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The bottled water industry sold 8.8 billion gallons of water in 2010, generating nearly $11 billion in profits. Yet plastic water bottles create huge environmental problems. The energy required to produce and transport these bottles could fuel an estimated 1.5 million cars for a year, yet approximately 75 percent of water bottles are not recycled – they end up in landfills, litter roadsides, and pollute waterways and oceans. And while public tap water is subject to strict safety regulations, the bottled water industry is not required to report testing results for its products. According to a study, 10 of the most popular brands of bottled water contain a wide range of pollutants, including pharmaceuticals, fertilizer residue, and arsenic.
What you can do:
(5) Turn down the heat
The US Department of Energy estimates that consumers can save up to 15 percent on heating and cooling bills just by adjusting their thermostats. Turning down the heat by 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit for eight hours can result in savings of 5–15 percent on your home heating bill.
What you can do:
(6) Support food recovery programs
Each year, roughly a third of all food produced for human consumption – approximately 1.3 billion tons – gets lost or wasted, including 34 million tons in the United States, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Grocery stores, bakeries, and other food providers throw away tons of food daily that is perfectly edible but is cosmetically imperfect or has passed its expiration date. In response, food recovery programs run by homeless shelters or food banks collect this food and use it to provide meals for the hungry, helping to divert food away from landfills and into the bellies of people who need it most. | <urn:uuid:a21f145e-9eb5-4113-b34e-6f597090b927> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://m.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/Change-Agent/2012/0103/12-simple-ways-to-go-green-in-2012/(page)/3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938808 | 356 | 3.390625 | 3 |
Advantages to conversion
DTV has several advantages over analog TV, the most significant being that digital channels take up less bandwidth (and the bandwidth needs are continuously variable, at a corresponding cost in image quality depending on the level of compression). This means that digital broadcasters can provide more digital channels in the same space, provide high-definition television service, or provide other non-television services such as multimedia or interactivity. DTV also permits special services such as multiplexing (more than one program on the same channel), electronic program guides and additional languages, spoken or subtitled. The sale of non-television services may provide an additional revenue source. In many cases, viewers perceive DTV to have superior picture quality, improved audio quality, and easier reception than analog.
Disadvantages to conversion
The analog switch-off ruling, which so far has met with little opposition from consumers or manufacturers, would render all non-digital televisions obsolete on the switch-off date, unless connected to an external off-the-air tuner, analog or digital cable, or a satellite system. An external converter box (an ATSC tuner) can be added to non-digital televisions to lengthen their useful lifespan. Several of these devices have already been shown, and while few are currently available, American industry and government statements predict that low-cost units will be available in January 2008.
Some existing analog equipment will be less functional with the use of a converter box. For example, television remote controls will no longer be effective at changing channels, because that function will instead be handled by the converter box. Similarly, video recorders for analog signals (including both tape-based VCRs and hard-drive-based DVRs) will not be able to select channels, limiting their ability to automatically record programs via a timer or based on downloaded program information. Also, older, handheld televisions, which rely primarily on over-the-air signals, and battery operation, will be rendered impractical, since the proposed converter boxes are not portable, nor powered with batteries. Portable radios which feature the ability to listen to television audio on VHF channels 2-13 would also lose their ability to function, while television stations which formerly broadcast on Channel 6 and were able to have their analog audio heard on common radios using a quirk in the system where their audio could be heard on the far end of the FM band at 87.7, would lose the ability for commuters to listen to their broadcasts.
If new TVs contain only an ATSC tuner, it prevents older devices, such as VCRs and video game consoles with only an analog RF output, from connecting to the TV. Connection would require an analog to digital converter box, which is the opposite as what is currently being sold. Such a box would also likely introduce additional delay into the video signal. | <urn:uuid:aa01521f-2350-4970-b990-5f2013622079> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.local15tv.com/guides/dtv/story/Advantages-and-Disadvantages-to-Conversion/T3ib4dSMCkCgB2YoD5QAIg.cspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956191 | 584 | 2.4375 | 2 |
Brasília’s Attempt to Mask Its Legacy Infuriates Brazilian Architects
Last week Brazilian architects protested Brasília’s engagement with Singapore’s Jurong Consultants to devise a new urban master plan for Brazil’s capital. The result was a protest at an annual Institute of Architects of Brazil (IAB) meeting in Rio de Janeiro. Donning masks and chanting Oscar Niemeyer’s and Lúcio Costa’snames, the architects and urban planners shouted their disapproval of outsourcing Brasília’s future to a foreign country.
Of course Singapore is a leader in urban planning; nonetheless Brazil is laden with talented architects, designers and planners. True, Brasília has its share of problems as the result of unchecked growth. What worked for Niemeyer and Costa, the fathers of Brasília and Brazil’s modernist take on design, 50 years ago must be amended now so that the capital can grow sustainably in the future. Brazil’s leadership in architecture and design is one of the great legacies of the 20th century: Brasília should embrace it, not turn its back on the country’s design heritage.
Photo courtesy Wikipedia (Beth Castelo) | <urn:uuid:721ae68a-a143-4306-bcc9-bfcd3db0b84f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://greengopost.com/brasilia-legacy-infuriates-brazilian-architects/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904663 | 261 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Microsoft Technology Vision of the Future
What a neat little video to check out what is going on in Microsoft's big brains for the next 8+ years. We have to guess that these innovations are already in the works, right?
Some other cool Future Technology things to check out:
A top Futurist who is doing, and has done some very exciting things, Ray Kurzweil, might be worth a check out.
As we look to the future do not forget the past, are you familiar with Moore's Law? For you and I the non-scientists, it equates to a double of computing speeds every two years while prices remain a constant. For Moore's law this means today is measured as x1, then in ten years technology will be 32x.
Is your business ready?
For business how does all of this help? Digest all of these future tidbits, then, look at your business & industry. How can you innovate beyond where you are today? Is it possible for your ENTIRE staff to be working from home and or the field and still be effective? What if the decisions you made today started working you toward a more reliable computer network and technology infrastructure? What if you were 5, 10, 15 years ahead of your competitors?
P.S. We can't promise we can predict the future of your industry, but we might be able to offer a 2nd opinion on your business's technology. Give us a shout, fill out our Free Consultation form and maybe your technology decisions can start being based upon a future plan, not just avoiding tomorrow's headaches. | <urn:uuid:8f3dd4f4-7e44-405a-8981-f3cd66272252> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://absolutenetworkingsystems.com/blog/bid/72950/Microsoft-Technology-Vision-of-the-Future | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955475 | 328 | 1.625 | 2 |
See all our coverage of the 2012 Global Family Planning Summit here.
Albert Einstein once said, “Never memorize something that you can look up.” As we head into the July 11th London Summit on Family Planning, we can focus more on concepts than numbers, because we know this: 222 million women in developing countries want to avoid pregnancy, but lack effective contraception. The London Summit will aim to meet the contraceptive needs of 120 million women in the world’s poorest countries. These “new users” will cost an additional $4 billion in resources over the next eight years.
What we don’t know, or rather have a hard time remembering, is that opportunities like this can become their own special universe. More attention (and criticism) is placed on the inputs —- such as framing, messaging, and logistics –- than on the more important outputs, meaning those 120 million women and their needs.
First, this groundbreaking global convening is adding something substantial, so let’s calibrate our expectations while trying to hit it out of the park. Those close to the planning of the Summit have said from the beginning: July 11th is the promise; what follows is the fulfillment of that promise. I take this to mean that the real work happens after we leave London. This will be accountability for donors, follow-up on pledges, and the design of a funding mechanism that promotes and protects rights, access, equity, choice and quality of care.
I haven’t before seen an opportunity like this, and we must be unified behind our shared agenda that every girl and woman deserves the opportunity to determine her own future. It is up to us to talk about these interventions as life-saving for individuals, transformative for communities, and cost-effective and multiplier investments for nations. It is up to us to make it work, in real time, and in real terms.
Second, the age-old advocacy divide risks playing out here: the Summit promises a ton of new money for family planning, but places less focus on the over-arching agenda of sexual and reproductive health and rights. But is it all or nothing? Family planning contributes to the well-being of women, and helps fulfill the promise of planetary sustainability and economic growth. Not too shabby.
Yet family planning is merely one piece of an individual woman’s sexual and reproductive health needs over the course of her lifetime. Other needs could include access to safe abortion, sexual health care as a young and unmarried woman, and a range of contraceptive methods. Again, the fulfillment of that promise is up to us. No one is denying that family planning is a means to a bigger and bolder end, and we cannot deny any woman the full realization of her health and rights.
So let’s engage with Summit conveners in a constructive, sleeves-rolled-up sort of way, behind our shared agenda. Let’s spend our energy attacking our true enemy — the people who peddle misogyny, fear of women’s power, and good ole Puritan-style discomfort with sex. It displays a profound weakness of the progressive front if we spend more time attacking our allies than we do our true critics. PAI has a big bucket of ice-cold water to throw at opponents’ repressed and perverse arguments — and we need more partners to help us lift it!
And that gets me to my final reminder: believe it or not, this Summit isn’t about us. By us I mean the civil society community who alternately calls ourselves family planners, reproductive justice advocates, gender defenders, and a host of other echo-chamber worthy monikers.
This moment is about women and girls who deserve the opportunity to “have it all,” if you will. I believe we have all the consensus we need on that front.
The train is leaving the station — and there are tickets for the willing. Join our journey, and watch women transform the 21st century. | <urn:uuid:e35afa62-5a92-40f7-972a-92bccd7451e6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://my.firedoglake.com/rhrealitycheck/2012/07/10/perspectives-on-the-london-family-planning-summit-2012-seeing-the-forest-and-the-trees/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941739 | 819 | 1.929688 | 2 |
Getting the Most from PowerPoint - Package for CD Feature
Fri 8th August 2008
Among the less well known features included is "Package for CD", known as "Pack and Go" in PowerPoint 2000 and prior versions. Using this tool the business user can package a presentation for distribution on CD or DVD along with all graphics, fonts and music as well as PowerPoint Viewer, guaranteeing that all the intended recipients will be able to view the slide show on their computer, even if they have not the full version of Microsoft PowerPoint.
The feature is launched by left clicking on the Office icon in PowerPoint and then selecting the "Publish" menu followed by "Package for CD". The user then has the possibility of naming the CD, adding or removing additional presentations to the package and determining the order in which the packaged slide shows will be played. By default PowerPoint Viewer is included in the packaged CD; the user is able to modify how the presentations will be played in the viewer. All linked files, such as graphics or Excel charts are also embedded into the package and the user can also ensure that the presentation will be displayed correctly on any computer by embedding any custom fonts utilised.
Package for CD also includes security options; passwords can be set to prevent unintended recipients from modifying or if necessary from opening the presentations and the files can be checked to prevent private or sensitive information, such as the author's name, being disclosed. Once finished, the packaged presentations can either be saved to a network drive for internal distribution or copied to a CD or a portable USB flash drive. To view the presentation the recipient simply inserts the CD and if Autorun is selected the presentation will automatically be launched. Alternatively by opening the CD or folder and right clicking on the PowerPoint file and selecting "Show" the presentation will be played.
By combining this feature with a thorough knowledge of slide show design acquired on an advanced PowerPoint training course, the user will become proficient in the production of professional presentations transforming PowerPoint into a potent tool for communicating messages to a business's stakeholders and consumers.
Original article appears here: | <urn:uuid:83ac88ae-bd75-458e-89ed-40bb07cd91ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.microsofttraining.net/article-352-getting-most-from-powerpoint.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921015 | 419 | 1.53125 | 2 |
By Seth Colter Walls
By Brett Koshkin
By Spencer Wilking
By Christina Black
By Calum Marsh
By J. Pablo
By Phillip Mlynar
By Jenna Sauers
In 1958, Miles Davis said of Louis Armstrong, "You can't play nothing on trumpet that doesn't come from him, not even modern shit." (Quincy Troupe has him saying it again in the 1989 autobiography.) What Miles said was not literally true. People routinely played things that were light-years ahead of what Armstrong was doing in the 1920s, and tremendous harmonic, formal, rhythmic, and communicative advances continue unabated. So what did the Prince of Darkness mean?
In his essay "Plato, the Philosopher," Ralph Waldo Emerson supplies one possible answer: "It is fair to credit the broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis." Indeed, Armstrong's seminal recordings (his "thesis") contain the "broadest generalization" of what it means to be a jazz musician. But "all the particulars"? How about these: The spontaneous creation of new melodies, an extraordinarily pliant approach to phrasing and articulation, andhere's the "modern shit"an understanding of the plasticity of time as a resource for the improvising musician. If all of Western philosophy is merely commentary on Plato, then all of jazz is, in some sense, commentary on Louis. * Armstrong's achievement is amply evident in two solos on "Basin Street Blues." (Both can be found on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1923-1934.) In the first, recorded in 1928, Armstrong ornaments the embedded melody with quick up-and-back arpeggios and little turns that visit the upper and lower chromatic tones. By the fifth bar it becomes clear that Armstrong is creating, out of the simple material of Spencer Williams's tune, a new and complex melody with all kinds of implied counterpoint. In bars seven and eight, Armstrong develops two independent melodies and weaves them together. The uppermost melody is rhythmically straightforward, and descends from a high G to the G an octave below. The lower melody is riff-like and begins with the leap from B flat to E flat. This intensely swinging bit of complexity ends with a downward arpeggiation of C-minor 7th, leading into an approach-note pattern that resolves on the third of the chord.
Throughout this solo Armstrong plays with our perception of time, pushing some phrases forward and holding others back, using a stuttering attack. Where other players were hemmed in by four plain quarter notes, Louis heard a vast expanse and infinite possibility. This solo beautifully demonstrates the "fractal" nature of Louis's time sense"infinity in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour" (or quarter note): an infinite amount of complexity contained in a finite amount of space/time.
A number of Armstrong's solos from this period (check out "Sweethearts on Parade") are living things, going through a process of germination, growth, and decay. So, too, our second "Basin Street Blues," recorded in 1933, which begins with a triplet figure that serves as the germ for the entire solo. The first six bars are a natural efflorescence from a simple seed, completely free of the restrictions of bar lines or chord changes. The turnaround pattern in bars seven and eight begins with an operatic gesture in the high register, leading down in coruscating fashion through a reverse arpeggiation of C-minor 7th flat-5, a delicious double chromatic approach into A, and finally grazing upon the flat 13th of the F-7th chord.
Two utterly different approaches, yet they can be played together as a duet, and sound like they had been composed that way. The fecundity of Armstrong's compositional mind allowed him to improvise solos that were completely different in shape, placement, and emphasis, yet always stemming organically from the melody.
One important facet of Armstrong's lapidary genius is the fusion of European-derived melodic material with Afro-Caribbean rhythmic complexity. The cornetist Peter Ecklund says that it wasn't until he began working in salsa bands that he understood the Caribbean origin of much of Armstrong's rhythmic language. Using Armstrong's classic 1927 solo on "Potato Head Blues," Ecklund deconstructs the fusion of these elements. Play just the notes in straight 3/4 time, devoid of jazz feel, and it sounds like a waltz by Franz Lehar! Then play the rhythms only, on one pitch, and you hear a very hip Afro-Cuban drum solo.
No amount of strictly musical analysis or influence-tracing forensics, however, can explain the heart of the matterthe luminosity and perpetual freshness of Armstrong's music. These qualities, as well as his essentially abstract ability to affect our perception of time, link him with the other artistic and scientific revolutionaries of the first half of the 20th century. Recently I had a very public fantasy (in Ken Burns's Jazz) in which Werner Heisenberg attends a Louis Armstrong concert in Copenhagen, in 1933. Did I go too far? Actually, I didn't go far enough. How do we recognize transcendence in a work of art? Perhaps a couple of physicists can help us out.
So here is Heisenberg, the 1932 Nobel Prize winner who figured out quantum mechanics, attending that fabulous Armstrong gig at the Tivoli Garden with his pal Erwin Schroedinger, who won the 1933 Nobel Prize for his work on wave equation. Both men are delighted and moved by Louis's performance. After the show they go to one of the Tivoli's cafés to decompress. (Schroedinger's lines are from his essay "Why Not Talk Physics," Heisenberg's from "Science and the Beautiful.")
After a couple of Tuborgs, Schroedinger sighs and says, "The scientific picture of the world around me is very deficient. It puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet; it knows nothing of the beautiful."
Heisenberg sets down his glass. "Perhaps I may remind you of the second definition of beauty, which stems from Plotinus: 'Beauty is the translucence, through the material phenomenon, of the eternal splendor of the One.' "
Schroedinger, nodding, knocks down the last of his beer. "Science can describe in full detail all that happens from the moment the waves of compression and dilation reach our ear to the moment when certain glands secrete a salty fluid that emerges from our eyes. But science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, or moves us to tears."
It's that translucence, that light shining through, that brings us to tears, wherever we find it. Music notation is a blunt instrument whose limitations become most apparent when you attempt to notate the extraordinary details of rhythm, articulation, phrasing, tone color, and nuance that are part of great improvised performances such as Armstrong's two versions of "Basin Street Blues." They can only be truly understood when heard. As Sidney Bechet put it, "You've got to be in the sun to feel the sun."
More articles in this week's Voice Jazz Supplement.
Find everything you're looking for in your city
Find the best happy hour deals in your city
Get today's exclusive deals at savings of anywhere from 50-90%
Check out the hottest list of places and things to do around your city | <urn:uuid:35b6fc34-c2f4-41b1-a842-8d726838b48e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-06-05/music/satchmo-the-philosopher/full/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946988 | 1,615 | 2.15625 | 2 |
Flavin, Dan (flāˈvĭn) [key], 1933–96, American sculptor, b. New York City. In the early 1960s, Flavin experimented with fluorescent lights, bending them into complex, angular shapes. His sculptures, which are closely related to minimalism in underlying approach, incorporate installations of commercially made fixtures that diffuse colored light, thus breaking down or defining the space around them. Flavin's work is represented in many public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim and Los Angeles County museums. Much of his late work was extremely large and site-specific. A gallery devoted to his work opened in Houston, Tex., in 1998 and features a large light frieze installed on its outer and inner surfaces. When Flavin died, he left instructions for the creation of his last work, a vast light construction, Untitled (Marfa Project), that was completed in 2001 and occupies six buildings at Donald Judd's huge Marfa, Tex., art space.
See studies by J. F. Ragheb, ed. (1999) and M. Govan et al. (2004).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
More on Dan Flavin from Infoplease:
See more Encyclopedia articles on: American and Canadian Art: Biographies | <urn:uuid:a5fafc4d-5f34-4d36-ba1b-1a12e57dc8a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/people/flavin-dan.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948173 | 280 | 2.234375 | 2 |
Child protection organisation the Parents Television Council has claimed 19 per cent of US game retailers will sell M-rated games to underage shoppers.
The PTC sent 109 children aged 12 to 16 to 109 stores US-wide, and found that 21 of them were prepared to sell the young spies titles ESRB-rated as suitable for those aged 17 years and above.
Ratings board the ESRB has dismissed the report as having "questionable methodology", but noted that it was an improvement on a 2008 study which found 35 per cent of retailers would apparently sell to minors.
"Frankly, the latest PTC member sting operation actually verifies the effectiveness of the ESRB rating system and the ever-increasing support it receives from retailers," director of communications Eliot Mizrachi told Gamasutra.
The PTC used its findings to support next week's ruling on Schwarzenegger vs EMA, a supreme court decision on whether the US requires further restrictions on the sale and display of violent videogames.
"The industry's PR spin about how ratings empower parents is specious if unaccompanied minors are able to purchase adult-rated games," said PTC president Tim Winter.
"A California law that would simply put consequences in place for retailers who sell exceedingly violent games to minors has been fought tooth and nail by the gaming industry and will come before the U.S. Supreme Court in a matter of days.
"We urge the Court to uphold the California law and heed the calls of concerned parents by requiring retailers to check IDs."
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests) | <urn:uuid:6451ec49-3149-4a5c-9586-9947b65681e2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/threads/340182-quot-Questionable-quot-report-finds-19-of-stores-sell-M-rated-games-to-minors | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959404 | 327 | 1.554688 | 2 |
BY BOB HOLT
The Food and Drug Administration has just approved a new drug that can delay the path of breast cancer by about six months, according to studies.
A drug known as Kadcyla combines established breast cancer medication Herceptin with a drug called DM1 to attack the growth of cancer cells.
The drugs will battle cancer cells that are filled with an overabundance of a protein called HER2. Kadcyla, along with Herceptin and DMI look for specific cells with the cancer-related proteins without affecting healthy cells, according to Reuters.
Doctor Melody Cobleigh of Rush University Medical Center called the new medication a “revolutionary way of treating cancer." She said, according to The Associated Press, "This antibody goes seeking out the tumor cells, gets internalized and then explodes them from within. So it's very kind and gentle on the patients, no hair loss, no nausea, no vomiting.”
The FDA based their approval on a trial of 991 patients facing a worsening form of metastatic breast cancer that had already been treated with Herceptin and a chemotherapy drug.
Half the women received Kadcyla and the other half took standard breast cancer drugs Tykerb, and Xeloda. The New York Times reported that patients getting Kadcyla lived for 30.9 months on average, compared with about 25.1 months for the other group.
Kadcyla also showed fewer side effects. About 59 percent of women taking Tykerb and Xeloda experienced serious side effects from the medication, to only 43 percent of the group on Kadcyl. But Kadcyla will still carry a warning that it may cause liver and heart damage, or life-threatening birth defects.
The product, manufactured by Roche's Genentech unit, is expected to be available in about two weeks. WSJ.com reports that it will cost $9,800 a month, but Roche said a patient-assistance program will help patients with payments. | <urn:uuid:cf6738ea-b596-43d0-99bf-36cac21f0a38> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/healthquest/fda-approves-drug-that-delays-effects-of-breast-cancer | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952598 | 410 | 2.5 | 2 |
Saginaw MI Oral History Project continues without grant
Saginaw, MI: Oral History project continues w/o grant. Lives of minority residents who helped build the city.
Saginaw News (Mlive) story.
It’s a long haul to get everything completed. Whaddaya do when the grant money runs out? Continue on, at a much slower pace.
…A Saginaw native delved inside the lives of minority residents who helped build the city.
Michelle S. Johnson, a former professor at Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, interviewed 35 black and Hispanic residents beginning in 1999.
The result is the Saginaw Oral History Project, which Johnson hopes offers a peek into the religious, economic and cultural impact minorities had on their hometown.
When the grant expired two years ago, Johnson said, she still had about 100 hours of work to do to finish the project.
She hopes to get a grant for the $6,000 she estimates it will cost to finish getting each tape into written form. If she’s successful, she said, she could have all of the histories available within three months. If not, finishing the project on her own, without funding, could take several years. | <urn:uuid:78b31268-9c9c-4c5e-a67d-e687d27914ed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://familyoralhistory.us/news/view/saginaw_mi_oral_history_project_continues_without_grant/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949387 | 267 | 1.773438 | 2 |
(That line is sometimes called "the radius vector").
| Illustrating Kepler's 2nd law:
segments AB and CD take
equal times to cover.
An ellipse is symmetric elongated oval, with two foci symmetrically locates towards the "sharper" ends--one focus contains the Sun, the other is empty. (Draw such an ellipse.)
If we bring the foci closer and closer, the ellipse appears more and more like a circle, and when they overlap, we do have a circle.
[ The Earth's orbit, and most planetary orbits, are very close to circles. If one you were shown the Earth's orbit without the Sun at the focus, you would probably not be able to distinguish it from a circle. With the Sun included, though, you might notice it was slightly off-center.]
The point of Kepler's 2nd law is that, although the orbit is symmetric, the motion is not.
A planet speeds up as it approaches the Sun, gets its greatest velocity when passing closest, then slows down again.
(The star S2 speeds up to 2% of velocity of light when approaching the black hole at the center of our galaxy)
What happen is best understood in terms of energy. As the planet moves away from the Sun (or the satellite from Earth), it loses energy by overcoming the pull of gravity, and it slows down, like a stone thrown upwards. And like the stone, it regains its energy (completely--no air resistance in space) as it comes back.
There is an easy exercise here, which is also in section #12A
Suppose you have a planet whose smallest/greatest distance from the center are
(r1, r2)--they are called perihelion and aphelion [ap-helion]) if the center is the Sun, or (perigee, apogee) if the center is the Earth. (Distances are always measured from the center of the bodies, or from centers of gravity)
Say it is a planet orbiting the Sun. Then
--the velocity V1 at perihelion is the fastest one for the orbit. It is therefore the distance covered in one second at perihelion.
--the velocity V2 at aphelion is the slowest one for the orbit. It is therefore the distance covered in one second at aphelion.
The area swept by the "radius vector" r during one second after perihelion is a right-angled triangle of base V1,
so its area is 0.5 r1 V1
The area swept by the "radius vector" r during one second after aphelion is a right-angled triangle of base V2,
so its area is 0.5 r2 V2
By the law of areas, both areas are the same, so
r1 V1 =
Divide both sides by r1V2
If the aphelion r2 is 3 times the distance of perihelion, the velocity V2 there is 3 times slower.
(Note: this ratio only works at these two points of the orbit. At other point the velocity and the radius are not perpendicular.)
When are we closest to the Sun? About January 4th, by about 1.5%, not enough to make the Sun look different.
Here is a quick way to demonstrate this asymmetry (although you may not have time to cover it in class). Draw an ellipse, with the long axis and a line perpendicular to it through the Sun)
It so happens (pure accident) that spring equinox and fall equinox, when day and night are equal, typically March 21, September 22 or 23, fall very close to that perpendicular line.
Look at the schematic view of the Earth's orbit in section #3. The long axis (as defined above) is the line connecting December-June in that drawing, and the perpendicular line is the one connecting March-September.
If the orbit were exactly a circle (in which case what we call "long axis would be completely arbitrary, a diameter no different from any other), then by Kepler's 2nd law, the Earth would move at a constant speed and spend equal times in the summer half and the winter half of the year. Actually, it spends about 2 days fewer in the winter half! (Take a calendar and count days from one equinox to the other). That may mean
- The winter half is shorter, or
- The Earth moves faster in the winter half
Actually, both conditions hold, if Earth is closest to the Sun around January 4. The "half" of the ellipse (determined by the perpendicular line defined above) which is closer to the Sun is smaller (demonstrate with a drawing of an ellipse that is notably oval), and by Kepler's 2nd law, the Earth moves faster when closer to the Sun.
The fact the northern hemisphere is closest to the Sun in mid-winter and most distance in mid-summer, moderates the seasons, making them milder.
In the southern hemisphere, they would be harsher, although the big oceans there moderate this effect.
But the axis of the Earth moves around a cone, in about 26000 years. In 13,000 years we will be closest to the Sun in midsummer, and climate will get harsher. As described in section 7, this may be one effect tied to the origins of ice ages, but we do not have time for details.
Kepler's 3rd Law | <urn:uuid:f8af4af5-d8f8-4918-945e-2b0ee5c667f2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Kep3laws.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948259 | 1,160 | 4.21875 | 4 |
The U.S. judicial system exists to uphold the laws initiated by the nation's legislature.
The Federal Judiciary's site, U.S. Courts, is, in large part, intended to provide individuals with forms and information relevant to legal proceedings with which they may be involved. However, noteworthy resources do exist, including an educational resources page.
This resource page offers brief overviews of major court cases and several court simulations. The simulations are designed in a number of formats including dramatic scripts and debates; and they are intended to present Constitutional amendments as relevant to teenage lives. Topics include "Teen House Party Search" and "Cell Phone Surveillance."
A number of other features may also prove handy to you. These included a comparison of federal and state courts (cases, judges, and structure) in the form of two comparable lists of bullet points; commonly used judicial vocabulary; and faqs addressing federal courts, jurors, and the Judicial Conference, among other topics.
Last, but not least, you may be searching for a way to tie current events into your history classroom, particularly in a civics class. If that is the case, you might consider looking into the courts' bankruptcy statistics, which could be used in conjunction with a lesson on the Great Depression. Note that the statistics all correspond to the past 20 years maximum. | <urn:uuid:fc34c660-1439-47f9-83b8-b891932bf5a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.teachinghistory.org/history-content/national-resources/22888 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946198 | 268 | 3.09375 | 3 |
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Spurred by a classroom demonstration involving a sex toy, Tennessee recently enacted a pro-abstinence sex education law that is among the strictest in the nation.
The most debated section of the bill bars educators from promoting "gateway sexual activity." But supporters seemed too squeamish during floor debate to specify what that meant, so critics soon labeled it the "no holding-hands bill."
One thing missing from the debate in the Legislature was a discussion of whether the law signed by Republican Gov. Bill Haslam last month really would help reduce Tennessee's high teenage pregnancy rate. Experts say it won't and warn that it leaves teenagers inadequately educated about sexuality and prevention of pregnancy and disease.
Tennessee's pregnancy rate among girls 15 to 17 has dropped steadily since the first abstinence-focused sex education curriculum was put in place in the 1990s, according to figures from the state Commission on Children and Youth. In 2009, the latest data available, there were 29.6 pregnancies per 1,000 girls, down from a rate of 48.2 in 1998.
Yet the state's teen pregnancy rate remains one of the highest in the nation, according to the New York-based Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization.
Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager for the institute, said state lawmakers across the country began considering more comprehensive sex education programs that talked about abstinence, but also included contraception, about 10 years ago.
Despite declining pregnancy rates around the country, Nash said, there's been a shift by states over the past two years to promote abstinence-only education. A Utah bill that would have prohibited any discussion of contraception or homosexuality in sex education classes passed the Legislature but was vetoed by the governor.
"Our perspective is that comprehensive sex education is appropriate and necessary for young people," she said.
"What we know ... from the research is that comprehensive sex education works. It delays sexual activity, it reduces the number of partners teens have, and it increases contraceptive use. There is very little in the way of any rigorous research that shows that abstinence education has any of these long-term benefits."
Barry Chase, president of Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region, agreed.
"This bill ties the hands of educators in Tennessee and will prevent them from providing the comprehensive education that students want and need and their parents expect," he said.
Rep. Jim Gotto, who sponsored the legislation, disputed the way the bill is being characterized.
"It's not abstinence-only education," said the Nashville Republican. "I'm so sick of people trying to spin it as that ... because they don't like it. The law does specify that the curriculum has to be abstinence-focused, but they can talk about contraception."
Proponents contend abstinence is the most reliable way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Tennessee education officials have said abstinence is already defined in the state's statute, and Haslam said he decided to sign the bill after they assured him it changed little.
But Sen. Jack Johnson, a Franklin Republican who sponsored the bill in his chamber, said the old law was too vague.
"We put in tighter definitions, more clearly defined what abstinence-centered and abstinence-based meant," Johnson said.
The sex ed law now uses the criminal statute on sexual assault to specify acts — such as groping or fondling — that fall under "gateway sexual activity." It also says family life curriculum must not "display or conduct demonstrations with devices specifically manufactured for sexual stimulation." If such incidents do occur, then a parent can sue and a fine can be imposed of at least $500.
Before the current law, Nashville parent Rodrick Glover thought about legal action in 2010 when he found out an anti-AIDS group had visited his 17-year-old daughter's class and demonstrated safe oral sex with a sex toy and a condom.
"I teach my child the power of abstinence," said Glover, whose complaint spurred the drafting of the legislation. "When you start bringing sex toys in, at a point you're stimulating the kids to have sex."
The leader of the group whose presentation concerned Glover agrees the material was inappropriate for a high school audience. He said the incident led to new procedures to adhere to school protocols.
"And we've had no problems for two years," said Joseph Interrante, president of Nashville CARES.
Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, said Tennessee is ahead of most other states and has closed a loophole.
"I think that is unique in that rather than this legislation just saying there needs to be an emphasis on abstinence education, it also prohibits too explicit sex education from being either put in schools under the guise of abstinence education, or in opposition to an abstinence education program," she said.
Democratic Rep. John Deberry supported the new limits on what can be covered in sex ed class as a way to help teenagers from going too far.
"When individuals are touching one another's intimate parts ... this is sexual activity that has its ultimate goal of penetration," said the Memphis Democrat and minister.
Student Josiah Pegues, 14, of Nashville said he's already made up his mind about sex — for now, at least.
"It's best to abstain," said the ninth-grader who aspires to be an FBI agent. "You don't want to get anyone pregnant or get an STD. It could mess up your future." | <urn:uuid:f69b14ac-3955-42e6-97fb-dd7a60787928> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120625/NEWS/120629756 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961745 | 1,118 | 1.914063 | 2 |
301 S. Person St., Raleigh, NC 27601 | 919.664.5737
Dear Parents and Guardians,
Each week our teachers and counselors meet in Professional Learning Teams (PLTs) to analyze student performance data and make decisions about how our program can best meet the diverse needs of our students. We focus our meetings on four essential questions:
1) What is it that we want students to know? 2) How do we know they know it? 3) What do we do if they don't know it? 4) What will we do to continue to challenge our students?
On six Fridays during the year, we release students at 12:00 pm. Early Release Days are used for Professional Development related to achieving our school improvement plan goals.
We feel that this additional protected time for professional collaboration allows us to better serve our students and will have an impact on their academic growth and proficiency. We have increased our student achievement each year for the last three years, and this is due in part to our implementation of PLTs. If you have questions about our program or our use of Professional Learning Teams to increase student achievement, please feel free to email me.
We appreciate your support of our school and of our PLT effort.
Dr. Kengie Bass, Principal | <urn:uuid:bf01ea2c-aef1-4e19-aeee-9bd789847d06> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mooresquarems.wcpss.net/modules/info/?tac=professional_learning_teams | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948269 | 263 | 1.546875 | 2 |
About 800 at-risk youth are targeted under the $8 million effort, which was announced last year after an increase in gang-related violence that included the shooting deaths of five Seattle teens. It aims to reduce youth and gang violence through better enforcement and prevention, including help to young offenders re-entering society, street outreach, counseling, job training and extended hours of activity at local community centers.
The initiative's goal is to cut juvenile violent crime by 50 percent, which officials plan to measure in cases referred to juvenile court, and expulsions and suspensions for violence in Seattle schools.
The plan approved Monday is focused on the Central District, Rainier Valley and Southwest Seattle. Community organizations such as Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, Southwest Youth and Family Services, and Atlantic Street Center have partnered with the city to set up support networks.
Last year, the council approved a first step of $2.7 million but delayed spending more money until it could work with the mayor to hammer out more details, including accountability measures.
Councilman Tim Burgess, who chairs the public safety committee, said Monday the initiative is a sign of "unity in city government on this important issue of youth violence in our neighborhoods."
Councilmembers have been concerned with how to measure the program's success. Burgess said quarterly reports will begin in January, and if a program appears ineffective, money will be diverted to strategies that work.
Councilman Richard McIver said the initiative's goals were "extremely optimistic" and he cautioned against labeling a program as unsuccessful solely because it doesn't hit the 50 percent target.
Modeled after programs tried in cities such as Boston, Chicago and San Jose, Calif., the initiative is budgeted for another $4 million in 2010. Burgess said research has shown 2 to 20 percent drops in crime in other programs.
Monday's vote follows last week's announcement that Mariko Lockhart, the former director of a dropout-prevention program in New Jersey, had been appointed to coordinate the city's youth-violence initiative.
Lockhart was president and state director of Communities In Schools of New Jersey, a partnership among school districts, the business sector and community stakeholders to reduce dropout rates, according to the Mayor's Office. She most recently served as a consultant on management, race and diversity.
Her annual salary is $118,000, spokesman Alex Fryer said.
The mayor also introduced four Seattle police officers last week who have been assigned to middle schools under the initiative. | <urn:uuid:4d4e629c-3139-4350-a6c4-933bfa78f5a2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/City-Council-approves-another-1-3-million-for-1303566.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970153 | 505 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Myanmar’s state media said on Sunday three army personnel were killed when a helicopter crashed in conflict-torn northern Kachin state, rebutting rebel claims that the aircraft had been shot down.
The military helicopter was on a “security and administrative mission” on Friday when “engine failure” forced it to make an emergency landing, according to the English-language New Light of Myanmar newspaper.
“Some parts of the helicopter were damaged, and two pilots and one flight sergeant who were on board sacrificed their lives for the country,” the report said, citing the defence ministry.
Growing fighting between the military and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) has overshadowed Myanmar’s wider political reforms, with the US and UN recently condemning the army’s use of air strikes in the state since December.
The rebels claim the helicopter was being used for aerial offensives and troop transportation and said it crashed in their territory after it was hit by KIA fire.
“This is true that they shot down [the helicopter], not an emergency landing,” said James Lum Dau, spokesman for the KIA’s political wing.
AFP was unable to verify either the government or rebel claims.
Tens of thousands of people have been displaced in Kachin – which borders China – since June 2011 when a 17-year ceasefire between the government and the KIA broke down. The number of casualties is unknown.
The intensification of the unrest in recent weeks is likely to further frustrate efforts to secure a peace deal in the region, observers have warned.
Myanmar has struck tentative ceasefires with most of the other major ethnic rebel groups, but several rounds of talks with the Kachin have shown little tangible progress.
The rebels accuse the government of pushing for a dialogue based only on a ceasefire and troop withdrawals and not addressing longstanding demands for greater political rights.
President Thein Sein defended the army’s response to the Kachin rebellion, in comments reported in state media on Friday, saying the Tatmadaw – Myanmar’s army – had done everything possible “to make positive contributions to the peace process”.
Some experts have cast doubt over the level of control Thein Sein, a former general, exerts over army units in Kachin after an order to end military offensives in December 2011 was apparently ignored. | <urn:uuid:84d57db0-2a3c-4708-afc2-40f49f7160cf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.scmp.com/print/news/asia/article/1127209/myanmar-army-rebels-trade-claims-over-helicopter-crash | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970353 | 500 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Shelter from the Night
A series of stories about the local emergency shelter
The Bridge Emergency Shelter is open every year from mid-October to mid-April, providing a facility for people in need of shelter from the cold winter nights.
Over a one year period, two people have died in the park.
The shelter, along with the Cortez Day Labor center, work to give residents a place to stay and the hope of finding temporary work.
In this series of stories, the Journal looks at the shelter, the people who use the facilities and the men and women who volunteer and work at the shelter. | <urn:uuid:8b1dbfe1-c7ae-4a8d-88a8-82c558dbc5fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cortezjournal.com/article/20120724/NEWS/701279999/0/COLUMNISTS09/Shelter-from-the-Night | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966255 | 126 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Here's something wonderful for fans of new Who! I just discovered this and it is amazing and exciting!!
For each new episode of Doctor Who the BBC website has a section called "The Fourth Dimension" (good name) which contains little bits of trivia for each episode. Within the text there are some words that are in italics. The use of italics seemed somewhat random and out of place. I noted each word, and discovered that they formed a legible sentence. I checked over each episode and sure enough, there were the italic words again. I've noted each of these sentences for your reading pleasure.
The Doctor's Wife sentence was a clue. The spot beyond the Doctor's home planet is the full stop/period after the last word in the text: Gallifrey.
When you click on this you are taken to a hidden page and this video titled: Analysis Lessons. Which happens to be an anagram of Lonely Assassins... I'm not sure if this has any reference but it is so crazy cool exciting!! My inner fan is going wild right now.
I hope you enjoy this and I shall certainly be on the lookout for future episode clues which I'll post here... | <urn:uuid:0bfdbe97-a481-4564-905a-2b8e6e63a680> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thefourthdimension.co.uk/2011/05/hidden-clues-in-bbc-doctor-who-website.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967806 | 243 | 1.585938 | 2 |
The long, hot German summer has managed to drain the energy from a vivid debate concerning Germany’s role in Europe. But related questions from early 2010 – such as responses to Greece’s debt crisis, what happened to German leadership, and (more broadly) why has Germany fallen out of love with Europe – have not gone away.
Germany’s extreme reluctance to aid Greece, and its visible retreat from its former role as committed leader of the European Union, had led many foreign observers into the unfamiliar stance of charging Berlin with not being European. For many the criticism was that Germany had benefitted from exporting to the eurozone but without giving the other members the chance to grow themselves. France’s economy minister, Christine Lagarde, was one who complained about the asymmetries of intra-European trade relations and Germany’s low domestic demand. | <urn:uuid:7b304fad-ff4c-4d39-872c-33a568f24c1a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://snuffysmithsblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/germany-goes-global-leaving-europe-by.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977077 | 175 | 1.875 | 2 |
In memory of all those who died or lost someone in the attacks on September 11th, 2001. May they forever rest in peace.
And to those who think this was an inside job by the government is an absolute fool. There were no bombs involved and the government did not plan this. Hate for America that led to this event began in the late 80’s.
The reason that the buildings caught fire and collapsed was from the jet fuel in the planes. The fuel spilled, covering everything inside, making it all extra flammable. And as the airplanes flew in it created a gap in the buildings support beams, causing them to weaken. Also the heat from the fire slowly weakened the beams. Eventually the part of the building above could no longer be held up and with the force of gravity, collapsed.
Now, I don’t know how any American or anyone could hate America or the government that much that they actually believe the government had something to do with this. How can you believe that the country you live in would do this rather than foreign man and his men hating the USA? The killing of more than 3000 Americans was not planned by our government.
Now that I have set things straight, I would once again thank all the firefighters, medics, police, doctors, and everyday people for their service and heroism on September 11th, 2001. May you look down from heaven and know that you will never be forgotten. | <urn:uuid:e0546478-a565-4f24-97d6-ebdeff659fd2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://historythroughphotos.tumblr.com/tagged/medics | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983118 | 293 | 1.742188 | 2 |
When the Union Pacific Railroad and Southern Pacific Railroad merged in 1997 and the former did a housecleaning of its inventory,
many of the Union Pacific's archival materials were saved. The records that were donated to USC were chiefly those that were
generated in the 1940s and 50s as part of the Tidelands controversies, concerning the Los Angeles / Long Beach / Wilmington
harbor areas, and documenting channels, wetlands, islands, elevations, and shoreline. In addition to many maps, drawings,
and historical files, the records consist of many volumes of land surveys (done by civil engineer Francis Bates) which were
done in the old tidelands area in the 1930s and 40s. Mr. Bates also obtained copies of many of the original rancho documents
for this area (e.g. Rancho Los Cerritos) to provide a complete history of the harbor, onshore and offshore.
The story of the Union Pacific Railroad's involvement with oil and the Tidelands goes back to at least 1911 when the State
of California granted the City of Long Beach its tidelands properties for development of commerce, navigation, fisheries,
and recreation under a public trust doctine, meaning any development and revenues from such development would have to benefit
the state as a whole rather than merely neighboring communities. (The tidelands are defined as land and waterways from the
mean high tide to three miles offshore.)
30.0 Linear feet
12 boxes, 3 mapcase drawers
All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Manuscripts Librarian.
Permission for publication is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended
to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained. | <urn:uuid:eeb15ad0-99d6-47f3-9cee-c9391e4d0f9c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt2v19r73h/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954001 | 373 | 2.859375 | 3 |
American Woman and her Political Peers, 1893. Henrietta Briggs-Wall. 1911. Manuscript Division. exhibit display
The long and difficult struggle for women's suffrage is one of the best-documented, most widely researched, and most seriously
debated topics in American women's history. That historians know as much as they do about the suffrage campaign is in large
part because of its participants' conscious efforts to record their movement's history. In the late 1870s, in the very midst
of their campaign, leading suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage began chronicling
the movement in The History of Woman Suffrage, published in three monumental volumes between 1881 and 1886. The early leaders supplemented this history by publishing various
autobiographies and memoirs and by assiduously collecting clippings, books, and pamphlets about their efforts.
In 1903 Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford convinced his friend Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) [catalog record] to donate her collection of books and other printed matter to the national library, where they now reside in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Following receipt of these printed sources, the Library's curators began amassing manuscripts, photographs, and other papers
relating to the struggle for women's rights, assembling in the process a compelling documentary history of the suffrage campaign
from its early connections to the abolition and temperance campaigns to its final victory in August 1920. | <urn:uuid:b9f8abd0-88d7-4a1c-bc7a-a4d574e1479a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awmss5/suffrage.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952415 | 315 | 3.5 | 4 |
Biophysical Journal, Volume 12, Issue 3, 1 March 1972, Pages 274-294
Edward Kresch and Abraham Noordergraaf
In order to quantify the collapse phenomenon in veins, this paper presents a mathematical analysis of the cross-sectional shape of a flexible tube as its internal pressure varies. Quantitative results are presented in terms of the physical parameters of the tube, such as wall thickness and Young's modulus. It is assumed that the tube is thin walled, that no stretching occurs, that the cross-sectional shape is elliptical when the transmural pressure is zero, and that the longitudinal prestress is zero. The equations were solved on a digital computer which displayed the cross-sectional shapes on an oscilloscope, which were then photographed. A selection of these photographs is presented. Curves are shown which give the cross-sectional area and compliance as functions of transmural pressure. Other curves are shown which are useful for interpolation, and for use in the experimental determination of the physical parameters which may otherwise be difficult or impossible to measure accurately.
Abstract | PDF (911 kb)
Biophysical Journal, Volume 99, Issue 3, 4 August 2010, Pages 745-754
V. Gurev, J. Constantino, J.J. Rice and N.A. Trayanova
In the intact heart, the distribution of electromechanical delay (EMD), the time interval between local depolarization and myocyte shortening onset, depends on the loading conditions. The distribution of EMD throughout the heart remains, however, unknown because current experimental techniques are unable to evaluate three-dimensional cardiac electromechanical behavior. The goal of this study was to determine the three-dimensional EMD distributions in the intact ventricles for sinus rhythm (SR) and epicardial pacing (EP) by using a new, to our knowledge, electromechanical model of the rabbit ventricles that incorporates a biophysical representation of myofilament dynamics. Furthermore, we aimed to ascertain the mechanisms that underlie the specific three-dimensional EMD distributions. The results revealed that under both conditions, the three-dimensional EMD distribution is nonuniform. During SR, EMD is longer at the epicardium than at the endocardium, and is greater near the base than at the apex. After EP, the three-dimensional EMD distribution is markedly different; it also changes with the pacing rate. For both SR and EP, late-depolarized regions were characterized with significant myofiber prestretch caused by the contraction of the early-depolarized regions. This prestretch delays myofiber-shortening onset, and results in a longer EMD, giving rise to heterogeneous three-dimensional EMD distributions.
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (1399 kb)
Biophysical Journal, Volume 96, Issue 8, 22 April 2009, Pages 3102-3115
Peter E. Vincent, Spencer J. Sherwin and Peter D. Weinberg
Uptake of low density lipoprotein (LDL) by the arterial wall is likely to play a key role in atherogenesis. A particular process that may cause vascular scale heterogeneity in the rate of transendothelial LDL transport is the formation of a flow-dependent LDL concentration polarization layer on the luminal surface of the arterial endothelium. In this study, the effect of a spatially heterogeneous transmural water flux (that traverses the endothelium only via interendothelial cell clefts) on such concentration polarization is investigated numerically. Unlike in previous investigations, realistic intercellular cleft dimensions are used here and several values of LDL diffusivity are considered. Particular attention is paid to the spatially averaged LDL concentration adjacent to different regions of the endothelial surface, as such measures may be relevant to the rate of transendothelial LDL transport. It is demonstrated in principle that a heterogeneous transmural water flux can act to enhance such measures, and cause them to develop a shear dependence (in addition to that caused by vascular scale flow features, affecting the overall degree of LDL concentration polarization). However, it is shown that this enhancement and additional shear dependence are likely to be negligible for a physiologically realistic transmural flux velocity of 0.0439 μm s−1 and an LDL diffusivity (in blood plasma) of 28.67 μm2 s−1. Hence, the results imply that vascular scale studies of LDL concentration polarization are justified in ignoring the effect of a spatially heterogeneous transmural water flux.
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (1225 kb)
Copyright © 1969 The Biophysical Society All rights reserved.
Biophysical Journal, Volume 9, Issue 10, 1261-1279, 1 October 1969
Adolph I. Katz, Yu Chen and Augusto H. Moreno
Flow through thin-wall axisymmetric tubes has long been of interest to physiologists. Analysis is complicated by the fact that such tubes will collapse when the transmural pressure (internal minus external pressure) is near zero. Because of the absence of any body of related knowledge in other sciences or engineering, previous workers have directed their efforts towards experimental studies of flow in collapsible tubes. More recently, some attention has been given towards analytical studies. Results of an extensive series of experiments show that the significant system parameter is transmural pressure. The cross-sectional area of the tube depends upon the transmural pressure, and changes in cross-section in turn affect the flow geometry. Based on experimental studies, a lumped parameter system model is proposed for the collapsible tube. The mathematical model is simulated on a hybrid computer. Experimental data were used to define the functional relationship between cross-sectional area and transmural pressure as well as the relation between the energy loss coefficient and cross-sectional area. Computer results confirm the validity of the model for both steady and transient flow conditions. | <urn:uuid:8c2d33c4-101b-42c0-b642-a1cccafe822b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cell.com/biophysj/abstract/S0006-3495(69)86451-9 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.915267 | 1,209 | 1.640625 | 2 |
The technologies that comprise the Elektrodress therapeutic electrode suit already exist and have been in use for some time. Maker Fredrik Lundqvist, MD has integrated a combination of electronic muscle stimulation (EMS) and vibration therapy into a modular wearable suit to help folks with Multiple Scelerosis, Cerebral Palsy, Parkinson’s and other nerve disorders relax and increase functionality and movement. Wearables like Elektrodress are exposing a larger audience to the therapeutic opportunities made possible by smart textiles. [Thanks, Laura!]
Find more medical and assistive technologies in MAKE Volume 29:
We have the technology (to quote The Six Million Dollar Man), but commercial tools for exploring, assisting, and augmenting our bodies really can approach a price tag of $6 million. Medical and assistive tech manufacturers must pay not just for R&D, but for expensive clinical trials, regulatory compliance, and liability — and doesn’t help with low pricing that these devices are typically paid for through insurance, rather than purchased directly. But many gadgets that restore people’s abilities or enable new “superpowers” are surprisingly easy to make, and for tiny fractions of the costs of off-the-shelf equivalents. MAKE Volume 29, the “DIY Superhuman” issue, explains how. | <urn:uuid:ab207436-f240-4c9b-ab14-0e1493b27591> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.makezine.com/2012/02/07/elektrodress-therapeutic-electrode-suit-for-nerve-disorders/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=8ac41143de | 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 | 0.925978 | 269 | 1.96875 | 2 |
By The Book
Golf's rules of the game confuse many players but preserve the sport's integrity
From the Print Edition:
Dennis Haysbert, Nov/Dec 2006
In 1978, Tom Kite stood over a birdie putt on the fifth hole at the Pinehurst No. 2 course. He was an aspiring young professional with one tournament victory, and now he was contending in the final round of the Colgate Hall of Fame Classic, giving the much ballyhooed Tom Watson a run for the money.
When Kite soled his putter behind the ball at address, the ball moved ever so slightly, just the barest fraction of an inch, a movement undetected by anyone around him. Neither his playing partner, Howard Twitty, nor any of the gallery saw a thing. The movement would not have given him the slightest advantage or affected the outcome of his putt.
But Tom Kite knew what he had to do. He called a penalty shot on himself, much to the surprise of Twitty. Instead of a birdie try, now he was attempting to save par. He missed, made bogey and lost the tournament to Watson by one shot. "I called it because I play golf," says Kite, now a member of the Champions Tour. "If you don't play by the rules, you aren't playing golf. You're playing some abbreviated form of it."
Do you think a basketball player is going to call traveling on himself? Do you think a baseball player is going to say he didn't touch second base after trotting out his game-winning home run? Do you think a football player is going to tell a referee that he was holding on the play and should be penalized? Do you think a hockey player is going to say, "Excuse me, but I just slashed that guy and should be in the penalty box for two minutes"?
Golf is different. Yes, it's an odd game, subtly athletic and maddeningly mental. Players chase around a ball for hours at a time to deposit it in a small hole. The best players—a Tiger Woods or a Phil Mickelson or an Ernie Els—do so with awe-inspiring proficiency, and the worst players do it with stomach-churning ineptitude. But Woods and a 36-handicapper are bound together in one overriding way—by the Rules of Golf. The rules are central to the game and to the ethics of its players.
"The Rules of Golf are an incredible character reference," says four-time major championship winner Raymond Floyd. "If you lived your life by the Rules of Golf, you'll be a stand-up citizen. The Rules of Golf go right to your integrity as a person. Are you going to shoot a 6 and write down a 5? The first thing I told my two boys and my daughter when they started to play golf is that you count every swing and don't move the ball. Playing by the Rules of Golf shows respect for the game and respect for those you are playing against."
In the late '70s, Floyd was leading the Westchester Classic when he lipped out a birdie putt, the ball stopping six inches from the hole. His two playing partners, expecting him to make the next putt, turned away and walked to the next tee. When Floyd soled his putter, the ball moved a touch. He had held the playing honor on the previous hole, and his partners expected him to hit away first when he got to the next tee. "I made bogey," he told them. "The ball moved."
That's what makes golf so different from other sports. There are no zebras chasing every play, blowing whistles for the infractions that are constantly committed. Golf isn't about what you can get away with, and if you try to get away with bending the rules, you will only succeed in sullying your reputation.
There is a difference, of course, between tournament play and everyday play, between those who play for money or the glory of amateur triumph, and those who play for fun and the delicious prospect of taking two bucks off their best friend. But even in casual golf, the overall ethics of the rules must be respected, and egregious attempts to break them are usually met with disfavor. Above all, the game requires a player to police himself.
"You are the only one who knows," says Floyd. "Rules do not hurt players. They are there to help you and to keep the playing field even. Out of respect for the game, you should play by them."
You must be logged in to post a comment. | <urn:uuid:d606b735-0956-496c-8bd6-9ddf40758206> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cigaraficionado.com/webfeatures/show/id/8842 | 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 | 0.982042 | 967 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Amid much confusion over the source of the YahooXtra hacking debacle, an IT expert has released a "plain English" explanation describing what really happened, warning users never to use the "remember me" check box when logging in.
Paul Matthews, CEO of the Institute of IT Professionals NZ, wrote the backgrounder, complete with advice on how to proof your email from future hacking attempts.
He first points out that the problems lie largely with Yahoo, which Telecom outsourced their email service to back in 2007.
Yahoo has been playing a game of "cat and mouse" with hackers since November last year, Matthews writes, when a hacker going by the name of The Hell discovered a major vulnerability on Yahoo's servers and sold it on a black hat security forum for $700.
The vulnerability apparently came about thanks to Yahoo's failure to keep its blog software up to date - a widely recognised security hole on the Yahoo subdomain developer.yahoo.com that that had been around for close to nine months.
Because developer.yahoo.com is a subdomain of yahoo.com, cookies - the small files that remember who you are on a website - are accessible to that site.
The security hole allowed the hackers to plant a script on the developer site that could read the Yahoo login cookie from any browser, anywhere, which would then be sent "home" to the hacker, Matthews says.
With access to those details, full control meant that the victim's Yahoo - and YahooXtra - email accounts were at their mercy.
All a customer had to do to be vulnerable was log in to Yahoo or YahooXtra sometime in the last year and tick "remember me" box.
It made no difference if the account hadn't been used in months.
To reproduce the attack, the hackers needed users to visit a webpage that had the XSS attack code on it - hence the links in the email.
Telecom initially blamed the ensuing spam attack on a "phishing" attempt, but later admitted that the Yahoo email service had been hacked.
Matthews writes that this was not a phishing attempt because it wasn't designed to trick you into giving out any personal details.
Rather it took users to a webpage that used the vulnerability on the Yahoo Developers Network to lift their cookie information, gaining access to the webmail account.
Once the hackers had access to the account, a script was used to send out an email to everyone in its address book, telling them to look at the link.
And we all know what happened then.
Even Telecom chief executive Simon Moutter fell victim to the attack when he opened an email and clicked on the link.
Telecom advised victims to change their password, but feedback from users has indicated that this didn't completely fix the problem.
"Contrary to reports, changing your password really isn't going to help in this case (although it may have killed the cookie depending on Yahoo's setup) and updating virus protection wouldn't help either. Although it's still a good idea, of course," Matthews says.
Yahoo disputes this, saying they can give "every assurance that it does rectify the situation".
More than 50,000 YahooXtra customers have already changed their passwords and Telecom is now advising that all 450,000 do the same.
And while Matthews says there isn't much we can do about the attack now that it's happened, he does offers a few tips on how to avoid similar scams in the future.
- It's a good idea to, firstly, log out. Once logged out the session is "dead" and the account cannot be accessed.
- Make sure you always log out as closing the browser window won't suffice.
- And never use the "remember me" checkbox on webmail, no matter how inconvenient it is to log in every time. | <urn:uuid:4f26e147-f036-4a4a-8ca3-a0b142aa92af> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nzherald.co.nz/news/print.cfm?objectid=10865397 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964956 | 791 | 2.015625 | 2 |
A few years ago, it was rare to hear anyone condemning excessive CEO salaries.
If Westpac wanted to pay its CEO more than a hundred times what it paid its average worker, who were we to disapprove? It was supply and demand. The market decreed it, and the market is never wrong.
The justification that issued forth from CEOs and their apologists echoed that self-serving L'Oreal slogan of the 1970s: "Because I'm worth it." As if that was all there was to it.
Thus, McDonald's in the US could blithely pay its CEO nearly US$9 million while simultaneously lobbying against minimum wage increases for its workers.
R.H. Tawney in his 1920 classic The Acquisitive Society described the enormous remunerations commanded by some heads of industry as "hundred-family salaries".
He noted that in societies where wealth was measured by cattle, big chiefs were described as "hundred-cow men". Similarly, one could describe a highly paid CEO as "a hundred-family man, since he receives the income of a hundred families".
Such salaries were "ungentlemanly", he wrote.
Tawney agreed that special talent "is worth any price" - but that was beside the point.
"When really important issues are at stake everyone realises that no decent man can stand out for his price.
"A general does not haggle with his government for the precise pecuniary equivalent of his contribution to victory. A sentry who gives the alarm to a sleeping battalion does not spend the next day collecting the capital value of the lives he has saved ..."
Everyone agrees we're a low-wage economy but the impact of that on families has been lost behind a haze of judgment and indifference.
Until last week, employers getting away with paying their workers the bare minimum could be forgiven their ignorance. No longer.
The $18.40 living wage identified by the Family Research Social Policy Unit in a report commissioned by the Living Wage Aotearoa campaign shows that despite the rhetoric of National and Labour, work doesn't pay for around 740,000 Kiwis.
That helps to explain why 40 per cent of children living in poverty are in households where at least one adult is working. And why crippling debt is endemic in low-waged communities.
And it makes clear that families subsisting on the minimum wage are fighting a losing battle, as researcher Charles Waldegrave says, "to not only provide the basic necessities, but to have a decent, but modest family and community life".
It's not much to ask, to be able to "participate in society and have enough to pay your rent and food and power".
As Helen Kelly says, "The deal is if you go to work and work hard, you should have a decent standard of living at the end of the week."
The living wage campaigners here are relying on the moral force of their argument, rather than legislation, to move employers.
For companies like Tonzu, an organic food company based in Auckland, the moral and business case is straightforward.
Co-owner Jesse Chalmers told TV One's Breakfast last week that Tonzu already had a target of two-thirds of the average wage. By the company paying the living wage, "staff feel more invested in their work, they're proud, we obviously have a lower turnover".
Though the higher wage bill might be unaffordable for some, "there are plenty of companies that can afford to lift their wages just a little more so that people can live a little more comfortably".
In the UK, a similar campaign has persuaded private and public sector employers to pay the living wage to around 450,000 workers.
The UK campaign was launched by an alliance of faith groups, union branches, schools and community organisations. It has cross party support.
Last year, the Department of Work and Pensions became the first Whitehall department to commit to paying the living wage to some 500 cleaners and catering staff (John Key and Parliamentary Service, please take note). London's Conservative mayor Boris Johnson, has become a passionate advocate.
One study shows the Government could save almost £1 billion($1.83 billion) a year in increased tax and lower welfare spending just from firms in London paying the living wage.
Becoming an accredited living wage employer has become a badge of honour, distinguishing employers as socially responsible and ethical.
As one cleaning company put it, "Taking a moral stand on paying above the poverty level makes us feel good, and means we have lower staff turnover". And, fortunately, "all our clients agreed it was the right thing and most of them paid the extra costs". In one case, a university campus went one further than paying its cleaners the living wage - it brought them back in-house.
All of which makes the excuses of some of our employers and politicians look rather hollow.
UK academic Jane Wills has argued the living wage campaign has stumbled on a way to help the most vulnerable workers - the low-wage subcontracted workers who had effectively been divorced from the people who really employed them.
It had put pressure on the "real employers" to take responsibility for the wages and conditions of these workers.
Some employers just needed encouragement to do the right thing. Moral pressure can be a powerful force, especially when brought to bear by a broad-based alliance of community groups.
Tapu.Misa@gmail.comBy Tapu Misa Email Tapu | <urn:uuid:ffae484f-1c5b-484e-a372-79b68ae7d9a0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10865952 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97688 | 1,128 | 1.859375 | 2 |
In The Annals, the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus wrote about the British chieftain Caractacus and how he was captured by the Romans. According to him, Caractacus was taken to Rome along with his ...
Did the roman conquerors have directives/guidelines to either integrate or assimilate foreign tribes/folks?
It is likely that Romans made no distinction between today's terms integration and assimilation. They did everything that was necessary for the expansion of the Roman empire and worked from ... | <urn:uuid:094bf4b8-39ec-4548-adec-7c558d4ad0b3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/language+roman-empire | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97928 | 105 | 2.78125 | 3 |
An Embedded Software Primer
||Author: David E. Simon|
List Price: $49.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (05 August, 1999)
Sales Rank: 18,154
Average Customer Rating: 4.18 out of 5
Customer ReviewsRating: 2 out of 5
Way to basic!
It's just what it say "a primer". This book seems like it would be great for someone who has never programmed for embedded systems. However, if you have even a few months experiance under your belt, this book is a big waste of time. I purchased this book to use a quick refresh after being away from embedded programming for a few years. Sent it back after reading about 25% and skimming the rest.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Good book used in UW Extension course
A good book for introducing embedded systems concepts from a practical point of view. It is used, along with uCOS-II by Jean J Labrosse, in a one of a kind certificate program course at the
University of Washington Extension,
Embedded and Real-Time Systems Programming (...)
Rating: 5 out of 5
A must-read Embedded Software Primer
If you are going to buy only one book on Embedded Software Programming, this should be the one. The author introduces virtually everything an engineer needs to know about programming embedded systems. There are two chapters describing hardware stuff that is useful for the software engineer to know. There is a chapter on Interrupts. There are three chapters on programming in an RTOS environment. All of the chapters include coding examples on what to do, and also examples of code with bugs to watch out for. There is also a chapter on debugging techniques.
All of the other FIVE STAR reviews (and many of the FOUR STAR ones as well) contain more specific points which I won't repeat here.
However, I will echo what I said at the beginnning. If there is only one book you are going to buy about programming embedded systems, this should be the one.
· MicroC OS II: The Real Time Kernel (With CD-ROM)
· Designing Embedded Hardware
· Programming Embedded Systems in C and C ++
· Embedded Systems Design: An Introduction to Processes, Tools and Techniques
· Real-Time Concepts for Embedded Systems | <urn:uuid:3b673b30-edfe-4217-85c6-aad944a78e8c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.centrasoft.com/d1/020161569X.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925002 | 501 | 2.25 | 2 |
LONDON (AP) — Britain's military has flown troops and heavy equipment from Ghana to Mali to support the international intervention in the West African nation, the defense ministry said Thursday.
A C-17 aircraft is carrying more than 120 members of a Ghanaian engineering company with vehicles and equipment to Bamako, where they will build accommodation and assist with projects like road building as part of the African-led support mission to Mali, the ministry said.
It added the request from Ghana for a C-17 was made earlier this week, with the first C-17 flights taking off Monday evening and continuing on through the week.
The Ghanaian engineering company will "be there as long as it takes to solve the problem," according to Col. M'Bawine Atintande, public relations director for the Ghana Armed Forces.
He praised the U.K. for giving "so much support" in a statement released through Britain's defense ministry.
Peter Jones, Britain's High Commissioner to Ghana, said the U.K. was pleased to offer the transport capability to Ghana, calling it "a moment where the international community is coming together for a shared challenge."
In addition to providing logistical support and aircraft to support the French-led intervention in Mali, Britain has said that it will contribute to an EU training mission to support the Malian army and provide trainers to help prepare an African-led intervention force. | <urn:uuid:f9c81282-8769-455d-90ed-d5f13b673292> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.khou.com/news/world/191206931.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965918 | 287 | 1.734375 | 2 |
A very effective adaptation of the George Orwell novel, which depicts a future totalitarian society – bleak in every aspect, thoroughly controlled, and impossible to escape. [Dir: Michael Radford/ John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton/ 115 min/ Drama, SciFi-Fantasy/ Anti-Socialism, Propoganda, Government as Torturer]
This Orwellian view of a possible future draws heavily on modern experience with totalitarian socialism: People in this world are slaves to the state. They live in fear and poverty. Art and media are used to control them. History is rewritten to create an appearance of progress. People are forced to make confessions of crimes they never committed. Families are destroyed to insure complete loyalty only to the state. And the state is in constant war with neighbors to unify the people through an “us against them” mentality. It’s a distillation of all the horrors of National Socialism, Soviet and Chinese Communism, and the various variants thereof. The story was meant as a warning to the remaining free countries, whose academic eggheads in particular seemed curiously open to socialist ideas. It opens with a propaganda broadcast in which Goldstein, an enemy of the state, is being denounced. A crowd watches the broadcast and begins shouting feverishly anti-Goldstein condemnations. The propaganda has clearly had its effect. However, in that crowd is a man who sees through at least some of it. He meets a young woman who, in her own cynical way, also sees through the propaganda. The two arrange a series of trysts in which they gradually get to know, trust, and love each other. But in this world, love for anything but the state is forbidden, and despite the most minute precautions, one day they are caught. Such are the horrors of torture and mind control that in the end the state succeeds in destroying even their love. In the background to all this is the full panorama of Orwell’s projected totalitarian world: the control of the individual through control of the language (“newspeak”); endless broadcast of faked production statistics intended to give the impression of material progress despite obvious widespread poverty; purges and denunciations of supposed traitors; televised executions; 24-hour surveillance via in-home monitors, and so on. It would be hard to imagine a better dramatization of Orwell’s novel than this film. It does a good job of communicating the novel’s substance and spirit, and it has some compelling performances. In particular, the expressive John Hurt is riveting in the lead role. However, this is such a powerful portrayal that many viewers will find the ultimate defeat of the individuals in the hands of the mega-state depressing, and some scenes of torture are graphic. It’s not the most uplifting film, but certainly a very important one.
This article was reprinted from Jon Osborne's Miss Liberty's Guide to Film and Video: Movies for the Libertarian Millenium, available in the Advocates Liberty Store. | <urn:uuid:be24033f-2252-4b8c-a14e-8e073da33961> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.libertarianism.com/pop_movie/195 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954035 | 612 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Located in the heart of Hollywood, El Cabrillo, the Spanish Revival home of interior designer Joshua Cain once sheltered up-and-coming artists and starlets in the 20s and 30s. Rumor has it that legendary filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille built the property for his daughter. To include its glamorous past in its decor, Joshua, a co-owner of Saxony Design Build, crafted an oversized armoire inspired by the pad’s original molding doors. He also used a neutral palette to highlight architectural features like the 1920s fireplace and designed a lamp to hold a 100-year-old vase, which was found in a shipwreck in Taiwan.
Last weekend's episode of Open House was all about magnificent homes and hot kitchens. Celebrity chef Art Smith and Shelley Young, founder of Chicago's Chopping Block cooking school, revealed what they couldn't live without in their home kitchens such as a counter hewn out of butcher block, an exhaust fan that disappears behind a range and an entertaining-friendly layout since the party always ends up in the kitchen. In Westport, CT, homeowner Jessica Robinson opened up the doors of her $3.9 million Colonial, where you can enjoy the water both indoors and out with an elaborate Disney-inspired indoor pool. Meanwhile, interior designer Joshua Cain breathed new life into the glamorous past of El Cabrillo (watch it in the video above), his Spanish Revival in the Hollywood Hills that director Cecil B. DeMille supposedly built. We then headed to the midwest to check out the Una Bella Vista estate, where gorgeous views are the star of the Italian-inspired property. Finally, George Oliphant helps a soon-to-be-hitched couple merge their closets. | <urn:uuid:037bd4a6-0ee6-41c2-967a-5b7cc7236934> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbcdfw.com/blogs/open-house/OH-Show-Recap-Chefs-Kitchen-Design-Tips-and-Joshua-Cains-Hollywood-Home--103213839.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952569 | 356 | 1.617188 | 2 |
That’s just the beginning. Not every action taken in the name of the statists ideology is a crime, but the list of illegal actions committed by these groups, cells, and individuals is extensive (and puts them squarely on our radar). In addition to the above, governments:
Commit murder and physical assault;
Threaten judges, law enforcement professionals, and government personnel;
Impersonate police officers and diplomats;
Use fake currency, passports, license plates, and driver’s licenses; and
Engineer various white-collar scams, including mortgage fraud and so-called “redemption” schemes.
Government agents are often confused with extremists from the militia movement. But while government agents sometimes use or buy illegal weapons, guns are secondary to their anti-liberty, anti-property beliefs. On the other hand, guns and paramilitary training are paramount to militia groups.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 0 guests | <urn:uuid:779f131d-8706-4d66-9c51-15529343073d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://libertariannews.org/Forums/viewtopic.php?p=187 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924297 | 197 | 1.507813 | 2 |
During the Revolutionary War, scouts tracked enemy movements and carried messages to troops moving through the frontier. Most scouts were men, but occasionally women filled the role, doing their part in the fight for American independence. This is the exciting and true story of one such woman, Anne Bailey, who risked her life in the American Revolution.
By Pamela Duncan Edwards, illustrated by Troy Howell
Explores the heritage and history of Virginia, offering historical facts for each letter of the alphabet. From Arlington National Cemetery, once part of Robert E. Lee's homestead, to magnificent Monticello, Virginia has always had a prominent place in American history. Jamestown, Williamsburg, and even the Pentagon are just a few of the many places highlighted in Old Dominion. Readers will also be introduced to such history makers as George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Booker T. Washington.
Life in the brand-new Jamestown colony in 1607 wasn't easy. The settlers arrived full of hope-then hard times brought despair. Now the latest archaelogical evidence offers us the clearest glimpse yet of one of the most fascinating chapters in American history.
In the summer of 1609 a fleet of nine ships left England bound for the Jamestown Colony. Days before landfall, the fleet was hit by a hurricane. Four nights later, the flagship, Sea Venture, ran aground on the reefs on Bermuda's northern coast. Miraculously everyone survived. This is their story.
"Juneteenth is the grandfather of all holidays for Black Texans
"From its spontaneous beginning on June 19, 1865, as slaves in Galveston, Texas, reacted to the delayed news of the Emancipation Proclamation, the holiday has spread nationwide among Black Americans. It is small gatherings on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, to immense crowds in Buffalo, New York. This ethnic holiday includes the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, retelling of legends about how it got its name, parades, parties, and family reunions.
"Join the author and photographer as they traveled to experience this celebration of freedom in various spots around the United States."
This history book includes many illustrations and photos.
Contents: The day of jubilee -- How free is free? -- "Give us this, and we will protect ourselves" -- A second bondage -- Black spirit, black mind -- A new war -- Redemption and rejection -- Timeline. | <urn:uuid:7c12fc50-dc9f-453d-bc63-6e4efac2d2ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.librarypoint.org/taxonomy/term/2118?page=17 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93436 | 496 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Would UEFA intervention make any difference?
Tottenham’s Europa League clash with Lazio was marred with racial abuse from home fans towards the travelling Spurs supporters and violence away from the stadium. Lazio’s violent following known as The Eagles – one of Italy’s hooligan organisations commonly referred to as ‘Ultras’ – have been held responsible by the media for an attack on a small group of Spurs fans in a pub in the Rome, leaving one man in a critical condition and ten more wounded, however the club’s president Claudio Lotito has refused to point the finger at the Lazio hooligans.
“It is too easy to speak about attacks by people with their faces covered and say that they were Lazio fans. I maintain Lazio fans had nothing to do with it,” 55-year-old Lotito told reporters following the attacks. Meanwhile, UEFA still maintain that hooliganism is not a footballing issue.
At the match itself, Lazio fans chanted racial slurs towards the Tottenham support throughout the 0-0 draw. Most notably, the chant of “Tottenham Juden” was heard ringing out across the Stadio Olimpico. During the alternate fixture at White Hart Lane, Biancocelesti fans made monkey noises at White Hart Lane, directed towards Jermain Defoe.
UEFA fined the Italian club £35,000 for the away fans’ obscenities, which will add to the long list of small monetary penalties handed out to national football associations and clubs by the European organisation as they continue to take a lenient stance on racism.
But should UEFA be expected to do anything? How can they realistically change the attitudes and culture of a club’s supporters, or for that matter a nation’s supporters?
It is true that the fines are minimal – Nicklas Bendtner’s Paddy Power underwear fiasco earned him a larger penalty fine for undeclared sponsorship than any club or country has for failing to control their fans. Similarly, the case set up by UEFA examining the England Under 21s match in Serbia in which Danny Rose and other black players were subjected to racial abuse has been delayed until next month because it requires “further investigation”.
The Serbian FA have denied allegations of racism, claiming Rose behaved in a provocative and vulgar manner throughout the match and have released the bizarre and ridiculously titled video “Danny Rose is lying to whom?” – a small collection of segments from the match where the Sunderland left-back is not subject to intense monkey chanting from home fans. Clarke Carlisle has called for Serbia to be banned from competing until their fans can be controlled, but UEFA continue to distance themselves from the issues of racism and hooliganism.
It would certainly not be overreacting to see UEFA’s policy as somewhat hypocritical. Following the Heysel Stadium disaster, English clubs were banned from competing in European competitions for five years until a solution could be found for the “English disease” of hooliganism. But, would banning clubs or countries actually achieve anything? Could it even make the problem worse?
The political, social and psychological implications of football are often overlooked. Newspapers are often filled with headlines such as “ban the thugs”, simplifying the issue and working towards it’s further detriment – a particular example that comes to mind is Manchester United’s Red Army being labelled as “barbarians” by newspapers in the 1980s, to which the United faithful at Old Trafford replied by singing “WE EAT HUMANS”. Clubs have an identity, and for good or worse that identity cannot be ignored or simply transformed overnight and branding that identity with negative connotations only escalates the problem.
Paolo Di Canio, on his return to Lazio, the club he personally affiliates to, often celebrated goals with the Fascist salute, which was warmly embraced by the Italian fans. The Serie A club has historic links to fascism dating back to the days of Mussolini – the deceased dictator even built Stadio Olimpico as part of his planned Mussolini Forum. Di Canio told reporters after his first instance of raising the salute that he is “a fascist, not a racist” and although it is true that the two are not mutually exclusive, both racism and fascism appears to be a heavy influence on Lazio fans and their identity. At the time, Silvio Berlusconi defended the current Swindon Town manager, stating: “He just does it for the fans, not out of malice. He’s a good boy, just a bit of a show-off.”
UEFA’s fines are a rather toothless punishment in response to the appalling actions of fans, and the organisation could certainly do more to push the issues of racism and hooliganism on to national football organisations as well as clubs, but as it stands, what difference can they truly achieve? Even banning clubs from European or international football would simply make martyrs of their fans and no doubt heighten their hostilities towards opponents.
Change takes years. It was widely believed that racism had been eradicated from English football, but over the past few years, and especially the past few months the issue has dominated the sport. It Is clear to see there is a glass ceiling, especially in management and coaching positions, and there are still groups of fans who find hissing at White Hart Lane acceptable behaviour. It would be premature to suggest England has gotten over its problems of the 1970s and 1980s. West Ham fans during the weekend’s London derby with Spurs sung “Viva Lazio” and “Can we stab you every week” just days after the attack in Rome.
Change must come from within; it cannot be thrust upon a subject from a higher power. And with the Serbian FA and Lazio football club wiping their hands clean of the allegations held against them, even denying and defending the actions of their fans, cultural improvement does not seem to be on the horizon.
English hooliganism was not successfully tackled until the early 1990s, where clubs worked in tandem with the police to effectively stamp out violence between rival fans. With the case of Italy, the Ultras have made football stadiums fortresses to ambush Italian police, and there are constant skirmishes between violent groups of fans and Italian officers away from the grounds and throughout the towns and cities.
If the Italian authorities cannot contain the Ultras, what chance do UEFA really have? | <urn:uuid:e269d60c-e74b-4ac8-8638-23a95924f2ce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.footballfancast.com/premiership/tottenham/would-uefa-intervention-make-any-difference?source=widget | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971224 | 1,359 | 1.5 | 2 |
We have centuries of rules, customs, and collective experience on how to manage this. It is an essential lesson of socialization to recognize the balance in a relationship, how it is shifting, and how to maintain it, at the comfort level of all participants, without being either too passive or aggressive. We can't evaluate relationships yearly with a questionnaire and a 1 to 5 scale like happens at jobs ("Well, the amount of texts you send is optimal, but the amount you cling around me at gatherings really is a 3: Needs Improvement") so we rely on cues. Most people's egos are not strong enough to handle direct communication on this level about how welcome they are, to the point that "He's just not that into you" as a sentence required a book and a movie to be celebrated properly as an idea. Nobody likes to be rejected, so people who blatanty reject get labeled 'mean', and the rest of us try to be gentle.
We handle the asymmetry by the amount of time we give, how long we take to call back, how often we actually do go over to watch the slide show, how much effort we do to see someone when they come through town. We can manage our exposure to each-other, how much time we invest, because physical life allows us to create gradations (and when it doesn't, well, there's always the assertivity training to learn to set boundaries, or the restraining order.) But electronic life really does not.
The current juggernauts of connecting, Twitter and Facebook, are really all-or-nothing relationships. There are millions of levels of friendship in physical life, yet Facebook really knows only one, and has limited controls about how you expose yourself, of which the results are really quite blatant to the follower. While setting them up last night I had to wonder if agreeing to friend someone but then putting them in a very limited group that couldn't see my stream of status updates isn't almost a snub worse than ignoring the friend-request altogether. (But no, 15 y.o. nephew, you really don't get that much access to my life.)
Twitter understands relationship are asymmetrical, where Facebook does not, but then expects them to be all-or-nothing. Yes, you are following my stream, and I know you in real life, but I am not sure I want to read every URL you find in your daily Net Grazing, crowding out the more seldom items from my friends. Third-party tools are trying to fill in this usability gap by allowing Twitter feeds to be grouped so you can keep the high-value Tweeters close to your heart while relegating the less valuable ones to the group you may check once in a while, while seemingly being a great social butterfly mediator person who is connected to everyone and everything. But I have to say that when I get a heartfelt invitation to "Follow me on my Twitter feed!" that already has 16.000 followers, I wonder how much value I will be able to bring to this relationship. Especially if I then get followed back among the 14.000 people this account follows. That is why I find email that I am being followed by what turns out to be an Affiliate Marketing robot so soothing: pretty much nothing is expected from me, and I get to look as if I am more interesting with that extra follower: WIN!
Most blogging have equally or even less sophisticated systems of privacy and mediation of relationship. LiveJournal and DreamWidth have a very sophisticated system for grouping followers for who can see what. The other blogging systems seem are all-or-nothing, and seem built for people who want everything they have to go out there to everyone in what are write-only systems with primitive comment fields attached. Blogs really are about publishing, not relationships.
And this mismatch between how electronic and away-from-keyboard relationships end up being conducted is really curious, because the software world is really good at filtering. Filtering by name, time, content, exposure, it's all in a context-switch's work, yet these things are not there. This could be because filters add complexity, and users actually do gravitate to simplicity over looks or features (see, respectively: Craigslist, 1st generation iPods).
I keep wondering if this is because these systems of connection grew up together with all-you-can-eat broadband in the centers where they were created. Back in the Usenet1 days, when IP connectivity was indeed metered, there were pretty sophisticated filtering systems for the stream of articles created globally by participants, and they acted on the server side before the article was transported, character by character, down to the reader. There actually was a monetary incentive to not receive too much crap, and computers assisted users -- if primitively -- in making that happen, instead of being open pipes to everything. But even then I was glancing at the amount of characters on my screen, together with the content in the From: and Subject: headers, to make a snap judgment on whether to hit the space-bar before even reading the first sentence an awful lot.
If broadband had always been metered, like it was early on mobile phones, would the systems created have allowed us to manage how much our new friends take over our time better? The early history of data applications on mobile phones, when data usage charges ended up on our bills measured in kilobytes, points to this being a moot question: like mobile application stores only took off when people didn't have to worry about how much data would cost on their iPhones, in a pennies-per-kb world the Web would simply have not taken off as it has, and electronic communications would have remained a beep-beep-doot-doot-modems-in-basements hobby, and I would still be sitting down with a travel agent to book an airplane ticket.
Instead, the Web took off, we will have to use our brains to navigate what the networks bring us full-blast 24/7, and hope for some model to arise that is much like the people who have to fiercely guard access to their time and person use: a personal assistant that trudges through the information and passes on only the best, a sort of human spam filter that keeps all the balls in the air, and writes coherent and targeted answers back while the celebrity in question gets to bark out strategy commands, and then gets to vacation in Hawaii again to escape the stress. The rest of us just get to hope we do not bruise egos too much when we click "Ignore" on a friend request, or remove a stream that is just not interesting.
1Yes, I was on Usenet. Indeed, I passed my 20-years-on-the-Internet a few months ago, which means I am a Question 2 social media expert outlier. I am still not sure of what it means that I looked at most of that article thinking 'My gawd, are you serious? I could get paid for this? Or do I have to only talk about margarine on Margarine blogs?' | <urn:uuid:3052011e-12a9-45ac-a11d-67af55d5df41> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.techsociotech.com/2009/08/electronic-friendship-regrettably-is.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968623 | 1,455 | 1.578125 | 2 |
- ANNOUNCEMENT! Marsh Island open to bow hunting
- Contact Us
- Demonstrations and Outreach
- Trails & Visitor Info
Welcome to the University Forests
The University Forests Office of the University of Maine is responsible for Managing the forestlands owned by the University of Maine and the University of Maine Foundation. The office also coordinates research activities on the land. The forestland under management is comprised of three distinct parts.
* The Dwight B. Demeritt Forest includes over 2,000 acres in Old Town and Orono immediately adjacent to the University campus.
* The Penobscot Experimental Forest is located approximately 15 miles from the University campus in the towns of Bradley and Eddington.
* The Green Endowment Forestlands are lands donated to the University Foundation for the benefit of the University of Maine. | <urn:uuid:b892f464-3055-43dc-93fe-43f572e4038d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forest.umaine.edu/university-forests/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904519 | 173 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Interview with Andy Herzer of 1st Shot Basketball
This week John sat down with Andy Herzer who is the Director of First Shot Basketball, a non-profit youth sports program that focuses on instilling both sports and life principles in "at risk" children through positive coaching of Murfreesboro area youth.
For additional info on 1st Shot visit www.1stShotBasketball.com
Tuesday Morning Coffee is also available as an iTunes Podcast HERE
View on iPad/iPhone HERE
JOHN: Hey, John Jones with an edition of Tuesday Morning Coffee. Thank you so much for being here. I’m excited to present my good friend, Andy Herzer. Andy and I go back a few years, and Andy is a veteran 18-year collegiate basketball coach in NCAA. He coached at MTSU and he loved Murfreesboro so much, he said, “You know what? I’ve decided to call it my home.” And he started a nonprofit—something I think he was moved by, and I’m going to let him tell a story in a little bit—for at-risk kids. And it’s through basketball. 1st Shot Basketball is the name of it.
And they have a winter league coming up, which starts January 4th. And we’ll put the information about this at the end of this segment. But this is a neat deal. My kids have been involved with it before, and it’s more than trying to find a superstar basketball player and a travel league, and all this stuff you hear about today. This is about giving kids a chance to compete in basketball, but more than that to learn about biblical principles, to learn about character, confidence, learning about being a part of something bigger than themselves.
So Andy, first of all, how did this even cross your radar? You’d been in the trenches as a collegiate coach recruiting 15-, 16-, 17-year-old kids for a living and all of a sudden you go to something like this. Must have been a heck of a transition.
ANDY: Well, I can just tell you the first time I sat in front of 5-year-old kids, I used words like integrity. And you know, John, the deer in the headlights came on and I’m going, “Man, I’m really out of my league. I don’t know what I’ve started here and what I’ve done.” But it was really not about me. And I think that’s what I’ve learned over the last five, six years of doing this. It’s really about the kids, and we’ve got a lot of at-risk kids here in Murfreesboro.
I think sometimes we all put blinders on too that we’ve got a lot of kids that can’t get to the Boys and Girls Club or the Y. They’re our street kids, so we’ve started working down at Patterson Park putting on some camps during spring break, fall break and we exposed them to more than just basketball. Last time we did dance, and no John, I’m not teaching the dance.
JOHN: That’s good.
ANDY: I can’t dance and chew gum. But we go out and get people who are competent in that area or they teach those skills. But at the end of the day, the whole thing is just plant the seed of Christ in them and love them and hopefully teach them some character. It’s not so much give them a handout but give them a hand up. And we think through sports—it attracts kids to it—that we can teach those biblical truths.
JOHN: So really, more than anything, basketball is just kind of a magnet to get these kids doing something, get them inside, and get them under your care.
ANDY: Well, you know, it’s amazing, John. We’ve started. We’ve added golf and tennis. But we say if you don’t go to golf and tennis, you can’t come to basketball. They all want to play basketball. It’s all they’re exposed to for most of their life. So to get them out of their comfort zone and not be afraid to try something new, it’s like those two sports that you and I know, if they can learn to hit a golf ball, a lot of business deals are made out there on that golf course, a lot of friendships. So there’s more than just basketball out there.
That’s one of things we’re trying to teach. The next thing we’re adding is a theater part to this and a music part to it. And during it, they’re going to have to come in and we’re going to help them do some reading and some math to get them up to speed because it opens doors. And we’re just trying to give them their first shot, John.
JOHN: That’s awesome. What age groups do you kind of focus on?
ANDY: We think you’ve really got to get them early. That gets a little harder and a little tougher to get as they get into high school. So we’re starting at age 5 and we go all the way up through junior high.
JOHN: Okay. And your winter league is starting up. Tell us a little about how the people can get involved in that and put their children in that. And guys, let me make something clear. It’s not just for at-risk kids. My kids got involved in it, and they had a blast and loved it. So it’s for any kid out there. Correct?
ANDY: I call it a by-product, John. I mean, I started the camps and then my pastor came to me and said, “Andy, we want a youth winter league” so I started a winter league. It started with 20 kids. Now we have over 200+ kids in it. It goes from ages 5 through age 8th grade and you can help in many ways. The first way, you can volunteer if you want to and help coach. And I will tell you the best coaches we have know nothing about basketball.
They come; they learn themselves; they get involved with the kids. And they’re there more for the kids than trying to probably teach it their way. It’s an old-school fundamental league, as you know, because your kids have participated in it.
JOHN: Andy, many would say that this is kind of the antithesis of what society is telling us we need to be doing with our kids. Society tells us right now that we need to figure out by the age of 5 years old what they’re going to be and start putting them in a travel team or with a special coach and getting them on special diets at the age of 5 or 6 and travel leagues and making it a year-round thing. Now what do you say to something that says that?
ANDY: Well, I think at 5 years old if you can tell me that that kid’s going to be a college basketball player, you’ve got a gift that someone needs to hire you.
JOHN: You need to be in Vegas probably.
ANDY: Yes. Because honestly, John, you never know if someone’s going to grow and be 6’10” or they’re big and they stop growing and they’re 5’10.” And size in basketball and all that stuff matters a lot in sports and how athletic you are, but I think you can use sports in a lot of different ways. I mean, my son’s in junior high and freshman this year. He played freshman football. I encouraged him to. And he’s got a chance to be a college basketball player.
ANDY: But I think by being exposed to different sports, A you’re not going to get burned out. B you’re really going to find out what you’re passionate about because if you’re not really passionate about football, you’re going to find that out quick once you get hit.
JOHN: Well, let’s all face it, and this is what I think society does not get and then I could probably say I was guilty of this for several years. There’s a very small minute percentage of kids that are ever going to play professional ball. And even there’s not a whole lot that are going to have even the opportunity to play college. But I would dare say that all of us have learned valuable lessons from sports. And I was a kid who hung on a coach’s every word, and I think most kids do.
Sometimes you didn’t understand those words a whole lot then, but they planted the seeds that eight years down the road you say, “Hey, I see what Coach was getting at.” And that’s the impact coaches can have. Wouldn’t you agree, Andy?
ANDY: I think they have such a remarkable—
JOHN: Good or bad.
ANDY: Good or bad. And that’s just what I was trying to figure out the word for. I think we can look back and think right away. I can think of one coach if I saw him today, I’d have a real hard time speaking to him. But I can think of four or five others that made such an impactful—you know, things in my life that they gave up their time. They took me to summer camps. They opened up the gym at 5 in the morning so I could come in and shoot. They spent time away from their family to give me something because I had a dream and a passion.
And I think that’s what coaches can do. I think they can get out there and they can awake that passion and that dream and help plant those seeds for success.
JOHN: Well, that’s awesome, Andy. You’re doing great things with your ministry. I call it a ministry because they do teach kids about Jesus Christ, and that’s so important because some of these kids aren’t getting that in the home. But Andy, tell us how to find out about you. Is the best place to go to your website?
ANDY: 1stShotBasketball.net and you can go on there; you can click on links and go to the winter league. We have several different leagues that we have during the course of the year.
JOHN: And that will give them all the signup and the dates and everything.
ANDY: And you go and register online right there.
ANDY: You can either pay by check or pay by credit card.
JOHN: Well, that’s great. Well, Andy, we wish you the best. Keep it up, keep doing it. It’s grown unbelievably because I was there one of the first years, and now the numbers are staggering.
ANDY: I think when your two sons were in we had 35 kids.
JOHN: Well, one thing you’ll like about Andy is you’ll hear him in the gym and he’s got the old coaches yell, yelling things out in a positive way, but by the third day, he has no voice. And so here in about another month we’ll see Andy without a voice. He’ll be hoarse just like most of the coaches you see when they do the interviews on TV. So Andy, thank you man. Thanks for coming on today. Keep doing what you’re doing.
ANDY: I appreciate it. | <urn:uuid:a2b1b87f-f2da-41e6-9070-480216a04fff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.johncjones.com/Blog/Interview-with-Andy-Herzer-of-1st-Shot-Basketball | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975215 | 2,498 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Book 18 of Homer's Iliad contains a remarkable description of the surface of Achilles' shield. Made by the god Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith, the shield offers an enigmatic picture of life in its totality: sun and moon, war and peace, city and country, the seasonal endeavors of agriculture and pastoralism and vintage, all encircled by the River Ocean. I like to think of the shield as the god's silent, somber celebration of all the possibilities of life beyond the Iliad: the city at war (i.e., life as it's lived in the Iliad) represents only a small part of the whole.
Above, a remarkable visualization not of Achilles' shield but of the geography of the Homeric world, creator unknown. (Click for a larger view.) If this picture were a real snowglobe, I'd buy it in a second. More via the links:
Homer’s Snowdome (Strange Maps)(Thanks, TRH!)
Homer's view of the earth (henry-davis.com)
An explanation (henry-davis.com) | <urn:uuid:31c701c9-97b4-4931-ba77-d452811195e2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mleddy.blogspot.com/2008/06/homers-world.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908864 | 236 | 2.84375 | 3 |
Have you always wanted to in-line skate, but it just seemed a bit too scary? Then, why not try STROLLER-SKATING? It's easy, and you have a stroller to hang onto! Also, if you have a baby or toddler to put in the stroller, you have an excuse to Stroller-Skate! (If you don't have any kids, or your kids have outgrown strollers, you can still Stroller-Skate --just use an empty stroller or put a doll or stuffed animal inside if you think you might look silly skating with an empty stroller.)
There's all sorts of places and ways to Stroller-Skate. Try a city park with a flat sidewalk or basket ball court. The large strollers, rather than the cheap umbrella strollers seem to give the beginning skater more stability, but an umbrella stroller works just fine too.
Beginning Stroller Skating Techniques
The first techniques you need to master are forward skating and stopping. I recommend first doing a series of forward swizzles (put your heels in a "V", bend your knees, then while keeping 2 feet on the ground, push yourself a little forward, and then close up your toes, and then repeat). To stop, do a swizzle, but then turn to the left or right and put your weight a little forward on your front skate. Then, try gliding on one foot at a time from that "V" position; you should look like quite an experienced skater by now; don't forget to keep holding on to the stroller, arms slightly bent and in front for balance! If you lose your balance, just hold on to the stroller with 2 hands and you won't fall.
Slalom Down Hills or Use Your Heel Brake
Once you've mastered skating forward on a flat surface, you are ready for more complicated techniques. Remember, that even small hills can be dangerous, so just slalom down those hills with your stroller. You can always use your heel brake to stop, but with a stroller, the slalom technique seems to be easier. Think of downhill skiing, but put your weight on the outside skate, turn your toes in, and bend a little forward. Don't let go of the stroller no matter what, especially if a baby is with you!
Try Going Backwards
Going backward is great fun when you Stroller-Skate. You want to pull, not push the stroller as you go backward. Look behind you every few minutes to make sure you don't run into anyone. First try backward swizzles (reverse the forward technique by starting with your toes together, and finishing with your heels together; then try back half swizzles by using one foot at a time. You should look like a pro by now.
Stroller Skating Tricks
If you can use a basket ball court or smooth parking lot surface, you can practice forward and backward cross-overs, turns, and tricks. One move that is sure to impress onlookers is the Stroller-Skate Spiral. Glide on one foot, hold on to the stroller, and hold the other leg in a horizontal position over your head. This move is guaranteed to bring attention from all directions! This move even seems to be easier when you go backwards, but don't let those who just watched you in awe know that secret!
Turning around quickly is one thing that will impress onlookers too, and with the added support of a baby or toddler and a stroller, you should be able to turn around on one foot. Just push the stroller in a straight line, hold on to it with one hand, and turn from forward to backward, then back to forward again. Then, once you have someone's attention (their mouth might be open as they stare at you by now), jump in the air on two feet! If you want, make a turn of one hundred and eighty degrees as you turn in the air. (By now, you should have more than one open mouth staring at you!)
To sum things up, Stroller-Skating is a safe and fun way to enjoy in-line skating, and every beginning non-skater can do it. It's also a great way for moms or dads to get out with their kids, and new moms will find it a fun and easy way to lose those extra pounds gained during pregnancy.
About the Author
Jo Ann Schneider Farris, About.com’s
Figure Skating Guide and the author of HOW
TO JUMP AND SPIN ON IN-LINE SKATES, is a professional figure skating coach
She put on her first pair of ice skates in 1964 and her first pair of in-line skates in 1987. Jo Ann is a U.S. Figure Skating Double Gold Medalist, a United States National Medalist, a Certified Advanced Level 4 Coach with the International In-Line Figure Skating Association, and has coached figure skating since 1983. She is also owner of the Jump-Spin Skate Company.
Jo Ann and Family and Friends Stroller Skating 1994
Jo Ann had three "excuses" to Stroller-Skate: son, Joel Benjamin Farris (born in August of 1994) daughter, Rebekah Abigail Farris (born in April of 1996), and daughter, Annabelle Deborah Farris (born in July of 1999). Her husband, Dan Farris, became an expert Stroller-Skater. | <urn:uuid:2857f347-0e61-44db-8261-37066767a606> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jumpspin.com/stroller.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94913 | 1,141 | 1.992188 | 2 |
FROM THE BEGINNING
August 1954, as NR waited in the wings, young
William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote that foreign policy
had divided the American right wing into two camps,
that of the non-interventionists and that of more
realistic persons like himself who understood the
Communist Menace in its horrible Totality. Given such
an unprecedented and cosmic threat, victory would
require Americans to "think in terms of institutionalizing
native despotism"1: better
a near-totalitarian central state run by our fellow
Americans than Soviet takeover.
its birth, the next year, NR boasted that it
stood "athwart the path of history, yelling Stop!"
Given the editors' willingness to create a bureaucratic
despotism on our shores, it would have been more truthful
to say that they stood in the path of the total federal
state, yelling Come On Down! Such an admission would,
of course, have been bad for their self-image as defenders
of the free market and the two or three liberties
whose suspension might not be demanded by the great
CONTINUITY AND LITTLE CHANGE
course the whole point of NR was to heal the
division on the right by driving the non-interventionists
out of respectable society. The right, no longer "divided,"
could now serve in the forefront of the new crusade.
Through the fifties and into the sixties, there was
hardly a war or intervention about which NR
showed any skepticism or reluctance.2
There were, indeed, a number of wars or interventions
on the editors' wish list, which we did not, thankfully,
time, the magazine's initial enthusiasm for European
colonialism became more muted, but its enthusiasm
for extensions of US power anywhere and everywhere
grew and grew. NR went all out for Barry Goldwater
in 1964 and when that adventure went sour, committed
itself to apologizing for LBJ and the war in Indochina.
The only complaint from NR was that more bombs,
more troops, and more money might be needed to win
the war, "contain" China, stop communism,
and so on.
for atrocities lately popular again because
of claims about Senator Kerrey's wartime activities
NR laid down the law in no uncertain
terms. Deriding Time's coverage of Songmy (the
Mylai Massacre), the editors wrote: "During the
American Civil War atrocity was not an aberration,
the act of bewildered or temporarily unbalanced men,
but a matter of settled military policy. 'Until we
can repopulate Georgia,' said General Sherman, 'it
is useless for us to occupy it; but the utter destruction
of its roads, houses and people will cripple their
military resources.' Does Time conclude that
the Union, therefore, should have been permitted to
don't know what Time might have replied to
that, but I do wonder exactly how NR expected
Southerners to react to that little sally.
about the release of the Pentagon Papers, NR
published its own "secret documents," which
were quickly exposed as faked. To this, the magazine
replied that such documents should exist and
therefore NR's papers were merely "technically
fictitious" not "substantively fictitious."4
Cornered by popular revulsion against the war, NR
defiantly began praising the notion of "American
so it went. The heroic cause in Vietnam ran aground,
somehow, leaving NR to grumble that more firepower,
atrocities, defoliation, whatever, would have led
to victory, but the weak liberals had not been up
to it. If NR had been running the war, it might
still be going on today; that, or the place would
be a flat plain of radioactive ruin. I'm afraid they
never made the case, though, that the deaths of 50,000
Americans and a couple million Vietnamese had much
to do with the actual defense of the liberties and
property of the American people.
of their war, NR whooped it up for invasion
and occupation of Libya in 1973, but to no avail.
Meanwhile, Nixon had come and gone, and the poor editors
had to endure the Carter years. They and their new
allies, the Neo-Conservatives, stirred up a crisis
atmosphere about the renewed Soviet threat – "the
Present Danger" – and then got all the dandy
new weapons systems they wanted during the long and
profligate reign of Ronald Reagan and Bush I.
OF THE ENEMY
with improper stealth and suddenness, the Evil Empire
imploded. The intelligence agencies with their large
and unaccountable budgets had somehow failed to see
it coming. One might think NR would have no
reason to go on. But No, NR cast about for
new enemies. Having signed on for "native despotism,"
it would never do for them to let their guard down
famously led to a renewed "division" on
the right, as some conservatives acknowledged what
many libertarians had said all along, namely, that
under cover of waging the Cold War the United States
had been transformed from a republic into an empire.
The Gulf War and the humanitarian aggression against
Serbia helped sort out the real commitments of members
of the right.
DERBYSHIRE AND INEXORABLE INEVITABILITIES
recent China incident may have been another defining
moment for the right. The unrestrained warmongering
from NR was wondrous to behold. John Derbyshire
distinguished himself in the struggle.
"America Grovels," NR online, April 11,
2001, he set everyone straight on the evils of China.
China, it seems, is Communist and Leninist. But, wait,
that's not quite right either; China is "anti-democratic"
and committed to "racial superiority." Therefore
China is HITLER. This "fascist" China brings
to mind Mussolini, not to mention Imperial Japan.
we come to the bottom line: "Early 20th-century
Japan was not bent on world conquest, only a Greater
East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere – precisely what China
wishes to construct in Central Asia and the West Pacific."
what? I'd sure go to war to prevent that.
it was a mistake for the US to get on a collision
course with Japan over that nation's attempt to create
an economic sphere of influence for itself. The Japanese
pointed out in the twenties and thirties that all
they wanted was an arrangement similar to that which
the US enjoyed in relation to Latin America. High-minded
US spokesmen could see no similarity whatsoever. Myopia
in high places is nothing unusual.
why repeat the exercise of the 1940s? Any fool could
see that, in the nature of things, China will be an
influential power in East Asia. Carl Oglesby, of SDS
fame, theorized that the war in Vietnam was really
about preventing an inevitable economic relationship
between China and Japan, a relationship which US neo-mercantilists
opposed as too competitive with their interests.6
One would have to be very cynical to believe that…..
of beating China back into the sorry shape it was
in around 1900, I think one has to accept that China
will play a role in the future of East Asia. We can
trade with China and – this is the hard part for many
Americans – mind our own business as regards China's
form of government and internal affairs. That would
tend to promote peace.
are those so enamored of "the joys and sorrows"
of being a Pacific Power that the appearance of any
rival seems a casus belli. Mr. Derbyshire is
polishing his pith helmet, even now, and dusting off
his manuals on "Wog-Caning" and "Surviving
on the Bamboo Shoot Diet While Securing the Sea Lanes
to India." He has already announced that war
with China is inevitable.
is gone; the old reflexes live on. It seems somehow
fitting that NR should recruit fresh warmongers
from the Old Country to stiffen the soft Americans'
resolve (not to mention those upper lips). They
did it for so much longer. It worked so well. I shall
not even raise the Irish Question, or Questions. The
original empire was so wonderful and so beneficial
for all concerned that I'm surprised that our ancestors
fought to secede from it, or that those terrible Boers
suffered 26,000 civilian casualties before giving
into such good government.
NATIONAL REVIEW TO NATIONAL REVIEW
British imperial connection is indeed fitting. Young
Mr. Buckley consciously named his new magazine after
the original National Review.
British NR had existed for several decades
when Leopold James Maxse, the son of an admiral and
a committed imperialist, took over it in the late
1880s. Under Maxse, the magazine proclaimed the "inevitability"
of war between Britain and Imperial Germany.7
Colonel Blimps and Social Reformers were already going
into coalition when Leopold Maxse took over the National
Review. Here, truly, was a school of National
Greatness, efficiency, and cold showers. The original
NR did not have to wait for Neo-Cons to come
on board. Beyond that, the two magazines seem rather
F. Buckley, Jr., "A Dilemma of Conservatives,"
The Freeman, 5, 2 (August 1954), p. 52.
Burnham, ex-Trotskyite, proto-Neo-Conservative,
and NR's reigning foreign affairs guru, did
not want to crusade against Rhodesia or the Republic
of South Africa ("Which Isolationism is Your
Isolationism?", NR, January 16, 1968),
but this pretty much exhausts NR's opposition
Great Atrocity Hunt," National Review,
December 16, 1969.
National Review, August 10, 1971.
James Burnham, "The Joys and Sorrows of Empire,"
National Review, July 13, 1971.
and Change (New York, 1967) pp. 127-130.
and Social Reform (New York, 1968), pp. | <urn:uuid:1e165842-61f8-4d0a-bb9a-5854d1383cf9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.antiwar.com/stromberg/s051501.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94409 | 2,211 | 1.890625 | 2 |
The terminology "native plants" is misleading and has been the source of frustration when used as a guide to saving water in home gardens.
Using plants that grow naturally in your local area is the way to go if you want a garden that does not need summer watering, and the best place to start working out which plants you want is by walking through your nearest bushland.
Now is a great time because many are flowering and you can select varieties by taking a photograph and then visiting a specialist nursery or the regular plant sales held by the Friends of Kings Park.
Be aware that not all plants described as Australian natives suit our climate and soils. An example is the stunning Grevillea hybrid from northern NSW, which needs lots of summer rain.Mediterranean varieties and plants from southern California, northern South America and Argentina grow in climates similar to ours and have adapted to long, dry summers, low rainfall, sandy soils and windy environments.
'The West Australian' is a trademark of West Australian Newspapers Limited 2013.
All rights reserved.
Select your state to see news for your area. | <urn:uuid:9a9ad611-a651-41b9-86cd-d9541e282e4b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/wa/14267547/how-to-find-a-friendly-native/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955749 | 222 | 2.46875 | 2 |
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Practicing responsible fiscal oversight is one of the most critical functions of the OPRF High School board, as it is for any board of a taxing body. Our communities deserve a full and accurate reporting of how the board manages the funds with which the public has entrusted us — and that is why it is essential to correct misinformation regarding District 200 finances, as was published in a letter to the Wednesday Journal last week [District 200 rushes levy increase, survey, Viewpoints, Nov. 21].
The letter writer stated incorrectly that the District's comprehensive, audited financial statements were late this year. In fact, they were presented to the district by representatives from the independent auditing firm during open session at the Oct. 25, regular board meeting, just as they are every October. These statements are published on our website (in the Business Office section) and are available for anyone to read.
In addition, the letter writer refers to the proposed property tax levy as "clandestine," a characterization that is difficult to understand given the facts: The presentation of this year's levy is following the same timeline it does every year. This timeline was presented publicly at the Board Finance Committee meeting on Oct. 16. As announced at that time, the preliminary levy then was presented in open session during the Nov. 15 regular board meeting. Next, on Dec. 20, the board will hold a Truth in Taxation hearing, which is not required by law. However, the board holds the hearing annually in the interest of transparency, and any member of the public is invited to attend. The levy will not be approved till the hearing is completed.
Illinois school finance is complicated, so some background about the levy may be helpful. The district's proposed 2012 levy is 2.5%. This actually is half a percent lower than the Consumer Price Index of 3% that is allowed this year. The maximum amount is set by Illinois tax caps, which limit the amount the district can levy (to 5% or the Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U), whichever is less).
Keep in mind that the CPI-U is based on a specific list of goods consumers typically purchase — including cigarettes, televisions, and pet products — not the items a school district must pay for, such as health care insurance for employees, which can increase annually by as much as 10%. If the district were to skip a year of levy — that is, if it were to levy 0% — it would not be permitted to request another levy until a new referendum passed.
The last District 200 referendum was in 2002, and the board intends to delay going into deficit spending of reserves, triggering the next referendum, as long as possible. Through significant cost-cutting measures incorporated into the current budget, the district saved nearly $600,000 over original budget projections for the year. Cost-savings targets have been set through 2022, and district leadership already has begun discussing cost-containment ideas for the 2013-2014 budget.
Increasing student enrollment and Illinois pension reform are likely to affect future budget projections, but the board remains committed to practicing sound fiscal management while delivering excellence in education for the young people of our community.
Terry Finnegan is president of the District 200 school board. | <urn:uuid:4ad990d7-e080-435a-9bb2-f28e2d7f7d70> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oakpark.com/News/Articles/11-27-2012/Criticism-of-District-200-levy-is-misinformed/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974738 | 671 | 1.570313 | 2 |
AUSTIN – Will a revolutionary wireless sensor system – up to 10 times more energy efficient than existing technology – set the standard for hazardous agent detection, telemedicine and agricultural, environmental and industrial monitoring?
Or could a new technology that detects and corrects movement in patients improve the precision of MRI images?
These two technologies were among nine developed at University of Texas System institutions that were awarded Texas Ignition Fund (TIF) grants totaling nearly $450,000 to help get the advancements out of the laboratory and into commercial use.
The wireless sensor and MRI technology, as well as the other winning entries awarded $50,000 grants, are described in detail online here.
The grants come from a $2 million fund approved by the UT System Board of Regents late last year to speed commercialization of products created at UT System institutions. In the first three TIF rounds, the Office of Research and Technology Transfer (RTT) and the Ignition Fund Advisory Board (IFAB) approved $1.16 million in TIF awards for 28 proposals from 11 System institutions.
“We are pleased at the high quality of proposals submitted to the TIF program from our institutions,” UT System Interim Chancellor Dr. Kenneth I. Shine said. “They reflect the remarkable talent and innovative thinking on our campuses and reinforce our belief that higher education is an economic driver in Texas. We have high hopes that these ventures will begin to produce new commercial products and startups as early as next year.”
The TIF fund was authorized to address the challenge that research discoveries and inventions at UT institutions often cannot reach their potential without additional effort to develop product applications that can attract investor capital to commercialize them. TIF funds are used mainly for personnel, equipment, supplies, instrument use fees, market analyses and business plans.
“We want to express appreciation for the valuable contributions of several outside experts who helped review and evaluate TIF proposals,” UT System Assistant Vice Chancellor for Commercial Development Cathy Swain said. “We expect to fully commit the balance of TIF funds this fiscal year and hope to find ongoing sources of funding to perpetuate the TIF’s good work.”
The TIF program was created by the UT System’s Office of Research and Technology Transfer, whose charge is to develop and implement strategies to expand and enhance research and commercialization activities at UT System institutions. With a total research expenditure of $2.2 billion in Fiscal Year 2008 by the UT System, research and product development activities resulted in 25 start-up companies (83 in the last five years), 99 U.S. patents (572 in the last five years), and 716 invention disclosures (3,207 in the last five years), ultimately creating new jobs, products and services.
The University of Texas System is one of the nation’s largest higher education systems, with nine academic campuses and six health institutions. The UT System has an annual operating budget of $11.5 billion (FY 2009) including $2.5 billion in sponsored programs funded by federal, state, local and private sources. Student enrollment exceeded 194,000 in the 2007 academic year. The UT System confers more than one-third of the state's undergraduate degrees and educates nearly three-fourths of the state's healthcare professionals annually. With more than 81,000 employees, the UT System is one of the largest employers in the state
210 West 6th Street, Suite 2.100
Austin, Texas 78701
p: (512) 499-4363 f: (512) 499-4358 | <urn:uuid:405f8953-27ce-496b-a06c-61717f24f7ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utsystem.edu/news/2008/12/09/ut-system-awards-third-round-commercialization-grants | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945708 | 737 | 1.929688 | 2 |
The advent of Internet genealogy and the rapid growth of online databases of original records have facilitated genealogical research in ways that previous generations could never have imagined. For a small monthly fee, researchers can sit at home and access thousands of census records from around the world through online databases, not to mention military records, city directories, and a growing number of other records. With a few keystrokes and the push of a mouse button, they can contact distant cousins and share information, a process that once took days, if not weeks. They can access digitized copies of hard-to-find out of print genealogies with little more than a Google search.
With all of this emphasis on digital research, should traditional methods be ignored? Specifically, do we still need printed publications, like records transcriptions? To answer those questions, we must consider the nature of both digital and traditional genealogical research. | <urn:uuid:baeb608c-b561-46e9-aefd-f1b2267bbbaa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://genealogical.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939902 | 184 | 2.71875 | 3 |
For everyone who wants to enjoy delicious food AND stay fit and healthy.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Fat belly? Eat these foods, help it melt away
Try emphasizing whole grains, vinegar and nuts -- and get rid of that spare tire.
So says Eating Well. Here are some tasty and easy recipes that include filling foods that contain these stomach-reducing ingredients....for example, this couscous salad.
Recipe: Couscous and Berry Salad
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons orange juice
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
2 teaspoons finely chopped shallots
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
2 cups cooked whole-wheat couscous
1 cup chopped nectarine
1 cup mixed fresh berries, such as blueberries and raspberries
2 tablespoons toasted sliced almonds
Instructions:Whisk oil, orange juice, vinegar, shallots, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Add cooked couscous, nectarines, berries and almonds; gently toss to combine.
At the University of Cincinnati, I teach writing, reporting and research methods to journalism students as well as a course in mass communication.
I also write a "Healthy Foodie" column, with co-author Mary Ann Barnes, M.D., for the magazine Whole Living Journal, which is distributed in the Cincinnati metro area.
I'm a freelance food and travel writer, a dedicated exercise fanatic (have been since my 20s) and an avid gardener, reader, cook and moviegoer. I'm live in Cincinnati with my husband, George, and recently lost my sweet mother, who died peacefully at 91. | <urn:uuid:68aace1b-e4c3-490a-ae02-fcc9eb6dc005> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://healthyfoodies.blogspot.com/2012/02/fat-belly-eat-these-foods-help-it-melt.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923215 | 346 | 1.539063 | 2 |
How to Use Digg to Assplode Your Blog
[I think I'm in the right room? There are lots of round tables with cups and saucers and silverware. Are we eating or are we blogging? Why am I the only one in the room? What's going on?
...Okay, that was totally, definitely not the right room. But it's okay because we're better now. And I'm sure that the 200 yard dash I just did to get here on time will help balance out this giant cup of coffee I'm enjoying. Life is good. And I hear my luggage, which was accidentally sent to Omaha, should be arriving in Vegas shortly. Huzzah!
Okay we're starting.]
Jeremy Wright is doing the introductions. I recognize Jeremy because he was at WordCamp. He explains that Brian Clark is not yet in Vegas so Tris Hussey is joining us in his place. Hi, Tris.
Funny title aside, this session is going talk about how to grow your traffic using social networks. We’re going to talk about Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Twitter. So basically, just another day at the office for us.
Bowing to the Digg Fanboys
Aaron Brazell starts the conversation talking about Digg, calling it the penultimate social network. It was the first site that took the whole concept of democracy online and the idea of what’s popular and what’s not and applied it to the Web. Stories go in, they’re submitted by users and then users can choose what gets popular and what doesn’t.
He uses a post he wrote that made it to Digg entitled HP Gives Consumers the Middle Finger that brought him 12,000 page views in an hour. Yowsa.
Tris says there are a couple of lessons in that. The headline Aaron used in the post was something Digg users like (i.e. it was inflammatory). Use things people can relate to. Controversial headlines get Dugg because people want to find out what it’s all about. Writing a good headline is really important. Many people will base their Digg almost entirely upon that.
Jeremy asks what happens when you get Dugg, become Digg popular and get this massive influx of traffic? He says that it has brought the b5media servers down plenty of times.
Digg users don’t like when you submit your own post. Its okay to Digg it yourself, but you have to get someone else to submit it. The submitter should have no visible connection to that network whatsoever. That makes it look like you’re not trying to game the system. If it seems like you’re a blog network trying to game the system, the Digg fanboys will toast it.
Aaron tries to define the concept of a "Digg fanboy" and say it is really important to understand how Digg works. Digg users are unlike any other group of users on the Internet. They defy logic in so many ways (hee!). He likens Diggers to gatekeepers. They’re guys between the ages of 18-24. They think they know more than you. You have to have thick skin in order to participate.
People who benefit the most from Digg are those working off a page view-based payment systems. Hardcore Diggers circulate their entire Internet activity around Digg. They’re not going to stick on your site. They’ll come in, see your story, they may Digg it, they may leave a comment, but then they’re going back to Digg. Don’t expect to get loyal users from Digg. It’s great for traffic and if you’re getting paid based on CPM. It’s not going to bring sticky users. Digg users come in swarms and then leave.
What About StumbleUpon?
Aaron talks about StumbleUpon. Unlike with Digg, it’s okay to submit your own stories. Aaron says he Stumbles every one of his.
Tris says that the great thing about StumbleUpon is that it works very well with Digg. He talks about the Digg Shouts (which I hate) where your friends can send you a "shout" asking you to Digg stuff for them. StumbleUpon will bring continuous traffic to you over time. (This is something we’ve seen a lot on the Bruce Clay site.)
What happens is that you Digg a post and then you Stumble it. It gives people a better chance for longer term traffic. What you do is hit the Stumble button and it will randomly pick another page that they think you’ll like based on listed preferences. The sites you submit and you say you like, your friends will get as well. This is why it’s good to Stumble all your own posts. It generates long term growth traffic. You’re not going to get a huge explosion, but you’ll get a nice, steady increase of traffic. As a growth strategy, it goes hand in hand with Digg.
Aaron brings up his traffic numbers to see the power of StumbleUpon. Basically, SU is his leading referrer.
Tris calls the Stumble button very much like the I’m Feeling Lucky Button on Google because you never know what you’re going to get.
Tris talks about Reddit and says it doesn’t have a lot of presence. I silently hiss. He says he also uses Delicious. It’s different in that it’s not a popularity driver, you’re sharing bookmarks. The power of Delicious is sharing links and having people subscribe to that link feed.
Twitter for Breaking News
Aaron says if you’re not using Twitter, you need to start. It’s his favorite social networking tool. It drives a tremendous amount of traffic when used properly. The best traffic, the sticky traffic, develops out of relationships, out of knowing and understanding people. With Twitter, it’s all about the relationships, who you’re following, who’s following you, etc. When you say, hey, I have a post here or I’m sending people to this link, it drives traffic.
Twitter is great for saying right now I am interviewing this person. It’s great for breaking news. It’s immediate.
Closing Thoughts & Key Tips
Digg is like playing the stock market. You can get a fast growth but then it might fall.
SU is like a money market. It grows over time.
Don’t Digg your own post. When you do Digg something, spread it around your network. When you Digg your friend’s post, Stumble it.
The ultimate sticky traffic thing is Twitter because it’s all about relationships.
What do you think about Facebook?
Aaron – it hasn’t been fantastic for driving traffic. It’s great for relationships. He uses FB to import his RSS feed from his blog. His connections on FB are people he’s also engaging with via other social networking channels. It may be a way to expose your content to new people.
An audience member says that Digg is more male-oriented. If you have a post about saving money on something female oriented, it gets laughed off Digg. It’s better to Stumble your "girly" posts or make your headlines more masculine. | <urn:uuid:163a7d64-8aeb-4007-a924-475264dbe263> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2007/11/how-to-use-digg-to-assplode-your-blog/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953023 | 1,580 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Category Archives: Vocaloid
I returned to work this week to find some of my students made me Christmas cards. I received a particularly awesome Vocaloid card that reminded me about how cool it is to be comfortable and honest about your hobbies. And as an added bonus, my students are more interested in English by being able to associate their studies with something they enjoy, which I know from first-hand experience is a terrific motivator. I guess the point I’m long-windedly trying to make is that this nice little surprise made my day.
I came to an interesting realization last night that I think is worth discussing. Generally speaking, most people nowadays are not fans of opera or musicals. This I think is a good generalization that doesn’t have much room for dispute. Singing out a story has fallen into the realm of a super-niche audience in an era when people prefer to have a plot presented to them with simple prose. But the important questions is why people don’t like opera or musicals. I think I’ve figured it out and the reason is because the music they play at these venues is horribly dated and out of fashion. As a kid I loved listening to golden oldies about the old west and Charlie Daniels telling horror stories accompanied by the fiddle. If they played genres that people enjoyed listening to I’m willing to bet opera would start to make a resurgence. I think of Avenue Q’s success as a more modern example to justify my claim. Now, how does all this relate to anime?
I’ve been a fan of Vocaloid since the leek spin meme gained popularity a few years ago. Last year, I really started to get excited about Vocaloid when the 39 Live Event in Tokyo was posted to YouTube and became a sensation. I recently watched the Vocaloid videos Daughter of Evil and Servant of Evil sung by the Kagamine twins and it’s an exquisite example of blending story with music (an approximation for what I think of as a modern opera). The theme of darkness and out-of-touch nobility is complimented by some harsh, synthesized tones that remind me of something out of central-European royalty. Starting the story with Rin’s point of view sets up a selfish and dislikeable perspective that results in a good feeling of satisfaction and justice by the story’s end. But when we see the story again from Ren’s point of view, it’s clear that this tale has two sides and you begin to realize that maybe your quick judgment on the first song may have been premature. It’s a fantastic dichotomy that really gets the listener to think in ways that may be uncomfortable. It’s an amazing accomplishment for something deceptively simple and easily overlooked. If you haven’t seen it yet, I suggest you check it out. | <urn:uuid:5bc1678b-4cef-4369-a55d-752d49991630> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ashitanoanime.wordpress.com/category/vocaloid/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970414 | 597 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Welsh National War Memorial. John Ninian Comper (1864-1960). Unveiled 1928. Portland stone, with bronze figures and dolphins by A. B. Pegram. In the centre of Alexandra Gardens, Cathays Park, Cardiff. Photograph and text by Jacqueline Banerjee. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL.]
Comper has achieved a dignified and elegant effect with a complex circle-within-circle design. As the listing text explains, the outer part consists of "a circular colonnade of unfluted Corinthian columns with 3 projecting rectangular porticos"; at each of the gated porticos, steps lead down to a circular space where a circular fountain basin contains a three-sided podium. The rectangular lower part leads to a circular upper part "with projecting columns echoing the shape of the outer colonnade." On the three projections are three bronze statues representing a soldier, a sailor and an airman, each holding high a wreath. Dolphins leap from the base of the main platform above, whilst in the middle stands another bronze figure representing Victory (according to the listing text in the PMSA site) or the Archangel St Michael ("Welsh National War Memorial"). Either way, the meaning, suggested by the only Latin inscription, "IN HOC SIGNO VINCES," is triumph over the adversary. The other inscriptions are in English and Welsh, one in English on the inner frieze reading: REMEMBER HERE IN PEACE THOSE WHO IN TUMULT OF WAR BY SEA, ON LAND, IN AIR, FOR US AND FOR OUR VICTORY ENDURETH UNTO DEATH.
This is a very striking memorial, especially as positioned in the centre of the gardens. Inspired by Comper's visits to N. Africa, especially Tunisia and the public works erected there by Emperor Hadrian, it is very different in its austere classical style from his earlier rich neo-Gothic church furnishings and interiors (e.g. the Lady Chapel at All Saint's, Margaret Street), but it may be linked to his more recent liking for the columned baldacchino or altar canopy. In theme and structure, it is also a perfect expression of his belief in "unity by inclusion" (Jenkins 284). This was Comper's only important secular commission (Symondson).
Closer Views of Sculpture
Jenkins, Simon. England's Thousand Best Churches. London: Penguin, 2000.
PMSA: Full Record. vads (resource for visual arts). Web. 1 March 2011.
Symondson, Anthony. "Comper, Sir (John) Ninian (1864-1960)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Web. 1 March 2011.
"Welsh National War Memorial". Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. Web. 1 March 2011.
Last modified 6 February 2012 | <urn:uuid:1e2ecf35-1ac2-4e26-a13e-8d47eba99d31> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/comper/3.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907242 | 627 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Invest in our own renewable energy
Today our country is in an economic mess with no solution in sight. If there is one thing that all parties must come together on, it is a strategy to create jobs in order to get this country back on track.
There is a simple solution right in front of us which has provided unparalled, value-added opportunity for agriculture and America. It has generated good-paying jobs, spurred economic activity, and provided rural youth a reason and an opportunity to find jobs closer to home.
The solution is the new and advanced ethanol industry which has developed over the past 10 years. After leaving a declining plastics manufacturing industry which Asia is now dominating, I joined an ethanol company and quickly learned that the common myths about ethanol are simply not true. I’m amazed by the clean, energy efficient technology associated with ethanol production, and the opportunity to produce more ethanol using the new, advanced cellulosic ethanol technology.
This year at the POET Biorefining-Cloverdale Plant, we created 50 direct jobs and an estimated 240 other support jobs related to the ethanol start-up.
Every year we pay $300 billion annually to foreign countries for oil. Increasing access to higher level blends of ethanol will reduce the role that foreign oil plays in our economy and will keep more dollars in the U.S. economy. At 10 percent of our fuel supply, the ethanol industry contributed $53.6 billion to the nation’s economy, generated $8.6 billion in federal tax revenues and supported more than 400,000 direct and indirect jobs that can’t be outsourced. The ethanol industry is prepared to double this impact.
As a job creator, I strongly recommend that it’s time to invest in homegrown, renewable energy that will put Americans back to work and get our economy back on track.
— Dave Brooks
Thinking about issues, ironies
A few thoughts:
• It’s nice our hospitals win awards for architecture, but with the helicopters making daily runs with patients to Indianapolis, maybe the interiors need attention.
• I believe it was Econ 101 which discussed this thing called price fixing. When all gas stations in a very coordinated manner raise their prices to the same level, is this it?
• A person used to have to rush to the fridge and back during commercials to avoid missing part of the show. Nowadays you can drive to the market and make it back in time.
• The immediate answer to most all problem situations is counseling. Small wonder we are producing individuals incapable of coping with life’s problems.
• Now that the space shuttle program is closed, wouldn’t it be nice if an accurate summary of costs and benefits would be issued? We have had to gain more than the beautiful outer space pictures for the billions spent.
— Don Sumansky | <urn:uuid:b71ec842-33ed-46f1-a282-743964f6a102> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tribstar.com/letters/x890683026/READERS-FORUM-August-29-2011/print | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94185 | 586 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Steve Wilson is a graduate student involved in WSU’s CRATEL (Center for Research in Art, Technology, Education, and Learning) program, and his video synthesizer was sponsored for further development in last year’s BETA (Bridging Entrepreneurship, Technology, and the Arts) competition.
One of Steve’s challenges for his video synth, and an interest in general, is creating expressive interfaces to electronic instruments. He describes it in a post to the Technology: Art and Sound by Design class mailing list. Basically, it comes down to the idea that acoustic instruments offer an immense amount of control over the sound that comes out through physical manipulation, and electronic instruments tend to offer much less control, and through mechanisms mainly like knobs and sliders.
While brainstorming with Steve about his synth, several of us came up with the idea of an interface like a plasma globe, which you control by moving your fingers over the surface. A cheap videocamera inside could watch what was happening and control the action.
Apparently a group of engineering students have been working on the globe subproject for six months without much progress to report. Although their difficulties seem to be mainly lack of organization and lack of time, others of us had talked about how clear an image might be obtainable on the camera with the globe lighted from the inside or outside.
Finally it occurred to me (while driving home from work) that gloves with LEDs on the fingertips would make lighted spots that should be very easy to see from the inside of the globe. Different colored LEDs on different fingers would allow the driver software to identify the different fingers; and pressing the LED against a translucent surface will produce a sharper point than holding it further away, so it might even be possible to determine approximately how near a fingertip is to the globe’s surface. And if made properly, the glove could be worn without impeding other use of the hand–just adding lights for the globe.
Time to prototype.
I was hoping to find a cheap lycra glove to make something like the original Dataglove. (Yes, I have a Dataglove system. No, you can’t play with it.) What I found instead was certainly cheap, but knit cotton instead of lycra. Heck, for 96¢, it was good enough.
When I put the gloves on, I could feel that they’d been assembled somewhat sloppily. Inside-out, it was easy to see that there was a lot of extra fabric inside the fingers outside the stitching:
So I trimmed it a little closer and more evenly around the fingertips, for better fit and comfort.
I wanted to use surface-mount technology (SMT) LEDs, so they’d fit flat against the glove surface. The ones in my stockpile are out of broken digital office phones, used to light up beside the line appearance and feature buttons.
I wanted to be sure I knew the polarity before I started attaching things and soldering them together, so I tested first with my meter. The LEDs actually lit with the small amount of current it supplies, which was kind of cool. Curiously, the green LEDs have the anode on the end with the cut corner, and the red LEDs have the cathode on the end with the cut corner. On each LED that I identified, I marked the anode end with the color of the LED. (The ones on this sheet are tinted to indicate their color, but the ones I’d already removed weren’t.)
The phone flex-PCB has a 300Ω resistor in series with each LED, so I tried out a couple there on the strip. Nice and bright.
Soldering the LEDs
My plan was to solder wire the LEDs, then sew the wire through the glove to the back side, where I wanted to attach a battery holder. I got out some fine wire, scraped off the enamel insulation, wrapped it around the fly leads on the LED, and soldered it up.
After I had both wires soldered to the LED, I threaded one at a time through a needle, held the LED about where I thought I wanted it on the fingertip, and started sewing. The goal was to get the wire from the tip of the finger to the back of the hand without leaving any large loops that might snag on anything, and without reducing the stretchiness of the glove. The latter factor called for a zig-zag stitch, which with a single thread looks like a running pattern of slash marks.
Once I got the wire stitched around to the back side, I followed along the back of the finger and then curved toward the center of the back of the hand.
Glue for Protection
I needed something to protect the LEDs on the fingertips so they wouldn’t snag. When the wires were safely stitched around out of the way, I got out the hot glue gun, put on the glove, put a dot of molten glue over the LED, and pressed the glue into a perfectly-shaped dimple in a USB serial connecter that I lifted from the CRATEL lab. It soaked into the fabric a bit, adhered very well, and made a nice smooth bubble over the LED.
Well, mostly nice and smooth. Hot glue tends to stretch like pizza cheese, and I made a little boo-boo.
For now, I settled on prototyping just two fingers, because I have only two colors of SMT LEDs, and because it seemed like enough for a proof of concept. I steered the appropriate wires onto the same paths and ran them up to where I wanted the battery holder.
Then I clipped the wires short, scraped the ends, folded the glove over to get room to work, and wrapped the wires around the leads of a surface-mount coin-cell holder salvaged from a PC motherboard.
I soldered them on, then folded the battery holder leads underneath so they wouldn’t poke through the glove and scratch up the hand. Laid back out, it looked like this.
I didn’t bother with a switch on the prototype–just pop in the coin cell and the LEDs come on. And because I’m using an old, small battery, I didn’t bother with current-limiting resistors–the internal resistance of the battery seems to be enough to limit the current to the LEDs.
Due to the idiosyncracies of my digital camera, the green LED on the index finger doesn’t look very green in this picture, but it really is. It’s a lot dimmer than the red LED, though; and I’m not sure why that is. Before going beyond a prototype, I’d want to pick current-limiting resistors to more closely calibrate the brightness of the different LEDs.
I don’t have a translucent globe to use, but I borrowed a hemispherical Tupperware bowl from my friend Lawrence’s daughters. (Don’t ask my why the girls have their own set of Tupperware–I really don’t know.) It works well enough to demonstrate the idea:
You can clearly see where the red LED is touching the bowl. Now all we need is a videocamera, some fancy software to track the lights, and an interface to a video synth.
Seriously, all of those things are Steve’s domain. I just wanted to see whether I could throw together a working glove, and I think this’ll do.
Oh–and when you want to shut it off, you take out the battery and drop it into the thumb. | <urn:uuid:58754859-530b-41cf-83e4-18cb7d55958f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.neufeld.newton.ks.us/electronics/?p=129 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958014 | 1,587 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Alfonso X El Sabio (1221 - 1284 / Toledo)
Alfonso X, El Sabio, or the learned, (1221-1284, reigned 1252-1284), king of Castile and León, is perhaps the most interesting, though far from the most capable, of the Spanish kings of the Middle Ages.
He was a writer, and he had considerable scientific fame, based mainly on his encouragement of astronomy and the Ptolemaic cosmogony as known to him through the Arabs.
As a ruler he showed legislative capacity, and a very commendable wish to provide his kingdoms with a code of laws and a consistent judicial system. The Fuero Real was undoubtedly his work, and he began the code called the Siete Partidas, which, however, was only promulgated by his great-grandson. He ... more »
Click here to add this poet to your My Favorite Poets.
- Cantiga de escarnio:
- Cantiga de Santa Maria No. 194
- Cantiga de Santa Maria, No. 100
- Cantiga de Santa Maria, No. 181
- Cantiga No. 60,
- Rose of roses and flower of flowers,
- The Treasury
- To The Month Of May (From The Cantigas)
Comments about Alfonso X El Sabio
World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development
celebrated on May 21st every year
Your Favorite Poets’ Favorite Books of Poetry
Daily Rituals of Famous Authors
Writers seem to be the most prone to unshakeable routines and elaborate superstitions.
Incredible Reading Rooms Around the World
Cozy, beautiful places to curl up with a good book... | <urn:uuid:7f2abf4e-d16e-4153-9eab-ecb3b7aaa8f0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://poemhunter.com/alfonso-x-el-sabio/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941913 | 365 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Background: Previous reports have suggested an association between birthweight and type 2 diabetes mellitus.
Objective: To investigate the association between birthweight and type 2 diabetes in a large cohort of adult women, taking into account potential explanatory factors in childhood and adult life.
Design: Cohort study. Birthweight was ascertained at the end of follow-up.
Setting: The Nurses' Health Study, a cohort of 121 701 U.S. women born from 1921 to 1946 who have been followed since 1976.
Participants: 69 526 women in the Nurses' Health Study who were free of diabetes at baseline and reported their own birthweight on the 1992 questionnaire.
Measurement: 2123 cases of confirmed type 2 diabetes diagnosed from 1976 to 1992.
Results: Low birthweight was associated with increased risk for type 2 diabetes. Age-adjusted relative risks suggested a reverse J-shape association between birthweight and risk for type 2 diabetes. However, after adjustment for adult body mass index and maternal history of diabetes, an inverse association across the entire range of birthweight became apparent; compared with the reference group, relative risks by ascending birthweight category were 1.83 (95% CI, 1.55 to 2.16) for birthweight less than 5.0 lb, 1.76 (CI, 1.49 to 2.07) for birthweight 5.0 to 5.5 lb, 1.23 (CI, 1.11 to 1.37) for birthweight 5.6 to 7.0 lb, 0.95 (CI, 0.82 to 1.10) for birthweight 8.6 to 10.0 lb, and 0.83 (CI, 0.63 to 1.07) for birthweight of more than 10 lb (P for trend < 0.001). Adjustment for ethnicity, childhood socioeconomic status, and adult lifestyle factors did not substantially alter this association. The association between birthweight and risk for type 2 diabetes was strongest among women whose mothers had no history of diabetes.
Conclusions: Birthweight is inversely associated with risk for type 2 diabetes during adulthood. Examination of prenatal nutrition and other potential in utero determinants of both birthweight and risk for type 2 diabetes may yield new means to prevent type 2 diabetes. | <urn:uuid:f6170e3c-edaf-4b91-950b-739f0bab8d36> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=712557 | 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 | 0.959318 | 466 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Leading the world by evil example: Obama and gay “marriage”
By Julio Severo
President Barack Obama’s announcement May 9 that he supports gay marriage boosted the hopes of gay supremacist groups around the world that other leaders will follow his example.
“This is incredibly important, it’s excellent news. The United States is a global leader on everything, and that includes gay rights,” said Julio Moreira, president of the Rio de Janeiro-based Arco-Iris gay supremacist group. “This will force other nations like Brazil to move forward with more progressive policies.”
|Follow his example?|
The Obama support for gay “marriage” came in a long trail of legal and political favors granted by his administration to gays. Even though he used words of Jesus and the Bible to justify his newest gay stance (from his old stance as a leftist senator defending gay “marriage”), Obama was unable to avoid widespread criticism, especially from Catholic and Pentecostal leaders, who believe that God created Adam and Eve. They do not believe that God created sex for two Adams or two Eves, who, by the way, were never created by God.
Political leaders and others opposed to gay “marriage” criticized Obama’s evil example. In particular, Pentecostal and Catholic politicians have spoken out strongly against gay “marriage” in Latin America.
His recent stance has been massively picked, praised and advanced by the world liberal media, pushing his evil example on the nations.
From now on, will nations, embattled by homosexualist attacks, get support (or US aid) to defend the natural family?
Even without his evil example, nations have been under huge pressure from leftist forces to embrace the gay agenda.
Brazil’s Supreme Court approved civil unions last year, striking down an article in the Brazilian Constitution that explicitly reserved marriage and civil unions only to a man and a woman. Liberal justices, appointed by leftist Brazilian presidents, put their ideology and gay supremacism over the Constitution. Their judicial activism has effectively opened the door for gay “marriage” in Brazil.
Nevertheless, Catholic and evangelical politicians continue to block the approval of any legislation in Brazilian Congress enshrining gay “marriage”.
Now, the world and Brazil embattled by homosexualist attacks have bigger leftist forces to face, because whatever happens in America, the rest of the world follows, willingly or not.
This article is largely based in a report from the Associated Press.
Portuguese version of this article: Liderando o mundo pelo mau exemplo: Obama e o “casamento” gay | <urn:uuid:bdb29871-f516-4c42-9e6c-8807050f258d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com/2012/05/leading-world-by-evil-example-obama-and.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955816 | 557 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Date of this Version
The following report provides up-todate information so birders and policy
makers can make informed decisions regarding the management of birds and
their habitats. This report identifies who birders are, where they live, how
avid they are, and what kinds of birds they watch. In addition to demographic
information, this report also provides an economic measure of birding. It
estimates how much birders spend on their hobby and the economic impact of these expenditures.
By understanding who birders are, they can be more easily reached and informed about pressures facing birds and bird habitats. Conversely, by knowing who is likely not a birder, or who is potentially a birder, information can be more effectively tailored. The economic impact estimates presented here can be used by resource managers and policy makers to demonstrate the economic might of birders and, by extension, the economic impact of birds.
All data presented here are from the wildlife-watching section of the 2006
National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation (FHWAR). It is the most comprehensive survey of wildlife recreation in the United States. Overall, 11,300 detailed wildlifewatching interviews were completed with a response rate of 78 percent. The Survey focused on 2006 participation and expenditures by U.S. residents 16 years of age and older. | <urn:uuid:0e673d41-76a0-46b6-82ce-56cfae35d1f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/usfwspubs/164/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935818 | 273 | 3.234375 | 3 |
All this talk about “green shoots” is out of control. It’s become the go-to oh-aren’t-I-clever analogy for signs of economic recovery.Well, two things I suppose ought to be said about it. The first is that there is no "seems to imply." It's saying it flat out. If you have an economy that runs on confidence instead of money and math, then all reality is transformed by clever phrases, animal spirits, and happy thoughts. The very phrase "green shoots" is designed to paint a specific mental and emotional picture. It's not condescending, it's science. Just ask an economist.
It’s obnoxious. It’s factually inaccurate. And it must be stopped! ...
“I am sick of it!” Peter Cohan, founder of management-consulting and venture-capital firm Peter S. Cohan & Associates, said of the term. “[I]t’s condescending because it oversimplifies what is really happening and it seems to imply that just by using a clever phrase, the reality will somehow be transformed.”
But secondly, the whole "are there green shoots?" debate is silly. Even in the worst of times, there is always good news, something you can find hope in. In the best of times, there is always bad news, necessary because it performs a task as valuable as the Praetorian guard: not to keep us safe but to remind us that we are mortal. There was never a time in which nothing bad could be said, there was never a time in which someone was not making a ton of money or having a good time or raising happy children.
The danger, of course, arises from treating green shoots like green cars, looking for only that data that reinforces your preconceptions and points to wished-for conclusions. Are there green shoots? Yes. Do they mean anything? Maybe. We'll know eventually.
* In true Bernanke fashion, while he popularized the term in its current iteration, he did not originate it. It was actually invented back in the early 90s by a British cabinet member whose name fortunately escapes me at the moment. He was sentenced to the House of Lords in 1998 anyway. | <urn:uuid:be5579d3-7d14-48f7-981e-da56e43a6130> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://elborak.blogspot.com/2009/05/anyone-seen-lawn-mower.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972425 | 472 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Returning from war is not an easy thing. Returning from war and needing a job is even more difficult. Right now, the national unemployment rate is 7.7 percent. For post-9/11 veterans, it's more than 10 percent. There's a massive effort underway to change that.
The transition from serving in the U.S. Armed Forces to working in the private sector can be a difficult one.
"Veterans have led in the field; they can lead in a factory or research facility. Veterans believe in getting the job done and doing it in the right way," writes GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt.
After charting five consecutive years of steady growth in the unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported a sharp five-percentage point decline in January and February of this year, bringing the unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans below that of the general population for the first time since 2008.
At Lockheed Martin, we believe America’s veterans should not return from the front line to stand in the unemployment line … and we’re working to make sure that doesn’t happen.
If one were to consider the story of today’s military veterans, they are often stuck in a similar situation when it comes to securing a new career in our civilian society. It’s both a challenge to the out-processing military hero and to the company giving an interview.
U.S. Bancorp CEO Richard Davis explains how his company is committed to hiring veterans.
TroopSwap is a full-fledged e-commerce and daily deals site exclusively for veterans, service members and their families. The discount site offers up to 90 percent off on everything from skydiving to legal services, vacations and restaurants.
With plans on the table to cut thousands of military jobs in the coming months, new research shows the servicemen and women who could be forced out aren't optimistic about their prospects for future employment.
Veteran hiring is a priority for one company-- not out of sympathy but as an investment in the bottom-line. Tom Brokaw reports for Dateline NBC.
Jim Amos, president and CEO of Tasti D-Lite, told CNBC, that franchises were the real heroes of the US economy and offer the solution to economic ills domestically and around the world. | <urn:uuid:44fce03c-9acf-4c00-b06b-7d8bcfc66de3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnbc.com/id/46762074/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954745 | 488 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Additional bands of locusts entered Israel throughout the day on Tuesday,
marking a week since the first wave of bugs flew across the Sinai border and
Two swarms swooped in on Tuesday afternoon in the Revivim
and Kama areas, following another fresh pack that entered through Kadesh Barnea
a few hours before, the Agriculture Ministry reported.
were just several hours after ministry workers had finished spraying swarms that
had entered the country yesterday in the Ramat Hanegev and Eshkol regions, the
No preventative pesticide can be used in advance of a
locust’s arrival, and effective spraying can only occur once the insects are
settled on the ground for the night or in the early morning before they fly off,
the ministry explained.
While individual locusts have made appearances
all over the country, the aerial and ground spraying has largely worked thus far
in eradicating the swarms, the office stressed. Individual locusts are not
harmful to humans, and they only pose a threat to agricultural plots in large
The chemicals being used to combat the locusts are of a “soft
pesticide” type and have no effects on other animals, preying upon the locusts
only and leaving no residue – as the pesticide breaks down quickly, according to
the ministry. Due to this spraying, there has not yet been any significant harm
to crops, but if agricultural damage was to occur, the farmers are protected by
The Agriculture Ministry said it would continue to work
around the clock to monitor the situation in Egypt as well as the wind
direction, the office said. | <urn:uuid:3cc4820e-4095-4a6f-bdb4-72b85c3e3a78> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jpost.com/Enviro-Tech/Agriculture-Ministry-More-locusts-swarm-into-Israel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944855 | 345 | 1.960938 | 2 |
Jobs @ MG
Social change in Islam
By Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
|During the time of the Prophet of Islam
there were so many evils in the social life of Arabia. The Prophet wanted
to reform all those evils according to the Islamic scheme but the method
he opted was not a revolutionary one. Rather, it was what may be called,
an evolutionary method.
An example of this evolutionary method can be seen in the case of slavery.
At that time slavery was widespread everywhere in the world including
Arabia. It even enjoyed the status of a highly established institution but
the Prophet avoided a path that would seek to abolish slavery right in the
beginning stage of his movement for reform. Instead, he adopted a gradual
process of trying to remove the evils by way of education, teaching and
explaining by peaceful means. God revealed verses in the Qur'an that
enjoined the Prophet to persuade people to be kind to their slaves.
These verses sought to change the very view of slaves in the eyes of
slaveholders. The Qur'an referred to slaves not as slaves but as human
beings no different from their "masters," equal to all other men
and deserving of respect, dignity and treatment that is but the right of
all human beings.
In those days, slaves were a most common commodity traded in the
marketplace. So had slavery been immediately abolished, it was bound to
create innumerable problems. It would have been as if a war were being
waged with such chaos as would be the result of abolishing the ownership
of all homes at a time when everyone owned their own house.
So Islam launched a two-fold movement. On one front, it continuously
discouraged the making of new slaves. On the other front it also
continuously ingrained into the mindset of society that freeing a slave
was an incomparable virtue, even to the extent that one was encouraged to
purchase new slaves solely for the purpose of freeing them. So the Prophet
and his companions began to purchase slaves from their masters and set
This example clearly illustrates the Islamic method for removing social
evils. This was the very method that was adopted by the Prophet to remove
all the prevalent social evils in Arabian society.
Aisha (RA), the wife of the Prophet, has explained the rationale behind
this evolutionary or gradual method. According to Al-Bukhari, she says
that in the early days of Islam only such verses were revealed that sought
to change a person's heart and mind, not verses that laid down divine law.
Only when the Qur'an had successfully inculcated in the believers an
innate acceptance of the evil nature of alcohol and adultery were the two
explicitly prohibited. Describing this Qur'anic prohibition, Aisha (RA)
says, had such a ban been revealed right in the very beginning, the people
would have immediately cried out, "Never shall we leave alcohol nor
shall we ever leave adultery."
Gradual change is but the Natural way of change. Islam was able to
establish an evil-free society for the first time in history only because
it employed this natural method of gradual change. We cannot find an
example of such comprehensive success in transforming society on the part
of any reform movement in the history of social reform.
In other words, the Islamic scheme for social reform can be called a
results-oriented method as opposed to a dogmatic method. Islam seeks to
bring about change in a manner that takes into consideration the possible
consequences of any action instead of simply imposing its laws without any
regard to the results.
Study of the Prophet's life reveals the distinction that he made between
his ideas and how he put them into practice. Although he was the greatest
of idealists and loved perfection, when dealing with people he kept
reality firmly in sight and remained ever practical. The Prophet's life is
laden with examples such as those leading unto the prohibition of alcohol
The Prophet's effort was always such that people accept the mores of Islam
by their own choice rather than be forced to accept it at the command of
some political power. One of the aspects behind the wisdom of the
Prophet's method is that when people relinquish a certain social evil of
their own accord then there is no negative psychology that results. If a
certain standard is imposed upon society, however, the social evil in
question may seem to have been removed but some other problem is sure to
take its place.
Judging by the standard of results achieved, reform by persuasion is true
reform while reform by force is simply upheaval rather than real change in
any positive sense of the word. q | <urn:uuid:78f6347e-b0d8-4936-931c-2e7bfc27007c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.milligazette.com/Archives/15092001/31.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961044 | 983 | 3.3125 | 3 |
WASHINGTON – Despite some sniping on the presidential campaign trail, negotiations on Capitol Hill are likely to ensure a smooth flow of disaster aid in the wake of Hurricane Isaac.
Congressional aides are working quietly on a six-month government funding bill that would prevent a shutdown of the government next month and ensure that the government's main disaster relief program gets a steady flow of money.
It's a different story from a year ago, when inadequate Federal Emergency Management Agency funding and a slew of expensive disasters combined to almost drain the government's main disaster program dry.
A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Tuesday it's hoped lawmakers can reach agreement on the funding bill next week. The House and Senate then would pass it before the current budget year ends on Sept. 30 and avert a government shutdown.
Both GOP and Democratic aides said the talks seem to be going smoothly.
"I have heard of no hiccups," Boehner spokesman Kevin Smith said.
Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced in late July plans for the six-month funding measure, which is expected to keep most agency budgets funded essentially at current levels. A lame-duck session of Congress after the Nov. 6 elections is expected to focus on efforts to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff — an austere, one-two punch combining the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts and automatic cuts to the Pentagon and other Cabinet agencies that were required after a congressional supercommittee failed to reach a debt-reduction agreement last year.
Democrats have jabbed Republicans over GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's past opposition to a new, more stable funding mechanism for disaster relief devised as part of last summer's budget and debt accord. But it's unclear how effective the attacks are, given that Isaac wasn't as bad a storm as had been feared and that disaster aid coffers are relatively flush.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney hit a partisan note as he criticized Ryan for opposing the new funding plan, under which disaster aid is added to the budget on top of the spending limits set for agency operating budgets.
"There was an effort to underfund the money that's used to provide relief to Americans when they've been hit by disasters," Carney said. "That effort was led by Congressman Paul Ryan, who is now running to be vice president."
FEMA's disaster relief fund, used to fund cleanup and rebuilding efforts and provide temporary housing for disaster victims, currently has a balance of $1.4 billion. That's enough to carry the program until the new funding measure would take effect on Oct. 1.
The FEMA fund received $7.1 billion for the current year. President Barack Obama requested $6.1 billion in his February budget.
Last year, a stopgap funding measure provided a $2.7 billion disaster aid down payment to FEMA; an alternative idea would be to allow funding to flow at current rates. | <urn:uuid:ab4eb4e1-0a84-4a2a-8092-406477ac6b23> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/09/05/smooth-path-seen-to-renewal-disaster-aid/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965202 | 600 | 1.585938 | 2 |
The sugar industry in the US is threatening to bring the World Health Organisation to its knees by demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO scraps guidelines on healthy eating, due to be published on Wednesday.
The threat is being described by WHO insiders as tantamount to blackmail and worse than any pressure exerted by the tobacco lobby.
In a letter to Gro Harlem Brundtland, the WHO's director general, the Sugar Association says it will "exercise every avenue available to expose the dubious nature" of the WHO's report on diet and nutrition, including challenging its $406m (£260m) funding from the US.
The industry is furious at the guidelines, which say that sugar should account for no more than 10% of a healthy diet. It claims that the review by international experts which decided on the 10% limit is scientifically flawed, insisting that other evidence indicates that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar.
"Taxpayers' dollars should not be used to support misguided, non-science-based reports which do not add to the health and well-being of Americans, much less the rest of the world," says the letter. "If necessary we will promote and encourage new laws which require future WHO funding to be provided only if the organisation accepts that all reports must be supported by the preponderance of science."
The association, together with six other big food industry groups, has also written to the US health secretary, Tommy Thompson, asking him to use his influence to get the WHO report withdrawn. The coalition includes the US Council for International Business, comprising more than 300 companies, including Coca-Cola and Pepsico.
The sugar lobby's strong-arm tactics are nothing new, according to Professor Phillip James, the British chairman of the International Obesity Taskforce who wrote the WHO's previous report on diet and nutrition in 1990. The day after his expert committee had decided on a 10% limit, the World Sugar Organisation "went into overdrive", he said. "Forty ambassadors wrote to the WHO insisting our report should be removed, on the grounds that it would do irreparable damage to countries in the developing world."
Prof James was called in by the American embassy in Geneva "to explain to them why they were suddenly getting an enormous amount of pressure from the state department to have our report retracted". The sugar industry, he discovered, had hired one of Washington's top lobbying companies.
The sugar lobby was unsuccessful that time, but now, he says, "we are getting a replay, but much more powerfully based, because the food industry seems to have a much greater influence on the Bush government".
Since his 1990 report, the International Life Sciences Institute, founded by Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, General Foods, Kraft and Procter and Gamble, has also gained accreditation to the WHO and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.
At one point, says Prof James, "I was asked not to send any more emails about any of the dietary aspects of health that related to sugar. I was told that within 24 hours of my sending a note, the food industry would be telephoning and arranging dinners."
Aubrey Sheiham, professor of dental public health at University College, London, Medical School, said he also encountered the strength of the sugar lobby when he was one of the experts involved in putting together an EC guideline called Eurodiet.
"I wrote the sugar part of that," he said. "When we met in Crete [in June 2000], the sugar people said if the 10% [limit] was in, the whole report would be blocked. I remember we went into a huddle with various people and some of the diplomats, and we were meeting in people's bedrooms and saying, how can we work around this?"
In the end, he said, they worked out that a recommendation that nobody should eat sugar more than four times a day was equivalent to a 10% limit. But he considered the committee had been bullied.
The Sugar Association objects to the new report having been published in draft on the WHO's website for consultation purposes, without what it considers "a broad external peer-review process". It wants a full economic analysis of the impact of the recommendations on all 192 member countries. In the letter to Dr Brundtland, it demands that Wednesday's joint launch with the Food and Agriculture Organisation be cancelled.
The report, Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases, has already been heavily criticised by the soft drinks industry, whose members sell virtually everywhere in the world, including developing countries where malnutrition is beginning to coexist with the obesity common in affluent countries.
The industry does not accept the WHO report's conclusion that sweetened soft drinks contribute to the obesity pandemic. The Washington-based National Soft Drink Association said the report's "recommendation on added sugars is too restrictive". The association backs a 25% limit.
The WHO strongly rejects the sugar lobby's criticisms. An official said a team of 30 independent experts had considered the scientific evidence and its conclusions were in line with the findings of 23 national reports which have, on average, set targets of 10% for added sugars.
In the letter to Mr Thompson, the sugar lobby relies heavily on a recent report from the Institute of Medicine for its claim that a 25% sugar intake is acceptable. But last week, Harvey Fineberg, president of the institute, wrote to Mr Thompson to warn that the report was being misinterpreted. He says it does not make a recommendation on sugar intake. | <urn:uuid:97c102b0-56ca-4483-bfc0-7191e56895dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/apr/21/usnews.food | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970154 | 1,129 | 2.078125 | 2 |
ABSTRACT: It is still a matter of debate whether delayed primary closure (DPC) of dirty abdominal incisions reduces surgical site infections (SSIs) compared with primary closure (PC). Our objective was to determine whether DPC of dirty abdominal incisions reduces SSIs.
A controlled randomized study was conducted at an academic tertiary care 1,500-bed university hospital in Western India involving 81 consecutive patients with dirty abdominal incisions. Only 77 patients (DPC = 37, PC = 40) were evaluable because of the deaths of four patients. A total of 52 patients had peptic or typhoid perforations, whereas the rest had appendicular perforations/abscesses, penetrating or blunt abdominal injuries with gastrointestinal perforation, or intra-peritoneal abscesses. Patients were randomized to have their surgical incisions (skin and subcutaneous tissue) either closed primarily (PC) or left open with saline-soaked gauze dressings for DPC on the 3(rd) postoperative day or later if the incision conditions were inappropriate for closure. The main outcome measure was the incidence of postoperative SSI.
In the entire series, SSI developed after incision closure in 23% of the patients. Infections were significantly more common in the PC group (42.5% vs. 2.7% for DPC; p = 0.0000375). There also were significantly more cases of abdominal dehiscence in the PC group (DPC 1 [2.7%] vs. PC 10 [25%]; p = 0.005). The mean complete incision healing (CIH) time and length of hospital stay (LOS) were longer after PC (18.52 days) than DPC (13.86 days), resulting in a significant difference in the end point of healing and LOS (p = 0.0207). Short-term cosmetic results for PC incisions were significantly inferior to those for DPC (p = 0.03349).
Delayed primary closure is a sound incision management technique that should be utilized for dirty abdominal incisions. It significantly lowers the rate of superficial SSI as well as fascial dehiscence and reduces the mean CIH time and hospitalization. The short-term cosmetic appearance is superior.
Surgical Infections 05/2009; 10(2):129-36. · 1.80 Impact Factor | <urn:uuid:732461ed-cff7-43eb-b27c-7df1806d39b2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.researchgate.net/researcher/35035749_Nikhil_Modi/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947281 | 495 | 1.5625 | 2 |
1.1 Serialization of HTTP requests
One reason why web pages download slowly is that most browsers implement HTTP requests serially on each persistent connection:
- Open a connection to a server.
- Send an HTTP request.
- Wait for the response.
- If there are more resources to be fetched from that server, repeat steps 2 and 3.
- Eventually close the connection to the server.
The minimum amount of time needed to fetch a resource via HTTP is the network round trip time (RTT) between the client and the server. The good news is that, if the client reuses a persistent connection to the server, the actual elapsed time is very close to this lower bound of 1 RTT in some common scenarios: retrieving small, static image files, for example. The bad news is that the RTT is often a large number: even at the speed of light, it takes several tens of milliseconds to send a packet across a continent and back.
Given a set of
n small, static objects, the time needed to fetch them all synchronously over a preestablished TCP connection is approximately:
n * RTT
(Note: For simplicity, this model assumes that the server’s initial TCP congestion window is large enough to avoid further round-trip delays to await ACKs during slow start. It also assumes that the time-to-first-byte as measured at the server is zero.)
For a web page containing 50 small images and a 100ms RTT, requesting all of the images serially would take five seconds. That’s too long.
1.2 Current best practices for mitigation
In common practice, the elapsed time is less than
n * RTT, because the developers of web browsers and web sites have taken some steps to reduce it:
- Multiple connections
Most modern web browsers will open up to six concurrent, persistent connections per server hostname. This reduces the elapsed time in the simplified model from
- Domain sharding
Knowing that browsers maintain persistent connections on a per-server-hostname basis, some web applications partition their static content into a few different hostnames: http://images1.example.com/, http://images2.example.com/, etc.
With the content spread across C distinct scheme:host:port combinations, the elapsed time drops further, to
A Content Distribution Network stores cached copies of web content at many geographically distributed nodes and uses anycast DNS to send each client to a nearby node. This reduces the value of
n*RTT by replacing a large RTT with a smaller one.
1.3 Example of unmitigated serialization latency
Despite these practices, however, serialized HTTP requests are still a significant factor in the slow page downloads of some websites. The following subset of a waterfall diagram, taken from the HTTP Archive, shows part of the work a browser must do to download the home page of a particular e-commerce website. (Because I am using this website as an example of slow page downloads, I have blurred the site name and URLs in the waterfall diagram to preserve the developers’ anonymity.)
Several things stand out in this waterfall:
- The client, MSIE 8, used 6 concurrent, persistent connections per server hostname.
- All of the requests in this sequence were for graphics. None of these requests depended on the response to any of the others (all the GIF URLs were specified in a CSS file loaded earlier in the waterfall). Thus, significantly, it would be valid for a client to download all of these images in parallel.
- Many of these requests had elapsed times of approximately 125 milliseconds. That appears to be the RTT between the client and the server in this test. Thus this waterfall shows the
- The amount of response data was quite small: a total of 25KB in about 1 second during this part of the waterfall, for an effective throughput of under 0.25 Mb/s. The client in this test run had several Mb/s of downstream network bandwidth, so the serialization of requests resulted in an inefficient utilization of the available bandwidth.
Given these observations, how might we speed up the downloading of these files? There are a few ways to reduce the download time by modifying the content:
- Domain sharding could reduce the elapsed time by a small constant factor. The total time for this section of the waterfall, though, was approximately 7*RTT. While partitioning the requests across 7 distinct hostnames could potentially reduce the total time to 1*RTT, the resulting 42 TCP connections per client might substantially increase the memory footprint of the server and any intermediate proxies or load balancers. (Because of the need to dedicate buffer space per TCP connection to accommodate the advertised receive window and the send window, adding TCP connections is a somewhat resource-intensive way to gain parallelism.)
- Spriting or inlining the images could reduce this section of the waterfall to a single HTTP request. These techniques have been used to good effect by some websites, but they are nontrivial to implement and maintain.
1.4 Protocol-level strategies
An alternate approach is to seek more parallelism at a lower level: not by changing the content, but by changing the protocol:
- The HTTP/1.1 specification allows a client to pipeline its requests. The responses arrive in order: first the entire response to the first request in the pipeline, then the entire response to the second request in the pipeline, and so on.
- The SPDY protocol, currently experimental but in production use on various Google websites, allows a client to issue arbitrarily many requests on the same connection. The responses arrive out of order and may be interleaved with each other; SPDY defines a framing protocol to allow chunks of multiple messages to be multiplexed onto the same connection.
There are barriers to the adoption of both HTTP pipelining and SPDY, however. Most current web browsers do not pipeline their HTTP requests, due in part to past experience with web servers or proxies that handled pipelining incorrectly. Those browsers that do implement pipelining, such as Opera, currently rely on heuristics to decide when pipelining is likely to be safe. And only one major web browser, Chrome, currently supports SPDY.
2. Empirical study of the opportunity for request parallelization
Given a set of timed HTTP transactions comprising the download of a single web page by a browser, a serialized request sequence is a subset of HTTP transactions with the following properties:
- All the HTTP requests in the set are for the same scheme:host:port.
- Each transaction except the first must begin immediately upon the completion of some other transaction in the sequence.
- Each transaction except the last must have an HTTP response status of 2xx.
- Each transaction except the last must have a response content-type of image/png, image/gif, or image/jpeg.
These criteria are based on a simple heuristic: If a set of back-to-back HTTP transactions are requests for images served from the same site, the requests are assumed to have been serialized due to a scarcity of available persistent connections at the client.
The length of a serialized request sequence is the number of HTTP transactions in the sequence.
2.2 Questions to be answered
- The pattern of a serialized request sequences, as defined in Section 2.1,
- the negative impact of this pattern on page load speed,
- the possibility that additional parallelism, in the form of HTTP request pipelining or SPDY, could mitigate the performance impact,
- and the practical barriers to adoption of either pipelining or a new protocol,
it is useful to address two questions:
- How prevalent is the pattern?
If only 1% of real-world web pages had a longest serialized request sequence with length greater than 1, there would be no need for widespread deployment of protocol-level changes to increase request parallelism. At the other extreme, if 99% of pages contained long serialized request sequences, it would be worthwhile for HTTP client, server, and intermediary (proxy) developers to pursue protocol-level solutions.
- And when the pattern occurs, how bad is it?
If the longest serialized request sequence in a typical page had length 2, it might reasonably be fixed (i.e., reduced to an average value closer to 1) by increasing the size of browsers’ per-hostname connection pools. Conversely, if the longest serialized request sequence had length 10, it would provide an argument for a more radical solution such as pipelining.
2.3 Experiment design
Starting from the database of surveyed websites’ home pages from the HTTP Archive’s July 1, 2011 sample, I downloaded the HAR file for each page from webpagetest.org. Each of these HAR files contains a detailed log of all the HTTP transactions required to download the corresponding web page using MSIE 8 (a browser that uses up to 6 concurrent, persistent connections per server hostname and does not pipeline its HTTP requests). The HAR file format contains timing data for each HTTP request and response, with 1-millisecond resolution.
For each HAR file, I ran a simple Java program to find the longest serialized request sequence, using the heuristics described in Section 2.1.
The following histogram shows the distribution of longest serialized request sequences among the 15,568 web pages pages in the sample set:
For 12% of the sites, the longest serialized sequence in the home page had a length of 1. These sites are already well optimized, at least with regard to parallelization.
For another 22% of the sites, the longest serialization sequence had length 2. By applying additional parallelization efforts, one could potentially reduce the elapsed time for the affected requests by 1*RTT. The simplest and most compatible way to achieve the small amount of extra parallelism needed for these sites probably would be to implement domain sharding at the origin web applications.
For the remaining 66% of the sites, the longest serialization sequence had length 3 or greater. Increasing the number of concurrent client-to-server connections by a factor or more to parallelize these requests (via either domain sharding on the server side or bigger per-hostname connection pools on the client side) probably would be a bad solution, due to the per-TCP-connection memory footprint issues noted in Section 1.3. For these sites, it appears that parallelization of requests within the same TCP connection, via HTTP pipelining or SPDY, would be an effective solution.
Based on the results in Section 2.4, two thirds of the websites in the HTTP Archive contain request patterns that may be good candidates for acceleration through protocol-level parallelization. | <urn:uuid:d0ec662e-8762-4c83-b0a3-e735d28aff59> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.brianp.net/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.906447 | 2,224 | 3.25 | 3 |
TOKYO (AFP) ― An extremely rare copy of a work by fourth century Chinese calligraphy legend Wang Xizhi has been unearthed in Japan, the first such discovery in four decades, Tokyo National Museum said Tuesday.
No original works survive, despite their having been treasured by Chinese emperors throughout history for their contribution to the development of the delicate art form.
However, Wang’s innovative style was so influential that Chinese courts created precise replicas of his writings more than a millennium ago, some of which are held by Japan as national treasures.
|This handout picture released from Tokyo National Museum on Tuesday shows a copy of a work by fourthcentury Chinese calligraphy legend Wang Xizhi. (AFP-Yonhap News)|
“This is a significant discovery for the study of Wang Xizhi’s work,” the museum, which will display it from Jan. 22 to March 3, said in a statement.
The writing, owned by an individual in Japan whose identity was not disclosed, shows 24 Chinese characters in three lines on a piece of paper roughly 26 centimetres by 10 centimeters.
It was long thought to be the work of an ancient Japanese nobleman calligrapher, but a recent review by Jun Tomita, Chinese calligraphy expert at the museum, has determined that it was an expertly-made copy of Wang’s writing.
The page appears to be part of a letter and includes phrases known to be used by the master calligrapher.
“I am tired everyday. I am living only for you,” part of the script says.
It also includes the names of his relatives including his son, the museum said.
The content of the writing, its style, copying technique, and other factors indicate the copy was made during the Tang Dynasty in the seventh to eighth century by the emperor’s court, the museum said.
It was likely brought out of China by Japanese commercial or diplomatic missions visiting their powerful continental neighbour during the same era, the museum said. | <urn:uuid:2a81f86a-c3fa-45c7-b5e9-dceebb8198cb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nwww.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20130110000876 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974665 | 427 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Quanz Family History
Quanz Surname History
This page is the home for the complete history of the Quanz family name, Quanz origins, and records of Quanz ancestors. The last name Quanz is an old lineage that has spread all across the world for many generations, and as the name Quanz has spread, it has evolved making its history challenging to piece together. Quanz family history has rich origins of which the particulars are beginning to be understood by Quanz family researchers.
No content has been submitted here about Quanz. The following is speculative information about Quanz. You can submit your information by clicking Edit.
The evolution of Quanz starts with the origins of thefamily name. Even in the earliest days of a name there are changes in that name simply because family names were infrequently written down that long ago.
It was common for a last name to change as it enters a new country or language. Quanz ancestors have moved across various regions all throughout history. As families, tribes, and clans emigrated between countries, the Quanz name may have changed with them.
Quanz country of origin
No content has been submitted about the Quanz country of origin. The following is speculative information about Quanz. You can submit your information by clicking Edit.
The nationality of Quanz can be complicated to determine in cases which countries change over time, making the nation of origin indeterminate. The original ethnicity of Quanz may be in dispute depending on whether the family name came in to being naturally and independently in multiple locales; for example, in the case of family names that come from professions, which can crop up in multiple places independently (such as the family name "Carpenter" which was given to woodworkers).
Meaning of the last name Quanz
No content has been submitted about the meaning of Quanz. The following is speculative information about Quanz. You can submit your information by clicking Edit.
The meaning of Quanz come may come from a trade, such as the name "Bishop" which may have been taken by church officials. A lot of these craft-based surnames can be a profession in another language. Because of this it is useful to understand the country of origin of a name, and the languages spoken by its family members. Many names like Quanz originate from religious texts like the Bhagavadgītā, the Bible, the Quran, etc. Commonly these family names are shortened versions of a religious sentiment such as "Worthy of praise".
- Theodore Quanz 1884 - 1967
- Carl Quanz 1902 - 1980
- Clifford E Quanz 1922 - 1998
- Helen S Quanz 1924 - 2004
- Mary A Quanz 1895 - 1990
- Charles F Quanz 1914 - 1996
- Robert Quanz 1955 - 1974
- Margaret Quanz 1886 - 1970
- Victor Quanz 1919 - 1969
- Clarence Quanz 1920 - 2009
- Anna Quanz 1885 - 1979
- Virginia M Quanz 1923 - 1994
- Helen M Quanz 1922 - 2008
- Daryl Quanz 1954 - 1987
- Martin J Quanz 1915 - 2010
- Julia Quanz 1893 - 1985
- Irene K Quanz 1919 - 1997
- Armand Quanz 1900 - 1974
- Dorothy C Quanz 1923 - 1994
- Harold L Quanz 1917 - 1997
Quanz Family Tree
Famous people named Quanz
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Nationality and Ethnicity of Quanz
No content has been submitted about the ethnicity of Quanz. The following is speculative information about Quanz. You can submit your information by clicking Edit.
We do not have a record of the primary ethnicity of the name Quanz. Many surnames travel around the world throughout the ages, making their original nationality and ethnicity difficult to trace.
More about the name Quanz
Fun facts about the Quanz family
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Quanz spelling variations
No content has been submitted about alternate spellings of Quanz. The following is speculative information about Quanz. You can submit your information by clicking Edit.
In times when literacy was uncommon, names such as Quanz were transcribed based on how they were heard by a scribe when people's names were written in government records. This could have resulted in misspellings of Quanz. Surnames like Quanz transform in how they're said and written as they travel across villages, family lines, and languages over generations. Knowing spelling variations and alternate spellings of the Quanz last name are important to understanding the history of the name. | <urn:uuid:ccfea018-0a94-4f3d-917d-a2a81b2df61c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ancientfaces.com/surname/quanz-family-history/479350 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93674 | 973 | 2.34375 | 2 |
Syrian refugees, who are being accommodated in a prefabricated city in Kilis province, told Today’s Zaman that they believe that Assad will not comply with the peace plan. Stating that they want to return to their motherland, they said the UN should intervene and the Assad regime should be overthrown.
A 40-year-old Syrian from Idlib, who declined to be named, said he had lost his three family members in the violence. He also added: “Because we were afraid of being killed by Assad’s soldiers, we decided to escape to Turkey. Assad’s troops were firing at us randomly. I know Assad will continue his killings despite the cease-fire. I wish the UN would do something about Assad’s brutal regime.”
Another Syrian refugee, Hazim Haccer, said he came to Turkey because he was afraid of being killed but that his brother was a soldier in Assad’s army. “My parents are still there. It doesn’t matter who intervenes in the country, but Assad has to be overthrown,” he commented.
Azize Dev, a 65-year-old refugee, said her children were still in Syria and she wanted to see them again. She thanked Turkey for providing security and accommodation for the refugees.
While most of the Syrian refugees who have escaped to Turkey are being accommodated in a refugee tent city in Hatay province, there are about 10,000 refugees living in a prefabricated city in Kilis province.
There are strict security measures in place at the prefabricated city. Nobody has been allowed in except state officials. Even journalists had been barred from entering until yesterday. Today’s Zaman became one of the first two dailies which gained the opportunity to enter the prefabricated city. Every corner is being monitored by the Turkish security forces and the area is regularly patrolled to ensure the security of the refugees.
The capacity of the city, which is constructed over 350,000 square meters, is 12,000, and there are currently 9,300 Syrian refugees living there. However, this number is increasing daily as the violence in Syria escalates.
All social, sanitation, accommodation and food facilities are provided by the Turkish state. The city consists of five separate neighborhood units, which are divided by barbed wire fences. People in each unit determine their spokesman and all the interaction between the refugees and the Turkish officials is done through these individuals. Each neighborhood unit has its own patrol, fire department, post office and supermarket. There is a 550-square-meter social center which contains a kindergarten, adult education center and television rooms.
The prefabricated houses in which the refugees are living contain all the necessary elements. There is a living room, kitchen and bathroom. There are six beds provided in each house and hot water available 24 hours a day. In addition to this, three meals a day are provided to the refugees.
There are also some public facilities such as two schools, a healthcare center and a mosque. A hospital and sports center will be ready in the coming days. The Directorate of Public Education Center is planning to provide various training and vocational courses for Syrian women at the city. A total of 3,500 of the 9,300 Syrian refugees are children. They are attending school but there are not enough teachers who can speak Arabic. Officials are currently working on resolving this problem.
The Syrian refugees seem to have adapted to their new environment easily. Turkish officials avoid disturbing the daily routines of the refugees. The refugees carry on with their daily lives without any interference; adult refugees go shopping and working while the children play games and attend school. There are also some refugees who have started running their own small businesses, including barbershops, grocery stores and outdoor tea shops. | <urn:uuid:419b2eba-20c6-430e-bf05-2f9c8491a6a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=277301 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984898 | 788 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Posted by Dave on December 6, 2012
While reports of election fraud have circulated on the Internet, at Food Democracy Now! we have been closely monitoring the results as they’ve come in and had not heard any credible reports of possible voting irregularities - until now.
Yesterday, we received some disturbing news from a voter integrity monitor, claiming that possible “statistical anomalies” had been detected in 9 counties in California.
According to Francois Choquette, a statistician closely monitoring incoming election results in California, there were significant “irregularities” in the vote totals for prop 37 to label genetically engineered foods that could not be explained by random coincidence.
Right now a team of independent statisticians are analyzing raw voter data or “preliminary data from 17 of California's 58 counties”. Potential anomalies have been detected in a number of the largest precincts in Orange, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Alameda and San Diego counties, among others.
And while Food Democracy Now! can’t say if election fraud has taken place, we want Prop 37 supporters to be aware of the fact that the results from the election are not over and we're asking you to be vigilant in standing with us as we call for further inquiry into these questionable patterns.
The next 24 hours are critical. Right now county election officials in the state of California are required to report their final results to the Secretary of State’s office by (today) Friday December 7th. According to state law, Secretary of State Debra Bowen has until December 14th to certify the results of the election.
And this is where we have some concern.
On election night the California Secretary of State’s office called the election for the No side, declaring that Yes on 37 to label genetically engineered foods had failed to pass by a margin of 46.9% to 53.1%, with some 4.3 million Californians having been reported voting Yes on 37 by the next morning. Since then the ballot proposition to label genetically engineered foods has slowly and steadily advanced both its vote total and percentage of the total vote.
California SOS Website Reports 6 Million Votes for Prop 37, Then Votes Disappear
As of Monday, December 3rd at 4:58 pm, the California Secretary of State’s office reported that Prop 37 had garnered 48.5% votes to the No side’s 51.5%, with 5,986,652 voting to Label GMOs and 6,365,236 Californians voting against.
The following morning, according to the California Secretary of State’s website the Yes on 37 campaign had received 6,004,628 votes and edged down to 48.4% of the vote total. The timestamp on the California Secretary of State’s website showed December 4, 2012, 6:04 a.m.
Six million votes is an important milestone for the election and the growing movement of millions of Americans that support labeling of genetically engineered foods across the country that were inspired by Prop 37.
I immediately shared the news via Twitter @food_democracy at 8:40 am PST.
Less than an hour later, the site was no longer showing the 6 million vote total. After capturing a screenshot, I Tweeted the image and then contacted the Secretary State’s office.
When asked about the discrepancy, the Secretary of State’s office claimed their office would no longer being updating the vote total until after December 14th, when the election is required by law to be certified.
When asked why, the Secretary of States’ office claimed that making updates to the official site were “no longer cost effective”.
After several calls to the Secretary of State’s office, their staff refused to give the number of remaining uncounted ballots and only stated that the latest vote totals were posted on the website and this information would not be updated until December 14th. This seems odd, since the Secretary of State's website had updated the vote count every day until December 4th, when the Yes side briefly appeared above 6 million votes.
Please share the screenshot below showing more than 6 million votes for Prop 37 to label GMOs, this may be our only hope to make sure that open and transparent election results are reported in California.
Click on the link below to share the image of the disappearing 6 million vote total for Yes on 37 on Facebook.Post on Facebook
Tweet This Share on Facebook
No on 37 Fraudulent Behavior During Campaign
Right now we are uncertain if election fraud has taken place, but we find the reports and these developments with the California’s Secretary of State’s website and their office’s responses troubling. Currently, less than 400,000 votes separate the Yes on 37 campaign from the No side. The voters of California deserve the truth.
The No on 37 campaign ran one of the dirtiest elections in modern history with a constant stream of lies and fraudulent activity. As if spending more than $46 million on an endless stream of TV and radio ads wasn’t enough, the No on 37 campaign sent more than a half dozen fraudulent mailers from Democratic and environmentalist front groups, made demonstrably false statements in the official California Voter Guide as well as the fraudulent misuse of the official seal of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
While none of these specific incidents can be used to bring the opposition to court or overturn the election, the current vote total irregularities taking place in California are concerning.
Right now, 48 hours before the final results vote counts from county election officials are to be handed over to the Secretary of State’s office, we need a strong showing of support for transparency and democracy.
Please stand with us and share this news far and wide.
Together we have already shown that we can stand up to the most powerful corporations on the planet, it’s time to make sure our democracy is as safe as our food supply.
Thanks for participating in food democracy,
Dave, Lisa and the Food Democracy Now! Team
1. "Proposition 37: Genetically Engineered Foods Labeling", California Secretary of State, December 3, 2012, 4:58 p.m.
2. “Election fraud in California Prop 37? vote count hits 6 million, then CA Secretary of States site loses 18,000 votes? pic.twitter.com/hlk4VM7i” @food_democracy, December 4, 2012
3. “Documented Deceptions of No on 37 Campaign”, California Right to Know Campaign, November 2, 2012
4. "Rigged Elections", Op-Ed News, Michael Collins, October 22, 2012
5. “How to Rig an Election”, Victoria Collier, Harper’s Magazine, November 5, 2012
6. “None Dare Call it Stolen”, Mark Crispin Miller, Harper’s Magazine, August 2005 | <urn:uuid:1c9dbe7d-be52-4231-8ab0-f0cd1d259dd8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fooddemocracynow.org/blog/2012/dec/6/breaking_prop_37_election_fraud/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949061 | 1,424 | 1.59375 | 2 |
||Defined by the creating statute as "Commencing at the intersection of the east line of range 31, west, with the north line of township 27, south; thence south along the range line to where it intersects the sixth standard parallel; thence west along the sixth standard parallel to the intersection with the east line of range 35, west; thence north along the range line to where it intersects the north line of township 27, south; thence east to the place of beginning." |
|Origin of Name:
||Named for the Arapahoe Indian tribe, who dwelt on the plains between Wyoming and Texas. |
||In 1883, Arapahoe was merged into an expanded Finney County; in 1887, when Finney was broken up, that part which had been Arapahoe was created as Haskell County. The county was never organized, and no county seat is known to have existed. |
|| No Data Available.
Post offices in Arapahoe County
|Look for other counties: | <urn:uuid:1ffb99e4-1c68-43b0-b360-cb3a05d831f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kshs.org/geog/geog_counties/view/county:AA | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961181 | 214 | 2.8125 | 3 |
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
You Never Know Where The Answer Is
The Alamo Today
When I began the research on the Vance family in Mississippi, I was optimistic that I was going to be able to put it together quickly. A marvelous lady, Betty C. Wiltshire, has done enormous research and written volumes of books on the area. I found where Elizabeth Porter, shown below, was an orphan. Her father died in the 1840's, and her mother just a few years later. Elizabeth's guardian, John Vance, became her father-in-law. I searched and found where John Porter had lived in Pike Co. AL. Elizabeth was born there. That was where my trail ended. I would half heartedly search in South Carolina, where he was supposed to have been born, and I put out queries on the message boards. I received responses from her descendants, but none knew where her father came from.
Then all my walls came down with a Texas Icon. The Texas Alamo. The picture above is what it looked like as I approached the front doors full of anticipation. A fellow researcher, on a related line that I knew nothing about, had emailed me and told me; my answers were in the Genealogy logs of the Alamo Library (I didn't know that they had a genealogy library in the Alamo. It would not have occurred to me to look for our Mississippi ancestor's information in a Texas Icon anyway.) I was to look for Joshua Smith's file. My husband and I strode up to the beautiful wooden doors, and pulled them open. There are wrought iron gates with an area where you have to sign in to be admitted. The sounds of the city left us at the door and it was as if you were in hallowed halls. The librarian smiled as I told her what I was looking for and she said the genealogy of the heroes of the Battle of the Alamo were there. Joshua Smith was one of the defenders of the Alamo. Wow. She brought the file to me. Ned and I sat down and began to enter the world of Joshua Smith. He was a brave new Texan. He had come to Texas from North Carolina to make a life. He had purchased land in Montgomery County Texas not far from where we live now...how wild. He also had land where the refineries in Texas City are now. He loved Texas and had sent a letter to his mom and step-brother John Porter in Alabama telling them of his endeavors. Our mouths dropped to our chin. Ned, a Texas History buff, was thrilled.
We found that because Joshua had not married, his estate had to be proved by his only blood brother. David Smith had moved to Texas after his brother died and then had to proceed to clean up the records. As it turned out, John Porter was the second son of James Porter of South Carolina and Rachel Gist. James died when John was young. Rachel then married an Alexander Smith. They moved to Tennessee where David and Joshua were born. They moved back to North Carolina where Alexander died. Rachel then married a Solomon Laudermilk and they had 3 children. That was an interesting point of Joshua's letter to John and Rachel, he was sending money back to John to help him, as John had taken on the task of helping Rachel and the 3 youngest children because Solomon had died. Mercy. I would never have found all this out if David had not done such a thorough job of proofs. It was a buried treasure in the Alamo. Not only did we find out that Rachel had died before Joshua, but we found out the character and nature of John G. Porter.
The most interesting note was, we knew John Porter died in the 1840's, but not that he died in service of his country. David noted that Joshua died in the Alamo, a part of the Mexican War, and John and James Porter had gone to serve in the Mexican War where they too were killed. What a sad time for David Smith, he was left the overseerer of a large and disconnected family. All but Elizabeth and a sister Emily moved to Texas.
Now you know, you never know where the answer to your brick wall is. You just keep chipping away. | <urn:uuid:8912a4bd-ff2e-4a56-9ebc-7128a097a07c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://branchingoutthroughtheyears.blogspot.com/2009/07/you-never-know-where-answer-is.html?showComment=1247274679696 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.993849 | 867 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Note: This lesson was originally published on an older version of The Learning Network; the link to the related Times article will take you to a page on the old site.
Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.
Overview of Lesson Plan: This lesson allows students to examine the existence of bacteria all around them and to consider the roles, both positive and negative, that bacteria play. Over a period of several days, students conduct an experiment in which they predict, determine, carefully log, and evaluate bacteria samples taken from the school environment.
Alison Zimbalist, The New York Times Learning Network
Suggested Time Allowance: 1 hour for initial in-class work and first phase of experiment, 15 minutes in subsequent three days for writing lab reports for observations of bacteria growth (can be done before or after school), and 30 minutes for wrap-up discussion.
1. Use prior knowledge to define bacteria and to explain how bacteria can be both harmful and helpful.
2. Explore how microbiology is used to research bacteria in homes by reading and discussing the Scientist at Work article “On Germ Patrol, At the Kitchen Sink.”
3. Conduct the first phase of an experiment to determine bacteria sources in the school by obtaining samples from different areas and items in the school to be incubated in petri dishes.
4. Predict where in the school they would expect to find a lot of bacteria, as well as where they would expect to find only traces or no bacteria.
5. Maintain notes of the growth in their petri dishes every 24 hours, including daily hypotheses, procedures, illustrations, and questions; assess their original predictions and hypotheses.
Resources / Materials:
copies of “On Germ Patrol, At the Kitchen Sink” (one per student)
two large sheets of paper
incubator (set around 98-100 degrees Fahrenheit)
sterile petri dishes (one per student, plus one to act as control)
nutrient agar (enough for all petri dishes)
two-ended cotton swabs (one per student)
petri dish lids, divided in half with a grease pencil
grease pencils (one per student)
lab notebooks (or paper)
Activities / Procedures:
NOTE TO TEACHERS: This lesson plan is designed to be used only after students have an elementary understanding of what bacteria are, what types of bacteria exist (cocci, bacilli, and spirilla), and their requirements for life.
1. WARM-UP/ DO-NOW: In their journals, students respond to the following questions (written on the board prior to class): What are bacteria? How are bacteria harmful? How can bacteria be helpful? Students then share their answers, and the teacher writes responses on the board.
2. Students read and discuss “On Germ Patrol, At the Kitchen Sink,” responding to the following questions:
a. Why are Dr. Gerba’s job and research efforts significant?
b. What is a microbe, and what damage can certain microbes do to the human body?
c. Why are kitchens and bathrooms such huge centers of bacteria?
d. What is the significance of Dr. Gerba’s public bathroom experiments?
e. What everyday advice to protect ourselves against bacteria in the home is offered in the article?
f. Which of Dr. Gerba’s experiments and findings are surprising to you, and why?
g. What measures are being taken to eliminate or reduce dangerous microbes found in food, the air, and the water supply?
3. Explain to students that they will be conducting an experiment to determine where bacteria exist in their school surroundings. Give each student a two-ended cotton swab and a prepared sterile petri dish that already contains the growing media nutrient agar. STUDENTS SHOULD NOT OPEN THE DISH UNTIL THEY ARE READY TO EXPOSE IT! The teacher should tape shut one petri dish without exposure and use a grease pencil to label it “Control.” Discuss with students the purpose of having a control in this (and every) scientific experiment. Then, each student should use one end of the cotton swab to obtain a sample of any environmental condition in the school (blackboard, desk, under a chair, doorknob, in between their fingers or toes, banister, hallway wall, window, any instrument handled in the classroom, cafeteria table, floor, etc.). Students then lightly swab half of their petri dish with this sample, and note in grease pencil on the lid of the petri dish what was swabbed on that half of the petri dish. THE PETRI DISHES SHOULD ONLY BE OPEN LONG ENOUGH FOR STUDENTS TO SWAB THEIR SAMPLES IN ORDER TO MINIMIZE THAT CONTAMINATION FROM THE AIR. Students repeat this procedure with another environmental condition using the other end of the swab and the other half of the petri dish. Encourage students to select different places and items to increase diversity of results. Once both halves of the petri dish are marked, students should tape their dishes closed (taping over the bottom of the dish, so the agar and samples are still visible through the lid) and write their names on the masking tape. Students should be sure that they correctly marked the name of the samples on each half of the petri dish to ensure correct results. Students then give their dishes to the teacher to be placed in the incubator.
4. Students predict where in the school they would expect to find a lot of bacteria, as well as where they would expect to find only traces or no bacteria. Each student should justify his or her answers for the two samples in his or her petri dish. The teacher should write their responses on two large pieces of paper, one labeled “High Bacteria” and the other labeled “Low or No Bacteria” and post these papers in a visible area of the room for future reference.
5. WRAP-UP/ HOMEWORK: Students observe the petri dishes every 24 hours for 3 days (over the course of 72 hours). In their lab notebooks, students should follow the procedures below for each of the three days that they observe their petri dishes, plus the first day:
-Hypothesis (Day 1): What would you expect to happen on each side of your petri dish, and why?
-Hypothesis (subsequent days): Why do you think changes occurred in your petri dish, and how would you expect them to change on future days?
-Procedure (Day 1 only): Enumerate the steps you followed in obtaining your sample.
-Illustration: Draw, in color, the contents of your petri dish.
-Questions: Any questions you may have about the experiment (minimum two per day).
At the conclusion of the 72 hours (after students have finished logging their findings in their lab notebooks), refer back to the “High Bacteria” and “Low or No Bacteria” sheets created on the first day of the experiment. Evaluate students’ initial predictions, and ask students to present their findings as logged in their lab notebooks. Which bacteria could be harmful, and why? What bacteria could be helpful, and why? If the teacher has proper training in preparing bacteria mounts, create slides for students to view under a microscope and to analyze regarding the type of bacteria found in each sample. BE SURE TO DISPOSE OF THE PETRI DISHES PROPERLY!
Further Questions for Discussion:
–What are bacteria?
–How can bacteria be harmful?
–How can bacteria be helpful?
–Where would you expect to find a lot of bacteria or other microbes, and why?
–Where would you expect to find a small amount or no amount of bacteria or other microbes, and why?
–What items do you come into contact with daily that could carry bacteria?
–What everyday steps can we take in our homes and in other environments to protect ourselves against dangerous bacteria?
–What measures are being taken to eliminate or reduce dangerous microbes found in food, the air, and the water supply?
–What are some historic examples of mass bacteria outbreaks, and how did they affect the general population?
–Do you feel that people demonstrate enough concern about the breeding of bacteria that occurs throughout the home? Why or why not?
–What products are now sold to control or eliminate bacteria in our environment?
Evaluation / Assessment:
Students will be evaluated based on written journal response, participation in class activities, and thorough, thoughtful, complete lab notebook recordings throughout the experiment.
parasites, bacteria, disinfectants, petri, microbiology, reverence, ferreting, infiltrate, sporadic, microbes, pioneering, antibiotics, aerosol, emission, diligence, pathogens, contaminated, prevalent, infrastructure, leverage, diluting, potable
1. Write biographies of biologists involved in the advancement of the field of microbiology, such as Louis Pasteur and Antony van Leeuwenhoek.
2. Create a “How It Works” poster illustrating how antibiotics attack bacteria in the human body.
3. Create a poster that demonstrates how different organs and glands of the immune system in the human body work.
4. Research how bacteria are used to protect animals and to help them produce “better” products (such as cow’s milk).
5. Investigate products and processes that are popularly used today to kill bacteria in our food, air, and water supplies, such as antibacterial soaps, air and water purifiers, and food radiation. Interview a health care professional about the effectiveness and safety of these products.
6. Learn about how the water supply in your community is filtered and/or treated to protect the population it serves from water-borne bacteria.
7. Examine the role of bacteria in the decomposition of living matter.
8. Study recent outbreaks of bacterial contamination in foods. Why did these outbreaks occur? How were the poisoning cases handled, both on the parts of individuals and of the food producers and suppliers? Try to find related newspaper articles.
9. Research different types of microbes (bacteria, fungi, algae, protists, lichens and viruses) and their potential to help or harm the human body and other living organisms.
10. Explore the use of microbes in germ warfare technology. Why do biological weapons pose such an enormous risk?
Geography- Create a map of the world indicating areas in which bacteria-caused illness have occurred throughout time. Then, assess why certain areas are prone to such contamination and disease.
Global History- Research major bacteria-caused diseases that have devastated specific populations around the world, such as bubonic plague and mad cow disease.
Language Arts- Develop a brochure or guide to eliminating bacteria throughout the home. Offer cleaning and food preparation tips, as well as a list of helpful Web sites and resources in your community.
Mathematics- Find and graph statistics that demonstrate outbreaks of bacteria-caused illnesses over a period of time.
Technology- Create an illustrated timeline of inventions that were designed to eliminate bacteria in food, the air, and the water.
Teaching with The Times- Maintain a scrapbook of articles that discuss how bacteria and other microbes affect the human population, both in positive and negative ways.
Other Information on the Web:
CELLS alive! (http://www.cellsalive.com) offers video microscopy of living cells, bacteria, parasites, and pharmaceutical effects, plus 3D biological animations.
Microbe Zoo (http://commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/dlc-me/zoo/) lets you discover the many worlds of hidden microbes. The major attractions of the zoo include Dirt Land, Animal Pavilion, the Snack Bar, Space Adventure, and Water World.
Fundamentals of Microbiology 101 (http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~hurlbert/pages/101hmpg.html) enlightens non-science students to the wonders of the unseen microbial world that flourishes in and around us.
The Hidden Killers (http://hyperion.advanced.org/23054/gather/index.shtml) is a ThinkQuest site created by students that covers virus basics and human defenses, virus profiles, and the military uses of these nasty bugs.
Academic Content Standards:
Health Standard 2- Knows environmental and external factors that affect individual and community health. Benchmark: Understands how various messages from the media, technology, and other sources impact health practices
Health Standard 8- Knows essential concepts about the prevention and control of disease. Benchmark: Understands how lifestyle, pathogens, family history, and other risk factors are related to the cause or prevention of disease and other health problems
Science Standard 15- Understands the nature of scientific inquiry. Benchmarks: Knows that there is no fixed procedure called “the scientific method,” but that investigations involve systematic observations, carefully collected, relevant evidence, logical reasoning, and some imagination in developing hypotheses and explanations; Designs and conducts a scientific investigation; Uses appropriate tools and techniques to gather, analyze, and interpret scientific data; Establishes relationships based on evidence and logical argument; Knows that scientific inquiry includes evaluating results of scientific investigations, experiments, observations, theoretical and mathematical models, and explanations proposed by other scientists; Knows possible outcomes of scientific investigations
Thinking and Reasoning Standard 4- Understands and applies basic principles of hypothesis testing and scientific inquiry. Benchmarks: Understands that there are a variety of ways people can form hypotheses, including basing them on many observations, basing them on very few observations, and constructing them on only one or two observations; Verifies results of experiments; Understands that there may be more than one valid way to interpret a set of findings; Questions findings in which no mention is made of whether the control group is very similar to the experimental group; Reformulates a new hypothesis for study after an old hypothesis has been eliminated; Makes and validates conjectures about outcomes of specific alternatives or events regarding an experiment
Health Standard 2- Knows environmental and external factors that affect individual and community health. Benchmarks: Knows how the health of individuals can be influenced by the community; Understands how the environment influences the health of the community; Understands how the prevention and control of health problems are influenced by research and medical advances; Knows how public health policies and government regulations impact health-related issues
Health Standard 8- Knows essential concepts about the prevention and control of disease. Benchmarks: Understands how the immune system functions to prevent or combat disease; Understands the social, economic, and political effects of disease on individuals, families, and communities
Science Standard 15- Understands the nature of scientific inquiry. Benchmarks: Understands the use of hypotheses in science; Designs and conducts scientific investigations by formulating testable hypotheses, identifying and clarifying the method, controls, and variables, organizing and displaying data, revising methods and explanations, presenting the results, and receiving critical response from others; Knows that a wide range of natural occurrences may be observed to discern patterns when conditions of an investigation cannot be controlled; Uses technology (e.g., hand tools, measuring instruments, calculators, computers) and mathematics (e.g., measurement, formulas, charts, graphs) to perform accurate scientific investigations and communications; Knows that conceptual principles and knowledge guide scientific inquiries; Knows that scientists conduct investigations for a variety of reasons
Thinking and Reasoning Standard 4- Understands and applies basic principles of hypothesis testing and scientific inquiry. Benchmarks: Presents alternative explanations and conclusions to one’s own experiments and those of others; Critiques proedures, explanations, and conclusions in one’s own experiments and those of others | <urn:uuid:5141e374-2d21-4c4a-9906-3aa9926495ce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/1999/02/23/petri-fied-of-bacteria/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923637 | 3,298 | 3.8125 | 4 |
The Food Almanac: May 31, 2011
It's National Macaroon Day. A macaroon is a cookie made originally with almonds and enough egg to make it very light in texture. Over the years, shredded coconut has become part of the recipe. The name comes from the same Italian root that gives macaroni, and is a reference to the stringy quality of the ingredients. The best thing ever done with the macaroon concept was the macaroon and coconut bread pudding they used to serve at LeRuth's. The pan of the light, wonderful stuff sat on a sideboard at the restaurant all evening long. It was served without either a sauce or warming, and it was still one of the two or three best in town.
Coconut Point is 21 miles south of Fort Myers, in the southern end of the Florida Peninsula, on the Gulf Coast. It's on Estero Bay, and is part of a resort area. It's full of fishing boats and everything that goes with them. Five major golf courses are within a couple of miles. A few homes are on the small grid of streets, but more people can be found on any given day at the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point. The best restaurant in the area is Tanglewood, right there on Coconut Point. The population of bars is higher than average.
coconut water, n. — The clear liquid inside a recently-picked, young coconut. As the coconut ages, the water is absorbed into the meat and disappears. In places where coconuts are grown, one can often find vendors of coconut water on the sides of roads. They cut off the tops of green coconuts, stick straws into them, and sell them to passing tourists for a very refreshing and delicious beverage. It's low in calories and contains more electrolytes than most sports drinks do. Coconut water is very popular among the locals as a drink, and in some places it's even canned. It is not the same thing as coconut milk, which is processed from the meat.
Annals Of Wild Game
On this date in 1929, the first reindeer born in the United States descended to the ground in Massachusetts. I ate reindeer once — in a teepee in a snow-covered vastness a bit north of the Arctic Circle in Finland. It was cooked by a Lappi, who made sandwiches out of the meat on bread that looked like a flat bagel. It was pretty good. Tasted a lot like caribou.
Annals Of Chocolate
Today in 1057, Lady Godiva took the horseback ride that made her famous. As the tale goes, she did so to pay off a challenge with her husband. Lord Leofric. He said he'd lower taxes if she'd ride in her birthday suit in the middle of Coventry town. Some husband. I wonder why she was chosen as the name for Godiva Chocolates. Despite the name on the famous American chocolate sampler, Walt Whitman — who was born today in 1819 — had no connection with chocolates.
Deft Dining Rule #178
When choosing a dessert or candy for a lady, the highest percentage comes from chocolate.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez
The best way to melt one-ounce chocolate squares in the microwave is to leave them in the wrappers, and let them get zapped for thirty seconds at a time until they're soft. The wrappers will hold them intact even after they're melted.
Great Moments In Processed Food
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg patented flaked cereal today in 1884. His aim was to expand the vegetarian diet he fed his patients. Cereal doesn't command much respect from gourmets, but it has its place. Despite the reputation cereal has as junk, it's a harmless appetite-killer that really helps if you're trying to lose weight.
Annals Of Food Writing
Christopher Kimball founded Cook's Magazine today in 1980. It was very different in style and tone from previous food publications, and caught a lot of attention while never quite becoming successful. It was bought by a larger publisher, and in 1989 was folded into Gourmet and disappeared. In 1993, Kimball tried the idea (and the title) again, but with new twists: no advertising, and no articles not directly related to cooking. No travel or lifestyle articles, no restaurant reviews. That made for smaller magazines and a much smaller circulation than is typical for a national food magazine. But Cook's unique, intensive style gathered an enthusiastic readership. These days, it seems that Cook's Illustrated publishes cookbooks more often than it does magazines; the magazine itself comes out only every two months. I've subscribed since day one.
Today in 1892, Lea & Perrins registered its trademark for Worcestershire sauce. John Lea and William Perrins were druggists who concocted the first version of that essential elixir. It was created at the behest of a British colonial officer after a tour of duty in India. He asked Lea and Perrins to make something like the fish sauces he'd enjoyed in Southeast Asia.
Sir Francis Bacon spent the night imprisoned in the Tower of London this day in 1621. Today in 1961, the seminal rock 'n' roller Chuck Berry opened an amusement park outside St. Louis. It was called Berryland. Actress Barbara Pepper was born in 1912 today. She was in Green Acres, among other productions.
Words to Eat By
"Condensed milk is wonderful. I don't see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans." — Fred Allen, one of the great comedians in the golden age of radio, born today in 1894. Here are two more of his food lines: "Three million frog's legs are served in Paris — daily. Nobody knows what became of the rest of the frogs." And, "California is a great place to live, if you're an orange."
Words to Drink By
"Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today." — Unknown. | <urn:uuid:cb9d970d-a17e-45f8-92ed-c6f0855e8285> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thedailymeal.com/food-almanac-may-31?page=0,1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97303 | 1,267 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Einstein: His Life and Universe
By Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster, 2007, 704 pages
When the English physicist Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) lost £20,000 in the collapse of the South Sea
bubble, he remarked, “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” A similar blindness toward human foibles seems to have afflicted Albert Einstein (1879–1955), who between 1905 and 1919 would overturn Newton’s stable universe of absolute space and absolute time with his radical new perspectives of relativity, all the while struggling mightily with his familial relationships. In Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson, CEO of the Aspen Institute and former chairman of CNN and managing editor of Time magazine, has done a fine job of bringing Einstein’s world and universe to life. He gives management readers valuable insight into the nature of the creative process and the contexts in which Einstein made his seminal contributions to human knowledge. It is the story of an astonishing interaction of nature; nurture; and the physical, social, and intellectual contexts that challenge and develop individual abilities.
The book is organized chronologically across what must be one of the most tumultuous periods of world history. Einstein’s birth in Germany into an independent-minded, nonobservant Jewish family set him on a winding path that he always felt he traveled as an outsider. His rebellion against authority grew out of his early exposure to German militarism and the regimentation prevalent in the national education system. His habit of using visual imagery did not blossom until he had the opportunity to attend a Swiss school with a philosophy similar to that of a modern Montessori school. Working with objects as well as concepts, he developed an amazing ability to move from experience to idea and back again, a competence exemplified by his famous “thought experiment” of what it would be like to ride a beam of light.
Einstein’s rise to world fame and his status as an icon of genius was cemented in 1919 when a solar eclipse confirmed his 1911 prediction that gravity would bend light. The Great War had shattered the idea of a steady human progression toward higher and higher levels of civilization, but in its aftermath Einstein’s theories of relativity, in particular, seemed to presage a new era of scientific discovery; he became an instant celebrity. At the same time that Einstein was overturning Newton’s universe, however, his personal life was falling apart. He divorced his first wife in 1919 after a period of separation and estrangement from her and their two sons. During this time he had become involved with his cousin, although this pragmatic union — she played the role of mother rather than wife — did not preclude numerous more passionate liaisons.
Einstein’s geniality and penchant for pithy comments turned him into a popular authority on all the great questions of his day. Starting in the 1920s, his influence on contemporary physics dwindled, but his grip on the public imagination only grew stronger. The author recounts a delightful story about a parrot sent to Einstein by an admirer for his 75th birthday: The bird was deposited in a box on his doorstep in Princeton. The poor parrot was so traumatized by this experience that it became depressed, so Einstein cheered it up by telling it bad jokes. It is a tribute to Walter Isaacson’s skill as a writer that when he recounts for the reader the story of Albert Einstein’s death in 1955, the reader feels almost the same sense of loss that Einstein’s contemporaries experienced.
Doing What Matters: How to Get Results That Make a Difference — The Revolutionary Old-School Approach | <urn:uuid:2626a94a-1d05-4997-a955-f6c1ad330bcc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.strategy-business.com/article/08112?gko=3a042 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969065 | 764 | 2.8125 | 3 |
New York State is broken down into eleven different geographic regions referred to as Sections. The Sectional champions from each region in addition to the Catholic High School State Champion (CHSAA) and New York Public School Athletic League Champion (NYSPAL) compete in the New York State championships. As of 2007 the tournament was modified to include four wildcard entrants based on selective criteria. Nassau and Suffolk Counties are each considered separate Sections due to the large population of students attending high school in each County. Long Islander’s therfore usually refer to the Nassau (Section 8) and Suffolk (Section 11) Sectional Championships as the “Counties” or “County Championships”. Some upstate regions are geographically larger than the more densely populated down state regions and therefore may include numerous Counties in their individual Sections. Most other Sections therefore refer to them as the Sectional Championships.
The New York State Championships are also broken down into two divisions based on the student enrolment at each individual High School and are referred to as Division One & Division Two. Massapequa like most Long Island schools is considered a Division 1 program. Nassau (Section 8) is comprised of approximately 50 wrestling teams, but only six are considered Division 2 programs. Suffolk (Section 11) is comprised of approximately 54 wrestling teams, but only 8 qualify as Division 2 programs. Division 1 is therefore much more competitive on Long Island. The larger geographic regions upstate have many more high schools with smaller student enrollment and therefore have many more Division 2 programs and a more competitive Division 2 Sectional Tournament. | <urn:uuid:54accc3b-2f02-4d83-a8cd-242137df75d5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.leaguelineup.com/miscinfo.asp?menuid=38&cmenuid=38&url=massapequawrestling | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970709 | 324 | 2.078125 | 2 |
A conservation group says a Queensland Government report suggests new coal ports are not needed along the Great Barrier Reef coastline.
WWF Australia says a recent Government report indicates the state's three major coal ports are operating at an average 50 per cent capacity.
The report was prepared by the Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning (DSDIP).
WWF Australia spokesman Nick Heath says the State Government called for expressions of interest in expanding Abbot Point, near Bowen in north Queensland, just days after the report was released.
"We're not actually using the ports we've already got," he said.
"Why are we thinking we need to build more ports and cause more destruction of the reef, more destruction of these fishing nurseries when we could better utilise the ones we've got already? "These ports are in sensitive areas - the nurseries of the fish that people like to catch out on the reef, back on the coastlines where these ports would be requiring enormous dredging." However, Deputy Premier Jeff Seeney says the central and north Queensland ports need to be expanded to meet future export demand. | <urn:uuid:43312383-04c8-4b1c-bdcf-c9ddcbfed695> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/group-says-coal-ports-along-225852919.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958009 | 226 | 2.1875 | 2 |
A presentation of the varied solutions to the many unique challenges faced in macro and close-up photography, this work discusses issues such as selecting a specially designed lenses and positioning flashes in order to avoid casting shadows. While tackling the main issues that this advanced application presents, such as correct focus, maximum depth of field and optimal lighting, this guide walks through numerous indoor and outdoor shoots and includes step-by-step sequences and techniques for single- and multiple-light setups. Advanced amateurs and professional photographers will learn how the pros conceptualize and carry out their lighting strategies to ensure expertly lit small and close-up photography from this indispensable guide. www.amherstmedia.com.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment. | <urn:uuid:394ec2ae-67b3-4e71-96f9-6786b402d222> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.wppionline.com/2011/04/21/flash-techniques-for-macro-and-closeup-photography-a-guide-for-digital-photographers/comment-page-71/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930447 | 152 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Study: Michigan charter school students out-learning their peers at traditional districts
Michigan charter school students are out-learning their traditional district peers on an annual basis by two to three months, according to a Stanford University study released Thursday.
Joseph Tobianski | AnnArbor.com file photo
But when compared with the state’s traditional districts, the charter schools fare better.
According to the new CREDO study, 35 percent of the state’s charter schools have more positive learning gains than their school district counterparts in reading, while 2 percent of charter schools have lower learning gains.
In math, 42 percent of Michigan charters perform better than their traditional districts and 6 percent perform worse.
CREDO says it is an independent research organization that’s mission is to improve the body of empirical evidence being used to inform and drive education decision-making, according to its website. CREDO has analyzed the effectiveness of charter schools in Indiana and New Jersey as well.
This study comes on the heels of a Bridge Magazine analysis that shows high-poverty school districts and charter academies are exceeding test-score expectations, questioning whether the best teaching in the state is in fact taking place at Michigan’s poorest schools.
The Bridge report looked at schools’ test scores, while accounting for the socioeconomic status of children who walk through the doors.
The CREDO study shows 70 percent of students enrolled in the state’s charter schools are low-income, compared to 43 percent at traditional public schools and 55 percent at feeder school districts. Feeders are those traditional districts that have charter schools located within their attendance boundaries, according to the study’s parameters.
Michigan’s charter schools also have a greater percentage of black and Hispanic students than their feeders and other traditional districts, the CREDO study says.
Fifty-seven percent of students enrolled in the state’s charter schools are black, compared to 17 percent at traditional districts and 25 percent at feeder school districts. The difference in Hispanic student populations is minimal: 6 percent compared to 5 percent at traditional districts.
Nearly half (49 percent) of Michigan’s charter school students are located in the greater-Detroit region. Washtenaw County is included in this region.
The CREDO report found the typical student at a Michigan charter school gains more learning in a year than his or her traditional school district peer, amounting to about an additional two months of growth in reading and math.
The results for the typical student in a Detroit charter school (27 percent of the state’s charter students) were even more pronounced. Students gained on average nearly three months of achievement for each year they attended a Detroit charter school, according to Thursday’s media release.
“These findings show that Michigan has set policies and practices for charter schools and their authorizers to produce consistent high quality across the state. The findings are especially welcome for students in communities that face significant education challenges,” CREDO director Margaret Raymond said in a statement.
- Download the complete Center for Research on Education Outcomes charter school study here. | <urn:uuid:095b1166-1dd8-45e8-8be4-3913f656e001> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.annarbor.com/news/study-michigan-charter-school-students-out-learning-their-peers-at-traditional-districts/ | 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 | 0.964404 | 645 | 2.703125 | 3 |
PSC's Suggestions on DTC
Published on Mon, Mar 12,2012 | 19:58, Updated at Mon, Mar 12 at 20:06Source : Moneycontrol.com
As part of its tax reform initiatives, the Government of India (GOI) is in the process of revising, consolidating and simplifying the language and structure of the direct tax laws into a single legislation – the Direct Taxes Code. In furtherance of this objective, a draft Direct Taxes Code bill along with a discussion paper was first released in 2009. This was the first time the draft bill was available for public comments.
A Revised Discussion Paper was released in June 2010 addressing some of the major identified issues. Thereafter, based on the inputs received from consultations with various stakeholders, Direct Taxes Code Bill 2010 (DTC) was placed before the Indian parliament on 30 August 2010 which seeks to substitute the existing Income tax Act (ITA) and Wealth tax Act (WTA). This was subsequently referred to the Standing Committee on Finance (SCF) on 9 September 2010 for examination and report thereon.
The SCF, after having a broad based consultation with various stakeholders, submitted its report to the Parliament on 9 March 2012 in the ongoing Budget session. This E&Y Alert captures the suggestions of the SCF on key proposals of the DTC.
Read the accompanying attachement for more.. | <urn:uuid:d7724657-3699-4aed-8b41-395fb01cab03> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thefirm.moneycontrol.com/story_page.php?autono=679339 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965841 | 283 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Modern classic furniture bloomed in the mid of the 20Th century..furniture designers such as Charles Eames,Arnie Jacobsen,Harry Bertoia,Eero Saarinen,Van der Rhoe,le Corbusier have inspired the reproductions furniture around the world for decades and created iconic furniture designs which stood the test of time and still regarded internationally as modern and undeniably elegant...
Star Design UK is a dynamic modern company specialised in the best of modern classic furniture designs.Today we would like to share our passion with one of the most iconic designers of modern classics and display some of his timeless furniture pieces,but first we like to shade some light about the life of Harry Bertoia and his struggle and determination to succeed and challenge all odds to become a household Name and well known sculptor and designer around the globe..
Harry Bertoia Story :
Harry Bertoia was an Italian born artist,sculptor and modern classic furniture designer..Born in Italy on the 10th of march 1915 in small village of san lorenzo.His real name was Arieto Bertoia,upon immigrating to Michigan in America in 1930,he altered his name to Harry Bertoia.He joined the art school of the district society where he trained on scholarship for painting and drawing.1937 he joined cranbrook Academy of Art and Designs in Mitchigan where he meet some of the most famous artists and designers of his time such as Charles& Ray Eames,Eero Saarinen and Florence Knoll.He enjoyed a very close relationship with the Eames and designed their wedding rings as a gift Unfortunately their friendship took a down turn in later life because of invention copyright claims and court disputes .In 1940 Bertoia meet Brigitta Valentiner the daughter of the director of the detroit institute of Arts and they tied the knot in 1943.From his early years Harry Bertoia had a very unique talent not only in modern classic furniture designs but also in jewellery and wedding dresses designs .His passion for jewellery designs inspired him to create the diamond chair .He was a unique artist with extraordinary inspirations .Harry Bertoia thought of a chair as a diamond,so he designed it in a shape of a diamond , and to add the clarity and transparency of a diamond on his chair design ,he made it from metal rods as he liked the idea of the air running through it.
Between 1943/1950 Bertoia decided to leave Cranbrook Mitchigan and join forces with one of the most powerful designer of his time Charles Eames in Los Angles.Bertoia was very excited by the prospect of experimenting new techniques with Charles Eames on plywood and fibreglass products .One of these basic techniques was the design and creation of a single piece of furniture in one single piece from reinforced plastic.The other technique is to move from the old traditional heavy and dark furniture to a more geometrical artistic forms and visually lighter furniture..Bertoia and Charles Eamesdecided their first project would be to continue the experiment of the Eames/Saarinen Cranbrook chair which won the museum of art furniture competition in new York 1940.The award winning chair did not make a huge commercial success so they decided to experiment this new techniques.Unfortunately the story did not have a very happy ending between the two iconic designers .Charles Eames was a director of research and development at evans products Co while Harry Bertoia was more involved in the actual workshop designs .apparently,according to some historian Eames was adopting bertoia,s ideas and depriving him from any credit or recognition.It is not really easy to support or deny any of these claims made by different opinion makers.simply because there is no clear evidence available to us to judge upon it.But surly Bertoia was not happy working with Eames and decided to move on to San Diego where he spend two years working on project involving human engineering which known today ergonomics.this science is totally new in modern age and the word was invented at Harry Bertoia time and yet he was already so advanced in it.This is the real beginning of the genius Harry Bertoia where ha started experimenting on industrial rods and wire mesh to create artistic forms shapes and sounds.all of his artistic work was manifested in his diamond chairs series and Sonambient sculptors..
The Cranbrook School Quadrangle
The 1950s were the best years in Bertoia,s professional and artistic career .He finally reach the top of the world and established himself as an iconic household name in the modern furniture history.Harry Bertoia was invited by the Florence Knoll the manufacturer furniture company which was following his cranbrook career and offered him a full support and total freedom to use their equipment for any furniture design project he choose.That soon led Bertoia to the creation of his famous Diamond Chair and the follow up series in 1952 which introduced by the manufacturer Florence Knoll and became a symbol of the modern furniture of our age.At this stage another conflict started by Charles Eames about the diamond chair design and harry bertoia find himself facing court and forced to by court order to change his design which he did and it was a huge success artistically and commercially.the invention the diamond chair allowed harry bertoia to receive royalties for the rest of his life and secured his financial situation which allowed him to devote himself exclusively to his sculpting career.
Harry Bertoie,s love of nature and art is present in most of his furniture work and sculpture designs.He interpreted nature forms,motions and sound in his work .His experiments with metal rod in his furniture and sculpture designs led him to understand the nature and the complexity of sounds .He eventually created the ultimate sound collection in a form of Kinetic sound sculpture and he called it the Sonambient....
**Harry Bertoia Sound Albums**
****Watch the video and listen to one of the greatest tonal art ever created.Bertioa produced several sound albums and he organised small concerts for friends and special guests to listen and enjoy this amazing tonal sculptures***
We offer a stunning modern reproductions of Harry Bertoia Designs reproduced to the original style.View our selection of Bertoia designer classic pieces with high quality material and affordable prices..
**Bertoia Upholstered Large Diamond Chair**
Harry Bertoia collection was a series of enigmatic iconic designs in modern classics designed exclusively for florence knoll in 1952..sculptor Harry Bertoia's Diamond Lounge chair remains a fascinating study in bent metal rods techniques and a fixture of mid-century design.Star Design UK offer a stunning modern reproduction to the original style,Upholstered with a high Quality Soft-Touch Danish Wool and mounted om a mirror shine stainless solid steel frame..
Harry Bertoia was obsessed with the idea of light travelling through space,that,s why he designed the Diamond Chair almost transparent in a shape of a diamond ring.The chair is completely welded and hand laboured.With its wide unique contoured arms,bent and and welded steel construction ,the sculptural diamond chair is exceptionally strong and surprisingly comfortable.Usually the diamond chair come with a leather seat cushion which is padded with a foam insert for extra softness.The brightly chromed steel frame is a shine mirror which pairs nicely with any modern interior design.
Wire Side Chair another iconic classic design by Harry Bertoia
The wire chair is made entirely from strong steel welded rods,the structure of the frame is beautifully designed and the mirror shine chromed metal make this chair a truly an elegant piece of classics which complement any modern living space.The wire chair usually come with a leather seat cushion which is padded with a foam insert for extra softness.At Star Design UK we provide a high quality reproduction of bertoia collection taking care of all the details which made these designs a timeless classics. | <urn:uuid:c166bd43-b58d-4756-b681-4d7355e3bef2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.swiveldesignuk.com/2011_03_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965439 | 1,620 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Green, one of the most influential soul and rhythm and blues singers of the 1970s, remembered the moment he first wailed the famous "I...I...I...I...I'm so in love with you" from his most famous song, 1971's "Let's Stay Together."
The breathy, smooth, silky register of his voice, combined with a series of soulful wails, moans and cries, prompted his producer at the time, Willie Mitchell, to exclaim, "That's Al Green right there."
Green's powerful and expressive voice would no longer be confused with other soul singers such as Wilson Pickett, Marvin Gaye, James Brown and Sam Cooke. Now listeners would know when Al Green sang, they would hear a sound only Al Green could make.
"I had to find my own voice," said Green, from his Memphis, Tenn., home. "I had to learn to sing like Al Green."
Millions of sales
Listeners liked the Al Green sound, which led to sales of 20 million records and legendary status with classic songs such as "Let's Stay Together," "Tired of Being Alone," "Call Me," "Love and Happiness," "I'm Still in Love With You," "You Oughta Be With Me" and "Take Me to the River" as well as acclaimed cover versions of Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" and the Bee Gees' "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?"
Green was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. In 2005, Rolling Stone magazine named him No. 66 on its list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time."
Singer becomes minister
At the height of his career in the 1970s, Green became an ordained minister and gospel singer. When he's not on tour, Green still ministers and counsels at a Memphis church.
"It's hard trying to find time to write new material," said Green, 66. "I start to write, and then I have to go to church to be a minister, and then I have to be a counselor."
Green will be in concert Sept. 23 at the Stiefel Theatre for the Performing Arts, 151 S. Santa Fe.
Born Al Greene (he would later drop the extra "e" in his name) in Forrest City, Ark., the sixth of 10 children, Green said he began singing in school choirs and glee clubs from seventh through 12th grades.
"I knew if I didn't get straight 'A's in choir, I'd be in trouble," he said.
At the age of 9, Green formed a gospel quartet with his brothers called the Greene Brothers, which toured throughout the South and Midwest during the mid-1950s. Green's father later kicked his son out of the group for listening to the "profane" music of Jackie Wilson.
At 16, Green formed a pop group, Al Greene and the Creations, with high school friends. After changing their name to Al Greene and the Soul Mates, the group released a single, "Back Up Train," which reached No. 5 on national R&B charts in 1967.
In 1969, Green met Mitchell, a record producer, bandleader and vice president of Hi Records of Memphis. Mitchell became Green's producer and songwriting partner for the next eight years.
Their association led to many of Green's hit songs of the 1970s, including "Let's Stay Together," which Green said he never dreamed would become such a revered classic.
"People come up to me in the store now with a gleam in their eye and start singing that song to me," he said. "I have to run away."
After a personal crisis in 1974, Green turned to the ministry. He became ordained pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Memphis in 1976, where he still preaches today.
Green's music also veered toward gospel, and he released several gospel albums in the 1980s. In 2004, he was inducted into the Gospel Music Association's Gospel Music Hall of Fame.
Returning to soul
Green returned to his soul roots in the 1990s, releasing several secular albums, including his latest release, 2008's "Lay It Down." The album is a collaboration with several contemporary rhythm and blues and hip-hop artists, including John Legend, Anthony Hamilton, Corinne Bailey Rae and members of The Roots.
"They have a new expression in their music, with fresh and exciting ideas," Green said. "To sing to what they're playing, it makes you get to work."
Green said in 2010 he toured 12 countries and played nearly 70 shows. In 2011, he played 40 shows.
The Al Green live shows "are sons of guns," Green said, and audiences at the Stiefel Theatre should expect to be wowed by all the musical talent onstage.
"We kick butt onstage," he said. "It's a 14-member band with backup singers that sound like silk cream, baby. And Al's gonna be going around going, 'Woo Woo.' We're gonna have a real good time."
-- Reporter Gary Demuth can be reached at 822-1405 or by email at firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:dfabef4e-81c0-4bb5-89a2-6afe65b79b16> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.salina.com/sports/story/Al-Green-9-14 | 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 | 0.978836 | 1,087 | 1.585938 | 2 |
WarrenArticle Free Pass
Warren, town, Bristol county, eastern Rhode Island, U.S. Located near Providence, it was settled in 1632 and was originally part of Massachusetts. In 1747 Rhode Island annexed it. It was pillaged and burned by the British during the American Revolution. It is now a summer resort. Pop. (2000) 11,419; (2010) 10,611.
What made you want to look up "Warren"? Please share what surprised you most... | <urn:uuid:ae2ec747-92c2-49be-913d-6d011145cf45> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/679491/Warren | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981109 | 101 | 2.78125 | 3 |
"Jefferson is the only president of the United States who was also a great artist. Other presidents have noodled at the keyboard or daubed at easels. But Jefferson was a building architect of large ambition and achievement, as well as a landscape architect and an interior designer. There are no exact parallels, at least in Western culture, for this combination of political and aesthetic prominence. To combine the prose of power and the poetry of art, at a high and continuing level, is something no one else did.
His greatest artwork was the cluster of buildings in Charlottesville that he called his 'academical village.'
As his own body's fabric was disintegrating, he poured his spirit into a physical expression of intellectual activity."
- Garry Wills, Mr. Jefferson's University
When it comes to watching the College World Series on television in our house every June, we're always amused to hear the distinctive voice of Robin Ventura. From year to year we remember him fondly, my son and daughter and I, not so much for his big-league career with the White Sox, Mets, and Yankees, nor for the prestigious Golden Spikes Award he won in 1988, his Dick Howser trophy, and the impressive stats he recorded as a student-athlete at Oklahoma State. Every June we remember him affectionately and with laughter, thanks to a certain conversation that took place between Ventura and his colleague in the broadcast booth at Rosenblatt Stadium during the summer of 2009.
Providing the color commentary during the second round of CWS play, losers bracket, Mike Patrick commended one of Virginia's players for his high GPA, meaningful acts of community service, leadership experience, keen intellect, and strong character. The dialogue went something like this:
". . . and he lives on the Lawn."
"Uh-huh." Ventura responded opaquely and seemingly in agreement, though it was obvious that the full import of his co-anchor's comment had eluded him. A few moments of confused silence ensued.
And then: "He lives on the lawn?"
The Oklahoma State legend paused to imagine a scene: the kid was living for free in somebody's front yard; or maybe he liked the game of baseball so much and spent so many of his waking hours at the field, he figured he might as well sleep there too, heck just camped out in shallow center field every single night in spring; or perhaps he had opted out of dorm living and erected a tent somewhere on campus, Greenpeace-style and short on cash; maybe he'd had no luck finding space in an apartment on Wertland or 14th, where so many other third- and fourth-year students chose to live.
As the 'Hoos pitcher threw over to first, Mike Patrick briefly described UVA's historic Lawn and its venerable significance, whereupon Ventura realized that the sorry habitats he'd conjured for this ballplayer were off the mark. "Oh, I thought you meant he pitched a tent somewhere on campus and lived in it."
Broad rectangles of terraced Virginia land flow outward, generously and invitingly, from the grand steps of Jefferson's Rotunda. The public lawn is bordered by ten masterfully designed, imperfectly symmetrical pavilions graced with colonnades, an elegantly curving serpentine wall of antique brick (the laws of physics dictate that it must curve since it is only one brick thick), and a delightful variety of shade trees and enclosed gardens. Numerous honors students and outstanding young individuals compete for the coveted rooms that open onto the university's magnificent expanse of grass.
"Thomas Jefferson designed the University of Virginia's first buildings to mirror his vision of higher education. As he conceived it, the college experience should take place within an 'academical village' where shared learning infused daily life. He developed plans for ten pavilions—stately faculty homes with living quarters upstairs and classrooms downstairs—attached to two rows of student rooms and connected by an inward-facing colonnade. Each pavilion was identified with a subject to be studied and inhabited by the professor who taught that subject" (virginia.edu).
Students and faculty at The University of Virginia do not refer to their surroundings as a "campus." The academic buildings, together with the surrounding Lawn, pavilions, gardens, and open spaces are known reverentially and almost mystically as "grounds." Although the mention of Thomas Jefferson's name may not instantly elicit an attitude of unqualified awe as it once did, the artistic and intellectual vision of America's third president is palpable when one walks the grounds and contemplates the deeply satisfying realization of one man's ideal. To stand on this Lawn is to inhabit a venue in which philosophical and aesthetic promise have been passionately executed and fully realized, its maker's spirit enduring and ever present.
In lieu of a school chapel, Jefferson wanted the grand Rotunda - and the library housed within it - to be his university's center. To this day, students symbolically face the domed building during Convocation exercises that mark the beginnings of their university education. In fitting contrast, the full academic procession of Commencement moves in the opposite direction: students descend the Rotunda steps and walk the entire length of the Lawn, heading south toward Old Cabell Hall, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the world beyond, leaving their undergraduate years symbolically behind them.
In a popular list of "100 things to do before you graduate," students are unofficially encouraged to streak the entire length of Mr. Jefferson's lawn. Three o'clock in the morning during the month of December is probably a good time to attempt this activity.
Undergraduates and professors who live on the Lawn are among the university's most distinguished leaders and scholars, the community's elite. "I could not find anyone, male or female, who regretted having bid for the honor of living where they do for one (their senior) year. To win a place, they must submit applications to a screening board, presenting their academic qualifications and their record of service to the university. There is an extraordinary camaraderie among those who take the lodgings 'Mr. Jefferson' designed for them. This is felt not only by those living on the Lawn at any one time. It is a social tie felt across generations," writes Garry Wills, who came to regard the magnificent design as a true reflection of Jefferson's "entire personality, its naive flaws as well as its towering strengths."
UVA students consider the Lawn to be "the soul of the place." Indeed, just as we are moved when experiencing our nation's most important monuments, hallowed shrines, and even its loveliest ballparks, visitors may feel in the Lawn and its environs something mysterious yet palpable that can only be called "a soul."
Students' quarters are at once elegant and rustic, each offering a charming brick entryway, weathered rocking chairs, tidy piles of wood, working fireplaces, high ceilings and elegant moldings, inspiring views of the Lawn, but no plumbing and limited privacy, since all rooms open directly onto the common ground which continues to be the scene of spontaneous play, outdoor classes, admissions tours, anti-war protests, concerts, and many public gatherings both formal and informal.
Ballplayers, a capella singers, student government leaders, legacies, poets, all ethnicities (black students were admitted to these rooms before women were invited to apply, the latter delayed thanks to inadequacies of plumbing). Students must travel outdoors and in public when accessing shared bathroom facilities. In one sense, a Lawn room is just one step up from living in a tent or cabin; on another level, however, it affords students a quality of life redolent with elegance, charm, architectural greatness, and living history.
While pulling for the Cavaliers (a.k.a. 'Hoos) in this year's College World Series, we've enjoyed laughing about Robin Ventura's misconception of the Lawn, but it's all in good fun. I imagine him today, sitting in the broadcast booth with a perfect view of the field. He surveys a meticulously groomed lawn, a brand new state-of-the-art facility with its underground cooling system, gleaming stainless steel, and immense standards of lights that eclipse constellations. From his seat high above, he looks down upon the coach named O'Connor who has turned a struggling college program around, nurturing talented young players like Ryan Zimmerman, who himself then turned around and gave a quarter of a million dollars back. Ventura looks out toward left field and notices a few young men clowning around. He sees the number 2 pick and seven others recently selected in the 2011 first-year player draft. The kids are stretching and sprinting on the lawn.
A college player once told me that the whole concept of student-athletes is a joke. Admittedly, these individuals are expected to maintain a ridiculous schedule, an unrealistic balance of work and play. But I like to think that on some level he was wrong about the entire thing being a joke, NCAA violations notwithstanding, and that something of an ideal remains. Otherwise, why college ball? Why college? Why Omaha?
TD Ameritrade Ballpark in downtown Omaha, Nebraska is located a considerable distance from Jefferson's Rotunda and the blue hills of Virginia. 1157 miles to be exact. The stadium does not yet qualify as an historic landmark or national shrine, just as Charlottesville's Davenport Field cannot claim to be a component of Thomas Jefferson's original academical vision, though both facilities speak to who we are as a culture and a nation of educated people. Nor, I daresay, did Jefferson ever contemplate the possibility of a few young scholars standing on a small diamond of grass, shouldering a rubber hose and preparing their lawn for a really big game of catch.
Those who play in the so-called losers bracket of the double-elimination NCAA Division I Baseball Championship are hardly losers. Sure, baseball is ultimately about winning and losing, but the special beauty of Omaha is that it represents the culmination of a long journey that blends academics with athletics, however imperfectly. The joy comes in lessons learned both on and off the field, in friendships forged through victory and loss, and in the privilege of representing a beloved school in a city far from home.
Once upon a time there was a ballplayer who lived on the Lawn, just as he played to his heart and mind's delight on another stunning expanse of grass a mile from where Thomas Jefferson once marked fertile ground for a new university. In the grand scheme of things, it strikes me that these two very different expanses of grass are part and parcel of the same Edenic dream or longing that is at the heart of our restless souls, at the core of what we sometimes call the human condition.
I can write only what I seem to know in my own soul. From whatever direction I approach it, walking the Lawn at the University of Virginia is an experience that takes my breath away in the very same way that a ballpark transports me to a higher plane of being.
This post is dedicated to the 2011 University of Virginia baseball team, now 2-1 in the losers bracket at Omaha, and to my daughter, who graduated from Virginia this past May. | <urn:uuid:47d1ab76-bf77-4c32-933c-11e8d4851405> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://watchingthegame.typepad.com/my-blog/page/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969462 | 2,312 | 1.570313 | 2 |
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Daniel Inouye, a World War II veteran who received the Medal of Honor and who represented Hawaii in the Senate for five decades, has died, his office announced Monday. He was 88.
He died of respiratory complications late this afternoon, at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, with his wife and son at his side. Inouye was hospitalized last week and had undergone procedures to regulate his oxygen intake.
He won his ninth consecutive term in 2010 and was the second longest-serving senator in the chamber's history, trailing only Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Inouye was a senator for all but three of the Hawaii's 53 years as a state and had served as its first House member before that.
Senators of both parties took to the chamber floor Monday to mourn his death, and President Barack Obama issued a statement describing Inouye as "a true American hero."
"In Washington, he worked to strengthen our military, forge bipartisan consensus, and hold those of us in government accountable to the people we were elected to serve," Obama wrote. "But it was his incredible bravery during World War II -- including one heroic effort that cost him his arm but earned him the Medal of Honor -- that made Danny not just a colleague and a mentor, but someone revered by all of us lucky enough to know him. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Inouye family."
Vice President Joe Biden, who served alongside Inouye in the Senate, recalled his "moral bravery" in the body. "He was one of the most honorable men I ever met in my life, and one of the best friends you could hope for. He was honest, and fiercely loyal, and I trusted him absolutely."
Fellow Hawaiian Daniel Akaka choked up as he said, "It is very difficult for me to rise today with a heavy heart to bid aloha, aloha to my good friend, colleague, and brother.
"Tomorrow will be the first day since Hawaii became a state in 1959 that Dan Inouye will not be representing us in Congress. Every child born in Hawaii will learn of Dan Inouye, a man who changed the islands forever.
Inouye enlisted in the U.S. Army shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In World War II, Inouye lost an arm charging machine gun nests in San Terenzo, Italy, earning him the Medal of Honor.
He was of Japanese heritage and served in an Army unit made up of Japanese-Americans. His battalion was the most decorated unit of the war. Meanwhile, stateside, many Japanese-Americans were held during the war by the government in interment camps based on their race.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, remembered his late colleague as a "unique, brave legislator" and as a fellow veteran who was injured in war.
Inouye's unit was in "many of the most gruesome and difficult bloodlettings of the entire conflict," McCain said. "In fierce combat, Dan Inouye was gravely wounded on the battlefield. He was brought home ... as we all know, (he) lost his arm."
What happened after that battlefield injury would lead to a long-standing friendship: Inouye was hospitalized alongside the second lieutenant who would also become a U.S. senator, Bob Dole.
Inouye served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriations and the Senate Commerce Committee, and was the first chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
As head of the appropriations committee, he defended the practice of earmarking funds for pet projects and brought millions to his home state. He gained national notoriety as a member of the Senate panel investigating the Watergate scandal.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said in remembrance, "If there was ever a patriot, Dan Inouye was that patriot." Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell described him as someone who "rarely called attention to himself but who lived a remarkable American life filled with dignity and grace of the true hero that he was."
Inouye graduated from the University of Hawaii and the George Washington University School of Law.
Asked recently how he would want to be remembered, the senator said: "I represented the people of Hawaii and this nation honestly and to the best of my ability. I think I did OK," according to his office. | <urn:uuid:ce8b631b-b92f-481e-8092-289d1328e476> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wibw.com/home/military/headlines/Hawaii-Mourns-Death-of-Senator-Daniel-Inouye-183875571.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989923 | 890 | 1.703125 | 2 |
At Nemours, we promise to do whatever it takes to treat children as we would our own. When your child comes to Nemours, we know you’re placing your trust in us. This trust and our dedication to improving the health of your child is what inspires us to provide exceptional care and the most satisfying experience possible.
Stories: Patients and families share their experiences.
Quality & Safety: Learn how we track and measure the success of our care.
World-Class Surgery Offers Big Help for the Littlest Hearts
About two-thirds of patients with critical heart disease are diagnosed as infants. So it’s often the tiniest hearts that need the most help—and as soon as possible. But thanks to advanced technology and our expert team of Nemours cardiac specialists, most children born with a congenital heart defect—even newborns only hours old—can be quickly diagnosed and treated right when it matters the most.
Our heart surgeons at the Nemours Cardiac Center (located at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, DE) are right at the forefront, contributing to the incredible ongoing advances in cardiac surgical management. Now, reconstructive heart surgery can help virtually all patients with structural heart disease, even the most complicated.
No matter what your baby’s diagnosis or predicted outcome, we do whatever it takes to improve the lives and the longevity of every patient we see. In 2011, we had lower-than-expected cardiac surgery mortality (death) in newborns and infants, compared to the national average provided by the Society for Thoracic Surgeons’ congenital database. That is, we have fewer deaths in babies (under 12 months old) who received heart surgery, compared to the national rate at other pediatric facilities for the predicted number of deaths in babies with similar conditions who received heart surgery. Our rate was 3.5% of the infants who received heart surgery, compared to the national predicted rate of 5%.
Of course, each baby and child we treat is precious to us. By specializing in early detection and repair and using the latest advances in technology and research, we can give top-notch care to every child who needs our help.
How We Do It
At Nemours, we’ve become a leader in minimizing the number of operations our young patients need. The techniques and advances we use can help babies and children avoid the trauma and recovery time of open-heart surgery. Our treatment options improve the outlook for scores of kids—with less discomfort and shorter hospital stays. And duPont Hospital for Children is actually one of only a mere handful of centers in the United States where certain treatment capabilities are available.
We’re able to ensure that even our smallest, most vulnerable patients with congenital heart defects can live longer, with a better quality of life—by providing round-the-clock care from our highly specialized cardiac intensive care team (including cardiac anesthesiologists and intensivists), dedicated entirely to the unique challenges of childhood heart abnormalities.
If your unborn baby has a heart defect, close coordination among specialists is also critically important. The Nemours Cardiac Center’s fetal cardiology team works with your obstetrician and/or perinatologist (a doctor who specializes in high-risk pregnancies) to help plan for the evaluation and treatment of your baby’s heart condition before and after birth.
Through our new Nemours Partners for Perinatal Management Program, early in-utero diagnosis (when your baby is still in the womb) offers you invaluable time to prepare emotionally and to make sound medical and financial arrangements for your child’s care. The Cardiac Center staff is here to help educate and guide you through the process of understanding your baby’s heart defect, what will happen after delivery, and what surgical or non-surgical procedure may be required to remedy the problem.
Our goal is to give every child with every kind of heart condition, from the teeniest preemies on up, the very best possible chance for a healthy future. | <urn:uuid:e301475d-c906-4e60-8196-f55fcfd5b866> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nemours.org/service/medical/heartdefects/arteriosus.html?tab=results&outcomes=heartdefectsurgery | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929225 | 838 | 1.5 | 2 |
Standard used by a trial judge to make a preliminary assessment of whether an expert’s scientific testimony is based on reasoning or methodology that is scientifically valid and can properly be applied to the facts at issue. Under this standard, the factors that may be considered in determining whether the methodology is valid are: (1) whether the theory or technique in question can be and has been tested; (2) whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication; (3) its known or potential error rate; (4) the existence and maintenance of standards controlling its operation; and (5) whether it has attracted widespread acceptance within a relevant scientific community. See Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993). The Daubert standard is the test currently used in the federal courts and some state courts. In the federal courts, it replaced the Frye standard. | <urn:uuid:7c4d756c-2779-432d-ad06-3b48d60f5d59> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/daubert_standard?quicktabs_3=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932724 | 186 | 2.59375 | 3 |
The 528 plates of the Orchid Album were painted and lithographed by John Nugent Fitch, a master illustrator of orchids. Orchids were all the rage in late Victorian England and on the continent and several orchid societies thrived. Benjamin Samuel Williams published the album as a subscription series, with the idea of meeting a demand for orchid illustrations, descriptions and notes on their cultivation. The series reached 11 volumes and was enthusiastically received by horticulturists and orchid enthusiasts. Nearly 400 of the original watercolors are in the Natural History Museum in London.
John Nugent Fitch was the nephew of renowned botanical artist Walter H. Fitch. Both men drew for Curtis's Botanical Magazine.
Condition: Generally very good with the usual light toning, wear, soft creases. Colors bright and fresh.
Nissen BBI 2107
Great Flower Books, p.80. | <urn:uuid:dd6d85e9-1c55-4eef-98f3-6f38d9a99474> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.georgeglazer.com/prints/nathist/botanical/warnerorch.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944884 | 191 | 2.109375 | 2 |
Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye (Matthew 7:1).
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you (Luke 6:36-38).
The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment:
“For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:15-16).
Even a superficial review of history can remind us that people have done some really evil things. Think of names like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, or Charles Manson. Is Jesus saying in the Scriptures above that we shouldn’t judge their crimes as evil? Is he telling us to ignore what they have done and practice an extreme form of tolerance instead?
Of course not. We need to make moral judgments. We need to stand up and say that certain actions are wrong. What Jesus challenges us about in these verses from Matthew and Luke’s Gospel is whether we are passing personal judgments against the people we are in contact with every day — judgments that tear them down or puff us up, judgments that are based on self-righteousness and not love. So let’s ask today: How do I view the people who are close to me or those I interact with during the day? Is it with a personal rating scale based on how they treat me, or is it with love and their best interest at heart? Do I assume the best or the worst motives in some of their actions. Do I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt or automatically make negative judgments?
Jesus judged people and situations every day, but he never held hatred or resentment; he never tried to get revenge. Instead, he measured each situation based on the way his Father wanted him to act. We too are called to take on this “mind of Christ” in judging others.
But there is more than a command in these Scripture verses. There is a promise as well: If we put an end to self-centered and self-righteous judgments, we ourselves will not be judged. God will not judge us because he will see in us a heart like his own, a heart of mercy, compassion, and understanding. Such a disposition shows that we have mastered our pride and self-centered ways of thinking. So there is nothing left for God to judge!
Neither will others judge our actions harshly, for the witness of our kindness and compassion will speak volumes about who we are as Catholic men. Even those of a suspicious nature will gradually come to trust and respect us, for we will have become living witnesses to the kingdom of God.
Of course, none of us will get this command completely right — at least not in this life! But isn’t it good to know that the more we try, the closer to the Lord we will get? And the closer God himself will draw to us!
“Lord, today I renounce all my self-righteous and wrong judgments of others. Please help me to see others as you see them.”
Maurice Blumberg was the founding Executive Director of the National Fellowship of Catholic Men (http://www.nfcmusa.org/ ), and is currently a Trustee. He is also the Director of Partner Relations for Partners in Evangelism , (http://www2.wau.org/partners/ ), a Ministry to the Military and Prisoners for The Word Among Us .
[Many thanks to The Word Among Us (http://www.wau.org/ ) for allowing us to adapt material from daily meditations in their monthly devotional magazine. Used with permission.]
Questions for Reflection/Discussion by Catholic Men
Prayerfully meditate on the Scripture passages at the beginning of this article. In what ways do they reflect God’s desire that we as Catholic men exercise the right kind of judgment of others? How are you doing?
How would you answer these questions that were asked in the article?
1. How do I view the people who are close to me or those I interact with during the day?
2. Is it with a personal rating scale based on how they treat me, or is it with love and their best interest at heart?
3. Do I assume the best or the worst motives in some of their actions.
4. Do I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt or automatically make negative judgments?
5. How would you compare the way Jesus judged to the way you judge? What steps can you take to put on the mind of Christ in your judgment of others? | <urn:uuid:2132f017-2469-47ce-a51e-8e27d400fdf0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://catholicexchange.com/understanding-right-and-wrong-judgment-as-catholic-men/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967656 | 1,145 | 1.859375 | 2 |
Asian Wetland Center to Open
By Do Je-hae
South Gyeongsang Province, home to the country's largest wetlands, will open the Ramsar Regional Center-East Asia in Changwon, today.
The new institute is a follow-up project of the Changwon Declaration, adopted at the Ramsar Convention held last November in the southeastern city.
The center will focus on expanding an Asian network of experts studying the economic, cultural and recreational values of wetlands, according to South Gyeongsang Governor Kim Tae-ho.
``The biggest achievement of the Changwon Ramsar Convention is Korea's renewed acknowledgement of the importance in safeguarding the environment, including our wetlands,'' Governor Kim said in a statement.
To further its efforts in dealing with ``green growth'' initiatives and climate change, the province is hoping to host the 2011 United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
For the opening ceremony of the Ramsar regional center, the governor has invited Anada Tiega, secretary general of the Ramsar Convention Secretariat as well as 100 experts from academia, governments and NGOs.
The center will cooperate with a similar facility based in Ramsar, Iran, and its projects will include wetland management training for developing countries and an international conference in October for discussing the progress of initiatives defined in the Changwon Declaration.
The declaration highlights practical measures for ensuring human well-being under the themes ― water, climate change, people's livelihood and health, land use change and biodiversity.
Signed in Ramsar in 1971, the convention is an international treaty providing the framework for cooperation on the conservation and utilization of wetlands and their resources.
The next Ramsar Convention will be held in Romania in 2012. | <urn:uuid:8aac2d1f-7d62-4a19-959e-9779bf26675d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2012/05/281_48767.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917211 | 349 | 2.125 | 2 |
CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) - We have talked to you before about chatroulette, a chat room with very few rules, that was attracting kids and adults around the world to text chat or video chat with random strangers. Just when you think you are up to speed, another service like it pops up but the new services seem to more actively target young kids.
There are two new services you need to be aware of right away, one is called tiny chat and the other is called blogtv. Both are incredibly easy to use. Tinychat's front page looks inviting and kid friendly. Odds are you, if you go on these sites, you might just see kids chatting with each other but WBTV's cyber expert Theresa Payton explains there is more than what meets the eye.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW NOW:
Blogtv and Tinychat are both video chat room services.
They are FREE.
Blogtv lets you view the latest video when you type in the website and looks like youtube meets webcam.
The landing page for Tinychat looks incredibly kid friendly. For both sites, the rules, are limited. With Tinychat, You can add/invite friends and it will integrate with your kids' FAcebook or MySpace account.
On both Blogtv and Tinychat: Without even logging on, you can see several streaming videos of chats in session.
4 EASY TIPS TO PROTECT YOURSELF & YOUR LOVED ONES:
Theresa said we are highlighting these two services but the same issues exist on other services and you can use these 4 easy tips to protect your kids when they use others services such as Skype or other online chat and phone services.
THIS WEEK'S WORD OF THE WEEK: GOGGLES
This is a Google service called "Goggles". It allows you to snap a photo on your phone, and Goggles will search the web and give you back information around the globe. You show a picture of a menu or food and you might get a list of recipes or restaurants. Show a picture of a tough soduku puzzle and it may send you the answers!
Want to check out Google Goggles? Go to: http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#text
If you want to stay current on internet safety issues for kids there are many great resources, we have highlighted a few for you here:
OnGuard Online: www.OnGuardOnline.gov
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PublicHomeServlet?LanguageCountry=en_US
Internet Crimes Against Children: http://www.icactraining.org/
National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA): http://www.staysafeonline.org/ | <urn:uuid:a20e0186-3ef9-4825-bb1f-1545be2a3e96> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wbtv.com/story/13921287/two-new-websites-for-parents-to-watch | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.90158 | 579 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Israeli demographics have always made for a chaotic political culture. While to the outside world, it's a nation of Jews, internally it's a nation of Russians, Anglos, native Sabras, Yemenites, Syrians, Persians and a hundred others. Even the smallest group has its compartmentalized identities: the delicate differences between immigrants from a single country but different towns, the countless distinctions among its religious communities in their own way are united and disunited.
Israeli politics are born out of the chaos of the nation's demographics. Its Knesset is a room where fanatical atheists and the fanatical religious, urbanites and hill-dwellers, representatives of Russian and Middle Eastern Jews, settlers and Arabs, feminists and patriarchs, socialists and capitalists, scream at each other for hours, not always for the reasons you expect, and do nothing constructive. That makes Israeli politics a lot like everyone else's politics, but it has its unique features as well.
The Israeli left is one of the few socialist movements in the First World to lose power because of immigration. Around the same time that Western immigration policies were being tuned to bring in populations with less investment in their new nations, new Israeli immigrants were more patriotic and nationalistic. To understand the effect, imagine that the United States today was being flooded, not with the morass of Mexicans, Haitians, Pakistanis and Kenyans, but with Irish and Italian immigrants who had no hesitation about flying the Stars and Stripes or identifying with their new country.
Russian and Middle-Eastern Jews who arrived in Israel (and the United States) were more likely to be conservative and to regard the left's growing preoccupation with appeasing terrorists with suspicion. And in a two party system, their votes would have prevented the left from ever doing more than having a few token elected members denounce the state on the floor of the Knesset before slinking back to their cafes.
The Israeli left was never particularly fond of immigration to Israel. Their ideal from the start was a land settled by a cadre of young men and women, trained in their schools and indoctrinated with their ideology. British restrictions of Jewish immigration were not nearly as troubling to them as they were to the right. Israel, as they saw it, would be for a small chosen elite, a socialist enterprise that the vast majority of European Jews did not have the skills or temperament to participate in.
Their vision of a country consisting of collective farms and a few state-operated enterprises under a single union was ended by the Holocaust. While the right took the lead in smuggling Jews into Israel, particularly in the fading days of the war, the left had still not come to grips with a country overrun being overrun by the kind of people they had wanted to leave behind.
The left seized power early on and, with the Altalena massacre demonstrated that it was entirely willing to kill to maintain that power. But it couldn't maintain it against the press of the ballot box. The system of patronage that it implemented was meant to marginalize the right, as well as those outside its club, the Holocaust survivors and Middle Eastern Jews, who were meant to play secondary roles in the life of the country.
One of the peculiarities of Israeli politics was that its left was nativist while its right took on the role of the defenders of marginalized minorities. A role reversal that was made possible because, while most Western leftist parties viewed immigration as a way to destabilize the nativist vote, the Israeli left saw immigrants as destabilizing their existing power base.
Begin's campaign against German reparations, which culminated in the ugly scene of tear gas being used against protesting Holocaust survivors, was a fundamental political moment. It was the type of the moment that the left would have loved to have owned. As did a speech by an Israeli entertainer at a Labor election rally in which he used a slur to refer to Middle Eastern Jews while linking them to the right, which allowed Begin to deliver a widely publicized statement of solidarity with them.
The modern Israeli left is an oddball fusion of Tel Aviv hipsters and the angry old men who resent the Orthodox, the Russians and the Middle Eastern Jews who upset their ideal society. The hipsters write up manifestos which call for the left to reach out to the Orthodox, the Russian and Middle Eastern Jews, but they have no idea how to go about doing it. The left had its chance and blew it.
That's not to say that the left isn't willing to capitalize on immigrants. Its new cause is fighting for migrant workers, mainly the African equivalent of Mexican illegal aliens, who commit most of the same crimes. The Israeli left has finally figured out that it needs the right kind of immigrants. The kind who don't care about the country but are just there for social benefits. But the left had those immigrants all along.
The inability of the left to connect with mainstream Israeli voters has led it to become more and more dependent on disguises, from third parties to the disintegration of Labor and the reemergence of much of its cadre in the Kadima Party, which was until recently the political opposition.
The Israeli left today does not exist as a movement, so much as it exists as a set of policies that are implemented by the bureaucracy, invested in an activist Supreme Court and that passes into the DNA of parties like Kadima. Its ventures appear as social protests, which it also disguises as populist rallies that are supposedly in no way connected to it, even though they are organized by its NGO's.
The old Israeli left did not need foreign-funded NGO's to conduct its political activity, but the new Israeli left is beginning to take on the air of a foreign-funded venture. Like the American Communist Party in the 1950's, the Israeli left is underground, emerging in front groups and policy programs, but not even making a serious effort to get the Israeli public to accept it as a movement. The political parties associated with it are a laughingstock and its grip on power is invisible, but still ruthless.
The two bugbears of Israeli demographics are also its two most controversial populations, Arabs and Orthodox Jews. Both groups have a high fertility rate and a mixed view of participating in the state. And that combination makes for some sharp edged studies and worrisome statistics. The right has been concerned about Arab demographics, and the left with Orthodox demographics.
While even non-Orthodox Israelis have a high birth rate compared to most of the West, it's not enough to compete with either group. Straight-line long-term projections paint the future as caught between an Arab and Orthodox majority, but the alarm bells are somewhat cynical.
The left has used the general disinterest of Arab and Orthodox votes to stay in power. It made deals with both Arab and Orthodox leaders, employing them as a blank voter base for a blank check in its own politics. Barring the National Religious, the Orthodox have mainly stayed disinterested, and the Shas Party has even successfully funneled away nationalist votes into its own community party built on the model of its Ashkenazi Haredi counterparts. But the Arabs have not stayed disinterested.
The Israeli Arab status quo was destabilized by the left's own last ditch effort to sideline the right by redefining Israel. Its Peace Process was poorly thought out and poorly implemented. And it made its grip on power even more unsustainable than it had been before, by making it easy for the right to present itself as the national security party. But it also encouraged Israeli Arab leaders to believe that the State of Israel might be toppling and to begin acting that way, effectively radicalizing them.
The right's efforts to solve Arab demographics with unilateral disengagements and land swaps are equally misguided, not only because the demographics are overblown, but because the problem has not actually been solved by walking away from it. All that does is lead Israel back to a 1948 ghetto surrounded by hostile enemies whose welfare the world holds it responsible for and whose attacks cannot be meaningfully ended without taking control of the land that they are operating from.
Israel is running out of immigrants, Having exhausted Russia and the Middle East, it can only draw from the remaining reservoirs in Europe and the Americas. But that reservoir is also not unlimited. And drawing back the large numbers of Israelis who have immigrated would require reforming the bureaucracy enough to make running a small business a lot easier than it is.
Nor are migrant workers any kind of solution, unless Israel wants to go down the same road as Europe. The situation in Tel Aviv should be a wake-up call that Israel is not in any way immune from the same maladies and that enough migrants will quickly become a social problem of an entirely different class than any immigrant problem that has come before. The Lost Tribe variations that involve zeroing in on some population
that can be claimed as one of the lost tribes is the same thing.
Israel has done everything possible to increase its birth rate, and its high birth rate is proof of that, but like most modern countries it is never going to be able to compete with the birth rate of patriarchal societies and subcultures. But it only truly has to compete with the Arab side.
A Haredi majority will take some political adjustment, but the left's alarmism about turning into Iran is something even they know to be false. The Haredi camp could not unite enough to win elections in Jerusalem. It spends half its time fighting internal battles, which is something the left should be able to relate to. Nor does it have any interest in running the country as a whole. It would not know what to do with the country if it had it. Its cultural DNA is built to be a minority in a country run by other people. For it to embrace a national identity, it would have to become more like the Dati Leumi, the National Religious, who have their own sizable birth rate.
All this will mean that Israel will not look very much like the socialist utopia that the left imagined. But it already doesn't. It is a country already dominated by the groups that the left does not like. The collective farms are turning into conventional farms. The privatization of state-owned industries has led to major economic changes. The accommodation of a society formed by traditionalist birth rates will be another of those changes. | <urn:uuid:1a70c7a7-608c-47fc-b860-5190b208cf7c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/06/demographics-of-israeli-politics.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978593 | 2,100 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Med-e-Tel is the meeting place with a proven potential for Education, Networking and Business among a global audience with diverse professional backgrounds.
eHealth , Telemedicine and Health ICT are a tool at the service of medical and nurse practitioners, patients, citizens, healthcare institutions and governments. It involves many different stakeholders who need to be brought face-to-face to share aspirations, learn from research and experiences, show the possibilities, understand the market, discover new applications. Attend the vast conference program featuring over 150 presentations and workshops, and learn from experience built up by experts from around the world. Hear about current applications and best practice examples, see a glimpse of future trends in Telemedicine and eHealth, and their effect on the healthcare system as a whole. Get an update on new developments that will allow you to stay ahead and make more effective and efficient use of technologies to improve quality of health and medical care. Medical specialists can benefit from up to 18 hours of CME credits.
Med-e-Tel promotes and enhances cooperation opportunities, and is the place to establish partnerships and contacts, both globally and locally. Meet and network with healthcare and industry stakeholders, use the dedicated meeting points and events at Med-e-Tel to exchange ideas. Attend meetings from a number of international and regional associations, and expand your network. Use the dedicated meeting rooms for one-to-one meetings with industry leaders. Participate in demonstrations that will give you a better view on the potential behind Telemedicine and eHealth tools.Develop or expand your local and international business. Be at Med-e-Tel to meet with a highly qualified audience of decision makers. An extensive international program with participants from 50 countries in Europe and around the world will put your company and solutions in front of an audience that is looking to see and hear the latest developments in telemedicine and ehealth.
Supported by the International Society for Telemedicine & eHealth, European Commission, World Health Organization, International Telecommunication Union, European Association of CyberTherapy & Rehabilitation, and a range of other associations, the Med-e-Tel event gathers European and global healthcare leaders and providers.A regional seminar, specifically targeted at healthcare administrators and professionals, is the ideal opportunity to profile your company and services among local stakeholders and to develop your business in the Luxembourg and Belgian marketplace. The seminar is an integral part of the Med-e-Tel conference program and is endorsed by the Luxembourg Ministry of Health and the CRP-Santé (Public Institute for Research in Healthcare, Public Health and Biotechnology).
You can discuss more about Teleradiology and related topics in our Teleradiology Group | <urn:uuid:2911721b-eca5-4d57-9883-3f423e35896e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.medicexchange.com/news-article/med-e-tel-2010-the-international-ehealth-telemedicine-and-health-ict-forum.html?category_id=4505 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930152 | 548 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Good news from the Caribbean
Nine protected areas in the European overseas territories in the Caribbean have been listed since 2010 under the SPAW (Specially Protected Areas and Wildlife) Protocol of the Cartegena Convention. The SPAW Protocol is the only legally-binding international agreement on biodiversity in the Wider Caribbean, and a key mechanism for strengthening cooperation and increasing consideration of ecological connectivity within the Wider Caribbean.
Since 2010, 16 protected areas in the Wider Caribbean have been listed in the Protocol. Among these, more than half belong to European overseas territories: six in the French Antilles and French Guiana, and three in the Dutch Caribbean islands. The listing took place after several years of developing criteria and guidelines by a dedicated Caribbean expert working group.
Being listed under SPAW means that the protected area is acknowledged for its quality and the efficiency of its conservation and management. The label can also be an useful tool to promote tourism and strengthen enforcement. Being listed also implies that the protected area is included in the cooperation programme developed by the SPAW Secretariat, and given priority for SPAW funding in view of improving management, developing science, and extending training and networking.
The process of listing protected areas under SPAW starts with countries submitting presentation reports, on a voluntary basis, on the areas they wish to see listed. The reports are then reviewed by the SPAW-Regional Activity Center and assessed by the SPAW Scientific Committee against the criteria that have been developed to that purpose, before a final decision is taken by the Conference of the Parties. For more information on the listing process and the criteria used to assess applications, see here.
You can find the list of all the Protected Areas that have been approved for listing under SPAW and the presentation reports submitted by countries to that purpose on the SPAW-RAC's website here. | <urn:uuid:cb48b861-e835-4ef9-8166-af21d5913413> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cms.iucn.org/about/union/secretariat/offices/europe/activities/overseas/?11595/Good-news-from-the-Caribbean | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949982 | 383 | 2.640625 | 3 |
In this prospective cohort study of Russian boys, we observed significantly later pubertal onset for boys with BLLs ≥5 µg/dL as compared to those with BLLs< 5 µg/dL; this finding was consistent across measures of pubertal onset based on testicular volume as well as genital and pubic hair staging, and persisted after adjustment for potential confounders. These findings are consistent with previous cross-sectional studies in US girls,20–21
which found delayed pubertal onset for girls with higher lead levels, and with our initial cross-sectional data on Russian boys.26
BLLs in the US have declined over time; however, 6% of US children under age 6 still had BLLs of 5–10 µg/dL in 1999–2004, and rates in some subgroups remain even higher (17% above 5 µg/dL among non-Hispanic blacks).36
BLLs in other countries may be similar or higher, particularly where leaded gasoline is still used.
Changes in genital staging and testicular volume are generally thought to occur in parallel, but few epidemiologic studies have simultaneously assessed both measures of pubertal maturation. We observed a median age at pubertal onset of 10.5 years based on TV>3ml, but a full year earlier for onset defined by genital staging. Despite these shifts across different pubertal onset measures, BLLs ≥5 µg/dL were consistently associated with a 6–8 month delay in pubertal onset relative to those with BLLs <5 µg/dL. This consistency is reassuring and has practical implications, given the relative ease in assessing pubertal staging in clinical settings and the lack of TV measurements in most epidemiologic studies.
It is unclear whether delays in pubertal onset occur at the level of the hypothalamic-pituitary gonadal axis by altering the activation of the GnRH pulse generator, or by altering other hormonal pathways that intersect with the reproductive hormones. Animal models suggest that lead exposure decreases concentrations of growth hormone, insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), testosterone and other hormones responsible for growth and pubertal development.16–19
The implications of altered pubertal timing have received more attention for early maturation, which has been associated with increased incidence of antisocial behaviors, substance use, and depression.37,38
However, late maturation in boys has also been associated with risk for psychosocial problems including lower self-esteem, depressive symptoms and eating disorders.39
It should be emphasized that the delays in pubertal onset we observed did not represent clinical delays for individual boys, but rather a shift in the mean age at pubertal onset for those with higher lead levels as compared to lower levels. However, given the large numbers of children with BLLs≥5 µg/dL in the US and worldwide, such a population shift has important implications from a public health perspective.41
BLLs above 10 µg/dL have been long recognized as having a strong association with neurocognitive and motor deficits in young children, leading to identification of this level as indicative of lead poisoning by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.42
Yet BLLs well below 10 µg/dL are increasingly identified as being associated with mild neurologic impairment and diminished growth.43
Our results indicate that timing of pubertal onset can also be affected at BLLs in the 5–10 µg/dL range; these findings add to concern regarding BLLs in this lower range and support review of current policies.
We report an association of high BLLs with later pubertal onset even after adjusting for BMI and height at study entry. These anthropometric measures, however, may be on the causal pathway between lead exposure and pubertal onset. Measured BLLs may reflect chronic lead exposure or exposures during earlier periods, which in turn may result in diminished growth by age 8 to 9 years. In addition, it is known that bone mass increases during pubertal growth40
which leads to an increased distribution volume for lead and thus lower BLLs. Thus, including these growth measures at study entry in our models may have resulted in over-adjustment and attenuation of estimated effects.
Our study’s strengths include its size, prospective design, and consistent assessment of pubertal status by a single trained physician. Longitudinal pubertal onset assessments over this age range provided greater power and precision for estimating exposure effects than our previous cross-sectional analysis. It is also one of the few large-scale epidemiologic studies to include both physician-assessed pubertal staging and measured testicular volume. Limitations of our study include the lack of pre-natal and early childhood lead measurements, and the possibility of residual confounding by socioeconomic status.
In conclusion, this is the first prospective epidemiologic study to demonstrate a relationship between lead and later pubertal onset in boys. These associations occurred at levels which remain relevant for US, Russian, and other populations, raising concerns regarding the potential consequences for population-wide alterations in male pubertal timing. | <urn:uuid:3b46f535-b35d-4ac7-b821-1460ed195dfc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pubmedcentralcanada.ca/pmcc/articles/PMC3111933/?lang=en-ca | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951476 | 1,062 | 1.921875 | 2 |
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which.
Joan Didion – The White Album
I used to write persona poems fairly frequently, back when I was in my late teens and early twenties and everyone’s life seemed interesting but mine. Now that I am in my forties, I don’t really have the desire to write poems in character. There are too many things that have happened to me. Nothing imaginary that I come up with rings as true as my own. It is easier in fiction than in poetry In fiction the length of the form allows me to develop a whole world for my character’s to reside in. Fiction is meant to be a beautiful lie. For me poetry is more personal than that. I want my poetry to reflect my life and my thoughts, so I no longer feel the urge to write the persona poems that I once wrote.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t tell stories. It also doesn’t mean that every word I write is true. I have tremendous sympathy for James Frey and his somewhat fictional autobiography. I don’t think that anyone can write a completely true autobiography. The mind doesn’t work like that. It fills in the blanks. It remembers things the way it wants to. I am absolutely positive that some of the key events in my life seem completely different to the other people involved. Everyone has a perspective and no one has all the information.
As a storyteller, I am perfectly happy to combine two different events in my life into one. If they live together in my mind, they should be allowed to live together on the page. The truth of the story is not necessarily the facts of the event, especially in the world of poetry. We are given poetic license for a reason. To me, poetry is about interpretation and distillation. In poetry, you strip away the things that don’t matter and you say what has the most importance, especially if you choose to write about yourself. That means that, sometimes, you don’t explain that there were four good reasons why you showed up late to the party, you just stick to the one that matters in the poem — unless your poem is about the four reasons.
I don’t encourage people to tell outright lies about themselves, even in poetry. If you are going to do it, though, be upfront about it. Tell the most apparent and glorious lie you can tell. Commit to the lie. Otherwise, make do with the truth.
Today’s Poetry Prompt
Write about the first time you did something. | <urn:uuid:5f189ea4-bfd2-465c-b86c-95150f6696f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://poewar.com/pd30-day-25-poets-are-liars/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964547 | 604 | 1.5625 | 2 |
I wrote a few months ago about the evolution of the web, with its “long steady march towards the holy grail of discovery – consumption without intent: content that you don’t even know that you want.” I end the post with a dramatic flourish that probably requires a bit more thought:
…the social web…has replaced intent with context, and so while wading through the stream, we are left with a feeling of serendipitous discovery, as we stumble blindly into content that we don’t even know that we want.
Serendipity is an interesting term. It’s universally perceived as good, but beyond that, I’m not sure that it is so well understood. Since writing this post, I came across a few explanations that I found incredibly useful:
First, the origin of the word. Johnson explains:
First coined in a letter written by the English novelist Horace Walpole in 1754, the word derives from a Persian fairy tale titled “The Three Princes of Serendip,” the protagonists of which were “always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” The contemporary novelist John Barth describes it in nautical terms: “You don’t reach Serendip by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously”
…your discovery may well be interesting and informative, but it will not be truly serendipitous unless it helps you fill in a piece of a puzzle you’ve been poring over.
Yochai Benkler, in his brilliant book “The Wealth of Networks,” never actually writes the word “serendipity,” but speaks to the concept eloquently in his rebuke of the Babel objection (i.e. information overload) – bolding is mine:
We, as individuals, also go through an iterative process of assigning a likely relevance to the judgments of others…. By a combination of random searching and purposeful deployment of social mapping-who is likely to be interested in what is relevant to me now-we can solve the Babel objection while subjecting ourselves neither to the legal and market power of proprietors of communications infrastructure or media products nor to the simple judgments of the undifferentiated herd…We do not degenerate into mindless meandering through a cacophonous din. We find things we want quite well. We stumble across things others suggest to us. When we do go on an unplanned walk, within a very short number of steps we either find something interesting or go back to looking in ways that are more self-conscious and ordered.
Yochai Benkler. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (pp. 173-174). Kindle Edition.
Finally, in no more than 8 words, Jeff Jarvis neatly summarizes the concept: “Serendipity is not randomness. It is unexpected relevance.”
Serendipity, in other words, is a form of passive discovery. It describes relevant information that is pushed to the user, in contrast to search results, which are pulled via the act of explicitly surfacing one’s intent. It replaces the exchange “I want this: ok, here you go” with “I thought you might like this: thanks, you’re right.”
Serendipitous discovery has found its most meaningful delivery mechanism today in Twitter. On Twitter we benefit from, in a very literal interpretation of Benkler’s words, “an iterative proces of assigning a likely relevance to the judgement of others.” The asymmetric follow system allows users to iterate through the set of curators that push them content. Further, lists and search allow us to provide a light layer of content categorization or social context on top of our streams. We become meta curators: actively curating a set of curators based on social proximity and perceptions of relevance to our constantly evolving interests. We optimize our streams to deliver content that we will find valuable – in other words, we position ourselves for serendipitous discovery.
All else equal,* serendipitous discovery is a fundamentally more valuable form of discovery than search.
What do I mean by value? Think about it at a basic level – for what service would you pay more? The tool that helps you get your questions answered whenever you need it, or the service of having your answers delivered before you even ask? A service that anticipates intent is more valuable – to the user (and yes, to the advertiser), than the tool that merely responds to intent.
I strongly believe that Twitter, and the ecosystem around it, are on the verge of building an industry that at least rivals what Google has built in search.
*Today, all else is not equal – for example, when I have a question, I want it answered now, not whenever someone happens to deliver it through my stream. I need to think through this some more. | <urn:uuid:7eacd7d5-091c-483a-8df7-ad4d657d2d53> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jakelevine.me/blog/category/curation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945798 | 1,061 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Computer Simulations Show Asteroid Impact On Mars Possible
The dramatic differences between the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars have puzzled scientists for 30 years. One of the proposed explanations–a massive asteroid impact–now has strong support from computer simulations carried out by two groups of researchers. Planetary scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, were involved in both studies, which appear in the June 26 issue of Nature.
"It’s a very old idea, but nobody had done the numerical calculations to see what would happen when a big asteroid hits Mars," said Francis Nimmo, associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UCSC and first author of one of the papers.
Nimmo’s group found that such an impact could indeed produce the observed differences between the Martian hemispheres. The other study used a different approach and reached the same conclusion. Nimmo’s paper also suggests testable predictions about the consequences of the impact.
The so-called hemispheric dichotomy was first observed by NASA’s Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s. The Viking spacecraft revealed that the two halves of the planet look very different, with relatively young, low-lying plains in the north and relatively old, cratered highlands in the south. Some 20 years later, the Mars Global Surveyor mission showed that the crust of the planet is much thicker in the south and also revealed magnetic anomalies present in the southern hemisphere and not in the north.
"Two main explanations have been proposed for the hemispheric dichotomy–either some kind of internal process that changed one half of the planet, or a big impact hitting one side of it," Nimmo said. "The impact would have to be big enough to blast the crust off half of the planet, but not so big that it melts everything. We showed that you really can form the dichotomy that way."
Nimmo’s group includes UCSC graduate student Shawn Hart, associate researcher Don Korycansky, and Craig Agnor of Queen Mary University, London. The other paper is by Margarita Marinova and Oded Aharonson of the California Institute of Technology and Erik Asphaug, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UCSC.
The quantitative model used by Nimmo’s group calculated the effects of an impact in two dimensions. Asphaug’s group used a different model to calculate impacts in three dimensions, but with lower resolution (i.e., less detail in the simulation).
"The two approaches are very complementary; putting them together gives you a complete picture," Nimmo said. "The two-dimensional model provides high resolution, but you can only look at vertical impacts. The three-dimensional model allows nonvertical impacts, but the resolution is lower so you can’t track what happens to the crust."
Most planetary impacts are not head-on, Asphaug said. His group found a "sweet spot" of impact conditions that result in a hemispheric dichotomy matching the observations. Those conditions include an impactor about one-half to two-thirds the size of the Moon, striking at an angle of 30 to 60 degrees.
"This is how planets finish their business of formation," Asphaug said. "They collide with other bodies of comparable size in gargantuan collisions. The last of those big collisions defines the planet."
According to Nimmo’s analysis, shock waves from the impact would travel through the planet and disrupt the crust on the other side, causing changes in the magnetic field recorded there. The predicted changes are consistent with observations of magnetic anomalies in the southern hemisphere, he said.
In addition, new crust that formed in the northern lowlands would be derived from deep mantle rock melted by the impact and should have significantly different characteristics from the southern hemisphere crust. Certain Martian meteorites may have originated from the northern crust, Nimmo said. The study also suggests that the impact occurred around the same time as the impact on Earth that created the Moon.
This research was funded by NASA.
Image 1: This image from a computer simulation shows the type of impact that could have created the Mars hemispheric dichotomy. Credit: M. Marinova, O. Aharonson, E. Asphaug.
Image 2: The northern hemisphere of Mars is low (blue) and smooth, while the southern hemisphere is high (red) and heavily cratered. Image courtesy of NASA.
On the Net: | <urn:uuid:bbf8b7ab-103c-440a-b182-1159ab8d5580> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1449971/computer_simulations_show_asteroid_impact_on_mars_possible/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949053 | 919 | 3.59375 | 4 |
Archive for the ‘MissionExplore’ Category
Perfect for thought provoking homework and school clubs, Mission:Explore have just released a new BETA version of their award winning website. The new Mission:Explore is a game, but not as you know it. There are two aims to the game. One is to collect points and unlock rewards. The other is to experience the world in new ways by doing vitally important (random and warped) challenges. The more missions your students do the more rewards they’ll unlock and the more fun you’ll have during their stay on planet Earth.
Created by a geography educators and supported by Ordnance Survey, Mission:Explore is a radically creative contribution to geography in schools. You will find missions on the site which have been created not only by Mission:Explore, but also National Geographic Education who are using challenges on the site to promote Geography Awareness Week this November.
Mission:Explore can be used to help us all learn about the world in which we live. Our advice is to stay playful, be curious and have an open mind. The website is 100% free for explorers and can be found at www.missionexplore.net.
Mission:Explore London is a free app for i-Devices, it is now available to download for free from iTunes.
Please support our effort to make geography even more popular by downloading and rating the app on iTunes.
If you don’t own an I-Device you can visit the the Mission Explore website.
The Geography Collective are having a big push this week to get the book noticed by the media. With 102 missions to challenge young (and old) people, all of our author royalties are invested in free copies for ‘deprived’ children. You may want the book to inspire a child to go exploring.. or for 102 inspirational first dates.. you can buy the book through online stores such as Amazon, as well as in many book stores.
Text stolen and adapted from Daniel | <urn:uuid:015a5832-d956-44b5-a2b1-d6375deee106> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sharegeography.co.uk/category/missionexplore/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955013 | 410 | 2.421875 | 2 |
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Police on Long Island resumed on Tuesday their search for clues in the hunt for a possible serial killer, zeroing in on hot spots identified by aerial photographs taken by the FBI. Since December, authorities have found 10 sets of human remains near...
Jacket CopyWhat was he up to? That's the question at the center of any consideration of Gordon Matta-Clark, an architecture student-turned-installation artist who died of cancer in 1978, when he was just 35. Matta-Clark doesn't have the name recognition of...
wpix.comA statue on the grounds of Queens Borough Hall is stirring up controversy instead of inspiring civic virtue. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D - Queens and Brooklyn) and Councilmember Julissa Ferreras, Chair of the Women's Issues Committee, held a press...
Staff reporterThe FBI is now playing a bigger role in the search for more bodies and for clues that will hopefully bring a serial killer to justice. "The more resources you have the easier it is to solve this." said New York State Police Captain Louis Weber. From...
Tags: Crimes, FBI, Criminals, Crime, Law and Justice
Theodore Kheel, a New York labor mediator who helped resolve more than 30,000 disputes, including an East Coast longshoremen's strike in 1962 and the city's 114-day newspaper union walkout the next year, has died. He was 96. Kheel died Friday in New York...
Staff reporterM@dAbout, a syndicated television show focused on educating teens and tweens on various life lessons, will begin airing in the New York market on Saturday, September 18th at 12 noon on PIX11 (WPIX/Channel 11.) M@dAbout is the brainchild of Minneapolis-...
wpix.comA 6-foot common dolphin that washed up on the shore of Gilgo Beach Thursday afternoon has died, PIX 11 News has learned. The mammal which was discovered by beach goers, was rushed to the Riverhead Foundation where marine biologists attempted to nurse...
Tags: WPIX, Long Island
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Original site for Robert Moses topic gallery. | <urn:uuid:a214e711-d5f8-46a4-b119-911515b346f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wdbj7.com/topic/politics/interior-policy/housing-urban-planning/robert-moses-PEHST002290.topic?page=2&sortby=taxrankprof | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943327 | 940 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Maoists rebels have been waging an armed rebellion against the Nepalese government since 1996, which has killed over 12,000 people (Photo: Sagar Shrestha/IRIN)
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End of ceasefire creates fear
in Nepal’s towns and villages
Report by IRIN
Human rights activists and development workers in Nepal warn that a further increase in violence in the country may place more civilians at risk and jeapardise development work. The situation in both the villages and cities has been one of fear and increasing insecurity since the Maoists called off their four-month long unilateral ceasefire on 2 January 2006 after the government, led by King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah, failed to respond to their offer of peace, they maintain.
The Maoists rebels have been waging an armed rebellion against the Nepalese government since 1996, which has killed over 12,000 people. "We are deeply concerned about the deteriorating security situation and the impact on efforts to support poor communities. The next few weeks are likely to be particularly difficult,” said Mark Mallalieu, head of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), the largest donor to Nepal.
His comments come as rebels intensify their military attacks against the security forces in a bid to continue attempts to disrupt the municipal elections scheduled for 8 February in 58 municipalities across the Himalayan kingdom - something the government has been adamant to go ahead with, despite protests from major political parties, local human rights organisations and citizens groups.
State authorities have also stepped up security, especially after the Maoists attacked a security post at the border of Kathmandu, killing 11 police personnel on 14 January. Following the killing a curfew from 23:00 to 04:00 was imposed in the capital on 16 January.
Political observers, citizens groups and human rights activists are concerned that the government should stop pushing for elections, which they say are being held undemocratically as all the major democratic political parties and citizens’ groups have decided to boycott the polls.
Around 13 per cent of Nepal’s 27 million people live in 58 municipalities of the country’s towns and cities, which house nearly 300,000 voters. Local elections have not been held in the country since all the locally elected bodies, including the municipalities, Village Development Committees (VDCs) and District Development Committees (DDCs), were dissolved by former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba in 2002.
Accused of incompetence and failure to hold elections in 2002, Deuba was sacked by the king who then assumed direct rule in February 2005.
Since the breakdown of ceasefire, the Maoists have prevented any government development money from entering areas they control most of which are extremely poor. Nepal as a whole is regarded as one of world’s poorest nations in the world, with nearly 36 percent of the population living on less than US $1 per day.
The Maoists have also threatened all the government’s local development offices to prevent them from implementing any of their development projects. During the ceasefire period, local government bodies like the DDCs were allowed to work through the NGOs in the villages, including those under the Maoists who control nearly 80 percent of the country’s rural areas.
The ceasefire declared in September last year helped to restore peace to some extent. Development work was allowed in the Maoist-controlled areas without much interference and their leaders also expressed commitment towards respecting the UN’s Basic Operating Guidelines (BOGs) in December.
So far, the NGOs funded directly by the aid agencies have not yet come under any Maoist pressure but development workers are uncertain whether they can work smoothly as both the state forces and Maoists are escalating military attacks.
“We would remind conflict parties of their public commitment to respect the Basic Operating Guidelines. We will continue to monitor the situation closely and if necessary will withdraw staff to keep them safe," said Mallalieu.
The rebels have also been targeting non-military buildings, including the education and ward offices that are the main contact points for villagers who need help with important documentation and paperwork relating to citizenship, land purchase, birth registration and so on.
“The announcement of elections has created so much tension among the civilians that they are again caught in the middle: they fear that they will be pressurised to vote by the state and on the other hand will have to face the risk from the rebels if they decide to vote,” explained rights activist Bhola Mahat in Nepalganj about 500 km west of Kathmandu. Nepalganj remains the centre of Maoist activities as it is the closest city to most of the districts of west Nepal, which is heavily controlled by the Maoist rebels.
He added that the situation of mass fear is much worse in the district headquarters and small town centres where most of the municipalities are based and where bombings are now taking place every day. “Trade, commerce and schooling of children have already been affected,” he said.
During the ceasefire, a large number of people who were displaced for many years had returned home expecting the ceasefire to last longer. But now, with the violent atmosphere at home, many are reported to be either planning or already on their way to cross the borders. However, a large number of them who cannot afford to travel have no choice but to stay in their villages. Finding refuge in nearby towns and cities has also now become dangerous due to the Maoists’ new strategy of attacking mainly towns and urban areas, including the capital.
According to reports by local journalists from Nawalparasi, Kapilbastu and Rupendehi districts of east Nepal, villagers have gradually started to flee their villages and are crossing the border to India for security.
“People are terrified about the uncertainties of what will happen in the next few weeks,” said local journalist JB Pun.
The citizens’ group believes that the international community has so far done little other than talk to the press. “Strong international measures are needed to pressurise the government in the interest of Nepal and Nepali people,” said Debendra Raj Panday, one of the key intellectuals leading the citizens’ group movement. “The resources including aid money are being wasted and the prospect for peace and development are receding further. Donors and diplomats have responsibility towards it,” added Panday.
“There are a series of war crimes against civilians and publishing press statements is not enough as there is a clear probability that violence will grow putting more civilians at risk,” said activist Gopal Chintan, who added that the concerned international organisations should start making more field visits as they have unlimited access to the most conflict-affected areas of the country.
Who are the world’s most outstanding mayors? If you know of mayors who have the vision, passion and skills to make their cities amazing places to live in, work in and visit nominate him or her now for World Mayor 2007.
World Mayor 2007
The World Mayor project, organised by City Mayors, is now in its fourth year. As in 2004, 2005 and 2006 this year’s World Mayor will again be seeking out mayors who have the vision, passion and skills to make their cities amazing places to live in, work in and visit.
The World Mayor Project aims to show what outstanding mayors can achieve as well as raise their profiles nationally and internationally. It honours those who have served their communities selflessly and courageously and who have made significant contributions to the well-being of cities. The most outstanding mayor of 2007 will be presented with the World Mayor Award.
You are now invited to nominate mayors who you think should be among the 50 finalists of the 2007 contest. The list of finalists will be published in June 2007. The winner of World Mayor 2007 will announced in early December 2007.
Winner: John So, Lord Mayor of Melbourne (Australia)
Runner-up: Job Cohen, Mayor of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Winner: Dora Bakoyannis, Mayor of Athens (Greece)
Runner-up: Hazel McCallion, Mayor of Mississauga (Canada)
Winner: Edi Rama, Mayor of Tirana (Albania)
Runner-up: Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mayor of Mexico City (Mexico)
Previous winners are not eligible in 2007. | <urn:uuid:c11cccbf-7ea6-4a6f-9def-ae566571451e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://citymayors.com/politics/nepal_rebellion.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961479 | 2,277 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Get Your Toddler to Eat Fuss-Free
"I don't like it!" may be a common sentiment expressed at the dinner table when you eat with a toddler, but getting a little one to eat doesn't have to be an epic battle. First, try to get to the bottom of why she is refusing food. From when they begin to talk until they are capable of making their own choices, they may want to assert their independence by turning their noses up at food - the dinner table may be one of the only places when they feel they have a chance to exercise that independence. Experts do not recommend bribing kids who won't eat the healthy stuff with dessert - you'll teach them to expect a reward whenever they do something they don't want to. But one unconventional way to get kids to eat at least a little dinner is to serve a small portion of dessert at the same time you serve dinner. | <urn:uuid:1b084e79-7bf5-4d72-9b34-03df927595c6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mydailymoment.com/moms/mom_tips/get_your_toddler_to_eat_fuss_free.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978904 | 184 | 2.171875 | 2 |