of colonialism.
Teachers mention Obama as a role model to their students, advertisers plaster his face across everything from phones to beer and foreigners who sing songs about him at the ubiquitous police roadblocks can be let off without paying a bribe. For many, the inauguration was a chance to make a little extra cash. One in five Kenyans struggle to get by on less than a dollar a day and many hope to cash in on the country’s Obama connection.
There are plans for a museum in his family’s home village and tour companies are already hawking Obama-themed holidays. Denis Mwangi, a 21-year-old business student, said he had sold 50 Obama T-shirts on Monday, more than he usually sells in a weekend.
“Obama is a great inspiration for all of us,” he said. “Obama should inspire people to be better and stop judging people according to their ethnicity.”
Nairobi’s famous Carnivore restaurant, where tourists dine on alligator and giraffe, said it had ordered an extra 240 crates of beer for partygoers watching the inauguration. Bulls and goats were slaughtered in Kogelo village in western Kenya, where many of Obama’s Kenyan family live. Around 3,000 people congregated at a local primary school to celebrate. Women dressed in colorful printed cloths performed traditional dances to the rhythms of cowhide drums.
In the nearest city, Kisumu, a local Obama look-a-like drove through the town in a honking convoy of cars, motorbikes and bicycles before he arrived at a local sports stadium, where he planned to deliver one of Obama’s speeches. But the celebrations have not been without controversy. Kenyan papers reported a team of ministers has flown to America to watch the ceremonies. However, the ministers had no invitation to the ceremonies, and would be watching the festivities from their hotel room televisions.
Anti-corruption campaigner Mwalimu Mati said Kenyans should not just be celebrating, but looking carefully at their own leaders.
“In Kenya, the biggest problem is a failure of leadership. People are getting poorer by the day,” he said. “Obama is an icon of hope, but he should also be a standard.” | <urn:uuid:a19d6a2b-2944-4d0d-bccb-9f411f3fe47c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bimchat.wordpress.com/tag/us/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974034 | 775 | 1.96875 | 2 |
Brookings: Mountain West Is America's Next Swing Region
Check out the Fronteras Vote 2012 Election Special & other stories about the fall campaign.
PHOENIX The shifting demographics of the Mountain West could have long-term effects on national and local politics, according to a report and book by the Brookings Institution.
As the West becomes more diverse than ever, it's also increasingly urban. The majority of Arizona's population lives in the metropolitan area in and around Phoenix.
The same goes for Clark County, in Nevada. It's home to Las Vegas, and houses more than 70 percent of that state's population, according to University of Nevada, Las Vegas Political Scientist David Damore.
"The big issue is the traditional view of these Mountain West states is as overwhelmingly white and rural," Damore said. "But the reality is you now have some of the most demographically diverse states and some of the most densely populated spaces in the whole country."
These characteristics include states like Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.
Because of the changes, Brookings is calling the Mountain West America’s new swing region. An urban and more diverse electorate will make the area more hospitable to Democrats this election season and beyond, Damore said.
Meanwhile, rural constituents in the West will increasingly struggle to have their voices heard in state legislatures across the region, he added. | <urn:uuid:c0962973-3354-4493-a600-857f7fcb3de7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fronterasdesk.org/news/2012/mar/19/brookings-mountain-west-americas-next-swing-region/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936581 | 282 | 2.234375 | 2 |
2005-2007 Academic Catalog
Credit By Examination
You may demonstrate mastery of curriculum areas through Advanced Placement (AP), the College-Level Examination Program (CLEP), the Credit for Academically Relevant Learning (CARL) program, International Baccalaureate (IB) Exam or departmental proficiency examination. The following general guidelines apply to all of these programs (specific details for each follow):
- A maximum of 32 semester credits earned through these programs may be applied toward the degree.
- A grade of Satisfactory is awarded for credit earned through these programs and is not included in computed grade point averages. (In some special cases, where the major requires it, the letter grade will be awarded.)
- Credit earned through these programs does not fulfill the College residency requirement.
- Credit is recorded on your permanent record after you enroll at the College.
ADVANCED PLACEMENT (AP)
The College grants credit for Advanced Placement (AP) Tests administered by the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB). The minimum grade required for credit varies across subject areas. For some AP tests, credit is awarded for a grade of 3 or higher, whereas other tests require a minimum grade of 4 or 5. Specific requirements are on file in the Registrar’s Office.
COLLEGE-LEVEL EXAMINATION PROGRAM (CLEP)
CLEP has been established to enable students of all ages to earn college credit by examination. The College of St. Catherine accepts the recommendations of the American Council on Education for the minimum scores necessary to earn credit and the number of credits awarded for General and Subject Examinations. You must have official CLEP scores submitted for credit to be considered.
To obtain further information about CLEP examinations, write to the College-Level Examination Program, P.O. Box 6600, Princeton, NJ 08541-6600, visit their Web site at www.collegeboard.org or inquire at the Office of Academic Affairs.
CREDIT FOR ACADEMICALLY RELEVANT LEARNING (CARL)
The CARL program provides an opportunity for you to earn credit for prior learning that took place outside of the classroom. You develop a portfolio that describes and documents a relevant, college-level learning experience, which is assessed by a faculty evaluator. After evaluation, the faculty member recommends a credit award for your learning.
You are charged a rate of 50 percent of tuition for CARL credits and may apply for the program after completing 16 semester credits at the College. For further information, contact the Office of Academic Affairs.
POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION CREDITS
Students who completed post-secondary college-level work through their high school may be able to transfer the course work to St. Catherine’s. (See Transfer Credit Evaluation in this catalog for information pertaining to the evaluation process.) The Registrar’s Office must receive a copy of your transcript from the college that offered the course. Post-secondary course work completed at the College of St. Catherine remains on your undergraduate St. Catherine transcript and is computed in your cumulative earned hours.
INTERNATIONAL BACCALAUREATE EXAMS (IB)
The College grants credit for IB exams. The IB exam score determines the number of credits awarded. The number of credits varies across subject areas. Specific requirements are on file in the Registrar’s Office.
A proficiency exam allows you to earn credit for a course by successfully completing an examination and/or skills test covering the content of the course. You may request to challenge a course when you believe your previous course work (for example, a portion of a course or combination of courses), experience (work, on-the-job training, continuing education) or knowledge (independent study in an area of special interest) is commensurate with a St. Catherine’s course.
This option is provided only by certain departments. Baccalaureate students may use proficiency examinations to satisfy a maximum of two courses in any one department. A fee, equal to one-fourth of the tuition, is charged for the testing process. Applications to take a proficiency exam must be submitted to the instructor (associate degree programs) or department chair (baccalaureate programs) no later than the second week of the term in which the particular course to be challenged has begun. Individual programs may have earlier application deadlines. Limits may be placed on the number of times a student may take a proficiency exam for a given course.
This page was created on 06/03/2005 and last updated on 05/02/2007.
Comments, questions and feedback about this site may be addressed to email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:9438c8b3-e998-41c8-a165-584841caf652> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://minerva.stkate.edu/academiccatalog0709.nsf/pg/12cd833272853f46862570150066336f?OpenDocument&Start=1&Count=1000&Collapse=12 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.920931 | 968 | 1.773438 | 2 |
An on campus orientation is required for all first time in college students. The purpose is to help guide students through the process of starting college and provide valuable information regarding course selection, college policies and procedures, and student services. Orientation will also instruct students on how to register for classes online. You will register for your first semester of classes at Orientation. All students must have submitted college level SAT/ACT scores or have taken the College Placement Test (CPT) before attending orientation. If you do not attend orientation, you will have a hold placed on your account that will prevent you from registering for classes. Please see an advisor to get scheduled for an orientation session.
Transfer students are not required to attend an on campus orientation. They will get important enrollment information and instructions on how to register for classes when they meet with an advisor. | <urn:uuid:d7a1e84d-c824-4de4-b545-198cbb567719> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hccfl.edu/southshore/student-services/advising/new-student-orientation.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934864 | 169 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Academic Curriculum Vitae Resume Format: Jobs for PhDs
The academic curriculum vitae resume format is a comprehensive biographical statement, typically three to ten pages, emphasizing professional qualifications and activities. An academic curriculum vitae (CV) resume of six to eight pages, ten at the most, is recommended for a veteran professional; two to four pages is appropriate for a young professional just starting out.
If your CV is more than four pages long, show mercy and save eyesight by attaching an executive summary page to the top. An executive summary gives a brief overview of your qualifications and experience.
Among various possible organizations of the CV format, the following sample template (a variation of the hybrid resume format, but with exhaustive coverage) illustrates a lineup of your contact information, objective, qualifications summary, skills summary, and professional background.
Create a comprehensive summary of your professional employment and accomplishments: education, positions, affiliations, honors, memberships, credentials, dissertation title, fields in which comprehensive examinations were passed, full citations of publications and presentations, awards, discoveries, inventions, patents, seminar leadership, foreign languages, courses taught — whatever is valued in your field.
Strengths and weaknesses of this resume format
The academic curriculum vitae resume presents all the best of you, which is good, but for people with aging eyes, a CV may be too reading-intensive. More important, weaknesses in any area of your professional credentials are relatively easy to spot.
Who should (and shouldn't) use this resume format
Anyone working in a PhD-driven environment, such as higher education, thinktanks, science, and elite research and development groups needs to use this format. Anyone who can avoid using it should do so. | <urn:uuid:2b085c20-c070-43b6-9c66-67be8334857a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/academic-curriculum-vitae-resume-format-jobs-for-0.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922155 | 355 | 1.664063 | 2 |
The uprising in Tunisia, which catalyzed the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, offers inspiration for social justice activists everywhere. (AFP)
In the last several days, Tunisia and Egypt have shown us what is possible when people are no longer afraid of those in power who deny them their rights and rob them of a life of freedom and dignity.
Government oppression of peoples’ democratic rights is not something endured only in the Middle East, however. Here in the United States, there has been a long history of repression of peoples’ struggles. Today that repression is keenly felt by members of the US Muslim and Arab communities, and increasingly by those who stand in solidarity with and who organize in support of the Palestinian people.
We have seen this with the persecution of Palestinian and Arab community leaders in the US like Muhammad Salah, Dr. Abdelhaleem Ashqar, Dr. Sami al-Arian and the Holy Land Five — all put on trial by the US government because of their work to educate Americans about the impact of US aid to Israel, and to raise money for humanitarian assistance to Palestinians living under the thumb of Israel’s occupation.
I am one of 23 individuals who have been recently subpoenaed by the FBI and who face a federal grand jury because of our work to end US military aid to Israel, and because we organize in solidarity with the people of Palestine. Seven of the 23 subpoenaed activists are Palestinians who also organize within their community in the US. A grand jury is a secret court designed to get an indictment and it is clear that the US government wants to put anti-war and solidarity activists on trial. Because of this, and even though it means we risk being put in jail, all of us who have have been summoned to testify have refused to participate in this attack on our movement.
Moreover, repression and intimidation don’t only come from our government. The backlash against Palestinian solidarity activists in the US has grown more severe as the movement globally claims more victories. Well-funded organizations whose narrow mission is to protect and promote US aid to Israel and maintain unchecked diplomatic support of the apartheid state smear those who speak out for truth and justice.
The campus boycott, divestment and sanctions movement has been particularly targeted by this backlash. Students for Justice in Palestine activists and organizers with similar campus groups have been victimized by hate crimes and physically threatened, their property on campus defaced, denied funding for their activities and their faculty supporters subjected to institutional censorship because of threats and harassment from outside groups.
Though this repression against our movement in the US is very real, not for a single day should any of us stop organizing in support of the liberation of Palestine, against the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and against US support of dictatorships in countries like Egypt and Tunisia. It is our government and our tax money that perpetuates the deadly status quo in the Middle East and the Arab World. We in the United States must continue to organize to end the wars and occupations by cutting off the billions of dollars and making sure that instead of being spent on war and death, and oppression of liberation struggles, our tax money stays at home and is invested in our schools and communities.
The backlash against the just movement in support of the liberation of Palestine and other peoples’ struggles in the Middle East is indicative the desperation of those interested in maintaining the status quo of US military aid to Israel.
Ever since the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions was issued by a broad spectrum of political forces and civil society organizations in 2005, the global movement that has formed in support of that call has claimed victory after victory. Those who profit from the occupation and support it practically and ideologically find themselves confronted by this movement at nearly every turn, and this movement shows once and for all that the charade of negotiations brokered by the US is hardly the way forward.
Like the US was amongst the last backers of apartheid South Africa, so it is with apartheid Israel, which is increasingly isolated in the international arena. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against apartheid Israel, like it did with South African apartheid, will force the US government to cut off the military, monetary and diplomatic support.
But in the meantime, as Ali Abunimah wrote for The Electronic Intifada yesterday, the fall of the Mubarak regime will mean that Israel will have one less major ally. As Israel becomes more isolated, it will also become more desperate — as will its supporters in the US, some of whom are being funded to disrupt what they will ultimately find to be an unstoppable movement.
Let us take our cue from our brave sisters and brothers who are resisting injustice in Egypt and Tunisia and Yemen, in Iraq and Palestine, and Lebanon and Afghanistan and let us never stop working towards freedom and a life with dignity for oppressed peoples in the Middle East as well as here at home. Let it be known that we too are not afraid.
Maureen Clare Murphy is Managing Editor of The Electronic Intifada and an organizer with the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago. This essay is based on a speech she gave at a Chicago rally in solidarity with Egypt on 29 January 2011. For more information about the activists facing a grand jury, visit stopfbi.net | <urn:uuid:6c05ebce-14c1-4e3f-b2fa-d44f90ca4a0a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://electronicintifada.net/content/arabs-rise-us-activists-must-too-persevere/9205 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968388 | 1,066 | 2.078125 | 2 |
updated 10:51 pm EDT, Thu August 16, 2012
Developers only allowed to have 100K users
As expected, Twitter has finally announced a tighter set of restrictions on its API for third-party applications. In an attempt to improve security and strengthen the company's control over the service, the forthcoming API will require authentication for access to public information and impose a limit of 100,000 users for most Twitter client apps on various platforms.
"One of the key things we've learned over the past few years is that when developers begin to demand an increasingly high volume of API calls, we can guide them toward areas of value for users and their businesses," Twitter director of product Michael Sippey wrote in a blog post directed to developers. "To that end, and similar to some other companies, we will require you to work with us directly if you believe your application will need more than one million individual user tokens."
Some apps will be allowed to surpass 100,000 users, but only after receiving official permission from Twitter. Any apps that already reach more than 100,000 users will be allowed to increase their subscriber base by 200 percent before running into the cap.
Twitter has also converted its "display guidelines" into "display requirements," requiring developers to adhere to a set of presentation rules. The requirements relate to linking usernames to profiles, displaying appropriate tweet actions, and properly scaling tweets for various devices.
The company has made several attempts to modernize and improve its popular service, filing lawsuits against spammers and enforcing its terms-of-service by shutting down violating apps. Popular third-party client TweetDeck was halted early this year, fueling speculation that Twitter was beginning to cull the herd, however service was later restored and the interruption was said to be necessary to patch a security vulnerability.
Version 1.1 of the Twitter API is expected to arrive within the next few weeks. | <urn:uuid:dfee58ab-9571-46a8-a748-255f46e7fef1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/08/16/developers.only.allowed.to.have.100k.users/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958913 | 384 | 1.65625 | 2 |
An organization such as TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) needs no introduction. Founded in 1974 currently headed by Dr. R K Pachauri TERI is one of the most respectable name in the world when it comes to issues related to energy, environment and sustainable development.
It is our great honor to be able to partner with TERI for the social media coverage of the 11th Delhi Sustainable Development Summit (DSDS) being held from 3rd to 5th Feb 2011 at the Taj Palace Hotel, New Delhi.
Actions – Blog, Twitter, Photography, Short Interviews etc.
To begin with we have created a DSDS 2011 Live Blog which is being updated with short notes on and pictures of the conference proceedings in real time. We are also running the live tweets on behalf of TERI on TERI’s twitter handle @TERIIN.
We have kept the language of the live blog very simple so that even a layperson with no background on issue of global sustainability is able to immediately connect with the blog and identify him/herself as a stakeholder.
We have also integrated the TERI’s Twitter stream with the blog so that people reaching the blog can start following TERI on Twitter. At the moment TERI has only 6 followers, twitter integration is likely to increase the follower count.
It has been Samyukta Media’s continuous efforts to keep pushing the limits of social media usage by nonprofit sector in India. This is the first time such a big organization has opened up to the idea of live blogging of their event. And we hope this sets an example.
This is a significant step not just for our business and TERI’s brand, but also for the cause of social media usage by nonprofits.
Why Live Blog?
It is not unknown that closed conferences, seminars & summits are always perceived as elite events and the common, ordinary every day youth never takes interest in the issues and causes discussed in these events. While a corporate conference on capitalist issues may not have much significance for the common youth, in a conference such as DSDS which is about sustainable development, energy and resources, every individual is a stake holder. And therefore it is important to have an open, social and democratic approach.
This approach is ensured by giving access to the conference proceedings and highlights to the online audience by using social media tools like live blog and tweet.
Sure there is always a live stream and perhaps the mainstream media also will give an extensive coverage to a certain event, a live blog however has its own significance.
Impact at the end of Day 1
Neither TERI nor DSDS had any social media content before the live blog went live. There is plenty of online content which are strictly informative in nature but not interactive or social. TERI has a very extensive corporate website which is the first results on Google key word search for ‘TERI’. For DSDS they have a micro site. But there was no blog or other social media presence.
Interestingly, the Google Search results for by key word DSDS or DSDS 2010 or DSDS 2011 are occupied largely by a non English language entity probably related to entertainment field. Before our blog went live, the whole of page one and page 2 of the search results were occupied by results related to this entity, which even has Youtube content.
It was a challenge to make space in the search pages, but in the last 24 hours, the TERI Live Blog created by us have pushed down the said non English blog and have taken the first position when searched for ‘DSDS 2011 blog’ and fourth position when searched for ‘DSDS live’
The DSDS 2011 Blog went live on 2nd Feb evening around 7 pm and we started sending live updates from the conference hall starting this morning. By the end of Day 1 of the summit, which is less than 24 hours of its going live, the blog has already received around 350 hits.
Most of the blog traffic has come from the DSDS micro-site and social networking places like Twitter and Facebook. Only a handful of traffic came by searching key words related to the conference.
TERI’s follower count on Twitter increased from 6 to 15 in about 12 hours. People also started sharing and recommending the blog URLs on twitter.
This was just a quick impact assessment at the end of 1st day of the conference. One day is too quick to judge the complete impact of any action on social media, as the full potential of a blog is only realized in the long run.
At this point we do sincerely hope this live blog adds great value to TERI’s social media presence. | <urn:uuid:ce6b776e-8e2f-4d76-9ece-f94f741488be> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://samyuktamedia.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/samyukta-media-social-media-partner-delhi-sustainable-development-summit-2011-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953766 | 959 | 1.5 | 2 |
Today, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and President Barack Obama laid out a plan to create and enforce stricter tax regulations for U.S. corporations. Obama's opening salvo from the presser:
Most Americans meet their responsibilities because they understand that it's an obligation of citizenship...and yet, even as most American citizens and businesses meet these responsibilities, there are others who are shirking theirs.
He went on to describe the U.S. tax code as "full of corporate loopholes that [make] it perfectly legal for companies to avoid paying their fair share."
That's right. He was talking about "tax havens": not just countries in which major U.S. corporations hide from U.S. taxes, but a big fat open season sign for fire and brimstone metaphors and sword of Damocles swinging. Democratic speechwriters must adore tax havens. They're like the Newt Gingrich of tax policy: always there to beat up.
Rhetorical fury aside, tax havens really do allow U.S. companies to shore up a whole lot of money, money which Obama hopes to use to revamp the U.S.'s healthcare system, among other things. Interesting factoids from the Treasury release:
The closing of three major tax haven loopholes should garner $190 billion in tax revenue for the government in the next ten years.
Another big beneficiary of the changes? Lobbyists. Corporate America isn't going to like this -- and they're going to pay a lot of money to see the repeal of these changes.
Passport, FP’s flagship blog, brings you news and hidden angles on the biggest stories of the day, as well as insights and under-the-radar gems from around the world. | <urn:uuid:9e284c85-6477-4f50-89f2-fed66de37982> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/04/tax_havens_about_to_get_pwnd_us_president_obama | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962472 | 359 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Masters provides golf business benefits for Augusta
If you wander too close to the gates of the Augusta National Golf Club, the chances are you will attract the attention of the private police force.
The club values anonymity and there is a reason for that - it is one of the world's most coveted courses and membership is by invitation only.
But every April the whole place is opened to the public when the Masters is held here, one of the four "majors" - the quartet of the most prestigious professional golf tournaments in the world.
The tournament began back in the 1930s and has always been hosted by Augusta National; its very history is intricately woven into the story of the city of Augusta.
It is hard to think of one without the other.
"We're very fortunate to have a major each and every year," says Augusta's mayor Deke Copenhaver.
"The international exposure it gives the city is something that is a huge benefit.
"It stimulates tourism - they want to see the course, they want to see our downtown, so its something that is impacting the city from a positive perspective throughout the year."'Busy and exciting'
The mayor's claim is borne out by the figures.
Augusta regularly ranks as amongst the strongest US cities economically and many businesses make more than half of their annual profits during the week of the Masters.
The landmark Partridge Inn - which describes itself as a "grand, colourful" hotel - is a good example.
The walls of its corridors and banquet halls are full of grainy old black and white pictures of guests putting golf balls in the corridors as Masters fever takes hold.
"For us its a good chunk of our annual income," says Brian Cole, general manager of the Inn.
"It's definitely a busy and exciting time," he adds.
"A lot of businesses in town rev up for this time period, they basically target their work around the tournament."
The association with one of golf's most famous tournaments has an almost irresistible pull for certain businesses.
Almost all of America's golf cars and buggies are made either in, or close by, to the city of Augusta and these manufacturers are major employers in the region.'Golf history'
At the E-Z-GO factory, where the workforce is around 800 strong, golf cars are rigorously tested on a track which comes complete with trenches, humps and steep inclines; standards to match a tournament that challenges the world's best golfers, perhaps.
E-Z-GO president Kevin Holleran admits that building golf vehicles close to the Augusta National Golf Club comes with its own advantages.
"Golf is our history," declares Mr Holleran proudly.
"[We are] able to call on the golf professional, the club managers who are buying our product, and they know we are in Augusta, Georgia," he adds.
"It has a way of just validating the company name, knowing that our home town is in one of the real hotbeds for the golf industry."
The gravitational pull of the Masters has become a powerful force for the city of Augusta.
Having an international reputation for organising a major sporting event every year has been a boon for other events and other sports.'Recognition'
Augusta now hosts one of the largest Ironman triathlon competitions in the world, and just about every sport you can think of holds events in the city.
End Quote Brad Parker Forest Hills Golf Club public golf course, Augusta
The aura that the Masters gives off means that it is time for golf”
"It's definitely beneficial to have recognition for that type of prestigious event," says Tammy Stout, executive director of the Augusta Sports Council.
She says that for event organisers finding a suitable location is often the biggest obstacle.
"But when you're known to be the home of the Masters that challenge is no longer there," she adds.
"It's kind of an understood quiet reputation that you have for hosting the best sporting event in the world."
For the city of Augusta and the state of Georgia the Masters plays a vital economic role, as does the sport of golf.
It's estimated that the game generates more than $5bn (£3.1bn) annually and keeps almost 60,000 people in work in this state alone; in Florida, Texas, California and New York those figures are even higher.
The Masters is then, without doubt, a tour de force for the city of Augusta.
As the tournament grows closer hotels, restaurants and local golf clubs brace themselves for an influx of eager spectators and prices rocket.
The Forest Hills Golf Club is the nearest public course to the Augusta National, a geographical fact that helps fill its greens and fairways with golfers at this time of year.
The club's general manager and golf pro Brad Parker says as soon as the azaleas start to bloom then it is time for one of the sports greatest tournaments to begin.
"The aura that the Masters gives off means that it is time for golf." | <urn:uuid:7afbb199-07da-447e-843f-d0cfdb38735e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12933328 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958516 | 1,039 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Greek coffee is a strong brew, served with foam on top and the grounds in the bottom of the cup. Although it can be made in a different pot, the traditional small pot (shown in photo) is best because it allows the proper amount of foam, which adds to the unique taste. (Text-only instructions.)
What You Need to Make Greek Coffee:
- Greek coffee
- Sugar (if used)
- A briki (μπρίκι, pronounced BREE-kee)
- Demitasse cups
- Cold water
- Water glasses
The pot used for making Greek coffee is called a briki. It comes in 2, 4, and 6 demitasse cup sizes that help create the right amount of foam ... a very important part of the process. If you plan to make coffee for more than 6 people, I suggest you do it in stages, making more than one pot.
Start with very cold water. Use the demitasse cup to measure the water needed for each cup of coffee (one demitasse cup of water is about 1/4 cup), and pour the water into the briki. | <urn:uuid:df9d79ad-3e58-4523-9122-1b2c9ce9f0e6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://greekfood.about.com/od/mezethesdrinks/ss/htgreekcoffee.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922744 | 237 | 2.3125 | 2 |
(Riemann) Integrability under composition of functions
1. The problem statement, all variables and given/known data
I've been looking at how integrable functions behave under composition, and I know that if f and g are integrable, f(g(x)) is not necessarily integrable, but it -is- necessarily integrable if f is continuous, regardless of whether g is. So I was wondering, what about if g is continuous and f wasn't, rather than f was? Is there an example of a discontinuous integrable f and a continuous integrable g such that f(g(x)) is non-integrable?
I don't want an explicit proof of the answer, but I'd just like to know whether there is or isn't such an example, so I can begin looking for a counterexample or a proof as appropriate, rather than ending up trying to prove something which is false or look for a counterexample for something which is true. My intuition tells me there isn't a counterexample, but I've found relying on intuition in analysis is a very bad idea! | <urn:uuid:4e2149df-24a5-4de8-bbca-26dd2c7b6aaf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=2132509 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945656 | 241 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Late Sen. Byrd's FBI files reveal CIA leak uproar
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd obtained secret FBI documents about the civil rights movement that were leaked by the CIA and triggered an angry confrontation between the two agencies in the 1960s, according to newly released FBI records.
Byrd, who died in June 2010 at age 92, had sought the FBI intelligence while suspecting that communists and subversives were guiding the civil rights cause, the records show. Decades before he became history's longest-serving member of Congress, or gained the title "King of Pork" for sending federal funds to West Virginia, the Democrat had stalled and voted against major civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. He also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan while a young man in the 1940s, and the FBI cited that membership while weighing his requests for classified information, the records show.Continue Reading
"He eventually had a change of heart about a lot of that stuff," said Ray Smock, a former historian for Congress who now oversees Byrd's archives. Smock said Byrd's hardline belief in law and order played a role in his view of the civil rights movement. Byrd also repeatedly called his time with the hate group a serious mistake, Smock noted.
The FBI released more than 750 pages from its files — many of them with words, sentences or entire paragraphs redacted — in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Associated Press. The records date to the mid-1950s, when Byrd served in the U.S. House. He was elected to the first of his record nine terms in the U.S. Senate in 1958.
The documents that reveal the September 1966 leak also describe how it sparked outrage among top FBI officials and prompted an internal CIA probe that singled out two agency employees as the culprits The episode damaged Byrd's standing with the bureau, though only briefly, the records show. Numerous documents depict him as an outspoken supporter of the FBI and particularly of J. Edgar Hoover, its longtime director, even toward the end of Hoover's tenure as criticism of him mounted.
"Byrd said that the Director's record of public service was unparalleled anywhere and he knew that it would never be possible for any successor to adequately 'fill his shoes,'" one June 1966 memo between top FBI brass said.
The files repeatedly refer to Byrd's "cordial relations" with the bureau, and include numerous thank-you notes and other friendly exchanges between Byrd and Hoover from the early 1960s until Hoover's death in 1972.
"He certainly was a law and order conservative," said Smock, director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University in West Virginia. "He had great respect for the Justice Department and for Hoover, as far as I know." | <urn:uuid:5630c1fc-da3a-44ad-b46d-42ebc3233b9f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79374.html?hp=l14 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983238 | 580 | 2.140625 | 2 |
Hamburg, Dec 13 - When several world records were broken in the run-up to the FINA world championships in Rome, it was clear that the season would be dominated not so much by the swimmers but by the times they were setting and the suits they were wearing.
This proved true in Rome during the championships held in the Italian capital from July 17 to August 2, when an astonishing 43 world records were broken - 28 more than at the last championships in Melbourne two years ago.
The reason for the record flood was simple: Polyurethane.
Since the material was first introduced in the form of a few panels in the Speedo LZR Racer, which US superstar Michael Phelps wore during his unprecedented haul of eight gold medals at last year's Beijing Olympics, world records have fallen like ripe apples from trees.
A progression in swimsuit design saw the first all-polyurethane swimsuit launched a few months before the start of the world championships. Since then, times have become even easier to break, resulting in the incredible records tumble in Rome.
Phelps, who was one of the few of the top swimmers who did not wear an all-polyurethane costume, lost his air of invincibility, as German Paul Biedermann beat him easily in the 200m freestyle, touching the pad more than a second ahead.
The swimsuit situation became so ridiculous that swimmers were even changing their costume between swims.
Chinese butterfly swimmers Zhao Jing and Gao Chang, for instance, were unhappy with their first swims and both changed to Jaked 01, one of the all-polyurethane suits.
The change obviously worked wonders, as they won gold and bronze respectively, with Zhao getting a world record.
However, both swimmers, like many others, opted to blacken-out the Jaked logo on their swimsuit as their federation is sponsored by a rival company.
Even before the world championship started, FINA realized that they had a problem on their hands - or better said - in their pools.
Unlike previous competitions, where the focus was on swimmers and swimming, most of the interest in Rome was on the swimsuits and the times that could be achieved with - and through - them.
FINA thus set about to level the playing fields, or better said - to level the swimming pools.
In Rome, the FINA executive reacted by confirming a ban on bodysuits from next year and said it would also be introducing strict textile restrictions.
Under the new rules, men are permitted to wear suits that extend from the navel to above the knees, while women's suits must have a bare neck and shoulders and end above the knees.
That, of course, made little difference to the swimmers in Rome, who were breaking world records and setting times that will probably stand for years to come.
US swimmer Ryan Lochte, who won four gold medals in Rome and was later named as the US Swimmer of the Year, ahead of Phelps, described the world championships as the craziest meet in which he had ever competed.
"This is not only the craziest meet, it is also the fastest meet that I have ever been to," he said at the time. "It seems that every race is a world record and is really, really fast."
Phelps agreed with his teammate, saying that there had been some amazing swims.
"The men's 200m freestyle and the women's 400m freestyle really stand out in my mind as being unbelievable records. Federica Pellegrini going under the four minutes for the 400m and Biedermann going 1:42 flat in the 200m is amazing," Phelps said.
"Some records have been pretty unbelievable."
But if anybody thought that the record flood would cease after Rome they were mistaken, as in the five World Cup meets that followed Rome another 37 short course world records were broken.
American Jessica Hardy and South African breaststroke sensation Cameron Van Der Burgh were crowned the Swimming World Cup champions after the final meet in Singapore and won the 100,000 US dollar that went with it.
Some swimmers, like Phelps, used the World Cup as a scene-setter for next season by swimming in costumes that will be allowed under the new rules.
One thing is certain, the next season will bring a change to the sport and - with virtual certainty - an end to the flood of world records.
Lochte, for his part, is looking forward to the new season.
"All these crazy races will change come January first. I think we will then decide who the real swimmers are out there," he said.
"Hopefully, I am there." (dpa) | <urn:uuid:2e9d00f0-dab4-49fa-8ec8-5d76c9df30b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://topnews.in/sports/phelps-not-invincible-fina-moves-level-things-27845 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988034 | 980 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Glossary of Literary Terms
Alliteration: The repetition of initial consonant sounds in neighboring words.
Allusion: A reference to a familiar person, place, or event.
Analysis: The process or result of identifying the parts of a whole and their relationships to one another.
Antonym: A word that is the opposite of another word.
Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds.
Characterization: The method an author uses to reveal his/her characters and their various personalities.
Compare: Place together characters, situations, or ideas to show common or differing features in literary selections.
Context clues: Information from the reading that identifies a word or group of words.
Conventions of language: Mechanics, usage, and sentence completeness.
Couplet: Two lines of rhyming poetry.
Dialect: Speech patterns that indicate a specific geographical region or social group.
Evaluate: Examine and judge carefully.
Figurative language: Language that cannot be taken literally since it was written to create a special effect or feeling.
Fluency: The clear, easy, written or spoken expression of ideas. Freedom from word-identification problems that might hinder comprehension in silent reading or the expression of ideas in oral reading.
Focus: The center of interest or attention.
Foreshadowing: An author's use of hints or clues to suggest events that will occur later in a narrative.
Genre: A category used to classify works, usually by form, technique or content (e.g. prose, poetry).
Graphic organizer: A diagram or pictorial device that shows relationships.
Homophone: A word that is pronounced the same, but that has different meaning (e.g. hair/hare, scale (fish)/scale (musical)).
Hyperbole: An exaggeration or overstatement (e.g., I was so embarrassed I could have died.).
Idiomatic language: An expression peculiar to itself grammatically or that cannot be understood if taken literally (e.g., Let's get on the ball.).
Imagery: Concrete details that appeal to the senses of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste, or to internal feelings.
Inference: A reasonable and intelligent conclusion drawn from hints or other information provided by the author.
Irony: The use of a word or phrase to mean the exact opposite of its literal or usual meaning.
Literary conflict: The struggle that grows out of the interplay of the two opposing forces in a plot.
Literary elements: The essential techniques used in literature, such as characterization, setting, plot, and theme.
Literary devices: Tools used by the author to enliven and provide voice to the writing, such as dialogue and alliteration.
Literary structures: The author's method of organizing text, such as foreshadowing and flashbacks.
Metaphor: The comparison of two unlike things in which no words of comparison (like or as) are used (e.g. That new kid in class is really a squirrel.).
Meter: The repetition of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry. (see also rhythm)
Mood: The total feeling in a literary work. Setting, objects, details, images, and words all contribute to create mood.
Narrative: A story, actual or fictional, expressed orally or in writing.
Onomatopoeia: The use of words to imitate sounds.
Paraphrase: Restate text or passage in other words, often to clarify meaning or show understanding.
Parody: A humorous imitation of a literary work, usually following the original form but changing its sense to nonsense to ridicule the writer's characteristics.
Pattern book: A book with predictable language structure and often written with predictable text; also known as a predictable book.
Personification: An object or abstract idea given human qualities or human form (e.g. , Flowers danced about the lawn.).
Phonics: The relationship between letters and sounds fundamental in beginning reading.
Point of view: The way in which an author reveals characters, events, and ideas in telling a story; the vantage point from which the story is told.
First person: The narrator "I" is a character in the story who can reveal only personal thoughts and feelings and what he/she sees or is told by other characters.
Third person: The narrator is an outsider who can report only what he or she sees and hears.
Public document: A document that focuses on civic issues or matters of public policy at the community level and beyond.
Reading critically: Reading in which a questioning attitude, logical analysis, and inference are used to judge the worth of text; evaluating relevancy and adequacy of what is read; the judgment of validity, or worth of what is read, based on sound criteria.
Reading rate: The speed at which a person reads, usually silently.
Research: A systematic inquiry into a subject, or problem in order to discover, verify, or revise relevant facts or principles having to do with that subject or problem.
Rhyme: Repetition of syllable sounds at the end of words.
Rhythm: The pattern of stressed ( ) and unstressed ( ) syllables.
example: The outlook wasn't brilliant for the
Mudville nine that day;
Satire: A literary tone used to ridicule or make fun of human vice or weakness.
Self-monitor: Know when what one is reading or writing is not making sense; adjust strategies for comprehension.
Semantics: The study of meaning in language.
Setting: Time, place, and surrounding circumstances of a narrative.
Simile: A comparison of two unlike things in which a word of comparison (like or as) is used (e.g., She eats like a bird.).
Primary: Text and/or artifacts that tell or show a first-hand account of an event; original works used when researching.
Secondary: Text and/or artifacts used when researching that are derived from something original.
Subject area: An organized body of knowledge; a discipline; a content area.
Stanza: A group of lines that form a unit in a poem.
Style: How an author writes; an author's use of language; its effects and appropriateness to the author's intent and theme.
Symbol: A person, place, event, or object that has a meaning in itself but suggests other meanings as well.
Synonym: Two or more words in a language that have highly similar meanings (e.g., sorrow, grief, sadness).
Syntax: The pattern or structure of word order in sentences, clauses, and phrases.
Theme: A topic of discussion or writing; a major idea broad enough to cover the entire scope of a literary work.
Thesis: The basic argument advanced by a speaker or writer who then attempts to prove it; the subject or major argument of a speech or composition.
Tone: The attitude of the author toward the audience and characters, such as serious or humorous.
Voice: The fluency, rhythm, and liveliness in writing that makes it unique to the writer. Writing without voice is mechanical and flat. | <urn:uuid:cbefe067-362d-4720-ae9d-09e3ec4dbef6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.warwicksd.org/teacherweb/module.php?id=225&tid=10 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.920803 | 1,495 | 3.96875 | 4 |
Did you miss it? Aircraft manufacturer Boeing made headlines this season with an insightful announcement about how potatoes had been used to test WiFi strength inside airplanes.
Using 20,000 lbs. of potatoes in human-like sacks, Boeing pumped signal through a decommissioned aircraft and measured its properties. Potatoes share similar “physical interactions with electronic signals” with humans. The assessment produced data Boeing will use to build safer, more robust wireless signal capabilities for in-flight entertainment and communication.
If you’ve used in-flight WiFi over the last year, you know its capabilities don’t live up ground standards. In most cases, that experience is forgiven, given the immature technology and obvious limitations of satellite-based Internet. But on terra firma, within enterprise corporations and SMBs, WiFi quality and signal strength are not so easily overlooked: They are mission-critical.
Most solution providers that have worked on wireless infrastructure will be familiar with network assessment capabilities. Often, these abilities are centered on security, as is the case with Rapid7′s Metasploit solution and WhiteHat Security Inc.’s MDM/app security tools. Cisco Systems Inc. focuses on network security capabilities, with tools to ensure bandwidth and device load capabilities in wide-scaled deployments. Often overlooked is the quality of service assessment, which is primarily driven by signal strength.
Like airplanes, corporate campuses are full of people and building material, all of which can impact service quality. The most advanced wireless deployment is worthless if devices can’t connect to it. Thus, solution providers have a unique opportunity to build and expand signal-based assessments that can be rolled into existing or new service level agreements.
Partners can package these solution using a variety of vendor options, but they will require a combination of access point technology, consultative planning and an on-site assessment. ADTRAN, for example, has been focused on delivering manageable access points with its Bluesocket technology. Partners already working with Cisco will be happy to know it offers wireless LAN assessment services, as does Rapid7.
Once vendor choices are ironed out and a customer is on board, providers must employ technicians to assess a campus, determine where signal quality can fail and build an access point deployment plan. This service can be advertised as part of an SLA, garnering customers that have struggled to address wireless challenges. Likewise, maintaining SLAs like these have the opportunity for value-added attach, from network repeaters to data center optimization technology.
The payoff: the ability to differentiate in the market, play the trusted advisor role and secure a space in a market that’s still relatively nascent. As smart devices become the regular platform for everyday work, wireless infrastructure quality will be more important. Partners should capitalize now — today’s fast-paced world of hosted solutions and sophisticated consultation will make it difficult to catch up once major providers are already in play.
Leave a Reply | <urn:uuid:fb4a15ad-77e1-4d9d-9f73-72b029b2f0d1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://channelnomics.com/2012/12/26/partners-potatoes-assess-infrastructure/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93589 | 601 | 1.75 | 2 |
California’s Renewables Portfolio Standard requires utilities to obtain 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2010. The California Public Utilities Commission is examining the potential use of renewable energy credits for compliance with the RPS.
Should Washington’s utilities be allowed to buy RECs from other regions to meet our RPS, rather than build renewable energy sources here in the state?
RECs are generated when a renewable energy source (such as a wind farm) generates power. The RECs can be sold, somewhat like stocks, except that they ultimately are “retired” by a buyer who gets credit for the clean power generated. (Read “Green Tags in a Nutshell” for more about RECs.)
The California Public Utilities Code gives the CPUC the discretion to authorize the use of RECs to meet the RPS. That could allow utilities to build fossil-fueled power plants and buy RECs to satisfy the renewable energy law.
The CPUC has previously explored the use of these tradeable credits for compliance with the RPS, but has not implemented a system for it.
A recent CPUC white paper, “Renewable Energy Certificates and the California Renewables Portfolio Standard Program,” provides an analysis of the use of RECs to meet the RPS.
The CPUC will hold a conference on REC trading September 5, 2007, and has solicited a single round of comments, deadline August 17.
Thanks for the team at Stoel Rives for the data in this article.
More on energy policy. | <urn:uuid:e4892134-2c60-416b-ba7b-772e26238fbd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.seattlepi.com/energy/2007/08/01/utilities-could-buy-credits-to-meet-renewable-energy-minimums/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929848 | 326 | 2.21875 | 2 |
Motion of flux transfer events: a test of the Cooling model
Publication date: 30 Jul 2007
Authors: Fear, R.C. et al
Journal: Annales Geophysicae
Copyright: CopernicusThe simple model of reconnected field line motion developed by Cooling et al. (2001) has been used in several recent case studies to explain the motion of flux transfer events across the magnetopause. We examine 213 FTEs observed by all four Cluster spacecraft under a variety of IMF conditions between November 2002 and June 2003, when the spacecraft tetrahedron separation was ~5000 km. Observed velocities were calculated from multi-spacecraft timing analysis, and compared with the velocities predicted by the Cooling model in order to check the validity of the model. After excluding three categories of FTEs (events with poorly defined velocities, a significant velocity component out of the magnetopause surface, or a scale size of less than 5000 km), we were left with a sample of 118 events. 78% of these events were consistent in both direction of motion and speed with one of the two model de Hoffmann-Teller (dHT) velocities calculated from the Cooling model (to within 30° and a factor of two in the speed). We also examined the plasma signatures of several magnetosheath FTEs; the electron signatures confirm the hemisphere of connection indicated by the model in most cases. This indicates that although the model is a simple one, it is a useful tool for identifying the source regions of FTEs. | <urn:uuid:3d734e8e-61e9-4f70-b35d-4609376ea2c6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=41243 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944509 | 325 | 2.1875 | 2 |
James Ford Rhodes (18481927). History of the Civil War, 18611865 1917.
last line was gained, wrote Major Peyton; the Confederate battle flag waved over his defences and the fighting over the wall became hand to hand and of the most desperate character; but more than half having already fallen, our line was found too weak to rout the enemy.1 The advancing mass was so deep and wide as to raise doubt whether the Union line could stand against its weight and momentum, but a brief contact with bayonets crossed and muskets clubbed solved this doubt. The Confederates threw down their arms as if they simultaneously realized that the battle was lost. Many surrendered while others who escaped the pursuing shots fled across the field to Seminary Ridge.2
I have never seen a more formidable attack, wrote Hancock to Meade on the day of the battle, with worse troops I should certainly have lost the day.3 Haskells detailed account confirms this judgment, as does the study of Colonel Thomas L. Livermore, who was in the battle. Meade, his face very white, the lines marked and earnest and full of care, rode up to Haskell and asked in a sharp eager voice, How is it going here? I believe, General, the enemys attack is repulsed, was the reply. What! Is the assault already repulsed? It is, sir. Thank God! exclaimed Meade.4
Lee, entirely alone, rode forward to encourage and rally his broken troops. His earlier excitement had passed and he betrayed no bitterness in his disappointment; his composure was really extraordinary and the spirit in which he
Note 1. The citations are from the only printed reports (so far as I know) of officers in Picketts divisions, O. R., XXVII, Pt. II, 385, 999. They are dated respectively July 9, 12. Major Peyton was in Garnetts, Col. Aylett in Armisteads, brigade. Pickett made a report but, at the suggestion of General Lee, destroyed it, O. R., XXVII, Pt. III, 1075; Picketts Letters, 100, 213. [back]
Note 2. T. L. Livermore, Milt. Hist. Soc., XIII, 537. [back] | <urn:uuid:e46879ce-a531-4c91-97f9-eb16fd38abb0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bartleby.com/252/pages/page242.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974758 | 472 | 2.578125 | 3 |
$ is a social contract - an abstraction of exchange. There is no limit to its use or value. However, seemingly natural models of exchange ingrained in culture seamlessly pave the way for relationships that serve few and exploit many. $ has a way of protecting its own value — by marginalizing and discrediting those that do not have much of it, or who question its absolute value.
But fortunately, in many places, ideas, and actions are still free. The piggy bank that holds and shapes stories of collective financial meaning has been dealt significant blows and a stream of alternatives is gushing through the cracks. Enacting more human and humane models for exchanging and using $ will help free us from inequality and inequity - enhancing cooperation, co-productivity, creativity, and culture.
As with $, social interaction is an exchange. Through art referred to as Social Practice (formalized and historicized social interaction), ideas are proposed, imposed, traded, and braided together to form living philosophy - ways of thinking and doing. Some people and projects working in this vein help me think differently about $, influencing what I accept as natural and valuable, and inspire me to write this and share their work with you.
Abigail Satinsky is hard to pinpoint - engendering experimental art practices on the fringes, under the radar, and for the future of art. Living in Chicago and working at the cultural nexus Three Walls, she makes art, helps others make art, and then examines, organizes, and disseminates the results. In 2007, as a member of inCUBATE, a Chicago-based research organization dedicated to innovating arts funding structures, she helped develop and found Sunday Soup, a community supported micro-granting program. Their amazingly successful model, which has spurred programs in over 60 cities, such as FEAST in Brooklyn, revolves around a community meal. Each diner contributes a small amount of $, receives food and partakes in a collective decision about which proposed art project to support. Sunday Soup's model helps communities define and support work that is meaningful and necessary to them, opening a forum of cultural exchange and creation, and efficiently sustaining an ever-strengthening loop between community and culture.
Abigail introduced me to an artist-run, Chicago-based residency program in Ohio called Harold Arts. While I was there this summer, I met the individually mind-blowing artists April Childers and Carmen Tiffany, or as they're know collectively, Destineez Child. They spent much of their time in the breezy Amish-built studio, sipping Coors Light and cheerfully making brightly colored paintings on found rocks and sticks, knitting unusual garments, and creating mysterious sculptures. I was curious what they were up to, but they wouldn't reveal their plans until one day they invited everyone to their Kuntry Store. Their version of an art fair seemed to be missing the hyper-pretentious cosmopolitan vibe that occupies typical art fair paradigms. They displayed lovingly-made trinkets and attractions such as illustrated tabs of drugs, collectible souvenir rocks with inscriptions such as fuckin' fishin' or A$$, a contemporary art table, and a set of opposing lawn chairs on a picnic table entitled, Make fun of Marina Abramovic with a Friend - $1, an invitation to re-stage her work, The Artist is Present. Their art was approachable, usefully, desirable, funny, and touching — and best of all, the prices ranged between $1 and $5 on average. With the $65 and change they made, they went to the gas station and bought 3 cases of beer to share with everyone. Their generous hard work and creativity punched a hole in the tire of the ubiquitous beige minivan of corporate consumption, mass entertainment, and conventional support for the arts.
While attending Open Engagement this summer, Portland State University's conference on art and social practice, I was introduced to Sal Randolph and her project, The Emancipation of Money, in a loud crowded bar. She handed me some $ she made to distribute at the conference. I admired the variously-colored hand stamped patterns and text on a clean, white, rubberized paper with clear text reading "FREE DOLLAR." There was also text that requested the user to inform her how the note was used. It was an imperfect and unique abstraction of an abstraction with strings attached — a promissory note, promising nothing except that it was free, and hence the object's transfer to me was ambiguous and full of potential and responsibility. This note was somewhere between art object, conceptual game, and financial asset, and led me to meditate on the meaning of value. In her writing on the anthropological theorist David Graeber, Randolph explains how value comes into being: in objects - through history and imbedded stories, and in currency - through the unknown potential of future exchange. I'm not sure if the object she handed me is $ of the past, present, or future, or of another reality, and have since held onto it, as it has become most valuable to me as evidence of the shifting nature of value and my own freedom to determine it.
xxxxxxx is something that Cassie Thornton doesn't want me or anyone to speak about; but how do you examine something which refuses to come out in the open? To that end, Cassie recently invited me and others to attend a group construction of xxxxxxx (previously known as debt boulder, and now as Unspeakable Thing) — a physical and metaphorical weight that represents the psychic and emotional consequences resulting from the deep black hole in consciousnesses where debt often lodges itself. Participants were invited to bring contracts and documents related to their debt to add to ATM receipts stolen from bank vestibules by Cassie and her friends. Once assembled, they collectively papier machéd them into aesthetically alluring, but weighty and unruly masses. xxxxxxx contains and embodies records of $ owed — and are positive forms representing a lack of resources. These meta-pyscho-physical masses rattle around the subconscious and murky spaces of the mind — flashing into consciousness from time to time triggering paralyzing thoughts. Through humor and a desire to create a space free of guilt and imbalance, Thornton holds a financial séance, which brings debt demons into the open to be seen for what they really are and to drain them of their power through realization of collective emotional experiences. Her work concerns the most serious topics of poverty, inequality, fear, and repression; but it is also seriously funny, as she playfully explodes the scaffolding that gives $ its psychological power, watching it topple and laughing as new possibilities emerge from the rubble.
David B. Smith is a conceptual multidisciplinary artist living in Brooklyn, NY, who seeks to expand perceptions of reality, articulate the creative process, and to challenge traditional art-making practices. To this end he makes immersive architectural installations, is in the one man band, Doom Trumpet, curates conceptual exhibitions, and teaches art at SUNY Old Westbury. He has shown at spaces such as PS1, Exit Art, NADA Miami, The International Center of Photography, and John Connelly Presents. He has also built large scale sculptural installations at BOFFO, Bring to Light, Harold Arts, and the (e)merge fair of contemporary art. | <urn:uuid:bfa7be0e-1773-4ae0-b7a7-68e71e70dc9d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://culturehall.com/feature_issues.html?no=91 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964303 | 1,510 | 1.921875 | 2 |
“Evolution” stickers are back in court, and I am back online. I had been on trip to England. And there in England, on every £10 (pound) note was a picture of Charles Darwin (replacing the other Charles, Charles Dickens). All I could think of was what would happen in the USA if we put Darwin’s picture on a $10 note? Upon arrival home, I learned that the Cobb County, GA (where I live) school board is back in a Federal Appeals court, appealing Judge Cooper’s order to remove stickers that were placed on all life science and biology texts in Georgia’s second largest school district. The stickers were removed last school year from all of the books, but the school board has resisted accepting the Judge’s ruling, and is now appealing the case. A group of science advocates calling themselves Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education expressed concern about the proceedings on the first day of the appeals hearing. Apparently one of the judges took the lawyers for the defendants to task, and according to “court watchers” this was not a good sign. As in many of the cases involving evolution, the paucity of understanding the nature of a scientific theory surfaces. Evolution is considered “just a theory” and is therefore less credible than say gravity or plate tectonics. In the field of science however, this is not the case. Theories are explanations of scientific facts and observations, and in the case of evolution, we might say that no theory has been scrutinized more than evolution.
About 25 years ago I formed a group of Georgia citizens. We were small. We were concerned about the emergence of “creation theory” as an alternative or equal partner (equal time was the concept) with evolution. We called the group “GO-APE” (Georia Ontological Association for the Preservation of Evolution). We went to meetings. We shared literature about teaching evolution in science classes. It was a time when evolutionary teaching was being challenged by creation theory. The advocates of creation theory made a lot of progress in impacting local schools, and in impacting state science standards. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. Back then our answer was GO-APE!Tags: Charles Darwin, Cobb County, Cobb County Schools, evolution stickers | <urn:uuid:59feabd8-4cf4-48d2-8e0b-ded2d5b13b81> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.artofteachingscience.org/2005/12/18/evolution-back-in-court-in-georgia/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971153 | 479 | 2.0625 | 2 |
The Associated Press reports that Japan suspended beef exports on Tuesday after three of 16 beef cattle at a farm in Miyazaki prefecture were found to have symptoms of foot-and-mouth disease earlier this month. The ban will last at least three months, the agriculture minister, Hirotaka Akamatsu, told The A.P.
In Manhattan, DeBragga & Spitler said on Wednesday that it was suspending the sale of any Japanese beef until it was confirmed to be safe.
The disease can kill cows, sheep, pigs and goats, but it does not affect humans. The affected cows had mouth ulcers, The A.P. said, a symptom of the disease. Virus samples tested positive in an initial examination, a ministry official said. If confirmed, it would be the first outbreak since the disease was found in 2000 in Miyazaki and northern Hokkaido. | <urn:uuid:b1b50ae7-1578-47c4-a6e9-911ddc2c1b03> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/japan-stops-beef-exports-in-possible-foot-and-mouth-outbreak/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971901 | 179 | 2.203125 | 2 |
States and local governments have the primary responsibility for education in the United States. But the federal government gets a big say, too, by awarding billions in aid, often with strings attached.
Where they stand:
President Barack Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney agree that the No Child Left Behind education law needs revisions. But by including things like charter schools and teacher evaluations in his education policies, Obama has angered part of his base - the teachers' unions. Romney says those initiatives "make sense," but he and Obama differ on the federal role in education and on voucher programs that use public money to send children to private schools.
Obama has called for college to be more accessible and won approval from Congress for a $10,000 college tax credit over four years and increases in Pell grants and other financial aid. Romney argues that increases in federal student aid encourage tuition to go up, too. He wants to see private lenders return to the federal student loan program. The two found common ground in supporting moves to block a doubling of interest rates on new federal Stafford loans this fall.
Why it matters:
"What did you do in school today?" It's a universal question asked by parents.
More than 8 in 10 Americans say education is an issue that is extremely or very important to them, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll this year. Only the economy ranked higher.
Yet, studies show that the United States lags behind other countries in reading, math and science, statistics frequently cited as hurting the nation's ability to compete globally.
And the cost of higher education is leaving students saddled with debt - or unable to afford it at all - when there's a growing recognition that students need college or some post-high school training to succeed in the job market. Obama, in fact, challenged all Americans to commit to at least one year of college or career training. Still, the nation is far from his goal that the U.S. lead the world in the percentage of college graduates by 2020.
With all the talk about the importance of education, state budget cuts have resulted in teacher layoffs, larger class sizes and fewer special subjects in elementary and secondary schools. Colleges and universities also have had to make do with less. All of this trickles down to the kids and their classroom experience.
The federal government contributed just a small fraction of the more than $1.15 trillion spent nationally on education during the last school year, but it still yields great influence over such issues as accessibility, accountability and teacher quality.
Obama's "Race to the Top" competition, for example, has given billions of dollars in grants to states that pursued education policies the president supports. Similarly, when it became apparent that states were nowhere near meeting the key requirement of the No Child Left Behind education law - that all children be up to speed in math and reading by 2014 - the Obama administration offered them waivers, but only if they came up with reform plans that were approved by the federal government. Republicans charged that the administration was usurping the power of Congress.
Still, the result is more breathing room for schools, their teachers and the students they serve.
Romney has spoken out in favor of some of the reform proposals that Obama wants to put into place, notably providing incentives for charter schools and better teacher and student evaluations. So, look for them to stay no matter who wins the White House. | <urn:uuid:5740ecf6-4bcf-4221-bd0f-f7595a75d482> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/sep/11/why-it-matters-education/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976219 | 688 | 2.765625 | 3 |
If you want to dry-hop, you have to deal with solids. Hops are solid.
Worrying about sterility is needless worry. As RSmith rightly points out, not only is beer a fairly inhospitable place for any contaminant you're likely to inoculate with hops, brewers have been dry-hopping with loose cones for 150 years and with pellets for as long as there have been pellets. If you're that
worried, steep the pellets in 180+F water for at least 10 minutes, maintaining the heat at or above 180F.
Your vodka technique won't really extract the oils and fatty acids you impart by letting bits of hops flowers soak in beer. You'll be adding more alcohol, but precious little in terms of flavor and aroma. Hops extraction is a much more complicated process. And even if you could
perform carbon-dioxide extraction, blind-taste panel data suggest that the flavors and aromas imparted by hops extract are inferior to those imparted by old-fashioned chucking hops into beer.
Just add the dry-hops and don't worry about it. Let it be part of the magic! Science is important to brewing, but part of it is magical; just ride on that. You'll be happier. | <urn:uuid:dee070e9-b490-43c6-85da-edfdfcab6389> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/hop-infusion-146798/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958033 | 264 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Helping You Get the Most From Your Hunting Dogs
Acoustic Trauma - How to Avoid Itby Bill Hanus
Hearing damage is gradual, subtle, CUMULATIVE and PERMANENT. Normal conversation is in the 60-65dB level. The threshold of pain is about 140 dB. A 12 or 20 gauge shotgun blast from 28" barrels is about 152 dB, with shorter or ported barrels even higher. And as the audiologist I spoke to phrased it, we hunters are "moving up on the short list for the `Invisible Badge of Hearing Loss.’"
The dilemma is obvious. Hearing is an essential element of the bird hunting experience, so hearing protection that deadens all sounds is worthless in the field. When I am working a chest-high weed field or alder thicket, I not only need to hear Tootsie’s bell to know where she’s working, but when it stops ringing too. I want to hear a lost quail calling for its covey, or a pheasant clattering up through standing corn with a wind blowing. The only practical solution I have found that lets in normal conversation and the hunting sounds I want to hear and keeps out shotgun blasts I don’t want to hear is the "sonic" ear plug.
"Sonic" ear plugs have a tiny valve imbedded in a soft silicone rubber. It allows normal conversation and regular sounds to pass through, but a loud sound wave -- like a shotgun blast -- shuts the valve and protects the ear. As a reminder to use them, multiple sets should be spread out between shooting jacket, hunting coat, car console, etc., plus some extras for family and friends. There are several brands to choose from and are available at mass merchandisers for well under $10 a pair. Just be sure it says "sonic" on the package.
If you have already experienced some hearing loss -- after all, we live in a world surrounded by "toxic noise" -- you may wish to examine custom fitted hearing protection/amplification devices. For more information, click on to www.freehearingtest.com. | <urn:uuid:01d97184-6b0b-43ce-9469-7bcf41f571e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gundogsonline.com/Article/acoustic-trauma-how-to-avoid-it-Page1.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921963 | 445 | 1.726563 | 2 |
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Their success fueled Jinks’ bold and risky idea: to restructure his neurochemistry course to support the clinic team’s genetic discoveries. “It was probably ambition coming off a really exciting sabbatical,” he says. “But it is a very unique population of patients and a great group of students.”
Mutations and Behavior Changes
Jinks went forward with the restructured course, teaching undergraduates how to make strong connections between the bedside and bench. Some students did so literally, by going to the clinic to meet patients and taking that experience back to the lab. Independent study student Rebecca Willert, for example, studied a Mennonite family in which five members displayed a form of intellectual disability characterized by learning delays. Through gene mapping and sequencing of family members’ genomes, the clinic team had come up with a single gene as the possible culprit. Puffenberger handed over that information to Willert, in addition to—with the patients’ consent—medical records data detailing symptoms and onset.
By searching bioinformatic databases, Willert hypothesized that the normal gene, called CRADD, regulates how brain cells sprout and maintain proper connections. Her cellular studies showed that the mutated version of CRADD found in the Mennonite family alters the ability of the CRADD protein to interact with other proteins necessary to initiate programmed cell death. Thus, her findings offered a potential reason for the patients’ cognitive and learning deficits.
"The critical thinking involved, thinking of these things as puzzles, has been captivating."
With Strauss and team, Willert shared her scientific sleuthing story with the family and at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D.C., in November 2011.
“We were looking for answers to whatever would cause this,” says family member Geneva Martin, whose three sons, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law are affected. “It helps just to know.”
Willert says that meeting the family helped her gain a better focus in the lab. “I could put a name and face on what I had been studying for so long,” she says, “and actually see the kids and how they interacted.”
Now she can imagine how a mutation in a nerve cell might translate into the behavioral changes that she saw. It also helped her better design the experiments that she conducted this past summer when she was hired by the clinic team to continue her work.
Shaking off those first-day jitters, Achilly took to the project as well. After two years uncovering how a mutation in an enzyme involved in protein synthesis might cause Usher syndrome type IIIB, characterized by hearing loss and progressive vision loss, Achilly, who graduated in May, has expanded his sights beyond a medical degree. He now plans to pursue an M.D.,Ph.D. in translational neuroscience.
“The two years of experience that I gained from Rob’s lab have changed my life in many ways,” he says. “The critical thinking involved, thinking of these things as puzzles, has been captivating.” | <urn:uuid:03682ab3-b866-4aa0-9fc2-720bb897de8e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hhmi.org/bulletin/fall2012/chronicle/plain_people_study2.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970159 | 663 | 2.59375 | 3 |
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Re: Feathered Tyrannosaur?????
<<Dan and list, Well, it could be a joke, but it wasn't played on me.
This is obviously an AP news article.>>
No, it's an original article out of the _Missoulian_ newspaper in
Missoula, Montana, dated Jan. 22.
<<< I found the exact same article on the sites of two different
print newspapers: Deseret News and the Spokane, Washington newspaper
their name is).>>>
The Spokane _Spokesman Review_ article is different in some details
from the original story.
The orginal story was written by Sherry Devlin, staff writer for the
The full article (I provided the web link of the _Missoulian_ to the
list yesterday; check the list archives), made this statement that
clarifies the bulk of the misunderstanding:
"The Linsters ALSO <emphasis mine> found several Maiasaura (duck-billed,
plant-eating dinosaurs) and a new species of feathered raptor - "a
series of spectacular fossil finds," according to the director of a
Florida museum who intends to make the skeletons the centerpiece of a
So the "feathered" dinosaur was a referal to a dinosaur other than the
Albertosaur that they found. Is the raptor really "feathered"? I don't
know, but I suspect that it was a news media slip-up. | <urn:uuid:9a83c4be-39db-4394-a8a9-907fdc226376> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dml.cmnh.org/2000Jan/msg00341.html | 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 | 0.915138 | 330 | 1.625 | 2 |
Robert H. Sayre; An Industrial Pioneer
Ask just about anyone who the father of Bethlehem Steel was and most would name those two 20th century titans of industry, Charles Schwab and Eugene Grace. Ask who the father of Lehigh University was and the reply will surely be Asa Packer.
But it would be the rare person who will know that without Robert H. Sayre, none of these institutions, one gone, the other flourishing, would have survived at all. Perhaps it is about time Sayre be given his chance to take a discreet historical bow.
Sayre was not always so obscure. At his death roughly 100 years ago, he was hailed in the press as a pioneer of development. His life and the rise of Lehigh Valley's industry happen to fit neatly together.
Born on October 13, 1824 in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, Robert Sayre might not have had the life he had if it were not for the War of 1812, which ended 9 years before his birth. This conflict between Britain and the U.S. was largely a naval one. And one of its victims was the venerable merchant shipping line that had been in Sayre's family almost as far back as their arrival in America in 1647. Bankrupted by the war, Robert Sayre's father, William Sayre, took his wife, Elizabeth, and children to a small farming property in Columbia County where young Robert first saw the light of day. He was one of 11 children, only five of which survived to adulthood.
That Sayre's father was not cut out to be a farmer quickly became clear to his friends. So they arranged a job for him at Mauch Chunk, now Jim Thorpe, working as a toll taker and record keeper on the Lehigh Canal. It was in this community that Robert Sayre got his first insight into life.
A quick study, Sayre did well in the local public schools and in civil engineering. But it was Sayre's link to a canal boat builder named Asa Packer that really changed his life. Packer met Sayre's father at Mauch Chunk's Episcopal Church. The elder Sayre had graciously accepted Packer as an Episcopalian when he was turned down by other churches for refusing to sign a temperance pledge.
Under Packer's guidance, Sayre's rise was swift. On May 25, 1855 Robert Sayre mounted the cab of the locomotive, General Wall, at South Easton and drove it four miles up the line on the new Lehigh Valley Railroad, which he himself had surveyed. And on September 15, 1855 the first train load of anthracite coal rolled down from Mauch Chunk to Easton.
It was Sayre who established South Bethlehem as the operational headquarters of the railroad. And while Packer ran the financial end of things from his Chestnut Street mansion in Philadelphia, Sayre oversaw the railroad.
His next venture for Packer had Sayre shepherd what was the Bethlehem Iron Company. It was Sayre who in 1861 persuaded a young Pennsylvania German machinist named John Fritz to come east from Johnstown and take a position with Bethlehem Iron to oversee rail-making operations. By the late 1860s Bethlehem's rails were being shipped around Cape Horn to California to supply the Central Pacific Railroad in its meeting with the Union Pacific for North America's first transcontinental railroad.
Sayre and Fritz did not stop there. Seeing in the early 1870s that the steel rails being developed in Europe were the wave of the future, Sayre sent Fritz to Europe to tour the best steel facilities in England and France and bring the ideas home. In 1873 they had created at Bethlehem a process for making steel rails that was to power the company through the economic panic that wiped out many another Lehigh Valley iron business. Later the pair would lead the company into armaments and the creation of the modern American navy. In 1899 it was renamed Bethlehem Steel.
But Sayre's talents were not confined to business. After Packer announced plans to fund Lehigh University, it was Sayre who oversaw its growth and development. He selected the architect and often the professors who taught there. As many of the students were the sons of business associates, he cast a watchful eye over their personal and moral lives as well, and, as a devout Episcopal layman, Sayre insisted that the college remain under the control of that church.
Despite Sayre's devotion to Packer, after his mentor's death in 1879 he found himself at odds with his heirs. "The boys have come to scalp me and have brought the hatchet," he noted in his diary on a day in 1882 when Robert and Harry Packer informed him that after serving the family faithfully for 30 years, his services were no longer required. "So I have arrived at the conclusion that honesty and faithfulness do not count for much in this world."
But when Packer's sons died young, the family interests were taken over by his nephew Elijah Packer Wilber. And Wilber wanted his uncle's right-hand man at his side. So Sayre once more went to work for the Packer family.
Sayre's last task for the Packer family was perhaps his hardest. The Panic of 1893 hit the Lehigh Valley Railroad hard. Lehigh University, largely endowed with railroad stock, was on the edge of closing its doors.
Only state aid could save the school, but that would never happen as long as the university was tied with the Episcopal Church. So working with the board Sayre agreed to "disestablish" the college from the church. The state gave Lehigh $150,000. By 1900 the railroad was back in the black, although no longer under the control of the Packer family and the state aid ceased.
Robert Sayre died in 1907. Today the steel mills and railroads he toiled to create are no more, but by keeping faith with his mentor he had saved Lehigh University as his legacy.
Copyright 2011 WFMZ. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:d33c7317-bccf-425c-9157-65962888fa12> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wfmz.com/features/History-s-Headlines/Robert-H-Sayre-An-Industrial-Pioneer/-/142386/1721250/-/view/print/-/k9ckusz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98937 | 1,255 | 2.34375 | 2 |
China’s leaders are investing $12.6 million every hour to green their economy.
So writes Ben Furnas Research Associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund in his excellent new fact- and chart-filled report, “We Must Seize the Energy Opportunity or Slip Further Behind: A Primer on Global Competition in Green Technology Investments,” reprinted below. For more on this important subject, see “U.S. left in dust, having invented solar PV technology” and “Why Anti-wind McCain had to deliver his climate remarks at a foreign wind company” and “Why the United States REQUIRES a strong climate bill to remain competitive.”
The picture below is of wind power turbines at a wind power plant in Ulanqab, which is in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Wind and solar PV will be two of the biggest job creating industries of this century. Yet, Furnass notes that “China is a leading manufacturer of photovoltaic (solar) cells, second only to Japan, and is set to be the world’s leading manufacturer of wind turbines by the end of 2009″ — not exactly low-tech, low-cost production. We need to understand how we got in this mess, so we can understand how to get out.
China’s leaders are investing $12.6 million every hour to green their economy. Other countries are equally energetic in their embrace of alternative energy technologies; they are setting targets and investing billions of dollars to spur the development of entirely new markets in wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, energy efficiency, high-speed rail, and other clean and innovative solutions to global warming.
The United States, too, is poised to transform its economy to create millions of new jobs and help create a cleaner, safer planet by investing in a green, renewable-energy based economy. The Obama administration wants to unleash the ingenuity of our private sector to rein in pollution and put millions of Americans back to work. Yet China is spending twice as much as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act spends to lay the foundations for a green energy economy, despite the U.S. economy being 1.5 times as large as China’s. And across Europe and Asia, other governments have diversified their energy portfolios and encouraged entrepreneurs to start and expand clean and renewable energy companies.
As venture capitalist John Doerr recently pointed out in his testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, “If you list today’s top 30 companies in solar, wind and advanced batteries, American companies hold only 6 spots. That fact should worry us all.”
Indeed, when it comes to preparing our country to compete in the new energy economy of the future and create millions of new jobs, we lag behind most of our competitors in the rest of the world in a four key ways.
- We have no national energy portfolio standard that encourages clean, renewable power and shifts away from dirty and dangerous energy.
- We have an outdated electrical grid unsuited for the task of carrying energy from regions rich in wind, solar, and geothermal potential to the people who need the energy.
- We don’t make dirty energy companies pay for the pollution they pump into the air; in fact, we give them billions every year in tax breaks.
- And we don’t invest enough in research, development, and deployment to inspire our entrepreneurs and leverage their discoveries by helping bring their bold new technologies to market.
As Doerr explained in his testimony, “What is at stake is whether America will be the worldwide winner in the next great global industry, green technologies.”
This analysis explores the current international terrain on which the United States is competing and asks three questions:
- Why is America losing the “green stimulus” competition?
- Why are we trailing Europe and Australia in renewable energy?
- Why are we clinging to the dirty, dangerous, job-killing energies of the past?
Why is America losing the “green stimulus” competition to China?
A February analysis by HSBC Global Research in Hong Kong projects that nearly 40 percent of China’s proposed $586 billion stimulus plan””$221 billion over two years””is going toward public investment in renewable energy, low-carbon vehicles, high-speed rail, an advanced electric grid, efficiency improvements, and other water-treatment and pollution controls. This stimulus is on top of historic levels of government spending and private investment in renewable technology, energy efficiency, and low-carbon growth all across China. The upshot: China, according to a recent analysis, is “the largest alternative energy producer in the world in terms of installed generating capacity.”
This massive stimulus plan will spend over 3 percent of China’s 2008 gross domestic product annually in 2009 and 2010 on green investments””more than six times America’s green stimulus spending as a percentage of our respective economies. This is about $12.6 million every hour over the next two years. In the United States, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act invests $112 billion in comparable green priorities over the next two years, about half as much as China, according to HSBC. This represents less than half of one percent of our 2008 gross domestic product.
China, however, has adjusted its stimulus spending slightly since the HSBC analysis was conducted. The country’s leaders trimmed spending on water treatment and environmental cleanup, but maintained huge investments in upgrading China’s existing power infrastructure, and more than doubled investment in technical upgrading and research and development. These numbers may change again in the future, but they nonetheless are emblematic of China’s focus on using this economic crisis to position itself to be the world leader in efficiency, green transportation, and clean and renewable energy. As Zhang Lijun, a Chinese vice-environment minister told reporters in March, “It’s an opportunity to restructure, and we must use this opportunity well.”
China’s renewable energy industries are already huge and expanding rapidly. China is a leading manufacturer of photovoltaic (solar) cells, second only to Japan, and is set to be the world’s leading manufacturer of wind turbines by the end of 2009.
Unlike China’s government economic planners, who have laid out these priorities in a five-year plan, the United States should address these challenges in our uniquely American way, by harnessing and channeling the vitality of our entrepreneurs.
This would mean investing in a new 21st-century energy grid, just like President Eisenhower built the interstate highway system, in order to leverage the energy innovations of the private sector and help bring them to market. It would mean smartly investing in research and development, like President Kennedy did with the space program, to spur new innovations and discoveries to inspire entrepreneurs. And it would mean reining in dangerous pollutants by charging dirty energy companies for filling the atmosphere with global warming gasses, just like the first President Bush did when he made polluting companies pay for acid rain.
President Barack Obama has proposed additional public investment in renewable energy research of $15 billion annually, paid for by charging dirty energy corporations for their pollution. While this would amount to just one tenth of one percent of America’s 2008 GDP, it would be a good start. With this money, the United States would finally join China and dozens of other nations across the world in providing public investment for renewable energy, including Japan, Germany, Canada, France, South Korea, Denmark, and Spain.
Why are we trailing Asia, Europe, and Australia in renewable energy?
Spending that $15 billion would be an important start to helping U.S. companies regain their leading edge that they’ve lost over the last decade. As other nations set rigorous energy targets, establish common-sense regulations that spur innovation, and plow money into research and development and deployment, America lags behind. Closing this yawning gap would help create millions of new jobs in the clean and renewable energy sectors and revitalize businesses across the economy.
Take the photovoltaic (solar power) industry. In the 1990s, the United States led the world in the development of solar energy technology. From 1994 to 1998, our burgeoning solar energy industry produced more photovoltaic cells than Japan, China, or all of Europe. But then, in the early 2000s, as the Bush administration stifled global warming data and blocked a renewable energy portfolio standard, America stumbled and fell staggeringly behind.
In a series of energy bills in 2001, 2003, and 2005, the Bush administration plowed billions of dollars into dirty energy””oil, coal, and nuclear””while neglecting clean renewable energy industries. The 2001 energy bill gave 80 percent of its value to tax breaks for oil, gas, nuclear, and coal companies. The 2003 energy bill, drafted in secret with Vice President Dick Cheney and members of the oil, gas, coal, and electric industries, gave $23.5 billion to dirty energy and loosened environmental regulations. Finally, while the 2005 bill contained a token level of investment in renewable energy, it also provided even more support for dirty energy, offering $27 billion in subsidies for coal, oil, and nuclear energy.
But as the Bush administration doubled down on the energy of the past, nations across the world invested in the future. Japan, China, and European countries zoomed past the United States, with a combination of dirty energy regulations, public investments, and private market incentives.
This same pattern has repeated itself across the entire renewable energy industry. Due in no small part to our regulatory vacuum at the federal level on renewable energy portfolio standards, which would require a certain percentage of our electricity to come from renewable sources, our deployment of new clean energy has lagged. The European Union has committed to 20 percent of final energy coming from renewable sources by 2020. China is working to have 16 percent of its primary energy come from renewable sources by 2020. Sixty-six other countries worldwide have committed to nationwide standards. But in the United States, the federal government has set no national standards.
In this absence, many state governments stepped in to fill the void, but the resulting patchwork of regulation and targets hinders widespread nationwide deployment of clean and renewable energy. According to energy analyst and environmental sustainability lawyer David Petersen, a uniform national standard adopted by other countries across the world would “be good for the renewable energy industry as a whole, providing long-term predictability, attracting more investment capital and allowing manufacturing of renewable energy technologies to achieve economies of scale.”
Indeed, renewable energy deployment in the United States lags far behind many European and Asian nations. While the United States has made great strides in recent years, in 2006 (the most recent internationally comparable data), the United States had less solar power capacity per capita than Germany, Spain, Japan, Switzerland, Australia, Austria, and the Netherlands, and less wind power capacity per capita than Denmark, Spain, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, and Greece.
In capacity per capita terms, this lag is particularly pronounced. But even in absolute terms, the public and private sectors in the United States have been strikingly slow to embrace renewable energy. As of 2006, the United States has less absolute renewable power capacity than either China or the 25 member nations of the European Union. And while America’s solar and wind capacity increased by an impressive 40 percent in 2007 (international comparison unavailable), China, Japan, and Europe are rapidly expanding their capacity as well.
In 2006, according to the most recent data from the Renewable Energy Policy Network, the United States, the world’s largest economy, invested less in new capacity for renewable energy than either the EU-25 or China. In fact, according to the most recent data, the entire United States invests less in renewable energy per year than the country of Germany, which boasts less than one-third the population of the United States and an economy less than one-fourth our size.
Smart climate change regulations, including a renewable portfolio standard and a carbon cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gasses like the one we have for emissions that cause acid rain would spur technological development in green sectors and help drive innovation across the U.S. energy industry. A 2009 study of inventions among developed countries by the CERNA Research Program on Technology Transfer and Climate Change found those developed nations which were signatories to the Kyoto protocol (and thus set targets to clamp down on their carbon emissions) saw their share of patents in green-tech innovation increase by over 33 percent. Those nations that weren’t initial signatories (Australia and the United States) saw no change in their share of total green tech patents.
New technologies can be developed, leveraged, and deployed with revitalized investment in federal research, development, and demonstration, as detailed in Peter Ogden, John Podesta and John Deutch’s “New Strategy to Spur Energy Innovation.” These measures include a doubling of the federal R&D budget, an interagency Energy Innovation Council to develop a multiyear National Energy RD&D strategy, and the establishment of an Energy Technology Corporation to manage demonstration projects.
Why cling to the dangerous, dirty, job-killing energies of the past?
The failed energy policies of the past decade represent an enormous job-creating potential gone to waste. A report by the Center for American Progress in conjunction with the Political Economy Research Institute shows that investments in the renewable energy industry create four times as many jobs as investments in the oil industry.
The imperative for renewable sources of energy, energy efficiency, and green transportation and power infrastructure is clear. And yet, we continue to neglect these priorities while plowing tens of billions of dollars of subsidies into polluting and wildly profitable oil and gas companies that create far fewer jobs and exacerbate global warming.
President Obama’s energy plan would eliminate $30 billion in giveaways to oil and gas companies and make polluting energy companies pay for their global warming pollution in order to invest in renewable energy infrastructure and cut taxes for 95 percent of working American families. This is the way to go.
There is no reason why the United States shouldn’t lead the world in renewable energy. Start-up companies across our country should be developing the solar panels of the future for deployment in the Southwest and on rooftops with good exposure to the sun nationwide. Wind turbines should be sprouting across our Great Plains and our coastlines. Thermal energy captured beneath our mountains and beneath our homes should be part of our alternative energy mix. And as a nation we should be developing and deploying the battery technologies needed to power the hybrid cars built in auto factories in the Midwest and elsewhere””alongside a smart electric grid capable of helping all Americans save on energy costs and combat global warming.
The rest of the world is seizing this opportunity. If we seize it with them, then together we can save the planet and develop China, the European Union, and the rest of the world as our customers.
Download the full report (pdf)
– Ben Furnas | <urn:uuid:ce978e7c-f305-4bc8-8d83-551b3fc6e94d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/04/21/203987/primer-solar-pv-wind-us-china-europe/?mobile=nc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937953 | 3,128 | 1.867188 | 2 |
The Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was lying dormant in J&K, is in a revival mode after the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. "There are enough signs that the Lashkar is reactivating itself in the Valley,'' a senior intelligence official told HT.
Expect more attacks, is the larger message that is emerging from the wireless chatter being monitored by intelligence agencies.
The Lashkar, which in the past has often co-ordinated resources with the Hizbul Mujahideen, is also trying to recruit local youth. The worrying aspect, as one senior J&K police officer puts it, is that "ordinary Kashmiri youth feel they have a duty to avenge Guru's execution.''
State CM Omar Abdullah had expressed fears of Afzal's hanging fuelling a sense of alienation among the Kashmiri youth, in an interview with HT.
Intelligence reports now dangerously indicate that the Lashkar in particular has been able to recruit at least 20 to 30 youth in the month following the hanging.
Besides, the Lashkar and other militant groups had made contact with the families of those killed in the summer of 2010, when over 100 youth had been killed by the security forces - a time when the Valley was in the grip of a stone-pelting phase.
"The members had been recruited but asked to lie low but there are indications that many are being trained in localized training camps."
Within a few days of hanging, the Lashkar and United Jihad Council had held a public rally in Islamabad, where they had vowed to avenge Afzal's execution. | <urn:uuid:e200258d-f610-4fc0-8d42-4ced96e3160f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/NewDelhi/Lashkar-revives-itself-Valley-fears-more-attacks/Article1-1026648.aspx?hts0021 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9824 | 332 | 1.625 | 2 |
“For I am jealous for you with godly jealousy. For I have betrothed you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ" (II Corinthians 11:2)
In the Jewish marriage contract there were promises the bridegroom would make to his future bride.
So what does a wedding have to do with you and me?
We are the Bride of Christ - the Church. Individually we are to make ourselves ready for the Bridegroom. We shall be holy and blameless when we stand before Him. We will not have spot or wrinkle. Pray that God will prepare us for that day and bring conviction upon His Church for our spirit of indifference and apathy. Lord Jesus, make us a bride ready for her grand entrance...
It seems in days past that getting married in the late spring had more to do with a bride being "fresh" while the temperatures had not yet reached their summer peak. Prior to the nineteenth century, daily or weekly bathing was not the norm. Carrying flowers added a colorful burst and a welcome fragrance for the groom. Additionally, since April frequently brought much precipitation, May and June were dryer months and much cooler than July or August. Thus began the trend of nuptials being held during May and June. | <urn:uuid:b52bb46d-c96d-469a-89df-1a7d17661db7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.godmissionpossible.blogspot.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982951 | 267 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Atheist Richard Dawkins appears to be leading the charge among non-believers in the U.K. who are appalled that a Swiss philosopher and writer residing in London plans to build a "temple for atheists" in the city's financial center.
Alain de Botton said he wants to counter Dawkins' "aggressive" and "destructive" approach to non-belief by building a 151-foot tower to celebrate a "new atheism," according to news reports out of the U.K.
"Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary or Buddha, but you can build a temple to anything that's positive and good," said De Botton, according to The Guardian. "That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective. Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens atheism has become known as a destructive force. But there are lots of people who don't believe but aren't aggressive towards religions."
De Botton, author of the newly released book Religion For Atheists, insists that atheists have as much right to build and enjoy inspiring architecture as religious people.
On Thursday, Dawkins spoke out against the project. The author of The God Delusion is one of several humanists that see plans for the structure as being "misplaced for non-believers to build quasi-religious buildings, because atheists did not need temples to probe the meaning of life."
"Atheists don't need temples," said Dawkins, as reported in The Guardian. "I think there are better things to spend this kind of money on. If you are going to spend money on atheism you could improve secular education and build non-religious schools which teach rational, skeptical critical thinking."
De Botton said he wants the temple to symbolize more than 300 million years of life on earth. The tower's interior has been designed to show the staggering difference between the earth's age and the amount of time humans have existed. The Guardian reports that the exterior "would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence."
Half the funds for the project have already been raised by De Botton to be used by a group of developers who want to remain anonymous, according to the Guardian reporter. Construction could begin by the end of 2013 should the project be approved by the Corporation of London.
However, in addition to opposition from Dawkins and other prominent atheists in the U.K., London authorities are not moving forward with the project's approval because "they can't be seen to be connected to anything to do with atheism," the project's architect, Tom Greenall, said.
De Botton said he chose the country's financial center because he believes it is "where people have most seriously lost perspective on life's priorities." | <urn:uuid:d2369687-f275-4037-9794-29dae347dda1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.christianpost.com/news/richard-dawkins-opposed-to-temple-for-atheists-planned-for-london-68070/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973086 | 555 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Last Wednesday on Market Square, the Knoxville-Knox County Homeless Coalition and the University of Tennessee jointly released two studies with powerful—and dismaying—statistics about the local homeless population.
But such numbers are only valuable if local leaders are willing to follow up on them, says Rev. Bruce Spangler, chief operating officer of Volunteer Ministries and president of the coalition. “We can provide all the data, and have for the past 26 years, but we need public, civic response to the issues,” he says. “One of the things I lean upon—I hope our leaders don’t lose their nerve in acting.”
While Spangler is not saying either mayor is “an advocate in any way,” he says he’ll keep reminding both Madeline Rogero and Tim Burchett that they showed up for the study’s release. “I think the city mayor intends to wrestle with this, and Commissioner Mike Hammond has expressed constant interest in the studies and I think he’ll wrestle with it, too.”
This is the first time the two studies have been released together. The first, an in-depth biennial study of 236 people experiencing homelessness, has been conducted by Roger Nooe, social services director of the Knox County Public Defender’s Community Law Office and UT professor emeritus, since 1986.
The second is a study for UT’s KnoxHMIS by social work professor David Patterson and data analyst Stacia West, an annual examination of population demographics and services provided to 7,320 individuals and families experiencing homelessness in the year previous. Each month in 2011, an average of 1,595 people access services for homelessness. For the year, the total number of individuals utilizing services was 7,320—a 3 percent increase over 2010.
A few more specific study statistics may shock—and perhaps prod—the general public and civic leaders. One is the increase of families experiencing homelessness. The coalition’s data showed a 2 percent increase of those receiving services in these demographics: children, African Americans, and individuals in a single-parent household. Single female parents comprise 9 percent of the total population experiencing homelessness.
“The public image of homelessness is those you see on the streets, but the reality is that it affects families with children in growing numbers,” says Spangler.
Another stat Spangler says “leaps out” at him: the overwhelming numbers of homeless with mental health issues. The study said 10 percent of people accessing homeless services report having a mental illness, but Spangler said among VMC’s population it’s at least half and may be as much as 80 percent.
“Homelessness is really just a symptom of the economy, and mental health issues—that’s the reason I’m trying to push City Council and the County Commission to regard it as a public health issue, and address it that way,” he says.
Another set of statistics handily refutes the notion that Knoxville is some sort of homeless magnet because we readily feed and shelter the homeless. The coalition’s study notes:
• 83 percent of the people who access services in Knoxville last had a permanent address in Knox or one of eight surrounding counties
• 57 percent of homeless individuals are originally from Tennessee.
This is a particularly important hard data set to absorb, says Eddie Young, executive director of Redeeming Hope Ministries in Fort Sanders. Long-held beliefs to the contrary have already inspired discussions about limiting the number of meals served to the homeless in Knoxville and other services. “Locals want to believe that Knoxville is the homeless Shangri La,” Young says, “that the homeless are coming here from all over America—the world, the galaxy; that they jump off the bus and are immediately escorted to banquet halls.”
The stats indicate that Knoxville’s just in the same boat as any major metropolitan area surrounded by smaller counties. “The problem is not that we are ‘feeding the homeless so well,’” says Young, whose group advocates for the homeless. “It’s simply that we are attracting needy people from East Tennessee because we are the largest city nearby and can provide the most resources.”
But even those who see the data might not develop a sense of urgency, says Young. “To bring about the systemic changes needed to slow down this runaway train requires an investment of time and energy and effort and funding. It’s hard to get the community’s attention: The ongoing position is ‘These guys made their own beds and can lie in them.’ With data from this study, we know that’s not true.”
The shortest bridge between the cold, hard statistics and the urge to do something about it is within the study pages, too, says Spangler. They’ve included numerous “case studies” that showcase the diversity of local homeless, from Scott, who hears “messages from God” that make him act out and refuse medication, to Amy and her son, who couldn’t keep up with their KUB bills and landed on the streets. “I really think the motivation will come when we can put a personal face on it, when we can recognize that any of us could have loved ones in a similar plight.”
But as Spangler says in the studies’ forward note: “If, however and on the other hand, the ‘facts and figures’ herein are just another proliferation of information, then the addictive stupor of data collection has once again mesmerized us into nonaction.” | <urn:uuid:44c8aca1-40e5-4658-aff9-7529aae2dfea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.metropulse.com/news/2012/may/16/new-studies-reveal-rising-number-homeless-families/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958763 | 1,187 | 1.898438 | 2 |
Dubbed Frankenstorm, Hurricane Sandy is an unusual storm by any measure.
It's enormous, could become a hybrid tempest of sorts, and is creeping north all in time for Halloween. Now, forecasters and emergency mangers have urged those in harm's way to prepare for the Category 1 hurricane, and for widespread impacts that potentially last for several days from Sandy's strong winds, heavy rains and punishing storm surge.
Here, OurAmazingPlanet reviews four facts about Sandy you need to know ahead of its arrival. [How to Prepare for Hurricane Sandy]
4. It's a huge storm.
Sandy is an extremely large storm, with hurricane-force winds that extend 175 miles (280 km) from its center and tropical storm-force winds that extend out 520 miles (835 km).
Sandy is now the second largest Atlantic tropical cyclone since 1988, behind 2001's Olga, which had winds that extended out 600 miles (965 km), according to Weather Underground.
"The size of the storm is going to carve a pretty large swath of bad weather," Rick Knabb, the director of the National Hurricane Center, said in a press conference on Sunday.
Some 50 million to 60 million people will potentially be impacted by this storm, authorities have said.
Sandy's wind field is so large that it could cover the eastern third of the country and even impact the Great Lakes as it works its way inland.
" # Sandy has prompted a lakeshore flood watch for # Chicago - that's how huge this storm is!" the Weather Channel's Hurricane Central account tweeted Sunday morning.
Sandy's size is also "why it is so capable of producing a life-threatening storm surge," Knabb said during the press conference. A storm's winds push up ocean waters ahead of it, and those waters can flood coastal areas as they're forced ashore.
New York City could see its highest storm surge levels in history. Hurricane Irene, for instance, caused a storm surgeof 4 feet (1.2 meters). Sandy is expected to cause life-threatening flooding in New York Harbor and tides of 6 feet to 11 feet (1.8 to 3.3 m) in areas of Long Island Sound, according to the National Weather Service.
3.What it's called doesn't matter.
Hurricane, post-tropical storm … even "Frankenstorm" — the name attached to Sandy isn't what people should focus on, Knabb said. More important is recognizing that it is a strong, large storm capable of causing significant damage.
While Sandy is still a hurricane, it is expected to transition into a post-tropical cyclone either before it moves ashore or shortly thereafter. While as a hurricane Sandy has derived energy from warm ocean waters and warm, moist air, it will begin to be fueled by the temperature difference between it and the cold air on the other side of a cold front sweeping across the country. [50 Amazing Hurricane Facts]
The National Hurricane Center didn't issue tropical storm or hurricane watches or warnings north of the North Carolina border in an effort to avoid confusion when the eventual switch to non-tropical alerts comes, Knabb said. Warnings being issued for areas under the gun are for "high winds" and flooding.
2. It's not like any past storm.
While Hurricane Sandy has been compared to the Perfect Storm that hit the Northeast in 1991, as well as other historic storms, "each storm is unique," Louis Uccellini, director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction, said during the same press conference. Historical comparisons can really only be made after the storm, Uccellini added.
Knabb warned those in states that could see impacts from Sandy not to judge their level of danger based on previous storms.
"I'd like to urge people to pay attention to this particular storm. Every storm is different," he said.
For example, while New York City didn't bear the brunt of Hurricane Irene last year, it could see major impacts from Sandy.
1.Its effects will be localized.
While broad watches and warnings for high winds, heavy rains and storm surge have been issued, "not everyone is going to have the same impacts," saidCraig Fugate, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The effects of Sandy may be highly localized. For example, while the potential storm surge for New York Harbor and the Long Island Sound is for 6 to 11 feet (2 to 3.5 meters), not all places along those coastlines will see that exact level of surge and the level they do see will depend on the timing of the storm's arrival and the tidal cycle, which is being affected by a full moon.
"We just can't forecast that timing exactly," Knabb said.
The National Hurricane Center forecast for Sandy notes that storm surge levels "can vary greatly over short distances." It also notes that while rainfall of 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) is expected over parts of the Mid-Atlantic, some areas could see isolated rains of as much as 12 inches (30 cm).
The best way to find out what to expect at your particular location is to go to weather.gov and type in your zip code, Knabb said.
- Hurricane Sandy: Photos of a Frankenstorm
- Video: Hurricane Sandy Expands, Gets More Intense
- Top 25 Songs for the Frankenstorm | <urn:uuid:fe6ad8aa-21d8-4972-adb0-74337c9bc6a4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.yahoo.com/4-things-know-hurricane-sandy-214906784.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955361 | 1,111 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Comet Lovejoy and Chilean Coast
ISS030-E-020039 (26 Dec. 2011) --- This busy night time panorama was photographed by one of the Expedition 30 crew members from the International Space Station on Dec. 26, 2011. Comet Lovejoy streaks through the star-filled sky just to the right of center. The land mass is the coast of Chile, looking southeast, with several coastal cities in the capital city region near Santiago. A 28-mm focal length was used to record the image. | <urn:uuid:e9feddfe-bb43-4a81-9f4e-41c7194b62ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/gallery/iss030e020039.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931637 | 104 | 1.992188 | 2 |
The recent cold weather has caused some considerable problems for many of our customers, plenty of burst pipe nightmares and these unusually cold conditions (for the UK) have made others more acutely aware of just how inefficient their heating systems and home insulation is.
We are not — ahem — out of the cold just yet either as January and February can often be the coldest months of winter. One of the more frequent appliance problems this winter is caused by the spontaneous shutting down of condensing boilers. These are now standard across much of the UK because their operating principals reduce air pollution to virtually zero. Many of us are familiar with the condensing steam and gas mixture that pumps out of gas flu’s in cold weather, this is a potentially polluting byproduct of natural gas combustion. However, a condensing boiler condenses the exhaust vapour within the system and hot exhaust gases are effectively re circulated in an effort to increase thermal efficiency and reduce entropic losses. The internal condensing process produces water which has to fed out into an external drainage system. Problems arise when the external drain pipe from the boiler freezes thus causing the system to shut down for safety reasons.
There are many things that one can do to avoid this problem including external pipe lagging or feeding the drain pipe into another drainage route which is less prone to freezing up such as the drain pipe from a low level kitchen sink etc.
Remember, if you have any problems we are only a phone call away 0800 737 247 or visit our website www.0800repair.com | <urn:uuid:d510df47-339a-4f92-8d3a-64e01d756950> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.0800repair.com/blog/gas-services/help-condensing-boiler-stopped-working | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947877 | 312 | 1.890625 | 2 |
It once was a story when politicians did use social media to get their messages across.
But a new report in The Hill focuses on the 56 members of Congress who have not joined Twitter, noting that it's increasingly the go-to place for think tanks, advocacy groups -- and politicians -- to blast out information.
"For now, the holdouts are divided almost equally between the two parties. Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) -- part of the over-60 crowd -- is the only Senate Republican still not using Twitter. Risch's office said the senator has not ruled it out.
"He certainly sees the benefit of Twitter as a social medi[um], as demonstrated by the Usain Bolt tweets during the Olympics, but less useful as a policy discussion tool," said spokesman Brad Hoaglun.
Twitter reported 80,000 tweets per minute sent when Bolt won gold in the 200-meter this summer, a social-media record for Olympic-related conversations.
Political interest on Twitter has grown in the past few years, too. Twitter reported that tweets sent about the political conventions this year had sextupled the number sent about both 2008 conventions by the second evening of the Republican National Convention. | <urn:uuid:8519099a-0ac1-4419-80c4-959ccdfa16bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.suntimes.com/politics/2012/09/twitter_addicts_abound_--_but_not_in_congress.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965989 | 249 | 1.679688 | 2 |
|Session:||109th Congress (First Session)|
|Witness(es):||Berrien Moore, III|
|Credentials: ||Professor and Director, Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, University of New Hampshire; and co-chair, Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space, Space Studies Board, Division on Engineering and Physical Science, National Research Council, The National Academies|
|Committee:||Science Committee, U.S. House of Representatives|
|Subject:||NASA Earth Science|
Berrien Moore, III., Ph.D.
Professor and Director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space
University of New Hampshire
Co-Chair, Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space
Space Studies Board
Division on Engineering and Physical Science
National Research Council
The National Academies
Committee on Science
U.S. House of Representatives
April 28, 2005
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Minority Member, and members of the committee: thank you for inviting me here to testify today. My name is Berrien Moore, and I am a professor of systems research at the University of New Hampshire. I appear today in my capacity as co-chair of the National Research Council (NRC)`s Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space: A Community Assessment and Strategy for the Future.
As you know the National Research Council is the unit of the National Academies that is responsible for organizing independent advisory studies for the federal government on science and technology. In response to requests from NASA, NOAA, and the USGS, the NRC has begun a ``decadal survey`` of Earth science and applications from space which is due to be completed in 2006. The guiding principle for the study, which was developed in consultation with members of the Earth science community, is to set an agenda for Earth science and applications from space, including everything from short-term needs for information, such as weather warnings for protection of life and property, to longer-term scientific understanding that is essential for understanding our planet, how it supports and sustains life, and that underpins future societal applications.
The NRC has been conducting decadal strategy surveys in astronomy for four decades. But it has only started to do them in other areas fairly recently. This is the first decadal survey in Earth science and applications from space. Among the key tasks in the charge to the decadal survey committee is the request to: Develop a consensus of the top-level scientific questions that should provide the focus for Earth and environmental observations in the period 2005-2020; and Develop a prioritized list of recommended space programs, missions, and supporting activities to address these questions.
The NRC survey committee has prepared a brief interim report, which I am pleased to be able to summarize today. This report provides an early examination of urgent issues that require attention prior to publication of the committee`s final report in the second half of 2006. A copy of the full report has also been provided for your use.
The report was requested by the sponsors of the study and by staff members of the Science Committee. The report also responds, in part, to direction in the FY 2005 appropriations bill that calls for ``the National Academy`s Space Studies Board to conduct a thorough review of the science that NASA is proposing to undertake under the space exploration initiative and to develop a strategy by which all of NASA`s science disciplines can make adequate progress towards their established goals, as well as providing balanced scientific research in addition to support of the new initiative.``
The current U.S. civilian Earth observing system centers on the environmental satellites operated by NOAA; the atmosphere-, ocean- , ice-, and land-observation satellites of NASA`s Earth Observing System (EOS); and the Landsat satellites, which are operated through a cooperative arrangement between NASA, NOAA, and the USGS. Over the past 30 years, NASA and NOAA have contributed to fundamental advances in understanding the Earth system and in providing a variety of societal benefits through their international leadership in Earth observing systems from space. Today, this process of building understanding through increasingly powerful observations and thereby expanding the basis for needed applications is at risk of collapse. Although NOAA has plans to modernize and refresh its weather satellites, NASA has no plan to replace its EOS platforms after their nominal six year lifetimes end (beginning with the end of the Terra satellite mission in 2005), and it has cancelled, scaled back, or delayed at least six planned missions, including a Landsat continuity mission.
These decisions at NASA appear to be driven by a major shift in priorities as the agency moves to implement a new vision for space exploration. We believe this change in priorities jeopardizes NASA`s ability to fulfill its obligations in other important presidential initiatives, such as the Climate Change Research Initiative and the subsequent Climate Change Science Program. It also calls into question future U.S. leadership in the Global Earth Observing System of Systems, an international effort initiated by this administration. Indeed, the nation`s ability to pursue a visionary space exploration agenda depends critically on our success in applying knowledge of the Earth to maintain economic growth and security on our home planet. Moreover, a substantial reduction in NASA`s Earth observation programs today will result in a loss of U.S. scientific and technical capacity, which will decrease the competitiveness of the United States internationally for years to come. U.S. leadership in science, technology development, and societal applications depends on sustaining competence across a broad range of scientific and engineering disciplines that include the Earth sciences.
The NRC`s interim report identifies a number of issues for NASA and NOAA that require immediate attention in the FY 2006 and FY 2007 programs. They include the following:
The impact of canceling or delaying NASA missions,
The need to evaluate plans for transferring capabilities from some cancelled or scaled back
NASA missions to the NOAA-DOD NPOESS satellites,
The adequacy of the technological base for future missions,
The state of NASA Research and Analysis programs, which are necessary to maximize scientific return on NASA investments in Earth science and to retain the intellectual base for future missions,
The need to reinvigorate the Explorer missions program, and
Near-term steps that are required to develop a sustained and robust observing system from space that provides essential baseline climate observations and create a climate data and information system to meet the challenge of production, distribution and stewardship of climate records from NPOESS and other relevant observational platforms.. With regard to these issues, the committee recommends the following actions:
1. The NASA Global Precipitation Measurement mission should be launched without further delays. This mission is an international effort to improve climate, weather, and hydrological predictions through more accurate and frequent precipitation measurements.
2. NASA and NOAA should complete the fabrication, testing, and space qualification of the GIFTS (Geosynchronous Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer) instrument and should support the international effort to launch this instrument by 2008. GIFTS will make highly detailed measurements from geostationary orbit of temperature and water vapor and will improve the prediction of severe weather conditions as well as the range of global weather forecasts.
3. NASA and NOAA should commission three independent reviews, to be completed by October 2005, regarding three missions or instruments: (a) the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, which has been endorsed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and was planned by NASA to continue the vital record of Earth land imaging after Landsat-7, which is currently failing, (b) the Glory mission to measure and characterize atmospheric aerosols and solar irradiance, which is now canceled, but which NASA had previously proposed to accelerate in response to the President`s Climate Change Science Program, and (c) the suitability of the instrumentation planned for NPOESS to measure ocean winds and direction.
The guidelines for these reviews are set forth in the Interim report.
4. Mr. Chairman, we also recommend that NASA significantly expand existing technology development programs to ensure that new enabling technologies for critical observational capabilities are available to support mission starts over the coming decade. One of the problems of having nothing in the mission queue after the Global Precipitation Mission, other than smaller, principal investigator led explorer-class missions, is that focused technologydevelopment is no longer supported. Amongst the areas requiring increased technology investments are:
Space-based interferometric synthetic aperture radar, whose numerous applications include monitoring of Earth`s crustal movements caused by volcanic or seismic activity;
Wide swath ocean altimetry, which will provide the first synoptic observations of global ocean eddies, coastal currents and tides, and internal tides; and
Wind lidar, which will facilitate long sought measurements of global wind profiles, particularly over the oceans where three dimensional measurements are sparse and where most weather phenomena originate.
5. We also recommend that NASA: Increase the frequency of Earth Explorer selection opportunities and accelerate the frequency of launch opportunities by providing sufficient funding for at least one launch per year (that is, a return to the schedule the program originally envisioned and followed prior to recent delays), and
Release the next announcement of opportunity for this program in FY 2005. NASA developed its Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) program as ``an innovative approach for addressing Global Change Research by providing periodic `Windows of Opportunity` to accommodate new scientific priorities and infuse new scientific participation into the Earth Science Enterprise...[using]... relatively low to moderate cost, small to medium sized missions that are capable of being built, tested and launched in a short time interval.`` But some of the missions now being planned may not be launched until nearly 10 years after they were selected.
6. Last, we recommend that NOAA, working with the Climate Change Science Program and the international Group on Earth Observations create a robust and sustained observing system from space that includes at a minimum a set of essential baseline climate observations. In addition NOAA should create a climate data and information system to meet the challenge of the production, distribution, and stewardship of highaccuracy climate records from NPOESS and other relevant observational platforms. These functions are within NOAA`s mandate to understand climate variability and change, but cannot be accomplished through the current NPOESS program or its data system architecture.
Finally, Mr. Chairman, our committee is also concerned about diminished resources for the research and analysis (R&A) programs that sustain the interpretation of Earth science data. Because the R&A programs are carried out largely through the nation`s research universities, there will be an immediate and deleterious impact on graduate student, postdoctoral, and faculty research support. The long-term consequence will be a diminished ability to attract and retain students interested in using and developing Earth observations. Taken together, these developments jeopardize U.S. leadership in both Earth science and Earth observations, and they undermine the vitality of the government-university-private sector partnership that has made so many contributions to society.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. I am prepared to answer any questions that you may have. | <urn:uuid:025f8758-4d9b-4eaf-90b3-b8e620002806> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ocga/testimony/NASA_Earth_Science.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921097 | 2,263 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Then Eliphaz the Themanite answered, and said:
Can man be compared with God, even though he were of perfect knowledge?
What doth it profit God if thou be just? or what dost thou give him if thy way be unspotted?
Shall he reprove thee for fear, and come with thee into judgment:
And not for thy manifold wickedness, and thy infinite iniquities?
For thou hast taken away the pledge of thy brethren without cause, and stripped the naked of their clothing.
Thou hast not given water to the weary, thou hast withdrawn bread from the hungry.
In the strength of thy arm thou didst possess the land, and being the most mighty thou holdest it.
Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless thou hast broken in pieces.
Therefore art thou surrounded with snares, and sudden fear troubleth thee.
And didst thou think that thou shouldst not see darkness, and that thou shouldst not be covered with the violence of overflowing waters?
Dost not thou think that God is higher than heaven, and is elevated above the height of the stars?
And thou sayst: What doth God know? and he judgeth as it were through a mist.
The clouds are his covert, and he doth not consider our things, and he walketh about the poles of heaven.
Dost thou desire to keep the path of ages, which wicked men have trodden?
Who were taken away before their time, and a flood hath overthrown their foundation.
Who said to God: Depart from us: and looked upon the Almighty as if he could do nothing:
Whereas he had filled their houses with good things: whose way of thinking be far from me.
The just shall see, and shall rejoice, and the innocent shall laugh them to scorn.
Is not their exaltation cut down, and hath not fire devoured the remnants of them?
Submit thyself then to him, and be at peace: and thereby thou shalt have the best fruits.
Receive the law of his mouth, and lay up his words in thy heart.
If thou wilt return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up, and shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacle.
He shall give for earth flint, and for flint torrents of gold.
And the Almighty shall be against thy enemies, and silver shall be heaped together for thee.
Then shalt thou abound in delights in the Almighty, and shalt lift up thy face to God.
Thou shalt pray to him, and he will hear thee, and thou shalt pay vows.
Thou shalt decree a thing, and it I shall come to thee, and light shall shine in thy ways.
For he that hath been humbled, shall be in glory: and he that shall bow down his eyes, he shall be saved.
The innocent shall be saved, and he shall be saved by the cleanness of his hands. | <urn:uuid:54d07a69-4f70-4a54-a6de-feb68dbfda34> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.speedbibleverse.com/douay_rheims/B18C022.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946194 | 637 | 1.734375 | 2 |
|Agrimoney.com - http://www.agrimoney.com/news/news.php?id=5419|
|Cargill axes beef plant, giving up on herd revival
By Agrimoney.com - Published 17/01/2013
Live cattle futures plunged their daily limit after Cargill revealed it was closing one of its beef processing plants, after giving up on a rebound in US cattle numbers from 60-year lows.
The agribusiness giant, one of the world's biggest privately-owned companies, said that it would at the start of next month close its Plainview, Texas site, which employs 2,000 people.
The "difficult" decision to close the site, which processes some 4,500 animals a day, followed "an exhaustive analysis" of North America's cattle supply and processing capacity, which highlighted the threat to industry profits from a US herd which has shrunk to its lowest since 1952, Cargill said.
The prospect of consolidated buying power weakened cattle futures, but sent shares in Tyson Foods, a major rival to Cargill in US meat, up 3.8% to \$21.23, their highest finish since September 2007.
No revival for a while
"Increased feed costs resulting from the prolonged drought, combined with herd liquidations by cattle ranchers, are severely and adversely contributing to the challenging business conditions we face as an industry," said John Keating, president of Cargill Beef.
"We delayed the decision to idle Plainview as long as possible. We were hoping the drought would break, pasturelands would be restored, cattle ranchers would retain heifers and the national herd trend of declining numbers over the past few years would be reversed.
"Unfortunately, the drought has not broken, feed costs remain higher than historical averages and the herd continues to shrink."
While Cargill that it was "optimistic about the long-term prospects for US beef demand", and was to retain the Plainview site for a potential reopening if US cattle numbers rebound, the group said that it "does not expect the US cattle herd to significantly increase in size for a number of years".
More than other states
The US cattle herd fell below 90m animals last year for the first time since the 1950s, and down from a 1974 high of 132m head, according to US Department of Agriculture data.
The Texas herd has shrunk particularly fast, dented by drought last year and in 2011, besides the high grain costs which affected the industry around 2007-08 as well.
"Texas cattle numbers have gone down more than any other state," Ben Parks, at FCStone's Kansa-based livestock division, said.
Being a distance from the main Midwest corn-growing areas, "feed costs are perhaps 90 cents a bushel over futures in Texas, compared with maybe 30 cents a bushel in Nebraska".
'Something was going to give'
Mr Parks added that Cargill's announcement had caught markets unawares.
"It was not a surprise that there was a closure at some point this year. But by Cargill, and today, that was a surprise," Mr Parks told Agrimoney.com.
"We felt something was going to give, but did not know where or when."
Live cattle futures for February fell the 3.00-cents a pound maximum in Chicago before recovering to close at 126.60 per pound, down 1.925 cents, or 1.5%, on the day.
Return to profit
Beef packer margins on Thursday were some \$37 per head in the red, according to HedgersEdge.com.
Cargill's closure will enable it to send increase volumes handed by its Friona plant, less than 100 miles from Plainview, besides send extra volume to sites in Kansas and Colorado too.
Cargill last week reported a return to profit at its animal protein operations, "compared with a loss last year when processing margins in the US beef industry were sharply negative".
"Most of the meat businesses benefited from improved volumes or margins in the current period, even though results were tempered by higher raw material or livestock feeding costs," the group said, as it unveiled a sharp recovery in group profits.
|© Agrimoney 2010| | <urn:uuid:cb08a0b6-40c4-4b4a-9396-81d09b5a8660> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.agrimoney.com/printnews.php?id=5419&area=n | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969318 | 889 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Ten Inmates Died From Heat in Texas Prisons Last Summer, and Nothing's Going to Change
Last month, the daughter of Larry Gene McCollum sued the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. McCollum was serving an 11-month sentence at Hutchins State Jail in Dallas last summer when, after days in a cell where the temperature neared triple digits, he had a seizure. He was taken to the hospital, where his temperature peaked at 109.4 degrees. He fell into a coma and died six days later of hyperthermia.
The crux of the lawsuit was that the state fails to take proper measures to protect its charges from heat, which, in the Texas summer, can amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Of TDCJ's 111 units, only 21 are fully air conditioned, the suit points out. In 2011 alone, it claims, there were nine heat-related deaths.
That number -- nine dead in one summer -- came from a legislative aide, TCCJ's Scott Medlock told us. In fact, though, records provided to Unfair Park by the state show there was one more: 10 heat-related deaths in Texas prisons in 2011, all in the course of 30 very hot days.
Either way, that's an alarming number, even if the summer of 2011 was an aberration. Since 2005, only two other prisoners suffered heat-related deaths, both in 2007. Each of the prisoners who died had an underlying medical condition, as you can see below, but the likely cause of death in all is hyperthermia.
TDCJ says it takes steps during the summer to ensure its inmates stay as cool as possible and well hydrated, but as last summer proved, that hasn't fixed the problem. A real solution is as simple as it would be controversial: a law setting a maximum indoor temperature of 85 degrees for state prisons, just like there is for county jails.
That's not going to happen. For one, it's too easy for policymakers to dismiss. Keith Price, a professor at West Texas A&M and former warden, told the Times that, really, 10 prisoners of 150,000 dying in a year is not a big deal. It's kinda their own fault, really.
"Just from a statistical standpoint, that's really not significant, particularly when you consider the population," Price said. "Many inmates are poorly equipped to manage their lives and thus make poor decisions. I do not believe it is up to the taxpayers to provide air-conditioning for inmates when some simple self-discipline would avoid many of these problems."
But what it's really about is money. Legislators will never vote to spend any amount of cash to give prisoners air conditions. In the current climate, that's political suicide. Much easier to say they're bad people who deserve what happens to them, at least until a court says otherwise. | <urn:uuid:6a8d13e9-ec71-4a11-8380-82520850b708> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2012/08/meet_the_texas_prisoners_who_h.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976117 | 591 | 2.09375 | 2 |
This article will help anyone looking for information pertaining to a commercial real estate and commercial lending in the State of
Wisconsin is located along the Great Lakes region in the United
States. Known for its cheese and its beer, this state is a leader in manufacturing,
agriculture and tourism. The state of Wisconsin has a population of 5,556,506
spread out across over 54,310 square miles. There are approximately 100 people
living in each of those square miles. The population has been slowly but steadily
rising over the past two decades. Between 1990 and 2000 the population rose
9.6%, and since 2000 the population has risen another 3.6%. The per capita income
of the residents of Wisconsin is $33,278.
What does this mean for those who are interested in commercial real
estate in Wisconsin?
The agricultural commercial real estate in Wisconsin is highly
productive. Forty-five percent of the state's land is dedicated to farmland,
and the state is the number one cheese producer in the country. It also tops
the nation in corn, cranberries, and ginseng, and it is one of the major producers
of oats, potatoes, carrots, and maple syrup. Commercial real estate is available
for purchase for agricultural pursuits in Wisconsin.
Despite its profitability and success, agriculture is not the top industry
in Wisconsin. That title goes to the manufacturing industry.
The state is a leading region in food processing, processing much of the food
that is grown locally. It also is a top machinery manufacturer and is number
one in the country in the production of paper products. Even though Wisconsin's
chief industry is manufacturing, it is in decline in this state, as it is across
the country. Many industrial pads are being to put other uses, primarily mixed
use retail and housing uses. This is especially the case in Milwaukee, which
is trying to revitalize its urban core. There is high demand for housing in
downtown Milwaukee, so condo development is booming.
The city of Madison has had steady economic growth since the early 1990's.
Forbes magazine consistently names it one of the "Best Places for Business
and Careers" each year. Commercial real estate continues to be affordable
in this economically strong city.
Wisconsin's housing market has been hit very hard by the market slowdown.
In Milwaukee, foreclosures are higher than normal but its unclear why. Unlike
other states with high foreclosure rates, Wisconsin didn't experience
a speculative boom or a drop in job creation. Even though experts haven't
figured out the causes of Wisconsin's housing woes, they predict a rocky
market for at least another 12 months. | <urn:uuid:9b2fd4bf-5bdf-4d0a-9dce-a0a94a39b45f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mortgagenewsdaily.com/commercial/Wisconsin.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958885 | 550 | 1.929688 | 2 |
First aid kit
Few sensible sailors would consider setting out without some form of first-aid kit on board. Scraped knees, cuts, bruises, and bumped toes are all part of the sailing experience—everyone suffers them at some time or other. Being able to deal with these appropriately makes them minor annoyances rather than life-threatening emergencies. Of course, don’t be slow to call for help if the situation demands it, or the nature of the emergency is outside your capabilities. But an on board first-aid kit should be your first line of defense.
What you need:
A. Scissors. Used mostly for cutting bandages and surgical tape to length, they can also cut clothing away from a wound if removing the garment is impossible.
B. Safety pins. Handy for holding errant bandages in place, these are also good fishing hooks—just don’t put them back into the first-aid kit afterward.
C. Syringe. Filled with saline solution, it can be used for flushing dirt from a wound. It can also be used as an emergency eye-wash pump.
D. Tweezers. These are the best tool for pulling splinters or other small foreign objects out of your body.
E. Fabric tape. This comes on a roll and can do all sorts of jobs from holding splints in place to taping pads to a wound.
F. Stretch bandages. These can be used to hold absorbent pads over wounds and to hold a temporary splint in position.
G. Triangular bandage. This will support and immobilize a damaged arm.
H. Large adhesive pad. Used with a gauze pad, this makes a huge band-aid—even if it does rip out half your body hair when you pull it off.
I. Cold pack. For temporary relief of minor burns and sprains, the pack contains two chemicals that are inert in their normal state but become an instant ice pack (without water) when squeezed and mixed.
J. Foil space blanket. Retaining 90 percent of body heat, it can treat shock by preventing body temperature from dropping to dangerously low levels.
K. Latex gloves. Sterile gloves should be worn during contact with body fluids—yours or anyone else’s. Use them once and throw them away. If you are allergic to latex, try nitrile gloves instead.
L. Absorbent pads. Individually packed in sterile packets, these cover wounds and abrasions.
M. Band-aids. We have all used them. They’re called “sticking plasters” in some parts of the world.
N. After Burn. Use this when you need to treat your sunburn with aloe or have inadvertently touched the hot plate in the galley. Treat a major burn as a medical emergency.
O. Eye patch. This is not for Long John Silver impersonations but for covering an infected eye.
P. Medications. Bring common medications individually wrapped—sting and diarrhea pain relief and aspirin, among others.
Q. Saline solution. Used for flushing wounds, this is preferable to peroxide, which destroys healthy cells at the wound site.
R. Storage bag. This keeps everything organized and easily accessible.
S. Dental kit. You won’t need this on a day trip, but it could be handy when a dentist is more than 24 hours away. Fortunately, it contains instructions.
T. First-aid guide. If you are not sure how to respond to a particular situation, this is an essential reference. You would be wise to read it before you need to use your first-aid kit.
Thanks to West Marine for help with this article. Contact them at 800-262-8464. | <urn:uuid:fd8b1aec-3f46-4b59-8f32-cbb3bae41043> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sailmagazine.com/first-aid-kit | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926474 | 788 | 2.40625 | 2 |
Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences
Anthropologist Caroline Brettell, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized immigration expert who can discuss how the technology boom affects immigration, trends of new immigration gateway cities such as Dallas, Atlanta and Minneapolis and the challenges of women immigrants. Her research interests include anthropology of Europe; migration and ethnicity; folk religion; and cross-cultural perspectives on gender. An immigrant herself, Brettell was born in Canada and became a U.S. citizen in 1993.
- Immigration and migration
- Folk religion
- Technology and immigration
Caroline Brettell in the News | <urn:uuid:6d319bbc-ec76-4b85-a5e3-a8c8ab74b5f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smu.edu/News/Experts/Caroline-Brettell | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936892 | 123 | 1.757813 | 2 |
I should say from the get-go that I have not seen all of the films nominated for Best Picture. In fact, I've only seen three of them: Lincoln, Life of Pi, and Les Misérables. From what I've read, the two main contenders for the 2013 Best Picture Oscar are Lincoln and Argo. I'm sure one of them will win, but I'm actually rooting for two other films, hoping one of them will be announced Best Picture.
The first of these is Ang Lee's Life of Pi . . .
book upon which it is based, Life of Pi the film seeks to highlight not only the narratives and myths (in the best sense of the word) of numerous religious traditions, but also an awareness of the one great mystery toward which all of these stories attempt to direct us.
The theological and spiritual themes of Life of Pi are not the catechetical kind. There are no quick and ready answers, no lingering on the surface of things. In a key scene in the film, Pi observes Richard Parker, the tiger with whom he is sharing a lifeboat, gazing down into the still, starlit ocean. "What are you looking at?" Pi asks the tiger in all sincerity. Richard Parker looks briefly at Pi before returning his gaze to the mysterious depths. Pi follows his example and is transported beyond, experiencing in the journey a profound expansion of awareness and sense of connection with the universe. Such a journey is incapable of being facilitated by dogma or doctrine. No, we're in the realm of spirituality as understood and grappled with by folks like Rabbi Alan Lurie, Karen Armstrong, Jeanette Blonigen Clancy, Rosanne Cash, Joan Timmerman, Michael Morwood, Daniel Helminiak, and Zainab Salbi; a spirituality distinct from religion in ways succinctly articulated by Joan Chittister:
Spirituality is about the hunger in the human heart. It seeks not only a way to exist, but a reason to exist that is beyond the biological or the institutional or even the traditional. It lifts religion up from the level of the theoretical or the mechanical to the personal. It seeks to make real the things of the spirit. It transcends rules and rituals to a concentration on meaning. It pursues in depth the mystical dimension of life that religion purports to promote.
I have come across some reviews of Life of Pi that recognize and acknowledge the film's efforts to "make real the things of the spirit," or what others have called the depth dimension of life. For instance, here's part of Tim Martin's review . . .
Everything about Life of Pi combines to make it a wondrous experience, not only a visually spellbinding spectacle but also a thought-provoking and emotional piece of storytelling.
Life of Pi is based on the allegedly unfilmable novel written by Yann Martel about a young Indian man who undergoes a sweeping journey of spiritual and personal discovery while lost at sea in a lifeboat with a bad-tempered Bengal tiger.
As easy as it is to reduce the plot to a single sentence like that, that same reductionism does a huge disservice to this detailed, philosophically rich story.
And the film's ill-considered trailer (which says nothing of the story while focusing on the special effects showpieces, set to a smug, incongruous soundtrack by Coldplay and Sigur Ros) gives the impression of a fairly shallow technical showpiece, rather than the deep, textured meditation that it really is.
And then there's this insightful review I found at Amazon.com, part of which reads . . .
The scenes with Pi telling his story in flashback, of his quest for religious unity in a world where gods and deities abound and haunt his imagination, his conversations with books late into the night, along with altercations and loving interludes with his close and inseparable family is contrasted with the uncompromising self-reliant individualism that Pi is subjected to in that fateful journey across the seas. The long migration to Canada initially seems like a fool's quest but the deeper emotional notes in Pi's odyssey across the seas have an empowering tragic sense of life that has no equal this year at the movies.
Ang Lee stretches his own range of interests in his quest for a deeper emotional connection with religious themes in Martel's novels. Pi's lone quest in a raft, struggling to come to terms with his demons, in the open sea, also opens up a range of interpretations. . . . The sheer beauty and detail of the digital imagery that unfolds on screen, the breathtaking vision of young Pi lost in the ocean is, in and of itself, only spectacle. But these visuals, become a beautiful, even consoling, vision of a human being absorbed in his infinite struggles and longings. The brilliant decorative pieces on the cinematic canvas become vast signifiers of life's deepest meanings. And none of this gets ponderous, or pretentious.
Finally, here's an excerpt from Moses Ma's Psychology Today article about the film, an article that very deliberately seeks to explore "Meaning, Faith and the Life of Pi."
To understand the jewel of wisdom buried deep within the story – which is pronounced to be “a story that will make you believe in God” – we need to understand that the story is actually about wrestling not with a physical tiger, but a metaphoric one . . . with questions of meaning and faith. This story is a gedanken experiment for the worst case scenario, a modern day story of Job, all about how you can find spirituality and the meaning of life in the throes of all that is horrible and terrible in the world today. It is by surviving and making sense of all that goes wrong in the world, that the meaning of [our humanity] is uncovered.
Okay, the second film that I wouldn't mind seeing 'upset,' as they say, this evening's awards ceremony by taking home the Oscar for Best Picture, is Tom Hooper's Les Misérables . . .
notes, for instance, that many of the 2013 Oscar Best Films "tell stories of great loss and heartbreak redeemed by grace and hope." Both Life of Pi and Les Misérables certainly fit this bill.
Here's what Garrett has to say specifically about Les Misérables:
Above: Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert
and Hugh Jackman as Valjean in Les Misérables.
and Hugh Jackman as Valjean in Les Misérables.
Recommended Off-site Links:
Nobody Said 'Racial Equality' in 1865: The Anachronistic English of Lincoln – Benjamin Schmidt (The Atlantic, January 10, 2013).
Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and the Historical Drama of the Civil War – Tom Mackaman (World Socialist Web Site, November 12, 2012).
What Argo Gets Wrong: People – Spencer Kornhaber (The Atlantic, October 12, 2012).
Former Canadian Ambassador Renews Criticism of Argo – Ian Austen (New York Times, February 22, 2013).
Torture in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty – Jane Mayer (The New Yorker, December 14, 2012).
The Intellectually Bankrupt Defenders of Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty – Davis Walsh (World Socialist Web Site, February 22, 2013).
Ten Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won't Learn at Django – Amara Jones (Colorlines.com, January 9, 2013).
The Impossible: A Narrow View of a Major Disaster – George Marlowe (World Socialist Web Site, January 31, 2013).
Life of Pi: In a Lifeboat Alone With a Tiger – David Walsh (World Socialist Web Site, December 15, 2012).
Life of Pi – A Review – Philip French (The Observer, December 22, 2012).
Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables: Social Misery, With a Vengeance – Hiram Lee (World Socialist Web Site, January 21, 2013).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Five Oscar Highlights (2008)
Oscar Observations (2009)
Oscar Observations (2010)
Beatrice Marovich on Divinity and Animality in Life of Pi
Colin Covert on Biutiful: "A Work of Extraordinary Vitality"
Where Milk Gets It Wrong
Pan’s Labyrinth: Critiquing the Cult of Unquestioning Obedience
Reflections on the Overlooked Children of Men
Reflections on Babel and the "Borders Within"
Christian Draz's Critique of Brokeback Mountain
Frank D. Myers' Long Hard Look at Brokeback Mountain | <urn:uuid:1c94b3f7-ca29-4a59-b996-ec857e5dc2f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thewildreed.blogspot.com/2013/02/pre-oscar-night-reflections.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933652 | 1,781 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Media payscale datapoint of the day
ProPublica — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — is advertising for a social media intern:
ProPublica offers one distributed reporting/ social media internship each spring, summer and fall. The spring and fall internships last 16 weeks. The summer internship lasts 12 weeks. The internship is full-time, based in New York, and pays $700 per week.
Let’s put this in perspective here. The average 15-24 year-old makes $9,862 per year, or $190 per week. The average 25-29 year-old — older, one would imagine, than ProPublica’s social-media intern — makes 27,436 per year, or $528 per week. Indeed, $700 per week, or $36,400 per year, is higher than the median wage for every single age group in America. Even the highest-earning of the lot, the 50-54 year-olds, only make 36,138 on average.
Now if you’re Paul Steiger, the editor of ProPublica, pulling down $570,000 per year, or $10,962 per week, then I’m sure that it’s barely conceivable that anybody could get by on a mere $700 for a week’s work. And it’s true that New York City is an expensive place to live. But it’s also true that the median per capita income in New York City in 1999, the last year for which there’s census data, was just $22,402, or $431 per week.
Of course, I have nothing against high wages, especially not in journalism. But it’s pretty clear to me what’s going on here: the high wage is a signal that this internship is for high-achieving upper-middle-class ivy-leaguers; even, dare I say, for the Young Global Leaders of tomorrow. “Applicants should have experience reporting and/or managing volunteers (or online organizing),” says the job listing, “and a track-record of innovation”.
The spring internship, which is hiring now, will pay a total of $11,200 for 16 weeks, on top of all the transferrable skills and contacts that it is designed to help build. It’s a plum gig, which will surely be snapped up by someone who doesn’t really need it, as opposed to someone without a fabulous and expensive education, without a middle-class upbringing, maybe even without a place at college — but someone who might still have a real aptitude for navigating and leveraging social media.
The fact is that ProPublica is looking to fill this position with someone who might consider $700 a week to be a fair wage for doing clever things on Facebook for a few months, but who reasonably assumes that they’ll improve upon that figure once they get a proper job. If you’re part of the majority of the population who would consider $700 a week to be an enviable wage at any point in someone’s career, you’re really not the target audience. And simply offering that much money is a signal to most such people that, sorry, this is a job for the privileged elite.
If ProPublica pays its summer interns $700 a week, and its editor $570,000 a year, then you can get a pretty reasonable idea of how much it pays its full-time staff. And you can compare that to the way that Jake Dobkin characterizes the economics of the New York blogosphere:
If you don’t want to fire more journalists, you’ll have to cut their salaries. Full time bloggers make about $40-50K. There are plenty of qualified journalists out there who will work for those salaries (many with Ivy-league J-school degrees!)
I think that the idea of non-profit journalism is an interesting one, which is worth experimenting with and exploring. And I think it’s noble that a non-profit like ProPublica has decided to set a high bar when it comes to pay. But I also fear that if ProPublica is ultimately doomed by its high cost structure, that could do unnecessary damage to the whole model of non-profit journalism. And I fear too that ProPublica is going to end up being staffed by a group of privileged and talented white guys who are convinced that their intelligence and their expensive educations are reason enough, in and of themselves, for them to be earning six-figure salaries. Meanwhile, the Sandlers, footing the bill, will be congratulating themselves on the quality of staff that they’ve managed to attract with their high wages.
In other words, there’s a downside to paying well — and that’s a degree of complacency and self-regard which is not uncommon in non-profits at the best of times. And to come back to the internship, a social-media job at ProPublica is never going to be easy in the first place, just because the whole edifice is set up so as to broadcast the work of a few excellent journalists to a large and grateful world. An organization of highly-paid elite professionals will never be collaborative or particularly accessible.
Personally, I prefer the cheaper and messier versions of ProPublica — HuffPo, say, or maybe Current TV. But interestingly, both of them are for-profit organizations, who feel no shame about paying small amounts of money for talented staff, no matter where those staffers might come from.
So while there’s undoubtedly a lot of upside to the message that ProPublica is sending with its payscale — that journalism is a high-value proposition, well worth paying serious money for — it’s worth being alive to the downside, as well — the message that journalism is an elitist profession, inaccessible to most Americans. Especially when the fact is that, even today, both of those messages are true.
Update: ProPublica’s Dick Tofel responds in the comments:
We’ve actually made it a point at ProPublica not to have unpaid internships, precisely to level the playing field between children of privilege and those who need to work for a living. Our research indicates that what we pay is the prevailing wage for such jobs (I wonder what Reuters pays interns?). And note that our interns don’t receive benefits. By the way, using 11 year old data for income seems funny for a business journalist. More recent figures indicate that median household income in New York in 2007 was almost $49,000, and New Yorkers in their 20’s were reported by the New York Times to make a median of $33,000 in 2005. | <urn:uuid:6becd5f2-5840-4401-b449-4f1f7491f848> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/02/11/media-payscale-datapoint-of-the-day/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954801 | 1,419 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Juba — Over 3,000 South Sudanese are jailed in various US prisons across the country for allegedly breaking the laws of their new host country, reveals media official in the office of the Vice President.
Vice President's Press Secretary, James Gatdet Dak, told the Sudan Tribune that the recent visit of the Vice President, Riek Machar, to the United States of America had revealed the grave situation facing the citizens of the young nation abroad.
There are hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese citizens, some of whom have acquired dual US citizenship, and are residing in different states across the US. Some went as big families since early 1990s while others remain singles particularly those who later went as "lost boys" and girls.
Some are economically well off or have excelled in US higher learning institutions while others have become homeless and drug addicts.
Gatdet said during Machar's visit to a number of states with higher South Sudanese populations he was briefed on the situation by the community leaders as well as by the South Sudanese officials representing the new nation in Washington DC.
He said there are also requests for deportation of at least 4 South Sudanese every week, which the officials have to every time handle with the US government.
Following the gravity of the situation Machar directed the South Sudan embassy in the US to establish a special desk for the Diasporas so that their issues could be addressed effectively.
The Vice President, he added, also called on the South Sudanese in the US to be law abiding and focus on issues that will promote their welfare while in the US and contribute to the development of the new country.
He also met with the authorities in the states he had visited including in Omaha, Nebraska, which is one of the states with the highest South Sudanese populations. Machar had cordial meeting with the city mayor, Jim Suttle, who gave him the key to the city as a symbol of friendly relations with South Sudanese.
Gatdet further added that while in the US the Vice President met with US investors who expressed interest to invest in various sectors in South Sudan.
He said the Vice President on his return from the US expressed that there were signs of changing investment climate in the US toward South Sudan, saying the investors were keen to invest in railway lines, agriculture, oil pipelines and refineries, among many others. | <urn:uuid:842fe1df-0c4e-40f2-8342-076102eb695d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://allafrica.com/stories/201211010388.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981121 | 483 | 1.585938 | 2 |
When venturing to build a solar panel system, firstly place it on the roof in order to provide superior exposure to the sun.
That being said, you may have concerns about whether the installation causes damage to the roof. Following is some good information to help you understand what to expect when you choose to build a solar panel and install it onto your roof.
Most roofs are constructed to hold pressure of at least eight to ten pounds per square foot more than that of the roofing material.
That’s usually more than sufficient to bear the load of the solar panels. That said, each house needs to be surveyed individually. Your local building surveyor or a qualified solar panel installer should be able to provide an accurate assessment of the roof’s ability to handle the weight when you decide to build a solar panel system.
Many installers attach the solar panel mounts to the beams. This makes the installation very stable and distributes the weight better than when the mounts are attached to roof decking. As rooftop installations have taken place for over 30 years, professional installers are knowledgeable about the best methods of how to build a solar panel to ensure stability and prevent damage.
However, you need to consider the age and condition of your existing roof before you schedule your solar panel installation. Since the mounts are placed on the roofing material, they would need to be removed and reinstalled if you decide to replace your roof. So if you’re thinking you might want to replace your roof in the next five to ten years, consider doing it prior to getting your new solar panels to avoid the cost of removal and re-installation.
If you are still unconvinced about how to build solar panels on your roof, a ground-mounted system may be the solution. In selecting a location for ground-mounted solar panels, the same criteria apply as with roof-mounted ones. The panels must be able to get enough sunlight to generate the amount of electricity your household requires, and you have to ensure that nothing is blocking the sun. If you have such a location on your property, it may be a viable alternative to using the roof. | <urn:uuid:1659f764-a770-440a-86b4-a68ab0a4d1ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://solar.how-to-digitals.com/how-to-build-a-solar-panel-avoiding-damage/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943714 | 437 | 2.828125 | 3 |
- What is PFOA?
- What are the concerns related to PFOA?
- What are fluoropolymers and telomers and how are they used?
- When did the Agency begin looking into PFOA and its potential risks?
- How are people exposed to PFOA?
- What is the 2010/15 PFOA Stewardship Program?
- What is the status of the Enforceable Consent Agreements (ECAs)?
- What is the status of the Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs)?
- Has the Agency brought an enforcement case against DuPont on PFOA?
- Is there a risk assessment on PFOA?
- What is the status of the Agency's on-going process to reduce the scientific uncertainties and to more fully understand the pathways of human exposure and potential risks from PFOA?
- What is the status of the Agency's efforts regarding reducing exposure to PFOS?
- How do Agency's actions affect aqueous film forming foams (AFFF)?
- Are EPA's efforts showing any results?
- Are there steps that consumers can take to reduce their exposure to PFOA?
What is PFOA?
PFOA is an acronym for perfluorooctanoic acid, a synthetic (man-made) chemical that does not occur naturally in the environment. PFOA is sometimes called "C8."
Companies use PFOA to make fluoropolymers, substances with special properties that have thousands of important manufacturing and industrial applications. PFOA can also be produced by the breakdown of some fluorinated telomers, substances that are used in surface treatment products to impart soil, stain, grease, and water resistance.
EPA’s efforts on perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) are not limited to only PFOA. EPA is also investigating other PFCs, including perfluorooctyl sulfonate (PFOS), higher homologues of PFOA and PFOS, and other partially fluorinated chemicals that are potential precursors of these chemicals. Read more about definitions of other perfluorinated compounds.
What are the concerns related to PFOA?
PFOA is very persistent in the environment and has been found at very low levels both in the environment and in the blood of the general U.S. population. Studies indicate that PFOA can cause developmental and other adverse effects in laboratory animals. PFOA also appears to remain in the human body for a long time. All of these factors, taken together, prompted the Agency to investigate whether PFOA might pose a risk to human health and the environment at the levels currently being found, or at levels that might be reached in the future as PFOA continues to be released into the environment.
What are fluoropolymers and telomers and how are they used?
Fluoropolymers impart valuable properties, including fire resistance and oil, stain, grease, and water repellency. They are used to provide non-stick surfaces on cookware and waterproof, breathable membranes for clothing. They are employed in hundreds of other uses in almost all industry segments, including the aerospace, automotive, building/construction, chemical processing, electrical and electronics, semiconductor, and textile industries.
Telomers are used as surfactants and as surface treatment chemicals in many products, including personal care and cleaning products; and oil, stain, grease, and water repellent coatings on carpet, textiles, leather, and paper. Some telomers are also used as high performance surfactants in products that must flow evenly, such as paints, coatings, and cleaning products, fire-fighting foams for use on liquid fuel fires, or the engineering coatings used in semiconductor manufacture.
When did the Agency begin looking into PFOA and its potential risks?
In the late 1990's, EPA received information indicating that PFOS was widespread in the blood of the general population, and presented concerns for persistence, bioaccumulation, and toxicity. Following discussions between EPA and 3M, the manufacturer of PFOS and PFOS-related chemicals, the company terminated production of these chemicals. Findings on PFOS led EPA to review similar chemicals, including PFOA, to determine whether they might present concerns similar to those associated with PFOS.
How are people exposed to PFOA?
The Agency does not have a full understanding of how people are exposed to PFOA, which is used as an essential processing aid in the manufacture of fluoropolymers, and may also be a breakdown product of other related chemicals, called fluorinated telomers. In April 2003, EPA released a preliminary risk assessment for PFOA, and started a public process to identify and generate additional information to better understand the sources of PFOA and the pathways of human exposure. Although the public process designed to produce additional information has been completed, new information continues to be generated as a result of the process and from other activities. This new information will assist the Agency in determining if there are potential risks and what risk management steps may be appropriate.
What is the 2010/15 PFOA Stewardship Program?
EPA is taking action to help minimize the potential impact of PFOA on the environment. In January 2006, former EPA Administrator Johnson's letter initiated the 2010/15 PFOA Stewardship Program, in which the eight major companies in the industry committed voluntarily to reduce facility emissions and product content of PFOA and related chemicals on a global basis by 95 percent no later than 2010, and to work toward eliminating emissions and product content of these chemicals by 2015.
What is the status of the Enforceable Consent Agreements (ECAs)?
An ECA is a publicly negotiated agreement among EPA, industry, and interested parties that requires certain signing parties to generate data and submit those data to EPA on a specified schedule. Test rules can take few years to complete, while typical ECAs can often be concluded in less than a year. ECAs that require new test protocols or adapted test methods can take longer to negotiate than standard ECAs. ECAs are enforceable, meaning that EPA can compel the submission of information agreed to under the ECA. Because they are negotiated in public, all parties who are interested in the data have the opportunity to participate.
PFOA is used in the manufacture of fluoropolymers. Fluoropolymers are used in a wide variety of industrial and consumer products, including non-stick cookware, chemical and fire-resistant cables and tubing, and waterproof, breathable clothing. The ECA incineration testing of fluoropolymers will help determine whether the chemicals used in these items may break down to release PFOA if they are disposed of in municipal incinerators.
PFOA may also be a breakdown product of some fluorotelomers. Fluorotelomers are used as surface application treatments on carpets, textiles, paper, leather, and construction materials to provide water, stain, grease, and soil resistance properties, and may be used as surfactants in cleaning and coating products. The ECA incineration testing of fluorotelomers will help determine whether the chemicals used in these items may break down to release PFOA if they are disposed of in municipal incinerators.
What is the status of the Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs)?
EPA signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with 3M and Dyneon LLC on October 25, 2004 for monitoring in the vicinity of a fluoropolymer manufacture facility in Decatur, Alabama. All information relevant to this MOU can be found in Docket OPPT-2004-0112
EPA also signed on MOU with DuPont on August 2005, concerning monitoring at the Washington Works facility in Parkersburg, WV. All information relevant to this MOU can be found in Docket OPPT-2004-0113.
These MOUs are publicly negotiated agreements among EPA, industry, and interested parties that require the signing companies to generate data and submit those data to EPA on a specified schedule. These are very similar to ECAs except that these MOUs are non-enforceable.
These MOUs are expected to characterize potential releases from manufacturing facilities to evaluate the potential presence of PFOA and PFOA precursors in air, water, soils, sediments, and biota.
EPA brought civil administrative actions against DuPont in 2004 and 2005 for failing to report information concerning PFOA to the Agency as required by section 8(e) of Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA). On December 14, 2005, EPA forwarded to the Environmental Appeals Board a settlement with DuPont for the largest civil administrative penalty EPA has ever obtained under any federal environmental statute. Read more information on EPA's enforcement action here.
Is there a risk assessment on PFOA?
To ensure that the most rigorous science is used in the Agency's ongoing evaluation of PFOA, OPPT submitted in 2005 a draft risk assessment for formal peer review by the Agency's Science Advisory Board (SAB). That draft was preliminary and did not provide conclusions regarding potential levels of concern. The SAB reviewed the information that was available at the time, and suggested that the PFOA cancer data are consistent with the EPA guidelines descriptor "likely to be carcinogenic to humans." Since their review, additional research has been conducted pertaining to the carcinogenicity of PFOA. EPA is still in the process of evaluating this information, and has not made any definitive conclusions at this time. Read more on the PFOA Risk Assessment available here.
What is the status of the Agency's on-going process to reduce the scientific uncertainties and to more fully understand the pathways of human exposure and potential risks from PFOA?
EPA identified the need to improve its understanding of the sources and pathways of exposure to PFOA in 2003 and initiated a process to develop needed new data on the issue. This new information will assist the Agency in determining if there are potential risks and what risk management steps may be appropriate.
Specifically, EPA is working with industry and other stakeholders to obtain additional environmental monitoring information on PFOA, exposures resulting from incineration or loss from products as they are used over time, and telomer biodegradation as a potential source of PFOA. The Agency has finalized TSCA Section 4 ECAs and MOUs for exposure-related studies with industry in a public process involving a large number of interested parties, and is cooperating with industry and other stakeholders on additional voluntary research activities. In addition, EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD) has collaborated with the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics (OPPT) and is conducting research focused on the health effects and exposures to PFOA and other perfluorinated chemicals. This research is designed to generate enhanced science knowledge and high quality data that will help the Agency address these key uncertainties in pathways of exposure and potential risks from PFOA.
What is the status of the Agency’s efforts regarding reducing exposure to PFOS?
In the late 1990's, EPA received information indicating that PFOS was widespread in the blood of the general population, and presented concerns for persistence, bioaccumulation, and toxicity. Following discussions between EPA and 3M, the manufacturer of PFOS, the company terminated production of these chemicals. Findings on PFOS led EPA to review similar chemicals, including PFOA, to determine whether they might present concerns similar to those associated with PFOS.
Following the voluntary phase out of PFOS by the principal worldwide manufacturer, EPA took prompt regulatory action under TSCA to limit any future manufacture or importation of 88 PFAS (perfluoroalkyl sulfonate) chemicals specifically included in that phase out. EPA uses the generic term PFAS to encompass more generally the category of perfluorinated compounds, which includes those with eight carbons (C8) as well as those with higher and lower amounts of carbon.
These significant new use rules (SNURs) allowed the continuation of a few specifically limited, highly technical uses of these chemicals for which no known alternatives were available, and which were characterized by very low volume, low exposure, and low releases. Any other uses of these chemicals would require prior notice to and review by the Agency.
Subsequently, EPA identified 183 more PFAS chemicals that it believed were no longer being manufactured, imported or used in the U.S., with the possible exception of the same uses excluded from the earlier SNURs. However, based on comments received during the public comment period and related communications, EPA learned of additional limited uses of PFAS chemicals. Consequently, those uses for particular chemicals were excluded from the final SNUR. EPA published an October 2007 Federal Register notice finalizing the SNUR on these 183 chemicals. Read more information on PFOS and related chemicals here.
How do Agency's actions affect aqueous film forming foams (AFFF)?
AFFF that contain perfluorinated compounds are typically used to extinguish highly flammable or combustible liquid fires, such as fires involving gas tankers and oil refineries. The biggest users of AFFF are U.S. military, petrochemical, and aviation industries.
EPA is not conducting an assessment of AFFF because fluorinated AFFF products currently on the market are predominantly C6-based. Nevertheless, AFFF discharges may be subject to various local and state restrictions.
The Agency’s SNUR regulations do not affect the continued use of existing stocks of the C8-based chemicals that had been manufactured or imported into the U.S. prior to the effective date of the SNURs. Existing products and formulations already in the U.S. containing these chemicals – for example, PFOS-based fire fighting foams produced before the rules took effect in 2002 – can still be used.
The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) will sample drinking water supplies, starting in 2009, around the state where repeated use of firefighting foams possibly may have resulted in seeping into the ground of AFFF chemicals. Read more information on the MDH investigation here.
Are EPA's efforts showing any results?
Although more time will be needed to assess the full impact of these efforts, a possible indication of progress can be found in a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study, published in 2007, which reported significant reductions in human blood concentrations of PFOS and PFOA from 1999-2000 compared to the most recent data in 2003-2004. The geometric mean for PFOA in human blood was reduced by 25 percent over this period and PFOS was reduced by 32 percent. The report concluded that these reductions were most likely related to changes brought about by EPA efforts on these chemicals and other related efforts by government and industry.
Are there steps that consumers can take to reduce their exposure to PFOA?
Consumer products made with perfluorochemicals include some non-stick cookware and products such as breathable, all-weather clothing. They are also employed in hundreds of other uses in almost all industry segments, including the aerospace, automotive, building/construction, chemical processing, electrical and electronics, semiconductor, and textile industries. Telomers are used as surfactants and as surface treatment chemicals in many products, including fire fighting foams; personal care and cleaning products; and oil, stain, grease, and water repellent coatings on carpet, textiles, leather, and paper. Consumer products made with fluoropolymers and fluorinated telomers, such as Teflon and other trademark products, are not PFOA. PFOA is used as a processing aid in the manufacture of fluoropolymers and can be also be produced by the breakdown of some fluorinated telomers. The information that EPA has available does not indicate that the routine use of consumer products poses a concern. At present, there are no steps that EPA recommends that consumers take to reduce exposures to PFOA. | <urn:uuid:41c3b71e-f14c-4622-9bc1-adaf70b3d457> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.epa.gov/oppt/pfoa/pubs/faq.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958203 | 3,317 | 3.140625 | 3 |
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2011, Issue No. 42
May 5, 2011
Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
- HOUSE INTEL BILL MANDATES INSIDER THREAT DETECTION
- CRS ON U.S. AID TO PAKISTAN
- WANTED: BETTER ACCESS TO CRS REPORTS
HOUSE INTEL BILL MANDATES INSIDER THREAT DETECTION
The House Intelligence Committee this week called on the Director of National Intelligence to establish an automated insider threat detection program to deter and detect unauthorized access to, or use of, classified intelligence networks.
"Incidents like the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by Wikileaks... show us that despite the tremendous progress made since 9/11 in information sharing, we still need to have systems in place that can detect unauthorized activities by those who would do our country harm from the inside," the Committee said in its May 3 report on the FY 2011 Intelligence Authorization Act.
Curiously, the Committee conveyed no great urgency concerning its proposal. It said the DNI did not have to demonstrate an initial operating capability for insider threat detection until October 1, 2012. Full operating capability would not be required until October 1, 2013.
In fact, however, executive branch officials are not waiting for congressional guidance to improve the security of classified networks. There is already a focused effort to develop "a new administrative structure" for the management of classified electronic records, an Administration official told Secrecy News. "I can't say anything about it," he said, implying that there was something significant to say.
CRS ON U.S. AID TO PAKISTAN
A retrospective tabulation of U.S. aid to Pakistan, up to and including the FY2012 budget request, was issued in updated form yesterday by the Congressional Research Service. See "Direct Overt U.S. Aid and Military Reimbursements to Pakistan, FY2001-FY2012," May 4, 2011:
WANTED: BETTER ACCESS TO CRS REPORTS
In a news story today about the imminent arrival of the federal government's debt limit ("Debt Ceiling Has Some Give, Until Roof Falls In" by Binyamin Appelbaum), the New York Times cited a Congressional Research Service report that was performed "in February" concerning the impact of the debt limit.
But that report has been updated and superseded, though one might not know it due to congressional secrecy policy, which precludes direct public access to CRS publications. The current version is "Reaching the Debt Limit: Background and Potential Effects on Government Operations," April 27, 2011:
I will be participating in a panel discussion on "The Future of CRS," including prospects for improving public access to non-confidential CRS reports, on Monday, May 9 at 2 pm in 2203 Rayburn House Office Building. It is sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation.
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.
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Secrecy News is archived at:SUPPORT the FAS Project on Government Secrecy with a donation here: | <urn:uuid:efcaa419-7a97-48fc-b5f0-00cf3c756cc6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2011/05/050511.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916081 | 708 | 1.65625 | 2 |
history of Hardcourt
I'm trying to recreate an early history of the hardcourt game. Here's what I have so far.
Jay Grisham, a Seattle courier, brought the grass game to the city from the Olympic Peninsula. They played with wood mallets and a mini soccer ball.
Lacking reasonable access to grass fields, they played in parking garages on 5th/6th sts. in downtown Seattle.
When Jay left Seattle for a stint with the Coast Guard, he left his mallets with his friends, Matt Messinger and Tim Mason.
The first real Hardcourt games were played in the winter/spring of '99/2000 on carpet in a stockroom at Kozmo.com. Kozmo eventually tore out the carpet, and they played on concrete.
Matt built many of the first mallets specifically for Hardcourt out of bamboo. They experimented with differengt balls. Batting cage balls, tennis balls, and a ball made with wadded up newspaper and duct tape were tried. They eventually settled on a roller hockey ball. There were many other players. I especially remember Guy and Irving. I can't remember your last names. Forgive me.
Although many games were played before, the first verifiable Hardcourt polo event which was witnessed by civilians was an exhibition game put on at the Bike Expo by the Courier Association Of Seattle (C.A.O.S.) in the spring of 2001 at the convention center in south Seattle. I rode a BMX, most people rode their work bikes. No-one had a polo bike. I think we used a street hockey ball; mallets were wood or bamboo.
The game spread from Seattle to Portland, and by 2002 Tad Bamford created the first polo club, the Axles of Evil. Portland refined the game, and created the modern ski pole/PVC mallet which we use today.
There were several West Coast tournaments during this time, most notably the Messman Masquerade (Seattle), and the first West Side Polo Invite (Portland), which were essentially still pickup games. Seattle was still the dominant force in Hardcourt. The sport continued to grow in popularity, and there several inter-city tournaments between 2003/04.
I brought the sport East from Seattle to Philadelphia in the winter/spring of 2001/02. I was still playing a dinosaur game with wood mallets of my own construction, and a ball made with newspaper and duct tape. We used rocks and beer cans for goalposts. We shot from the narrow end of the mallet, and we tapped out at the nearest sideline.
The first major Hardcourt polo tournament was scheduled for the the Seattle World's in the summer of 2003. it was a miserable failure, and, after the organizers lost their venue we played a pickup tournament on the roof/parking deck of Castle Superstore, a big box porno and sex toy shop on the south shore of Lake Union. I played on a team with a dude from somewhere, and another dude from someplace. We didn't win. A men's and a women's team winners were declared (this was back when almost as many girls as boys played polo. I miss those days). I have no idea who the men's winners were. One of the three girls on the winning women's team was my girlfriend, Kathryn. Anybody, please help fill in the blanks. This tournament was Ottowa's introduction to the sport, and I have a sneaking suspicion that Brian was one of the dudes on my team, but that's too wierd to think about. I'm pretty sure Guy from Seattle was on the winning men's team. There were a mixture of wood, bamboo and ski pole/PVC mallets. We played with a street hockey ball, and I don't remember where we tapped out. People were still playing on their work bikes.
The 2004 WSPI in Portland was probably the first successful Hardcourt tournament, with around 15 teams from at least two cities. Seattle, Portland, maybe Vancouver? Help me out.
Polo continued to grow in Philly; we switched to a street hockey ball, but still played with wooden mallets. Corey Hilliard (AKA No really, put your pants back on, nobody wants to see that) organized the first East Side Polo Invite in 2005. I remember Ottawa first, Philly second, NY third. The Philly team was Capriotti, Alex and another dude named Notme. Ottowa was Alexis, Angelo and Jen? NY was Brad, Jared and ? This was the first tournament where I remember there being a fixed point where players had to tap out. Some of us had bikes specifically built for polo. There were fewer than a dozen teams.
In 2006 the NACCs came to Philly, and there was a tournament on a similar scale. This time I think it was Ottowa, NY, Philly. I know the Philly team was Alex, Capriotti, and Dave Wagner. Other cities please fill in your rosters. Most people played on polo bikes.
In 2007 shit really blew up, and I think most people have a pretty good idea of their history from there on, but there are some gaps left to fill. NY made the first wheel covers, Philly refined super low gearing. I would love to hear from the Pacific Northwest about turnout (numbers of teams) at the WSPI from 2005 to present. I would love to get firm numbers from NY and DC for teams at the ESPIs 2007 and 08. I want to know when Vancouver started playing. Although some people have said that New York learned about polo from Portland at the 2005 Worlds, others insist that NY was playing Hardcourt as early as 2004. What's up? The upper Midwest apparently made their transition from a grass game in '07 after Ben Schultz returned from ESPI, but in the fall at Northsides Milwaukee was still new to Hardcourt. I'm sure the rest of the country has stories to tell, and I want to know how the South and the lower Midwest found the sport too. I think that really, the most pressing question facing us today is, if I've been playing this sport so much longer than the rest of you fucking amateurs, how come some of you assholes are so much better at it than I am? | <urn:uuid:82b89a4b-f907-406e-9d7b-9ea8f13f116f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://leagueofbikepolo.com/forum/general/2008/09/16/history-of-hardcourt | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985748 | 1,298 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Here is the complete version of my response which was excerpted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Saturday:
Constitutional Amendments have historically extended human rights, not curtailed them. The last movement to restrict individual liberty--the 18th Amendment which brought on Prohibition--was a disaster. An Amendment limiting the definition of Marriage would do the same and brand the United States as a repressive society among the civilized world. The United States is not a theocracy and should not make laws based on religious principles, period. | <urn:uuid:1466c187-0a7b-4fc3-ba14-9e8af22ed906> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hankdrake.blogspot.com/2003/08/constitutional-amendment-to-define.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958764 | 101 | 1.625 | 2 |