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WA Seasonal Rainfall Outlook: probabilities for Winter 2006,
issued 25th May 2006 |
No significant shifts in rainfall odds in Western Australia
There are no significant shifts in the odds towards
either above or below average winter (June-August) rainfall
in Western Australia,
the Bureau of Meteorology announced today. The chances of accumulating at
least average rain during winter are close to 50% throughout the state.
The pattern of winter rainfall odds is largely a result of above average
temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.
Conditions in the Indian Ocean are near normal
and have little influence on the outlook.
Outlook confidence is related to the influence of Pacific and Indian Ocean
temperatures on seasonal rainfall.
During winter, history shows this influence to be
generally weakly consistent in Western Australia,
reaching moderate only in patches
(see background information).
The Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) has been generally positive recently,
with values for February, March and April of zero, +14 and +15 respectively.
However, values have recently dropped with the approximate SOI for the 30
days ending 21st May being zero.
Most computer models indicate that neutral ENSO conditions are likely to
remain in place for most of the remainder of 2006. However, it should be
noted that model skill is at its lowest during autumn. For
routine updates and comprehensive discussion on the latest data relating to
ENSO, together with details on what the phenomenon is and how it
has affected Australia in the past,
please see the ENSO Wrap-Up.
Click on the map above for a larger version of the map. Use the reload/refresh button to ensure the latest forecast map is displayed.
More information on this outlook is available from
9.00am to 5.00pm (WST) Monday to Friday by
contacting the Climate and Consultancy section in
the Bureau's Perth Office: (08) 9263 2222.
THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE SEASONAL OUTLOOK IS EXPECTED BY 22nd JUNE 2006
Corresponding temperature outlook
April 2006 rainfall in historical perspective
February to April 2006 rainfall in historical perspective
The Bureau's seasonal outlooks are general statements about the probability
or risk of wetter or drier than average weather over a three-month period.
The outlooks are based on the statistics of chance (the odds)
taken from Australian rainfall/temperatures
and sea surface temperature records for the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans.
They are not, however, categorical predictions about future rainfall,
and they are not about rainfall within individual months
of the three-month outlook period.
The temperature outlooks are for the average maximum and minimum temperatures
for the entire three-month outlook period.
Information about whether individual days or weeks may be
unusually hot or cold, is unavailable.
This outlook is a summary.
More detail is available from the contact people or from SILO
Probability outlooks should not be used as if they were categorical forecasts.
More on probabilities is contained in the booklet
The Seasonal Climate Outlook - What it is and how to use it,
available from the National Climate Centre.
These outlooks should be used as a tool in risk management
and decision making.
The benefits accrue from long-term use, say over 10 years.
At any given time, the probabilities may seem inaccurate,
but taken over several years, the advantages of taking account
of the risks should outweigh the disadvantages.
For more information on the use of probabilities,
farmers could contact their local departments of agriculture or primary industry.
Model Consistency and Outlook Confidence:
Strong consistency means that tests of the model on historical
data show a high correlation between the most likely
outlook category (above/below median)
and the verifying observation (above/below median). In this
situation relatively high confidence can be placed in the
Low consistency means the historical relationship, and
therefore outlook confidence, is weak.
In the places and seasons where the outlooks are most skilful,
the category of the eventual outcome (above or below median)
is consistent with the category favoured in the outlook
about 75% of the time.
In the least skilful areas,
the outlooks perform no better than random chance or guessing.
The rainfall outlooks perform best in eastern and
northern Australia between July and January,
but are less useful in autumn and in the west of the continent.
The skill at predicting seasonal maximum temperature peaks in
early winter and drops off marginally during the second half of the year.
The lowest point in skill occurs in early autumn.
The skill at predicting seasonal minimum temperature peaks in
late autumn and again in mid-spring.
There are also two distinct periods when the skill is lowest
- namely late summer and mid-winter.
However, it must always be remembered that the outlooks
are statements of chance or risk.
For example, if you were told there was a 50:50 chance
of a horse winning a race but it ran second,
the original assessment of a 50:50 chance could still have been correct.
The Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) is calculated using the
barometric pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin.
The SOI is one indicator of the stage of El Niño or La Niña
events in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
It is best considered in conjunction with sea-surface temperatures,
which form the basis of the outlooks.
A moderate to strongly negative SOI (persistently below 10) is
usually characteristic of El Niño, which is often associated with below
average rainfall over eastern Australia, and a weaker than normal monsoon
in the north. A moderate to strongly positive SOI (persistently above +10)
is usually characteristic of La Niña, which is often associated with
above average rainfall over parts of tropical and eastern Australia,
and an earlier than normal start to the northern monsoon season.
The Australian impacts of 23 El Niño events since 1900 are summarized
on the Bureau's web site | <urn:uuid:4fa4be2e-fee0-455f-b5f5-130716ff336c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/archive/rainfall/20060525R_wa.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911736 | 1,297 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Make a 2500 sq ft House in 20 Hours with a 3D Printer - Seriously!
The video features University of Southern California engineering professor, Behrokh Khoshnevis, who shows how houses can be built with a large scale 3D printer in only 20 hours. He calls it Contour Crafting. He also talks about the numerous benefits of using this technique beyond just the cost savings for the construction business. There are many social benefits also. The walls that are created are structurally more sound than conventional walls, there are less CO2 emissions generated, less waste,less inefficiency, reduction of construction accidents, and elimination of slums. He believes that the 3D construction industry can create more jobs, offsetting building jobs that would be eliminated. 3D houses can even be all different in a neighborhood, avoiding the tract housing look, by just making a choice in the software.
I guess if we see KB Home (KBH), Lennar Corp. (LEN), or PulteGroup, Inc. (PHM) start to use one of these 3D homebuilding printers, then we will know that 3D is here to stay.
There are a couple of 3D printing stocks that are available to investors, according to the free list at WallStreetNewsNetwork.com. 3D Systems Corporation (DDD), a Rock Hill, South Carolina based company, makes and sells 3D printers and related products. The company recently implemented its Cubify.com 3D @home experience, which allows sharing printable content and has intuitive apps to modify and print creations, along with a Kinect-to-print app powered by Geomagic and many tablet-to-print content creation and manipulation apps are being showcased.
3D Systems, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, has been around since 1986. The stock trades at 69 times current earnings and 30 times forward earnings. Earnings for the latest quarter were down 37.8%, however, the company had a 51.7% boost in revenues. The company has $158 million in cash and about $140 million in total debt.
Another 3D printer business is Stratasys, Inc. (SSYS), which produces three-dimensional printers, rapid prototyping systems, and related consumable materials. This Minnesota based company was founded in 1989. Latest quarterly earnings tanked by 24.4%, but revenues were boosted by 31.6%. The company is debt free and has $51 million in cash. The stock trades at 76 times trailing earnings and 42 times forward earnings.
Of course you need software to run the 3D printers. Autodesk, Inc. (ADSK) makes 3D software for many different industries, everything from entertainment to architecture to manufacturing. The stock has a price to earnings ratio of 28 and a forward PE of 15, is debt free, and has $1.5 billion dollars in the bank.
For a free list of the companies involved in 3D printing, which can be downloaded, sorted, and updated, go to WallStreetNewsNetwork.com.
Disclosure: Author owns AAPL and DDD. | <urn:uuid:28b9aefb-aea8-46d4-83e6-994d6000973a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stockerblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/made-2500-sq-ft-house-in-20-hours-with.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954086 | 638 | 1.867188 | 2 |
This editorial first appeared in the Los Angeles Times:
For all the hand-wringing among Democrats about the tough choices the party's voters are facing in their selection of a presidential nominee, it's nothing compared to the troubles Republicans are creating for themselves this year. On that side of the aisle, three contests, including this week's primary in Michigan, have yielded three very different winners, with no sign of a uniter anywhere on the horizon.
In one sense, the current campaigns reflect an unmistakable shift that occurred in American politics during the late 20th century. Once it was the Democrats whose big tent accommodated uncomfortable allies: Southern segregationists and civil rights leaders, defense hawks and doves, conservative construction unions and liberal service labor groups, earthy populists and refined academics. All of that made for fractious politics and often produced nominees who won the party's backing by bringing out one element of its base while antagonizing another. It also often doomed the nominee in the general election (think George McGovern).
Today, for all their differences, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards emerge from a generally cohesive base. They embrace civil rights and want to bring an end to the Iraq war; they see a role for the government in combating poverty and protecting the environment. They represent, in short, a political party.
Then there are the Republicans. It is inconceivable to imagine Mike Huckabee's followers - those willing to back a candidate who's unsure about evolution - switching to Rudolph W. Giuliani, who's been through a couple of divorces and mildly supports abortion rights. It's equally hard to see supporters of John McCain, who has made a principled defense of immigration reform, jumping to Mitt Romney, whose demagogic attacks on illegal immigrants are part of his effort to convince conservatives he's with them despite a record as governor of Massachusetts that suggests otherwise.
The Republican Party's conflicting constituencies - chamber of commerce moderates and religious conservatives, those threatened by illegal immigration and those who are moved by the humanity of those same immigrants, libertarians who want the scope of government reduced and zealots who want government to ban abortion and regulate marriage - are tearing its field apart in 2008. Democrats may be fretting - they do have a tendency to worry - but it is Republicans who now command a party without focus or cohering principles.
Juneau Empire ©2013. All Rights Reserved. | <urn:uuid:b3a3d108-8cb1-44f9-9102-3104c54b0cce> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://juneauempire.com/stories/011808/opi_237832590.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961616 | 486 | 1.804688 | 2 |
California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill last month to ban what’s commonly called “conversion therapy” or “reparative therapy,” processes aimed at changing the sexual orientation of minors.
The controversial therapy has been around since Freudian times. Numerous studies, such as one published as a booklet by the American Psychological Association, stated that the therapy can be tied to isolation, lack of support, and negative self-destructive behaviors.
Youth and LGBT groups in Richmond welcomed the new law. Aran Watson, the community health director at RYSE in Richmond, said it represents a position that needs to be broadened to better work with younger generations. RYSE is a community based organization that seeks to provide a safe, positive and supportive environment for Richmond youth and frequently provides support to the local LGBT community.
“The hardest thing [LGBT youth] have is to find a place where they feel safe,” Watson said.
He also said he believed that the bill would improve relationships with the younger generation in Richmond.
“Young people are treated as if they have this problem inside of them, that adults say they need to fix,” Watson said, “when we should be meeting them with open arms.”
Molly Merson, a registered marriage family therapist intern, moved to Richmond four years ago, but has a private practice internship in Berkeley.
“We’re all impacted by it, either people have gone through this therapy or have been ostracized by friends, family, or community,” Merson said. “ I think it’s a big win to know they aren’t going through this therapy.”
She said she also believed that the isolation, lack of support, and bullying inflicted on a minor due to his or her sexual orientation has severely adverse effects, and the attention shouldn’t be on changing the child’s sexual orientation but on stopping the bullying.
“Change the people who are bullying, but that’s never talked about,” Merson said. “It’s ‘If you’re having this negative experience than you need to change.’”
Merson said she has worked with various LGBT mental support groups in the Bay Area over the years, and completely supports the new law, which will take effect Jan. 1.
“As an adult people can be free to choose what they do,” she said. “LGBT is not a disease or a problem, it doesn’t require fixing.”
But some practicing Bay Area therapists said they thought the law went too far.
“People have a right to seek therapy,” said one therapist, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of professional retribution. He said he believed the law was unconstitutional, and that Governor Brown succumbed to political pressure.
“You can’t stop people from getting the help that they want,” he said. “It’s not going to hold up in court.”
He also said that the law places unequal scrutiny on mental health care providers who provide the conversion therapy, and that to be equal all forms of therapy should be studied equally to determine if they are harmful or not. Several groups have announced plans to file lawsuits against the ban.
And in Richmond, some were ambivalent. Preacher James E. Austin of the Church of Christ on Macdonald Avenue said his position on the matter isn’t to try to change the individuals that come to him to talk about their homosexuality. But he said he only tells them what the Bible says.
“Never condemning, I believe the Bible speaks against that quite clearly,” Austin said. “I believe what the Bible says, that homosexuality is a sin.”
If mental health care providers are reported for breaking the new law, they could be accountable to “discipline” by state licensing associations, the law’s text stated.
The California Board of Psychology met last week to discuss how it will change its regulations and guidelines now that the law has been signed. Robert Kahane, the group’s executive enforcement officer, said that discipline could range from fines to the revoking of the provider’s license, depending on the severity of the situation. | <urn:uuid:757e7ff9-23ab-427d-8175-242614328cdd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://richmondconfidential.org/2012/10/22/richmond-reacts-to-ban-on-gay-conversion-therapy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971851 | 902 | 2.296875 | 2 |
The Value of a Vote and China's Governance Deficit
Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20233064
Whatever you think of the outcome this morning, it's clear that American voters placed a high value on their chance to choose the next president. In the East Coast states buffeted by Hurricane Sandy, where many are homeless or without power, turnout was heavy.
That's not how it is in China, where the next leadership will "emerge" in a few days' time from the communist party's eighteenth national congress.
Although not a professional China watcher, a few months ago I began to notice a rash of articles telling us how much better off China is with its supposedly meritocratic leadership selection process. What's more, we are told, it's such a great system that the Chinese people themselves endorse it. China's leadership, although selected in secret by unknown rules, is apparently "legitimate." I saw this first in February in an influential article in the New York Times by the Shanghai "venture capitalist" Eric X. Li on Why China's Political Model is Superior. In August the China-based academic Daniel A. Bell was extolling the merits of China's meritocracy in The Huffington Post. A few days ago the China pundit Martin Jacques repeated the same message in the BBC Magazine.
Some contributions in this vein refer to the empirical research of the Harvard political scientist Tony Saich. Saich has carried out repeated opinion surveys in China. These indicate that Chinese respondents are generally more critical of the lower tiers of government. However, high proportions are "relatively or extremely satisfied" with higher tiers, and their satisfaction rises with distance so that at least 80 percent are satisfied with China's central government. Moreover, satisfaction levels have been rising over time.
An alternative source gives a different picture. The Worldwide Governance Indicators dataset measures perceptions of the quality of government in over 200 countries since 1996 on six dimensions -- Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. Each indicator is based on hundreds of individual underlying variables, taken from a wide variety of data sources. Each indicator is scaled from +2.5 to -2.5, with the global average set to zero. (The dataset is described by Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, "The worldwide governance indicators: methodology and analytical issues," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5430, issued by the World Bank in 2010; RePEc handle: http://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/5430.html).
The advantage of the Worldwide Governance Indicators is that they are worldwide; they allow one country to be measured against others on a uniform methodology. For China I'll give you the 2011 results, but the Worldwide Governance Indicators go back to 1996 and they are fairly stable over time.
In the table below, the first column shows that the data include most countries in the world. The second column shows the percentage of countries that score below China on each of the six dimensions. The third column shows China's score. Since we are also given the standard errors associated with the scores, we can also work out whether China's difference from the world average (zero) is statistically significant. An asterisk indicates that China's score is significantly above or below zero at 5 percent.
Three things stand out:
- China scores below the median country in the world in every dimension except one: effectiveness. China's citizens definitely agree that their government can make decisions and carry them out.
- In two dimensions, effectiveness and regulatory quality, China's score is not signficantly different from the world average. In the other four, it is significantly below.
- In voice and accountability, China is grouped among the worst countries in the world.
How can we reconcile China's deficit in the Worldwide Governance Indicators with praise for the "legitimacy" of the communist one-party state? I'd start from Tony Saich's finding that Chinese people are least critical of the level of the government that is farthest from them. It would seem that in their society there is still a place for the myth of the "just monarch": the benevolent ruler in the faraway capital city.
According to this myth, the just ruler thinks of nothing but the plight of his people. But his will is said to be distorted by ambitious and corrupt intermediaries -- his ministers, the provincial barons and local authorities, who stand between the people and the king. The king relies on the people to tell him of the injustices from which they suffer; supposedly, only he can put them right. If they will reach out to him directly, bypassing those that pervert his intentions, he will answer their prayers and petitions and right their wrongs.
People who believe this can thus reconcile personal experience of oppressive and corrupt rule with the idea of a kindly but distant ruler who will eventually vindicate them.
One reason the myth endures is that it is open to manipulation. A ruler who is not benevolent but self-interested and power-seeking can exploit it to remain in power. From time to time he will give up some local princeling to assuage popular anger and build his own legitimacy. Stalin did this; Mao did it; today's Chinese communist party does it.
But managing the mythology of benevolent dictatorship is like riding a tiger. For the myth of the just monarch does not make the people passive; on the contrary, from time to time they may rise up in the name of the ruler to act directly against those that oppress them. (See for example Daniel Field, Rebels in the name of the tsar, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1976.)
Finally, in many peasant societies, as China was until quite recently, this myth has persisted until the illusion is shattered by some collective blow. There will be some setback, some outrage, or some scandal that is too deep for the myth to endure -- at least, until some new ruler emerges who can once more take up the mantle of the true king. | <urn:uuid:9b444563-716f-43b9-b8e8-aba06c581722> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/the_value_of/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956911 | 1,284 | 2.09375 | 2 |
- (Photo: Twitter/Berenstain Bears)
One half of the dynamic Berenstain duo, Jan Berenstain, has died at the age of 88. Jan Berenstain survived her husband, Stan, by six years.
The couple met at college and worked during World War II together until its end in 1945. They immediately married and started their family, which includes two sons: Leo and Mike. In 1962, Stan and Jan decided to write their own children's books and enlisted the help of Theodor Greisel, also known as Dr. Seuss.
"The Big Honey Hunt" debuted in 1962 and spawned the series that now has over 200 titles, movies, and TV specials. The books still remain best-sellers and cover very relevant topics including bullying, lying, unhealthy eating, sexual education and birth.
After Stan passed away in 2005, son Mike, an illustrator and editor, began helping write new books for the series. He also helped Jan make the decision to move the company from the publishing company HarperCollins to Zondervan. Mike believed that the books could explore the spiritual side of life, which they were already doing, though not in an obvious manner.
With that transition came titles such as "The Berenstain Bears Show God's Love" and "The Berenstain Bears: God Loves You!" Some Sunday school teachers have begun using the books as tools for their classrooms, providing a new audience for the timeless series.
The Berenstain Bears' family has grown over the years as well, from just Mama and Papa to Mama, Papa, Brother and Sister, and now, new baby Honey. The family has taught children how to read while providing them with a sense of morals and ethics. Each book contains an introductory poem containing a lesson for both parents and children.
Jan Berenstain suffered a massive stroke on Thursday and never regained consciousness, according to son Mike. The Berenstain Bears are celebrating their 50-year anniversary, and readers everywhere are remembering their favorite tales. She will be sorely missed. | <urn:uuid:6a7eb785-32d4-4b9e-b413-0232a19c1a47> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.christianpost.com/news/berenstain-bears-co-creator-dies-at-88-70407/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971156 | 430 | 1.734375 | 2 |
This sampler was made by Ann Ansell in 1827, when she was aged ten. We know the exact date because Ann included it in her embroidery. The sampler is made of silk embroidery on a wool worsted ground. Worsted is the wool made from the long fine hairs in a sheep's coat. The sampler is faded and has been nailed to the stretcher. | <urn:uuid:c1661df2-52a0-4dfb-9f3b-f8d74964bd63> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/conservation/objects/gallery/Textiles/ansell_sampler.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.992934 | 82 | 2.203125 | 2 |
The Costs of Greece Leaving the Euro Could Be Very High
The prospect of Europe's debt crisis spilling over to the United States is threatening
May 16, 2012
It is hard to imagine that the economic crisis in small country like Greece that is just over 2 percent of the Eurozone's gross domestic product is generating shock waves big enough to destabilize the region. Today, politicians, pundits and the public in Europe are talking about the possibility of Greece leaving the euro and returning to the drachma.
What seemed like an inconceivable idea just a few months ago, today seems almost inevitable, but the costs of Greece leaving the euro could be very high.
"The spillover effects, the chain of consequences that could result from that [Greek euro exit] are very difficult to assess," Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund told the press. "We can certainly assume that it would be quite messy."
Continued economic and political turmoil in Greece is generating great market volatility, wreaking havoc in bond markets and continuing to weaken growth prospects in the region. Greece's exit from the Euro could exacerbate these trends increasing the potential need for further bailouts for Spain for example.
The prospect of Europe's deepening sovereign debt crisis spilling over to the United States through exchange rates, trade and financial channels is also threatening.
Greece's continued failure to implement the harsh austerity measures imposed upon it by its creditors is making it hard for the creditors to continue to provide support. But Greece's non-compliance with this austerity agenda should not come as a surprise—the agenda was never politically or socially viable in Greece in the first place.
But where to from here? Europe and the Greeks themselves have to decide whether the costs of the bailouts are a worthy trade-off against Greece's inevitably messy withdrawal from the Eurozone. | <urn:uuid:15aa9104-b593-47ce-9efa-a1a7832fd733> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-greece-leave-the-eurozone/the-costs-of-greece-leaving-the-euro-could-be-very-high | 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 | 0.96258 | 372 | 2.203125 | 2 |
Spots Or Wrinkles
It’s no different for adults. There’s a bevy of things for us to worry about. For example, watch the news for ten minutes. Or closer to home, take a look in the mirror: It's either pimples or wrinkles! You finally get rid of the one and then it’s time for the other to start showing up and unfortunately wrinkles don't go away, they just invite all their friends!
Trials and tribulations, irritations, and aggravations: That's life, but only one side of it. Because hidden inside every trouble and every aggravation is an opportunity just waiting to be noticed and taken hold of.
They’re an invitation from God to let go of what doesn't matter or doesn't work, and to search for what does matter and what can bring us joy and freedom. It’s His invitation to focus on straightening out what's behind the face, what's inside the head and deep within your heart.
Sometimes there are pains or frustrations that must be lived with; we can't make them go away. What's the opportunity there? Perhaps it's an invitation to relax in the Lord; to give ourselves over to Him at long last. Perhaps it's an invitation to let go of our obsessive perfectionism or our excessive need to control and focus on what really matters.
Each of us has our own special collection of stresses and hurts, and we know them well. But have we looked behind them? Have we searched in faith for the invitation God has wrapped inside them?
If we haven't, we're wasting a lot of time on pain and disappointment. That isn't what God wants for us. He is offering us joy and freedom for the taking, here and now. Look a little deeper and you'll find it, wrapped discretely inside your troubles.
If you look, you'll find it. I promise you it's there!
Loving Father, it’s so easy to become laboured with life’s wrinkles. Teach us to accept what we cannot change. Grant us the wisdom to see beyond ourselves, that we may reach out to others and bring Your world closer. Amen | <urn:uuid:add4618e-ba34-4d92-a26c-9abfd41cb003> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://anglicans.blogspot.com/2006/02/spots-or-wrinkles.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95852 | 456 | 1.578125 | 2 |
News from the
|Mary in the Catholic Press||
Mary in the
The Mary Page News items give insight into our interest areas, our outreach, and the many ways people honor Our Lady. We welcome your input and your comments.
A dedicated friend and volunteer of The Marian Library for fifty years, Mrs. Mildred Sutton has given countless hours toward organizing clippings of interesting items from diocesan papers and other publications. The "Sutton File" contains over fifty-six thousand items and is an indispensable source for replying to Marian devotion questions. For more information click into the Roesch Library Newsletter for Spring 2009 [requires Adobe Acrobat Reader].
Mary in Books, Films and Music
Marian Lectures available on CD
Mary, the Mother of Jesus is an insightful series of twenty-four talks (on eight Audio CDs) by world-renowned Mary scholar, Father Bertrand Buby, S.M. S.T.D., long-time Professor at the International Marian Research Institute in Dayton, Ohio. For the first time ever, you can all learn about Mary with one of the world's leading experts as your personal guide and teacher. Father Bert will instill in you the fervor to grow in your understanding and love of Mary.
For more details, click into NowYouKnowMedia.com or call 1-800-955.3904.
Radio Maria from the Marian Library
Francesca Franchina, MS. Ed., a long-time member of the Marianist Family, will be doing a series of Marian broadcasts through the local stations for Radio Maria WHJM (FM 88.7) in Anna, Ohio and WULM (AM 1600) in Springfield, Ohio. Called "Francesca and Friends: Why Mary?," the program airs every Wednesday from 11:30 AM-12:30 PM EST focusing on what is going on in the world about Mary, how to speak with others about Mary, and Mary in Scripture.
On Wednesday, April 29, 2009, Francesca Franchina speaks with Curtis Kneblik, Director of Transfiguration Center for Spiritual Renewal in West Milton, OH about applying Scripture readings in everyday life, Scripture and spiritual growth, understanding the language of the Bible, Lectio Divina made easy and more based on a course he designed and teaches, Praying the Bible for Ordinary People. CALL IN TOLL FREE; PARTICIPATE IN THE PROGRAM (during the live show); 1-866-333-6279.
The broadcast may also be heard on-line at radiomaria.us [Click on the BVMary photo ... Scroll down to RADIO MARIA USA (English) ... Click on the windows icon or whichever media program you have on your PC.]. The web site also provides access to some previous broadcasts. We'll keep you informed about future programs. An encore of each show is broadcast Monday night from 8:30-9:30 pm EST one week after the original.
Fran's series, Through the Tummy to the Heart, (T5H) airs every Tuesday except the first Tuesday from 5:00-5:45 PM on RADIO MARIA WHJM and also online. The series encores Saturdays from 3:00-3:45 pm. Tune in 88.7 FM (WHJM) in the northern Archdiocese of Cincinnati and on line at www.radiomaria.us from anywhere in the world. Send email to Francesca with questions, comments, suggestions at email@example.com. Send email while the programs are going on if you cannot get through or if you are listening outside of the USA. CALL IN TOLL FREE; PARTICIPATE IN THE PROGRAM (during the live show); 1-866-333-6279.
New Program: Living With Mary Today! Live: Thursdays and Fridays 2:30-3:00 PM EST: From the Pontifical International Marian Research Institute (IMRI) at the University of Dayton Marian Library, internationally-known Mariologists Fathers Johann Roten, Francois Rossier, Thomas Thompson, and Bertrand Buby of the Society of Mary (Marianists), and other IMRI faculty; Schoenstatt Sisters Jean Frisk and Danielle Peters, Michael Duricy and Brother Erik Otiende will discuss Marian themes such as The Blessed Mother and Ecumenism; Mary and The Family; Mary and Suffering, Marian Teachings and Writings of Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI; Mary and Scripture from the Founder of the Marianists, Blessed Wm. Joseph Chaminade; Mary and Vatican II, Marian Apparitions and others. The Marian Library at the University of Dayton houses the largest collection of Marian books and artifacts in the world and IMRI is the site of post-graduate studies in Mariology for the Doctorate, STL and STD. Find out more by visiting marypage.org. The University of Dayton; The Marian Library and IMRI are collaborators with the International Satellite Radio Maria Network and Radio Maria Ohio. Click here for the complete schedule of future programs planned to date.
This week's programs:
Sister Danielle Peters, Thursday, April 30, 2:30 PM on Mary as teacher of spiritual life I
Sister Danielle Peters, Friday, May 1, 2:30 PM on Mary as teacher of spiritual life II
From the Marian Treasure Chest
The Effect of The Virgin Mary in Intellectual and Spiritual Formation (by Brother John Samaha, S.M.)
An attempt to measure the effectiveness of the Vatican instruction about teaching Mariology, The Virgin Mary in Intellectual and Spiritual Formation, was made in 2008 (for the twentieth anniversary of the document's issuance) by Professor Sieme Laoul of the Marianum Theology Faculty in Rome.
A survey of 282 Catholic seminaries and universities worldwide revealed that 68% include a course about Mariology in their theology curriculum, as directed by the Vatican authorities. Either by neglect or lack of qualified instructors, 32% have not yet complied with the directive. Among the institutions that have complied, 60% offer separate courses in Marian theology, while the other 40% include Mariology in another area of study, such as ecclesiology or Christology.
In general, these statistics are encouraging. They indicate that more and more Mariology is being taught as an academic subject in theology programs. And this is what the 1988 Marian Year letter of instruction is seeking to achieve.
Current Exhibit Extended!
Fairest of All
The Marian Library gallery will show thirty works of Jan Oliver from January 30, 2009 through June 26, 2009. For more information, click into the article from UD's Campus News Digest or click here for virtual exhibit. On a related note, please see our answer to a reader's question, "Is There Marian Imagery in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?" and Semiotics, Snow White and Mary: A Mystical Rose by Any Other Name?
The Marian Library Gallery is located on the seventh floor of Roesch Library. Free and open to the public, hours are Mon-Fri, 8:30 am - 4:30 pm or by appointment. Call 937-229-4214.
Additional Web Addresses for The Mary Page
In order to make our web site more accessible, The Mary Page may now be reached at the following URLs: lapagedemarie.org; lapaginademaria.org; marypage.org; themarypage.org; marypage.udayton.edu; campus.udayton.edu/mary; and themarypage.net. The original address on the University of Dayton site, www.udayton.edu/mary, remains active as well.
Two important Catholic websites have added The Mary Page to their list of Media Partners. CatholicWeb.com highlights items from The Mary Page in their section on Catholic News. Catholic.net includes a Mary Channel on their navbar with articles from The Mary Page. Please visit these sites in return. We expect continued collaboration with them in the future.
Radio Maria broadcasts from Milan, Italy, heard in forty-nine countries; WHJM broadcasts out of Louisiana across USA [including FM 88.7, an affiliate station in Anna, Ohio (north of Dayton) and AM 1600, an affiliate in Springfield, Ohio, which air regular Marian talks from UD's Marian Library every Wednesday at 11:30 am EST.]
Mary's Gardens, the website of the late John S. Stokes, Jr. is in the process of being migrated to The Mary Page in accord with his bequest. His children have also donated related physical holdings to The Marian Library. Click here for more information.
International Marian Research Institute Course Schedule
IMRI courses for the Spring 2009 semester concluded on April 3, 2009. The Summer 2009 course schedule is now available.
May, Mary's Month, Marian Coronation.
The program for this year's annual meeting of the Mariological Society of America (MSA) is now available online along with a letter from the MSA President. In our Korean section, we have updated News through 4/20/2009, and also posted Marian Commemoration Days for May.
Cardinal Saraiva to Commemorate Our Lady of Europe
Made public today was a letter from the Holy Father to Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins C.M.F., prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, appointing him as special papal envoy to the closing celebrations of the Jubilee Year marking the seventh centenary of veneration of Our Lady of Europe. The event is due to take place in Gibraltar on May 5. The letter, written in Latin, is dated March 31.
The cardinal will be accompanied on his mission by two members of the clergy of the diocese of Gibraltar: Msgr. Paul Charles Bear, vicar general, Father Charles Azzopardi, apostolic vicar for youth.
The director and editors of The Mary Page under the auspices of the International Marian Research Institute do not necessarily endorse or agree with the events and ideas expressed in this feature. Our sole purpose is to report on items about Mary gleaned from a myriad of papers representing the secular press.
Taking Mary to the Air
From the top floor of the Roesch Library, the knowledge and expertise about Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, that resides at the University is being heard around the world.
Through a new partnership, the faculty and staff of the Marian Library and International Marian Research Institute are broadcasting several shows weekly to more than fifty countries through Radio Maria, an international network of Catholic radio stations.
"It's a wonderful way to broadcast the University of Dayton's message," said Father Johann Roten, S.M., director of the institute. "It allows us to have another way to spread the message of theology nationally and internationally as well as disseminate Catholic and Marianist values."
Roten and other faculty host a weekly program called Living with Mary Today!, which explores a variety of Marian themes including Mary and ecumenism, the founding of the Society of Mary, Marian apparitions, and Mary and suffering. ...
You are invited to help us pray for our Prayer Corner intentions. Please take a look! This site has been updated and enhanced and now allows users to directly submit prayer requests or to volunteer as a prayer partner for these intentions!
Marian Commemoration Days
To celebrate the month of May with Mary:
The Mary Page offers a variety of resources inviting study, reflection and meditation. We also list important Marian dates for each month of the year. Please see Marian Commemoration Days for the month of May.
Spring Meeting of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary, USA Chapter
Title: Development of a Model for an Ecumenical "Day with Mary"
Date: Saturday May 9, 2009, 9 am - 4 pm
Location: First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, 4 Mead Street, Walton, New York
The program will feature Rev. Dr. Donald Charles Lacy, Methodist pastor and author; Dr. Maura Hearden, Roman Catholic ecumenical Mariologist at De Sales University; Rev. Dr. Janyce Jorgensen, Lutheran minister and professor of Ecumenical Theology at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltmore, Maryland; Rev . Jennifer Juliano, pastor of the Walton church; and Dr. Virginia M. Kimball, Eastern Orthodox professor of Theology at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. The program will include a full presentation on Roman Catholic/Methodist dialogue on the Virgin Mary by Dr. Hearden and Lutheran ecumenical Mariology by Dr. Jorgensen. Also, an open discussion will be held on developing a model for a day of Marian prayer and reflection for Protestant churches. Everyone is invited and the program is free. A donation for lunch will be accepted. Membership in ESBVM, an international society, is $20 per year.
The Mary Page web site is updated frequently. Please stop in again and see What's New. | <urn:uuid:075dc34f-2232-4137-9de6-a4b94a6c0b0d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/news09/20090429.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907809 | 2,690 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Friends of the Waite Conservation Reserve
- Enjoy being in the Waite Conservation Reserve?
- Value the conservation of indigenous species?
- Think biodiversity matters?
- Want to learn more about local plants, animals and their feral competitors?
- Want to make a practical difference?
- Want to work cooperatively with like-minded people?
Membership Application Form
Print, complete and forward to the address at the bottom of the form.
Friends of the Waite Conservation Reserve formed in February 2001.
- To assist in the conservation and ecological restoration of the Waite Conservation Reserve.
- To encourage the community use and enjoyment of the Waite conservation Reserve.
- To promote the Waite Conservation Reserve as a research and educational resource.
- Semi-annual Newsletter informing Friends about current issues, conservation and development work.
- Up to date information on conservation activities in the Waite Conservation Reserve.
Working Bee Program NEW - Autumn and Winter 2012 dates!
Current Friends Newsletter
Please see our Archive for back issues.
In November 2008 and Friends and others conducted a 9-day intensive survey of mammals, reptiles and birds, systematically sampling each of the 14 vegetation communities in the Reserve. Here is the Report.
The Big Picture
One of the great challenges of our era is to preserve what remains of our natural heritage. In order to do this we must control introduced plants and animals which compete with indigenous species. This requires unending, labour intensive work. If this work is not done, the alternative is bleak.
Currently there is not enough funding to control feral animals and the "advancing wall of weeds" in our parks and reserves. This is why the work of volunteers is vital for the survival of remnant bushland. Limited funding for the Reserve to date has come from a variety of sources but more is needed to continue the essential work.
Funds are spent on supplies of equipment, paid labour for the most arduous or specialist tasks, signage and trail guides.
To attract secure funding the Reserve needs the support of an active Friends group. Friends land-care groups have proven to be the best way to attract assistance from Local Councils, Government bodies and business.
The support of the Friends of Waite Conservation Reserve is crucial to the ongoing care and restoration of the bushland.
In 2002, Friends of Waite Conservation Reserve were awarded a community grant from the City of Mitcham to improve community access and information about The Reserve. | <urn:uuid:740cdaa9-9310-4736-90d4-bd1a6418c443> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.waite.adelaide.edu.au/reserve/friends/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921516 | 503 | 1.929688 | 2 |
- About Fred Frese
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- Contact Fred Frese
On Crushing Schizophobia
On Crushing Schizophobia
By Frederick J. Frese III, Ph.D.
Presented at the 8th annual APPP Conference
October 17, 2005
As we are experiencing the early years of the third millinium we seem to be observing significant threats to our collective well being. Within the past few years we have been exposed to intense ravaging by mother nature. Here in the US, the gulf coast, including the town of my alma mater, New Orleans, has been devastated by hurricanes and accompanying flooding. The recent earthquake in Pakistan and the Kashmire has killed tens of thousands, and who can forget the devastating tsunami.that engulfed the Indian Ocean area last year causing massive devastation to the peoples of that region.
The AIDS/HIV epidemic continues to ravage entire countries, infecting as much as one third of the population of many African nations.
And from our fellow men, we seem to be experiencing increasing acts of crime and violence. American jails and prisons are overflowing with populations currently exceeding two million. And world-wide, the acts of violence seems unending, as evidenced by the recent tragic terrorist bombings in Madrid, London, Bali, Russia, and the daily attacks in Iraq, not to mention the constant vigilance we keep in anticipation of another Islamo-terrorist attack such as that which we experienced in the heart of this northeast region, the destruction of the World Trade Towers in Manhattan on 9/11/01.
Compared to these concerns, the issue I am addressing today may appear to be relatively minor. But I am suggesting that for those of us with mental illness, particularly serious mental illnesses, mystery, misunderstanding, and the resulting fear of these conditions is a major factor that needs to be addressed.
Irrational fears and phobias have been recognized in the mental illness field from its earliest time .Traditionally recognized phobias are identified with a litany of similarly sounding quaint terms such as acrophobia, agoraphobia, and arachnophobia, just to mention a few “phobia” terms fro the top nfo a long list of traditionally recognized phobias.. More recently we have seen the emergence of the term homo-phobia to refer to and irrational fear of a traditionally misunderstood and ostracized group, homosexuals.
In that schizophrenia has often been called the most mysterious, as well as the most devastating of the serious mental illnesses, | <urn:uuid:c7fd2c02-afff-4908-a1ec-8d6f9d0523d6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fredfrese.com/node/14 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956797 | 532 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Are you forgetting about the fact that "put to justice" means using government sponsored courts and increasing the authority of the state police? Just like all issues involving children, parents have too much control, and that can lead to abuses. When the state seeks to end those abuses, though, it isn't doing so because it supports equal legal status for children, but because state agents think that they have an ethically-derived authority over children's lives, and they envision themselves as children's protectors. If you support children being recognized as having rights independent of adults, supporting expanded state-based protection against parental abuse will not achieve that goal. Indeed, established public policy on laws against physical harm to children has been "help instead of punish
". This specifically applies to corporal punishment, which, on the one hand, is a traditionally accepted way of treating children, and, on the other hand, has much more obvious negative long-term repercussions. So the German courts have established this ridiculous double standard that severely punishes types of child abuse practiced more commonly by minorities while merely chastising for more severe abuse that is popular among the majority demographic. Essentially, they've turned this reasonable law against physical and psychological harm into a law against causing harm if you're a Jew or Muslim. Thus, the German government is really enforcing standards concerning who can influence children. (If this anti-harm rule were really about supporting children's rights, courts would have been even tougher on parents who practice corporal punishment.) As a net effect, that's more harmful than the very small number of circumcisions that will be prevented due to this law. | <urn:uuid:5b3b7e1b-2c72-4a58-8699-8d3e5aeeaa1a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.graveyardofthegods.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12020 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974812 | 327 | 1.96875 | 2 |
It always seemed to me that the use of the concept "mandala" in pre-colonial Southeast Asian history seemed to reduce the complexity of history, the interplay of strategic human agency and more fixed, long-term, deterministic structures, that one finds in well-written narrative histories, to a simple concept, a much too simple concept.
I've grown to appreciate the concept recently, and understand how some historians such as Sunait Chutintaranond, Thongchai Winichakul, and Martin Stuart-Fox have used the idea to pick apart received traditions about unified and centralized rule in their respective time periods and regions.
Sometimes the best way to gain an appreciation of an idea is to go through the laborious process of solving the problem that the idea was created as a solution to. After rereading Martin Stuart-Fox's history of Laos (see bibliography below) that uses the concept of Mandala extensively, I realized that the concept probably applies to nearby Mong Mao also. Furthermore, I read Chris Baker's paper that argues that the northern provinces of Ayutthaya were largely independent of the Ayutthayan center even into the period of Burmese invasions of the 16th century, but when I read Sunait Chutintaranond's paper, I realized that Sunait had already shown how "mandala" was the solution to this problem.
The world historian and historian of Burma Victor Lieberman's rejection of the term mandala in lieu of "solar polity" , "galactic polity" being yet another possible metaphor, is particularly instructive.
I still think that narrative history that closely follows primary sources is the best way to capture the interplay between strategic human action and long-term social and environmental factors in human and plan to follow this course in future research. General models that have been highlighted by Lieberman's Strange Parallels recently, including Gerschenkron's collective problems and advantages to backwardness, O'Connor's agricultural succession in Southeast Asia, and a general political anthropology approach, can clarify and highlight important themes in this narrative (without imputing abolute causal relations of different factors where multicausal factors is the norm).
Anyway, I've been slowly revising the Wikipedia page devoted to "Mandala (Southeast Asian history)". Here are my contributions to-date:
Mandala (Southeast Asian history)
Mandala means "circle of kings". The mandala is a model for describing the patterns of diffuse political power in early Southeast Asian history. The concept of a mandala counteracts our natural tendency to look for the unified political power of later history, the power of large kingdoms and nation states, in earlier history where local power is more important. In the words of O.W. Wolters who originated the idea in 1982:
"The map of earlier Southeast Asia which evolved from the prehistoric networks of small settlements and reveals itself in historical records was a patchwork of often overlapping mandalas"In some ways similar to the feudal system of Europe, states were linked in overlord-tributary relationships. Compared to feudalism however, the system gave greater independence to the subordinate states; it emphasised personal rather than official or territorial relationships; and it was often non-exclusive. Any particular area, therefore, could be subject to several powers or none.
Intersecting mandalas circa 1360: from north to south Lan Xang, Lanna, Sukhothai, Ayutthaya and Angkor.
TerminologyThe term draws a comparison with the mandala of the Hindu and Buddhist worldview; the comparison emphasises the radiation of power from each power centre, as well as the non-physical basis of the system.
Other metaphors such as Tambiah's original idea of a "galactic polity" , describe similar political patterns as the mandala. The metaphor of a "solar polity" is preferred by the historian of Southeast Asia Victor Lieberman because in the solar system there is one central body, the sun, and the components or planets of the solar system can be fully enumerated, unlike galaxies.
History....The historian Stuart-Fox uses the term "mandala" extensively to describe the history of the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang as a structure of loosely held together "meuang" that disintegrated after Lan Xang's conquest by Siam starting in the 18th century
The Thai historian Sunait Chutintaranond made an important contribution to study of the mandala in Southeast Asian history by demonstrating that "three assumptions responsible for the view that Ayudhya was a strong centralized state" did not hold and that "in Ayudhya the hegemony of provincial governors was never successfully eliminated" ....
ReferencesChutintaranond, Sunait, "Mandala, segmentary state, and Politics of Centralization in Medieval Ayudhya," Journal of the Siam Society 78, 1, 1990, p. 1.
Lieberman, Victor Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830, Volume 1: Integration on the Mainland, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Stuart-Fox, Martin, The Lao Kingdom of Lan Xang: Rise and Decline, White Lotus, 1998.
Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer, Cambridge, 1976.
Thongchai Winichakul. Siam Mapped. University of Hawaii Press, 1984. ISBN 0-8248-1974-8
Wolters, O.W. History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982. ISBN 0-87727-725-7
Wolters, O.W. History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Revised Edition, 1999.
1. O.W. Wolters, 1999, p. 27
2. Tambiah, 1976, ch. 7, cited in Lieberman, 2003, p. 33
3. Lieberman, 2003, p. 33
4. O.W. Wolters, 1999, pp. 27-40, 126-154
5. Martin-Fox, 1998, pp. 14-15
6. O.W. Wolters, pp. 142-143 citing Chutintaranond, 1990, pp. 97-98 | <urn:uuid:7bb38738-8b21-4bbf-840b-60fff0acc406> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://slipperybannanapeel.blogspot.com/2006/09/mong-mao-mandala-galactic-polity-or.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913874 | 1,310 | 3.046875 | 3 |
For almost a decade, the American public has been told time and time again that some of our government's most controversial national security policies and programs are "secret." From warrantless wiretapping to the CIA's torture and "targeted killing" programs, the government has often insisted that our security requires secrecy, and that information about these programs is too sensitive to be shared with the public — even claiming state secrets to have the information shielded from judicial scrutiny.
But an op-ed in the LA Times today by the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer brings up a disturbing trend: Jameel points out numerous instances where the government insisted on secrecy in one context only to later disclose its supposed "secrets" in another – be it an interview with the media or a national book tour. Jameel discusses a recent interview with former CIA lawyer John Rizzo in Newsweek magazine in which Rizzo discusses the scope, process and methods of the CIA's "targeted killing" program — a highly controversial counterterrorism program that had previously been cloaked in official secrecy. Jameel writes:
"What was most remarkable about the interview, though, was not what Rizzo said but that it was Rizzo who said it. For more than six years until his retirement in December 2009, Rizzo was the CIA's acting general counsel — the agency's chief lawyer. On his watch the CIA had sought to quash a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by arguing that national security would be harmed irreparably if the CIA were to acknowledge any detail about the targeted killing program, even the program's mere existence.
Rizzo's disclosure was long overdue — the American public surely has a right to know that the assassination of terrorism suspects is now official government policy — but it reflects an opportunistic approach to allegedly sensitive information that has become the norm for senior government officials."
The public absolutely has a right to know what our government does in our name. President Obama himself has declared that, "A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency."
While there may be some instances where secrecy is indeed a necessity to security, there are too many examples of the government's secrecy double standard for the American pubic to continue buying this argument.
Jameel notes that the courts themselves are partly to blame, explaining that "both the Constitution and the Freedom of Information Act invest the courts with the power to determine whether claimed state secrets are actually state secrets and whether classified information is properly classified, courts too often accept executive claims without scrutiny."
One of the most egregious examples of excessive secrecy is with regard to survivors of the Bush administration's torture program. Despite the fact that there is a significant and ever growing body of public information about the abuse and torture of prisoners in CIA custody, the government's misuse of the so-called 'state secrets privilege' has enabled it to deny all survivors of U.S. sponsored torture their day in court and shielded their torturers from accountability.
The ACLU will continue to challenge this notion of secrecy in our lawsuit on behalf of five survivors of the U.S. "extraordinary rendition" program, Mohamed v. Jeppesen. You can add your support by sending a letter to the Obama administration letting them know that the American public deserves to know why prisoners were tortured in America's name. | <urn:uuid:91a5037f-795d-443c-b0df-5a2dea531583> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aclu.org/print/blog/national-security/secrecy-double-standard | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960605 | 671 | 1.859375 | 2 |
View of Finsehytta cabin. The camera is placed at Finse railway station.
Finse is an area in the Ulvik municipality of Hordaland. The railway station at Finse on the Bergensbanen at 1,222m is the highest station on the entire Norwegian railway system. Since there are no roads to Finse, the railway provides the sole means of transportation to and from Finse. During summer, however, it is possible to walk or cycle to Finse. Across the railway line from the station is housed the railway navvy museum, which has exhibits on the construction of the railway line and two decommissioned snow-clearing engines which you are free to explore. The area also has a hotel (Finse 1222), a hostel (Finsehytta, DNT) and a number of private cabins. During the winter, Finse is popular for cross-country skiing, sail skiing (due to its location on the edge of a frozen lake), expedition training and Red Cross training. The ill-fated Scott expedition to the South Pole trained here, and outside the hotel there is a monument to those that died. There is one small drag-lift which ... Read more about Finse on Wikipedia | <urn:uuid:59052a31-8238-4cfa-9ac2-f24096b3d154> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.webcams.travel/webcam/1323701094-Weather-Finsehytta-Finse | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962604 | 256 | 1.976563 | 2 |
This is just plain awesome. Some of my favorite watches in the world are the Patek Philippe chronographs made during the middle of the last century. True "Gentleman's Chronographs," these watches are absolutely beautiful, incredibly refined, immensely wearable. Inside those chronographs was, in most cases, a Patek Philippe caliber 13-130 - you'll find it in the reference 1463, for example, and what is still the best value in vintage Patek, the Ref 130. The thing is, both of these watches haven't been made in the better part of a century.
Today, we caught word of new Patek Philippe chronograph that will use the exact same movement as these classics, the Caliber 13-130. How, you ask? Well, when Patek Philippe moved in 1996, they found an old wooden chest on the 5th floor of their historic home, and inside were 16 unused caliber 13-130 movements. These movements were fully assembled and regulated in 1955. So, to celebrate this discovery, Patek disassembled and then reassmebled the movements this year, and placed them into a steel cushion case, reminiscent of the original Patek wristwatch chronograph.
What we have then is the Patek Philippe Reference 3670A, featuring vintage Caliber 13-130 movements dating to 1955 house in a stainless steel case with anthracite dial. Of course, only 16 watches could be made because that is how many movements were found, and the price will be 240,000 CHF, available only at Patek Philippe boutiques.
Just. Plain. Sick. | <urn:uuid:23278869-f434-4a7b-be67-543bab3d6338> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/2011/10/21/introducing-the-patek-philippe-3670a-a-new-chronograph-in-st.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940954 | 335 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Ellesmere Island, which lies within the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, appears to have once been the home of alligators, according to the fossil records of the Eocene epoch (see After the Dinosaurs: The Age of Mammals, 2006. By Donald R Prothero. Bloomington (Indiana): Indiana University Press). Alligators cannot tolerate freezing temperatures for long. Such tidbits are of interest to any folks who want to take a long view concerning temperature variations of the earth.
Moving to more contemporary pursuits, Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, suggests the signature of Greenhouse warming (that the warming should be accompanied by rather large changes in atmospheric temperatures in the tropics) has not occurred. The warming levels that have occurred in the atmosphere of the tropics imply that perhaps only a third of surface warming has been due to the greenhouse effect, and it is unclear how much of that small effect could be attributable to humans. Lindzen says:
This contradiction is rendered more acute by the fact that there has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years. Modelers defend this situation by arguing that aerosols have cancelled much of the warming, and that models adequately account for natural unforced internal variability. However, a recent paper (Ramanathan, 2007) points out that aerosols can warm as well as cool, while scientists at the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Research recently noted that their model did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability thus demolishing the basis for the IPCC’s iconic attribution (Smith et al, 2007). Interestingly (though not unexpectedly), the British paper did not stress this. Rather, they speculated that natural internal variability might step aside in 2009, allowing warming to resume. Resume? Thus, the fact that warming has ceased for the past fourteen years is acknowledged. It should be noted that, more recently, German modelers have moved the date for ‘resumption’ up to 2015 (Keenlyside et al, 2008).
So should we hope that the political class taxes us to save us from ourselves? Who has lobbied hard for Kyoto? Enron (will we see some revisionist history on that score), Goldman Sachs lobbies fro cap and trade. If Healthcare is a 1000 page bill, how big will a final cap and trade bill be? If a bill is too big to read, maybe it's too big to pass. | <urn:uuid:ad689eb5-950f-4086-9ac1-5961ff25a81d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://yargb.blogspot.com/2009/08/alligators-in-ellesmere-island.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948152 | 499 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Pilgrims cheer Pope Benedict in Madrid
August 20 - Thousands of young people flood into the streets of Madrid to hear Pope Benedict speak. Andrew Raven reports.
Beginner - Other reasons Many people choose their partners based on their wealth, lineage, beauty or religion. Some even go to the extent of marrying someone twice their age just for the money. In today's podcast, we have a dialogue full of useful vocabulary around this subject.
Many people choose their partners based on their wealth, lineage, beauty or religion. Some even go to the extent of marrying someone twice their age just for the money. In today's podcast, we have a dialogue full of useful vocabulary around this subject.
El Nino Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Comparison: 1982-1983 to 1997-1998
A comparison of the Pacific sea surface temperature anomaly during the El Nino of 1982-1983 with that of 1997-1998, as measured by NOAA AVHRR
Scientists use mosquito to test water quality.
Aug. 15 - A Costa Rican researcher has discovered a type of mosquito that can be used to identify safe river water for human consumption. Sharon Reich reports.
"NextLab I: Designing Mobile Technologies for the Next Billion Users, Fall 2008"
"Can you make a cellphone change the world? NextLab is a hands-on year-long design course in which students research, develop and deploy mobile technologies for the next billion mobile users in developing countries. Guided by real-world needs as observed by local partners, students work in multidisciplinary teams on term-long projects, closely collaborating with NGOs and communities at the local level, field practitioners, and experts in relevant fields. Students are expected to leverage technic
Dinosaurs in Patagonia
This Web site is a firsthand report from an expedition to Patagonia in which the first dinosaur embryos with fossilized skin were found. It tells the story of the find, which was made by scientists who were actually looking for early birds and their ancestors. Discovery explains the original mission of the expedition and the remarkable find of a nesting site that contained thousands of dinosaur eggs. What Does a Paleontologist See? challenges students to find dinosaur remains in two rock specime
Sacred calendars : Pesach : Professor Agata Bielik-Robson talks to Professor Tom O'Loughlin
Agata Bielik-Robson, an expert in Jewish thought, explains how Jews celebrate Pesach (often called ‘Passover’ in English). She talks about its origins and significance for Jewish people today.
This 7:27 minute video is a biography of Tubman starting from her early life and providing some insights into why she did what she did in a manner that should be easy to students to follow. Good images.
Tourism and Seismic Risk - Southern Alps, New Zealand
PhD candidate Caroline Orchiston, Department of Tourism and Geology presents her PhD research - Tourism and Seismic Risk, Southern Alps, New Zealand.
Read and write exercise: La dépression pendant la grossesse
At the completion of this lesson you will be able to summarize some factors that may cause depression during pregnancy.
World Pieces: The Neuroscience of Conflict
A study of conflict resolution through neuroscience with Emile Bruneau and Rebecca Saxe. By Kenrick Vezina, Gillian Conahan and Emily Ruppel.
Ricardo Radaelli-Sanchez, Richard Baraniuk
The Fourier Series is the representation of continuous-time, periodic signals in terms of complex exponentials. The Dirichlet conditions suggest that discontinuous signals may have a Fourier […]
Goals as being a reader
Learn How Anchors Work for Rope Climbing
Learn how anchors work for lead and top rope climbing while you're out mountain or rock climbing in these free rock and mountain climbing in this two minute video.
Acronym to learn how anchors work...
E xtension if piece falls
other picks up
A ngle no more 60% cause of forces pulling
anchor same place as you climbing
S trong has to be strong anchor or it will
T ime spend less time dont take to long
"Hi, My Name Is Flat Stanley"- Stanley Travels Around the World in Song
The famous Flat Stanley travels around the world in this video. Sing along and see the famous sites with him as he travels to China, Egypt, France, Germany, Africa, Alaska, and California. ( 3:21)
Met Eireann - Quiz
Do you know anything about the weather?
Undervalued S&P 500 has room to grow: BlackRock's Doll
Aug. 17 - The S&P 500 is trading at a low multiple and BlackRock Chief Equity Strategist Bob Doll says this suggests the market can still end the year higher than where it started.
How to Set a Hanukkah Table
This four minute video teaches how to set the Hanukkah table and what this holiday means. A good video for all ages, it provides information on the food and what it represents as well as the religious aspects. | <urn:uuid:3818ea51-b3bd-4313-ad99-4ff22e5fd8c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/scoreresults.php?keywords=BURN%20-%20Biosciences%20Undergraduate%20Research%20at&start=11320&end=11340 | 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 | 0.926621 | 1,053 | 2.109375 | 2 |
Tibetan calendarArticle Free Pass
Tibetan calendar, dating system based on a cycle of 60 Tibetan years, each of which usually has 354 days (12 cycles of the phases of the Moon). Adjustment to the solar year of about 365 days is made by intercalation of an extra month every three years. The 60-year cycle appears to be a 9th-century adaptation from the Chinese calendar.
The written Tibetan calendar calls for an ideal month of 30 days; to reconcile this with the 29 1/2-day cycle of phases of the Moon, the number of days in six of the months is reduced to 29. The first day of each month coincides with the New Moon and the 15th day with the Full Moon.
What made you want to look up "Tibetan calendar"? Please share what surprised you most... | <urn:uuid:9b0eeaa5-6ef2-4a64-b011-eaa5ed7768b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/594979/Tibetan-calendar | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944808 | 175 | 2.96875 | 3 |
And what if a long-lost letter from a Catholic cardinal who knew Gadhafi's true identity was evidence that could have solved the mystery?
To many Libyan people, the biggest question mark about Gadhafi does not involve his repressive and dictatorial rule, delusional statements or brazen lies. Behind closed doors, for years, they've wondered if he is Jewish. Last week the issue came out in the open, as NBC's Richard Engel reported from Libya that one in five rebels was fighting Gadhafi because he believes the leader is Jewish.
Conflicting reports surrounding Gadhafi's birth have circulated since about 1970, two years after a Gadhafi-led coup made him the de facto leader of Libya.
In a handful of biographies from years ago, mostly written by Europeans, Gadhafi is almost always described as being born in a tent in Sirt, the son of a poor, illiterate Bedouin sheepherder and his wife.
But the hushed-up rumors in Libya about Gadhafi's parentage involved his mother being Jewish. The stories have conflicted over the years, and the narratives are different. One had her converting to Judaism at age 9. In another, Gadhafi's grandmother is Jewish but leaves her husband for an Arab sheik.
A more specific claim, backed up by a Libyan historian, is that Gadhafi was born out of wedlock to a Jewish woman and an Italian soldier in a village east of Tripoli. Because of the shame surrounding the birth, the baby was given to a Catholic cardinal who in turn gave the child to the sheepherder and his wife.
Many contemporary scholars of Libya and policy experts interviewed by AOL News drew a blank when asked for more details about Gadhafi's origins and early years.
A spokesman for the U.S. State Department's Libya desk said it was of no concern, and the Vatican had no comment. Mohamed El-Jahmi, a Libyan-American activist who left Libya 30 years ago, said that the rumors have always been strong in Libya and that there are reasons to believe they are true.
"But I'd prefer not to talk about it," El-Jahmi said. "It doesn't matter if Gadhafi is Jewish or not, in the long run. What's important is that he is evil, and he needs to go. And the Arab people need to embrace Jews and Israel if the Arab world is ever going to really grow."
Mohamed Yusuf al Magariaf, 71, a prominent Libyan dissident now based in the U.S., investigated Gadhafi's past for several of his books and believes much of what the dictator has told people about his origins is a lie.
During research for one of his books, Magariaf tracked down a letter he said was written years later by the cardinal whom he believes was given the infant Gadhafi and who turned him over to his Bedouin parents. Gadhafi's mother, Aisha, reportedly died in 1978, and his father, Abu Meniar, in 1985.
The Oxford University-educated Magariaf was a professor at the university in Benghazi in 1971 when he joined Gadhafi's cabinet and later became the Libyan ambassador to India. In 1980, he became the first diplomat to break with the regime and formed the National Front for the Salvation of Libya.
Magariaf was sentenced to death in absentia and hunted abroad for years by hit squads carrying out Gadhafi's notorious "physical liquidation." Six of his brothers were imprisoned in Libya, but were eventually released. A seventh brother disappeared in Libya and has never been heard from again. He is thought to be in prison or dead. Magariaf finally moved with his family to the U.S. in 1991.
He has written about 20 books, mostly in Arabic, about Libyan policy and history. In 2009 he wrote "A Coup d'Etat by an Informant," which posits that Gadhafi was a double agent who only pretended to be a revolutionary and in fact had been an informant for the monarchy.
Magariaf is also among the many in Libya who believe Gadhafi has Jewish roots. But he mentions it only very briefly in his books and doesn't want to be portrayed as someone whose work focuses on the issue.
Last year, Israel's Channel 2 interviewed two Israeli women of Libyan origin who claimed to be Gadhafi's Jewish relatives.
A journalist named Mary Pace wrote a book last year called "Gadhafi's Secret" in which she claims that Gadhafi should be considered Catholic because he was born to an Italian officer who impregnated a Libyan girl and then took the baby to Venice, where he was baptized at the age of 8 or 9 months.
AOL News spoke with Magariaf about what he learned about Gadhafi's origins, including the "Da Vinci Code"-like rumors surrounding his birth.
AOL News: Why is there so much mystery surrounding Gadhafi's childhood?
Magariaf: No one knows exactly which year he was born or exactly where he was born. Nobody knows which day or month. There are so many question marks about it. Everything the average person knows -- and there isn't much -- was a story he invented.
But aren't there people from his tribe around today who knew him back then?
This is the bizarre thing. Tribal traditions are everything in Libya, and everyone is always known by their cousins and uncles. In the case of Gadhafi, no one has ever mentioned that he is from his uncle's tribe. Who are his uncles? For someone like Gadhafi to be so powerful, it would be normal for his uncles to come out and say he is our nephew. Gadhafi never mentions his uncles.
How legitimate are the reports that have circulated for years in Libya that Gadhafi has Jewish roots -- especially the one where he was born out of a wedlock to a Jewish girl and an Italian soldier?
There have always been rumors in Libya about this. But then came two facts. In the early 1970s, the Italian newspaper Oggi published a story saying Gadhafi was born to a Jewish mother. I have no idea why or where it came from.
In 1973, Gadhafi told two journalists who were interviewing him for a local Libyan magazine called Al Blagh that he had some cousins of Jewish background. One of the cousins was born to a Jewish mother. This cousin, who has since died, looks very much like him. But Gadhafi retracted the line about his Jewish cousin, and it was never published in the magazine. I interviewed one of the journalists, Ahmed Dajani, in 1980, and he confirmed all this.
The born out of wedlock to a Jewish girl story sounds a little apocryphal. Do you believe it, or was it to make Gadhafi look bad in Libya?
What I know comes from my own investigation. First, I want to say that Gadhafi's Jewish roots are a very sensitive subject. I don't mention them because I hate Jews or because I hate Gadhafi. I hate what he has done, not the man himself. And my books are not focused on the subject of whether Gadhafi is Jewish. It's about telling the world the truth about all his lies.
In 1972, one of Gadhafi's colleagues, Omar el-Meheshi, who was acting in charge of the Revolutionary Command Council, received a letter written in Italian from a cardinal who was working in Libya when Gadhafi was born. I only heard about the letter when el-Meheshi fled to in 1975 and mentioned it on a radio address.
What did the letter say?
First of all, Omar could not read Italian, so he gave it to the Libyan ambassador of external affairs, Khalefa Almuntasir, and asked him to translate it. He mentioned Almuntasir's name on the radio. In December 1984, I met with Almuntasir and asked him specifically about it. Almuntasir confirmed to me the existence of the letter and that it was from a cardinal reminding Gadhafi of his Jewish and Christian blood.
Why would the cardinal wait until 1972 to write a letter to Gadhafi about this?
My interpretation was that Gadhafi had been in power for a few years and the cardinal realized who he was and his past -- and he also saw the repression and brutality Gadhafi was exhibiting.
What was the cardinal's name?
I was never able to find out. In the 1980s, an Italian journalist tried to contact the Vatican about this very issue and was warned to stay away from the subject and received threats. She doesn't even want to be identified. I will remind you that the Vatican has not condemned any of Gadhafi's crimes. Don't you wonder why?
What else did you learn about Gadhafi's early years?
He grew up very poor. Everyone lived in tents in those days. At the time he was young, Libya was among the poorest and most backward nations in the world. He had a very deprived childhood. His schooling was stopped several times because his father moved around a lot. There were reports he was sexually abused. He was expelled from secondary school because of bad behavior.
What did you find out that made you conclude that Gadhafi only pretended to be a revolutionary and was secretly an informant for King Idris?
I read and listened to hours of Gadhafi's speeches and the speeches made by a lot of the people closest to him in the government involving what they said and did in the run-up to the revolution. There were so many lies and discrepancies when it was all pieced together. He was collecting information on the officers in the military and giving it to the monarchy while posing as a revolutionary. He played both sides off each other, which has been one of the hallmarks of his rule. All the officers who were his colleagues and companions in the coup claim that he totally changed after the coup when he took power.
How did he change?
He became very abusive to everyone. He was a very handsome, innocent-looking guy at the time. He had a sense of humor. Even I said we should give him a chance. But then he became someone else overnight -- who shouted at people, cursed at them, told them they were ignorant. From the earliest days in power, he just turned evil. He never shared power, so no one challenged him. He didn't hesitate to kill the closest people to him.
He accumulated all these arms. Why? We had no enemies. We were surrounded by friendly countries. He spent more than 40 to 50 percent on our oil revenue on arms. He waged wars that had nothing to do with aspirations of the people. Even his colleagues were against him.
What was he like to work with?
I usually was only around him when there were others around. During meetings he could act quite calm and normal. It was through others that you heard all the crazy and vicious stuff he did. He would test his employees from the beginning. If they showed a willingness to do whatever he wanted. If they showed resentment at being used, they had to leave. And when they left they were in danger. They had no security in life or from Gadhafi. The atmosphere was such that every night I told my wife that I didn't know if I would be alive the next night. | <urn:uuid:18de2b25-2cac-493f-a3aa-703be7225597> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/31/the-mystery-behind-moammar-gadhafis-birth-some-say-hes-jewish/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.992756 | 2,369 | 1.820313 | 2 |
By courtesy of Image Google
The Culebra Island giant Anole is another fascinating animal. The scientific name is Anolis Roosevelti. An another name for the Giant Anole is Xiphosurus Roosevelt. They where listed as endangered on July 21, 1977. The Anole is extremely rare, but some people think that they can even be extinct, the last sighting was in 1932.
They can get to be 6.3 inches from head to tail. They are a brownish-gray and the underside is a whitish color. These types of anoles can be found in trees called Ficus or Gumbo-limbo trees. Anoles usually eat fruit, insects, or even smaller lizards depending on the type of lizard. | <urn:uuid:e3f92d38-2b5a-474a-9c8c-a06fb501def2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://library.thinkquest.org/07aug/01755/thinkquest/Giant_Anole.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948774 | 151 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Rep. Tim Moffitt, a Buncombe County Republican, made waves last year when, on May 4, he introduced a bill that called for seizing the utility — run by the city since the breakup of the Regional Water Authority in 2005 — and handing it off to the Metropolitan Sewerage District.
Following a major backlash by local elected officials and residents alike, Moffitt backed off. On May 26, he turned it into a study bill, establishing a committee to make a recommendation on whether to leave the system with the city, turn it over to MSD or to a new, independent water authority. Asked about the change, Moffitt said this had been his intent all along.
Moffitt (the only member from Asheville), chairs the five-person study committee; three of the five represent counties outside Western North Carolina. The other members are fellow Republicans Chuck McGrady (Henderson County), William Brawley (Mecklenburg County) and Tom Murry (Wake County) and Democrat William Brisson (Bladen and Cumberland counties).
The committee held its first meeting Jan. 23; except for the Feb. 21 public hearing, all its meetings are being held in Raleigh — another source of controversy. The study committee is charged with delivering a recommendation by April 20. After that, the fate of Asheville’s water system will be up to the General Assembly, which has nigh-absolute power over local governments.
In the meantime, however, several forums on the issue have been held locally, including a Feb. 20 event sponsored by the Mountain Voices Alliance (see sidebar, "Steamed Up").
Murry did not attend the Feb. 21 hearing, but the other four study committee members were on hand to hear from local residents. The all-day session was divided into sections allocated to different constituencies: elected officials, Asheville residents, Buncombe County residents, Henderson County residents and local business leaders. There was some overlap in those categories, however, blurring the lines somewhat.
Here’s an overview of how the public hearing played out.
Elected officials, Asheville residentsLocal elected officials and city residents mostly told the study committee that Asheville should retain its water system.
“Today the system runs very efficiently; we have excellent credit,” noted Asheville City Council member Jan Davis, adding, “To consider taking [it] is not the most efficient way to run a water system.”
Democratic Reps. Patsy Keever and Susan Fisher, Moffitt's colleagues in the local legislative delegation, leveled harsh criticisms, saying they'd been shut out of all of this session’s study committees, particularly this one. Most people, they maintained, are happy with the system’s current status.
“I have had thousands upon thousands of emails over the four terms I've been sent back to the General Assembly,” said Fisher. “None of them have expressed concern about the way the water system was being run.”
During her first term in Raleigh, she admitted, the rest of the local delegation had pressured her into voting for the Sullivan Acts, a series of state laws aimed solely at Asheville that limit what the city can do with its water system. Fisher urged committee members to listen to the people most affected by their decision rather than pursuing a “divide and conquer” approach that might lead to privatization.
Not everyone opposed taking the water system away from Asheville. Henderson County Commissioner Mike Edney said he “still feels the cold steel of the knives [the city of Asheville] stuck in our backs,” blaming them for the 2005 dissolution of the Regional Water Authority and saying he wants the system out of Asheville's hands.
But Hendersonville Mayor Barbara Volk said her town is happy with its own water system and would view a regional authority as “unnecessarily complicated.”
Buncombe County Board of Commissioners Chair David Gantt, meanwhile, said that while the city and county had had bitter disputes over water in the past, things are different now.
“Five years ago, I was totally in favor of an independent authority,” Gantt told the study committee. “But times have changed.” After pulling out of the water agreement, he noted, “The city put $40 million into the system right off the bat.”
Moffitt's membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative think tank that has advocated privatization, was a target of frequent criticism. In one case, Moffitt told a speaker who mentioned the connection to “stick to the topic.”
None of the Asheville residents who addressed the committee favored moving the system to either an independent authority or the Metropolitan Sewerage District. Some used words such as “worthless” in describing the committee. Others said water service has improved since the city took control.
“Why are you doing this?” demanded Asheville resident Nelson Cobb.
“Those from Raleigh morally should not take this decision from local hands,” declared Robbie Schweitzer, echoing an oft-repeated refrain. “As a citizen of North Carolina, I resent this type of heavy-handed governance.” Without more local representation on the study committee, he asserted, people would see its actions as “power-grabbing deceit.”
Buncombe County residentsDuring their portion of the hearing, Buncombe County residents (some of them from Asheville) kept up the drumbeat, the vast majority arguing that the city should maintain control of the system.
About an hour and a half into the session, Davyne Dial noted that more than 20 people had spoken against making any major changes, while only two had favored transferring control to the Metropolitan Sewage District or a regional authority.
"So the argument that all these people living in the county are so threatened? I'm sorry, but your argument is not holding water here," she asserted.
Jeff McLarty of Asheville FM Internet radio’s “AFM News Hour,” urged committee members to heed the message they were getting from the public.
"I hope that there's some legitimate listening going on, and this is not just a little piece of political theater," he said, adding, “I hope your minds aren’t already made up.”
Meanwhile, local activist Barry Summers — a vocal critic of the study committee who’s characterized it as a potential step toward privatizing the system — engaged in a bit of political theater himself. Implying that the committee's study amounted to a power grab by Republicans who’d gained control of the General Assembly for the first time in more than a century, he offered some backhanded compliments that drew laughs from the 50 or so attendees.
"I want to commend you for having the confidence that the current majority party will permanently rule the General Assembly, and that there will not be a renewed cycle of retribution," said Summers. "And that there will never come a day when the aggrieved parties in this seizure are going to come looking for your assets," he added, drawing a grin from Moffitt.
Not everyone felt the city should continue managing the system, however.
Conservative activist Robert Malt called all the talk of privatization "a red herring that's being used to try to stop what I think is a good process — if it ends up in a place where everybody is represented equally." Moffitt, noted Malt, has repeatedly said the committee isn't considering such a move.
"The city of Asheville,” asserted Malt, “wants to use water as a club to force people to be voluntarily annexed. The rest of this is a diversion."
The current system, he argued, is "accountable to the people who live in the city of Asheville; it's not accountable to me. I pay the same rate … but I have no say. … we have no vote — that's wrong, and it needs to be fixed," Malt maintained. "Whatever you end up deciding, it has to be representative of all of the people that pay: Everyone that pays gets a say."
Henderson County residents, business communityBy 3 p.m., when it was Henderson County residents’ turn, the room was mostly empty. Only five people had signed up to speak, and their comments took roughly 20 minutes of the allotted hour.
Four of the five women who spoke opposed creating a regional water authority.
“Local government,” asserted Debra Stephens of the Green River Community Association, “is the most accountable form of government. Surrender of control of water resources to a regional [body] is a surrender of local representation and local accountability.” A regional water authority, she maintained, would give local residents less say in decisions concerning water quality, stewardship, environmental impact and rates while favoring larger urban areas over smaller communities.
Meanwhile, former Henderson County Commissioner Renee Kumor said history makes it hard for her county’s residents to forgive and forget. “Although I have heard disclaimers of improved stewardship coming from the current members of Asheville City Council,” she noted, “I believe that they are fighting the memory of generations of bullying and scheming from their predecessors.” Kumor pleaded with the committee to find long-term solutions to environmental issues and to think at least 50 years out.
Afterward, McGrady said he wasn’t surprised by the small turnout, because “So much of Henderson County’s water is supplied by the Hendersonville system. So I don't think a lot of Henderson County residents view this as their issue.”
The hearing's final hour was reserved for the business community. Few showed up, and only six of them spoke. Most favored leaving things the way they are, while asking committee members not to lose sight of the fact that their recommendation concerning the water system could affect local businesses’ ability to make money.
Vincenzo's Ristorante owner Dwight Butner said there’s been a lot of nonsense surrounding the debate about the water system. “Saying that people who pay their water [bills] own the system is like saying that patrons own my restaurant because they pay for my food,” he declared.
Joe Minicozzi of the Asheville Downtown Association read his organization’s position statement aloud, declaring that Sullivan Acts II and III are no longer needed. “These acts,” said Minicozzi, “operate to compromise the financial integrity and future prosperity of our city, county and region.”
At the end of the hearing, Moffitt said he thought the long day had been worthwhile, noting, “It's always good when we in Raleigh can go to the local area and make it convenient for folks to have their voices heard.”
— The authors can be contacted as follows: Caitlin Byrd (251-1333, ext. 140; email@example.com), David Forbes (251-1333, ext. 137; firstname.lastname@example.org), Jake Frankel (251-1333, ext. 115; email@example.com). | <urn:uuid:998eb840-cc61-40ee-8a58-870c39a24af0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mountainx.com/article/40783/Hands-off-Residents-officials-give-legislators-an-earful-over-water-system | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964785 | 2,317 | 1.5625 | 2 |
For nearly 80 years physicists have struggled to reconcile the prevailing theory of gravity with quantum mechanics. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, mass and energy warp spacetime. The undulations then affect the trajectories of passing objects, producing the effects we call gravity. In Einstein’s theory, spacetime is a stretchy, dynamical entity.
However, the precise state of any dynamical thing remains uncertain, according to quantum mechanics. So at lengths of about meters, spacetime can no longer be smooth, but must be roiling and frothy. That “quantum foam” bedevils researchers trying to concoct a quantum theory of gravity because in it concepts such as “ahead” and “behind” or “sooner” and “later” can lose their meaning. And no one has explained how the four-dimensional spacetime we take for granted emerges from the fantastical foam. Researchers have attempted to generate familiar four-dimensional spacetime by adding up all the possible configurations of the foam, thus borrowing a page from quantum mechanics, in which theorists assume that a particle travels between two points by taking every conceivable path at once. But these calculations have produced spacetimes that have either just two dimensions, or infinitely many.
The approach can produce a four-dimensional universe, however, if each particular version of the foam preserves a certain notion of cause and effect, report Renate Loll of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and colleagues. As in previous calculations, the researchers used a computer to generate approximate versions of all possible curved and frothy spacetimes by gluing together little triangular bits of flat four-dimensional spacetime, much as an artist might fashion abstract sculptures curving every which way by randomly gluing flat triangular tiles edge to edge. However, this time the researchers required that in each bit of spacetime nothing could travel faster than the speed of light, which implies that effects could never precede causes. In previous work, researchers imposed no such “causality.” The team also took care to connect the triangles together in a way that preserves the cause-before-effect ordering.
The researchers added up all the possible spacetimes to see if something like a large-scale four-dimensional spacetime would emerge from the sum. That was not guaranteed, even though the tiny bits of spacetime were four-dimensional. On larger scales the spacetime could curve in ways that would effectively change its dimension, just as a two-dimensional sheet of paper can be wadded into a three-dimensional ball or rolled into a nearly one-dimensional tube. This time the researchers found that they could achieve something that appeared to have one time dimension and three space dimensions–like the universe we know and love.
“It’s exceedingly important” work, says Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. “Now at least we know one way to do this.” Des Johnston of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, agrees the work is “very exciting” and says it underlines the importance of causality. “The other neat thing about this work is that you’re essentially reducing general relativity to a counting problem,” Johnston says. “It’s a very minimalist approach to looking at gravity.”
Adrian Cho is a freelance science writer in Boone, NC. | <urn:uuid:807e360d-f87d-4f16-baf0-9c372f5ff8c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://physics.aps.org/story/v14/st13 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942564 | 711 | 3.84375 | 4 |
Adopting a Rescue or Shelter Pet for Your Family
Consider giving a gift that gives back – and provides a home to an abandoned cat, dog or other animal. But be sure your family is ready first.
(page 1 of 2)
For many kids, the ultimate pal is a companion pet. A dog. A cat. A ferret. A fish. It doesn't matter what kind of pet it is. There's just often a strong tug between children and animals.
But adopting a pet is not an easy decision. It's a huge responsibility, say experts and families – and, also, also one that's immensely rewarding.
It doesn't cost much to adopt a pet – about $175-$300 to adopt a dog from the Michigan Humane Society (check here for most recent rates), whose staff walk adoptive families through the process and include spaying or neutering, vaccinations and a 60-day guarantee in the adoption price to make sure the pet is a fit with your family.
The majority of adoptive pets are cats and dogs, but there are other animals available in varying degrees – rabbits, ferrets, gerbils, hamsters, birds, snakes – even a turtle once, says Kevin Hatman, MHS public relations coordinator.
So where do you begin if you want to adopt a pet? Here's a primer for the process of adopting a pet, which begins with a long hard look at your lifestyle, time and family budget.
First, the thought process
It's not enough that the kids are clamoring for a cute cat or precious puppy. Do you have the time to care for a new family member? Feed it, nurture it, train it (which often entails attending obedience classes with your pet) and walking a dog no matter the weather? Are you prepared to clean up after accidents and deal with shedding and the potential of gnawed furniture or other belongings?
What happens when you go on vacation? Do you have pet sitters lined up? And don't forget the vet – that's an important part of your pet care cadre, whose bills, as your pet ages, won't get cheaper.
Reetu and Will Sanders of Royal Oak adopted a black/brown lab they named Bella in spring of 2010 from Home FurEver Rescue. The pair, who welcomed son Rohan to the family in April of 2011, were rejected twice before receiving approval to adopt Bella because they lived in a condo at the time.
Their search began on PetFinder and "whenever we saw a dog that looked promising, we went for a visit," says Reetu Sanders. They visited the Royal Oak Animal Shelter and three other rescues, including Home Fur-Ever. They attended rescue adoption days at the Troy Petco.
"Our original intent was to adopt a young adult dog, 1 to 3 years old, for a few reasons: They are usually housebroken and trained to some extent, it's easier to see the dog's personality and they cost less at first – adoption fees and vet bills are lower," says Sanders, a grant writer who is also an MBA student. Her husband is finishing his medical residency at Beaumont Hospital.
"Shelters and rescues are packed with adult dogs, especially in Michigan," says Sanders. "So many families have had to cut costs and many surrendered their dogs to shelters." Also, people adopt puppies because they're cute but, when they grow into adult dogs, some lose their interest and give up their pets.
The Sanders found that rescues were wary of letting condo dwellers adopt a dog because they didn't have a fenced-in yard and they lived in a small space. "These dogs have already had one bad experience, and the rescues want to make very sure it doesn't happen again," she says.
"This was disappointing, because we knew that those are the dogs most in need of the loving home we were eager to provide," says Sanders. "We gave up and decided to adopt a puppy."
Home FurEver scheduled a home visit, which the Humane Society does not do. In the end, they were approved to adopt Bella and have been very happy with their pet ever since.
Being flexible enabled the Sanderses to bring home a pet that fits their family. Throughout the process, they reflected on the roadblocks they hit and made sure pet adoption wasn't just a fleeting thought. | <urn:uuid:b198d2ec-6c90-4264-b793-9005b856338e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.metroparent.com/Metro-Parent/December-2012/Adopting-a-Rescue-or-Shelter-Pet-for-Your-Family/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977788 | 899 | 1.773438 | 2 |
From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia
Scorpio is A Scorpion who is a Friend of Leo, Aries and Taurus. whose Scorpion who Kills Aquarius, Sagittarius then He Holds The Pans of The Libra To Suck the Nipples, & Holds The Ass of The Scales who Calls an Asshole to Kill Orion, an Hunter is Planning To Kill The Scorpion, But He Killed Because of the Scorpion's Claws Who Calls Orion an Dubya, While Orion Calls the Scorpion an Faggot, Satan and Whore.
With Leo, Scorpio is associated with all those countries: those who really don't give a fuck, or who do give a fuck but a) won't do anything about it, b) can't do anything about it, or c) are so drunk that they forgot what it was that they were giving a fuck about. Countries include North Korea, Norway, China, India, Egypt, South Africa, Italy, Germany, Ethiopia, Syria, Turkey, which same as Taurus & Aquarius. Zambia, Angola, Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Libya, Morocco, Cuba | <urn:uuid:2ce5524e-d0d6-4fbb-9020-a17ad33c8b57> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Scorpio?oldid=5540610 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931391 | 236 | 1.554688 | 2 |
- THE MAGAZINE
Question:My small pottery business is doing well, and I need to purchase a larger kiln to keep up with the demand for my products. However, I’ve noticed that larger kilns are extremely expensive. Why do industrial kilns cost so much more than pottery kilns?
Answer:For many small pottery producers, deciding to upgrade to an industrial kiln can quickly lead to a sense of “sticker shock.” Instead of the average $15,000 to $50,000 price of most periodic kilns purchased by potters, the initial cost of a typical gas-fired industrial periodic kiln can run as high as $150,000 or more. However, the “cost” of a kiln is more than just the sticker price—the real cost is the achieved cost per unit of ceramic.
Industrial companies are just as concerned about costs as individuals, so it can be helpful to observe the way larger industrial firms look at costs. For example, a refractory brick manufacturer was looking for a high-temperature kiln. It compared a modern downdraft periodic kiln with sealed burners to an updraft kiln with venturi burners (a common design found in pottery kilns), both from reputable American firms. The company found that the cost per ton of brick fired in the modern kiln—which had a selling price of at least twice as much as the other kiln—was much lower than in the venturi burner kiln, even including the amortized initial cost of the kilns. The cheaper kiln (selling price) was actually the more expensive kiln to own. Based on this information, the company purchased the modern periodic kiln.
Calculating the SavingsGiven that an industrial kiln typically results in enough lower realized costs that it provides a fast payback, the question then becomes: Why is an industrial kiln often so much cheaper to own than a pottery kiln?
For one thing, an industrial kiln uses much less fuel. The sealed burners with individual combustion air blowers are much more efficient than the venturi burners, which have bases that are open to the firing atmosphere and are therefore much more difficult to control. Additionally, most industrial kilns are fiber-lined, while most pottery kilns are lined with insulating fire brick (IFB) or hard brick. Fiber lining weighs about 1⁄8 as much as IFB, and IFB weighs about 1⁄3 as much as hard brick. Since a kiln fires weight, the weight of the walls can greatly exceed the weight of the load. By reducing the wall weight, much less fuel is required.
The faster firing cycles of industrial kilns can also provide significant fuel savings. Some pottery producers worry that they will lose the slow heating and/or cooling cycles required to fire their products. However, these slow rates are typically needed only because some pottery kilns are non-uniform, and it is difficult to ensure that all parts of the load are treated properly. In a modern downdraft kiln with side burners and multiple zones of control, the temperatures are so uniform that even difficult shapes, such as statuary, can typically be fired quickly without defects.
For potters working with crystalline glazes, the crystal formation requires a carefully controlled cooling curve to develop the desired effect. However, if the temperature in the kiln is uniform, the cooling cycle does not have to be as slow as one might think. Crystalline glazes have been developed on the surface of tile fired in a roller hearth kiln in very short times—sometimes less than one hour from cold to cold.
Additional cost savings are typically realized from reduced product losses when using an industrial kiln. Some pottery producers using venturi burner-fired kilns experience losses of around 10% or more—but this loss rate is unacceptable. The cost is tremendous when considering the amount of labor and materials required to make each piece before firing. I have seen cases where a reduction of just 5% in firing losses completely paid for a new tunnel kiln.
A large part of the initial cost of an industrial kiln is the control system. Industrial kilns divide the burners into groups—often referred to as “zones”—to deliver the heat more evenly inside the kiln. Many industrial kilns have burners both above and below the ware to allow a different heat input at the top and bottom of the kiln. It is also common to separate a kiln into horizontal sections—in some kilns, the center bottom, center top, bottom ends and top ends might comprise four different zones. All zones are fired to one time/temperature curve, which is dictated by the control system (and fully programmable by the kiln operator). This type of multi-zone control provides much greater temperature uniformity inside the kiln. If the zones are chosen properly and the kiln is a properly designed downdraft kiln, the temperature uniformity can be as good as ±2∞F.
In addition, a sealed burner can easily control the amount of air entering the kiln through the burner. It is possible to have a very small amount of cooling air enter the kiln when the burner valve is nearly shut, thus allowing slow cooling, even with fiber lining.* A considerably larger amount of air enters an updraft, venturi burner-fired kiln due to the relatively large opening of each burner. The high level of control in an industrial kiln enables it to be used even with products that previously seemed very sensitive to cooling rates. Of course, there are some instances where the kiln must still be fired down to achieve the desired effect, such as for developing certain crystal glazes or firing extremely large pieces, but even this extra firing is not a great disadvantage considering the overall cost savings provided by the kiln.
Additionally, a venturi burner typically has a very poor maximum-to-minimum spread (turndown ratio), with 3:1 being typical. A good sealed burner can have turndown ratios of 10:1 to 25:1 or more, and these higher ratios enable the kiln to be kept under control over a wide range of temperatures. This is especially important for firing porcelain, where very low temperature control is required to ensure high product quality.
Exploring Payment OptionsDespite the long-term savings in fuel and product losses that can be provided by an industrial kiln, there is still the question of how a small pottery producer can afford the kiln’s high initial cost. Many pottery producers believe that they must either pay for everything in cash up front or go to the bank and borrow the money, and their balance sheet typically won’t support such a large expense. However, larger companies often lease their equipment to avoid affecting their balance sheets, and smaller companies can do this as well.
For example, a kiln that costs $100,000 seems terribly expensive compared to a pottery kiln that sells for $50,000. Even though the industrial kiln could significantly lower the cost per fired piece and the extra amount would come back quickly, it is difficult for a potter to obtain the extra $50,000 to purchase the kiln. However, if the kiln were leased over a period of seven years at less than $1400 per month, the higher initial cost wouldn’t seem so bad—especially since the monthly amount of the lease is generally tax-deductible. At the end of the lease, the pottery producer can typically exchange the equipment for a newer model, renew the lease for a specific period of time or purchase the leased equipment for a pre-negotiated amount, depending on the details of the lease contract.
A lease can typically be arranged through a local bank. Some kiln builders and suppliers have also begun offering this option through arrangements with leasing companies.
The Price is RightAn industrial kiln often looks more expensive than a typical pottery kiln because of its price tag, but it can actually be much cheaper in the long run—even at twice the initial price. If the kiln is designed correctly, fuel is often cheaper, losses are generally much lower and the level of control is typically much greater and more repeatable. Additionally, flexible payment options can often make industrial kilns affordable even for companies operating on a small budget.
*Because of its light weight, fiber lining tends to speed the cooling process. | <urn:uuid:cd97af42-1dcc-4348-b134-d705e2105e8d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ceramicindustry.com/articles/ppp-drying-firing-br-questions-answers-1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959283 | 1,756 | 2.390625 | 2 |
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Supreme Court upholds stricter mine permitting
HELENA, Mont. — The Montana Supreme Court has upheld a judge's ruling that a mining company must go through a stricter permitting process before it can build a copper and silver mine in northwestern Montana.
The justices in a 4-2 decision upheld Judge Kathy Seeley's 2011 ruling that the more rigorous process for the Rock Creek mine will protect threatened bull trout habitat in the Cabinet Mountains.
Revett Minerals Inc. must apply for individual permits that require a public comment process instead of a general permit that had been approved by the state Department of Environmental Quality.
The Spokane, Wash.-based company had argued that environmental concerns were addressed through the general permitting process.
Justices Jim Rice and Patricia Cotter dissented with the majority, saying they would have reversed Seeley's ruling. | <urn:uuid:de78eaf0-cefd-4b8c-90ce-4973f023eef8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kplu.org/post/supreme-court-upholds-stricter-mine-permitting | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944118 | 180 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Published October 04, 2012
There has been an on-going debate in Japan on the best way to obtain a safe and affordable energy supply for the island nation. The nuclear option suffered a set back in March, 2011, when a massive earthquake and devastating tsunami caused a meltdown in reactors at Japan's main Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant. But nuclear power boosters say expensive imported fossil fuels for conventional plants will hurt the nation’s productivity. More from correspondent Steve Herman in Tsuruga, Japan where VOA was given an unprecedented look inside the country's only fast breeder reactor facility. | <urn:uuid:a4bb17e4-905d-4f4b-8778-9bb387017c67> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.voanews.com/media/video/1520150.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.905519 | 119 | 2.265625 | 2 |
Since then, more people have migrated to Mexico from the United States rather than the other way around. The most recent immigration figures show more Asian than Latin immigrants.
Recent polls suggest that Obama may run even stronger among Hispanics than his 67 to 31 percent margin in 2008. That will help him in target states Colorado and Nevada. But polls in the biggest target state, Florida, show Hispanics about evenly divided, even though less than half are Cuban-Americans.
Republicans got 38 percent of Hispanic votes in 2010, enough to win the total national vote. In the future, Hispanics are likely to vote more Democratic than average, but not hugely so. And they're likely to become 12 to 15 percent of the electorate someday, not 20 or 25 percent.
The third group of non-whites are Asians, 2 percent of the electorate in 2008 and 2010. They're the least Democratic non-white group, 62 percent for Obama in 2008 and 58 percent for House Democrats in 2010. Current polling suggests similar numbers this year.
But Asians aren't a single cohesive group and may not be reliably Democratic over time. They voted Republican for president in the 1990s.
Most Asian-Americans live in heavily Democratic California and Obama's birth state Hawaii. In target states, they formed 3 percent of the electorate in Nevada and Virginia in 2008.
Nevada Filipinos will vote heavily Democratic. But Republicans are working the Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese communities in Northern Virginia. In non-target state New Jersey, South Asians in Middlesex County cast decisive margins for Republican Chris Christie in 2009.
So puncture a couple of myths. Romney can win even if 80 percent of non-whites vote again for Obama. And rising percentages of non-whites in future electorates will pose challenges, but not threaten doom, for the Republican Party.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2012 THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Great Moments in Human Rights: Mandated “Emotional Support” Animals in College Dorms | Daniel J. Mitchell | <urn:uuid:ff96ed5c-01b2-48f7-842e-b29ee7dbe389> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2012/10/29/changing_demographics_wont_mean_the_end_of_republican_party/page/2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921058 | 508 | 1.945313 | 2 |
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)has reiterated the importance of training children arts to expose their talents through art initiatives.
This was revealed yesterday by the UNHCR Deputy Representative, Chansa Kapaya when briefing journalists on the ‘bridging the lines’ art initiative held at the UNHCR office in Dar es Salaam.
The four-day ‘Bridging the Lines’ project was implemented by Ujamaa Art gallery and the UNHCR focusing on working with Congolese refugees children form primary and secondary schools living in the Nyarugusu refugee camp and with neighbouring primary and secondary schools with Tanzanian children in Kasulu district, Kigoma region.
The envoy said the influx of refugees in the country back in 1996 was caused by volatile or instability in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the same situation has prevented the refugees to go back home.
“So we have worked together to give these children opportunity to express their hopes and aspirations through artistic endevours,” she said
For her part, the Director of Ujamaa Art Gallery, Lorna Mashiba said the idea of the project was to nurture the artistic talent of refugee and Tanzanian children by exposing them to specific art techniques from renowned Tanzanian artists.
“We want them to know how UNHCR together with its partners facilitate projects that benefit the Tanzanian population in the refugee –hosting areas through documenting the learning process of teaching arts while utilizing pictures, film footages and publications to promote similar teaching endevours to children from marginalized communities.
“We held a three-day workshop from January 23 to 27 this year in the Nyarugusu refugee camp for 140 children of whom 40 were tanzanians living in the neighbourhood and 100 were Congolese refugees,” said Mashiba.
The URG director noted that all the 140 children from primary and secondary schools participated in the project.
Haji Chilonga a Tanzanian artist said they were exited and amazed by the talents the children have.
“In normal circumstances, an artist’s work can take up to two weeks to be complete, but these children within three days of our training, had already accomplished the arts they were working on,” said Chilonga.
The children, according to Chilonga, had an opportunity to experience and exhibit water colours, pastels, acrylics and coloured.
The groups is expecting to hold an exhibition mid February this year where to raise funds to support artistic training for the refugees in Nyarugusu.
“The proceeds generated from the sale of the artworks , colouring books and post cards will go towards the procurement of art equipments and educational materials for schools in the Nyarugusu refugee camp and the adjacent host communities,” said Mashiba, Ujamaa Art Gallery Director. | <urn:uuid:2bb2435c-bf49-44d5-a23e-82145a2b6694> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ippmedia.com/frontend/index.php/hl=23tion=com_content.com/2/2t/function.fopen?l=38335 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965686 | 595 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Disrupting East Side Traffic, UN Today
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in town, and will "face off" against Hillary Clinton today at the UN regarding the 40-year-old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Announcing only last week that he would attend the 189-nation conference, the controversial Iranian leader plans to mount a frontal attack on world nuclear powers -- the United States chief among them -- that he will say have failed in the NPT's nuclear disarmament obligations, reports the Christian Science Monitor.
The Obama administration is currently pressing for a fourth round of sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. Watch for Ahmadinejad to "pound the podium with his rant on the little guy's rights, he's going to tell all the other little guys in the audience that we [Iran] have done nothing wrong, that it's the U.S. that wants to keep you down -- and suddenly it's going to be very hard to keep everyone on the reservation," says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Education Center in Washington.
While Ahmadinejad will likely defend Iran's nuclear program as nothing more than a "civilian power project," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who will follow the Iranian leader to the UN stage, has said, "We're not going to permit Iran to change the story from their failure to comply."
Groups have been busy protesting Ahmadinejad's visit, pressuring luxury hotels to refuse to host him and requesting UN ambassadors to leave the hall during his speech. We didn't see him in Tompkins Square Park last night, so we presume he got a room.
If you're traveling up the East Side, plan ahead. | <urn:uuid:d2ee1bf2-a413-4527-a03e-cd0f1eef1731> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2010/05/mahmoud_ahmadin_1.php | 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 | 0.968904 | 358 | 1.65625 | 2 |
In a 2008 United Nations report, Asma Jahangir Jahangir, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, and Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, demanded that China explain the dramatic increase in organs used for transplantation from 2000 to 2005, and the mismatch between the high number of transplants and the relatively few known donor sources.
The Chinese government responded that they have no statistics on the number of transplants between 2000 and 2005.
The United Nations officials pointed out that the persecution against Falun Gong practitioners was the most brutal between 2000 and 2005. This time period coincided with the surge in organ transplantation in China.
The report also stated that the United Nations had heard allegations that between 2000 and 2005, there were 60,000 transplant operations, averaging 10,000 annually.
The report said that in 2005, approximately 0.5 percent of the transplant organs came from patients' relatives. In 2006, there were 9 donors who died and donated organs to non-relatives. An approximate 1,770 people died from the death penalty in 2005, while 3,900 people were given the death sentence (not all of them were executed in that year). It has been alleged that the difference between the number of transplants and available sources was due to organ harvesting from live Falun Gong practitioners.
A Canada-based special investigation group said that of the 60,000 transplants taken place between 2000 and 2005, at least 40,000 could not be attributed to known sources. The Chinese government has not given any explanation.
In response to the United Nations report, the Chinese government denied having any official statistics on organ transplantation between 2000 and 2005.
A March 2006 article on the China Organ Transplantation Web quoted Professor Shi Bingyi, Deputy Director of the Transplant Chapter of the Chinese Medical Association, who said that over 90,000 transplant operations had taken place in China. The Canada-based investigation group estimated that 60,000 of those occurred between 2000 and 2005.
The Chinese government said that the 90,000 figure reported by the China Organ Transplantation Web and Health Journal was "a mistake." It said that Professor Shi has denied the figure during a January 2007 interview with the BBC. | <urn:uuid:fdf5033d-1122-4e13-ba5e-95a5623ab93c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/8-7-8/73169.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971075 | 462 | 2.40625 | 2 |
Hong Kong (CNN) -- An avalanche, such as the one that killed at least eight climbers in Nepal this weekend, is known in mountaineering circles as an objective hazard -- a risk that you cannot control and one all climbers must accept.
But with Mount Manaslu playing host to some 231 mountaineers from 25 teams this season -- an unusually large number for the world's eighth largest peak -- the natural disaster is likely to revive concerns about whether the Himalayan mountains favored by commercial expeditions are becoming too crowded.
The avalanche was triggered by a huge piece of ice that fell from a glacier. It destroyed some 25 tents at one camp and survivors spoke of being swept hundreds of meters down the mountainside.
Manaslu had proved particularly popular this year after Chinese authorities restricted tourist visas, making access to Cho Oyu or Shishapangma, two 8,000m (26,000 ft) peaks on the border with Tibet, difficult, said Grayson Schaffer, senior editor at Outside magazine.
"The devastation of the avalanche was certainly magnified by the number of people that were in its way," he told CNN.
Ang Tscherting Sherpa, the former head of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, said that avalanches on this scale were relatively rare on Manaslu, which was regarded as one of the easier 8,000m peaks to surmount.
He said the accident was not connected to the number of climbers.
"Such avalanches are hard to predict. It all depends on the snow fall and how warm the ground is."
The problem of over-crowding is most stark at Mount Everest, the world's highest peak, which attracts hundreds of climbers each year eager to take a shot at the 8,848m (29,029 ft) summit.
In May this year, climbers spoke of "traffic jams" as more than 150 climbers waited their turn to summit the mountain during a window of good weather.
The consequences were deadly as some climbers' air supplies began to run out and frost bite began to set in. Six climbers died in the space of two days.
Leanne Shuttleworth, a British woman who made a successful summit on May 20, said there were bodies attached to fixed lines and she had to walk around them.
"There was a couple who were still alive," she told Britain's Daily Mail. "Our Sherpa helped one of the people but a couple were so far gone they didn't even know we were there. It was the most horrendous thing to see."
A total of 10 climbers died on Everest in April and May, making it the third deadliest spring season on record after 12 people perished in 1996 and 11 in 2006.
Schaffer, who spent April and May at Everest base camp, attributes the high death toll to thrill-seeking amateurs, who are actively courted by cut-price outfitters.
"If you really want to climb one of these mountains, you can pay someone to take you regardless of your experience level," he said. "In the past 10 years, it's gone from almost unheard of to happening more often."
Nepal has eight of the 14 highest peaks in the world and tourism is a big earner for the landlocked country's economy.
September marks the beginning of the fall climbing season, which runs through November.
Unlike the spring season, which comes after a dry winter, the fall season follows the wet monsoon, coating the mountains in a lot more snow.
This attracts mountaineer skiers like Glen Plake, who survived Sunday's avalanche. The extreme sports celebrity had planned to ski down the mountain without the aid of oxygen.
Manesh Shrestha in Nepal contributed to this report | <urn:uuid:159419c8-ecb7-4624-98a1-019ace593b86> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://edition.cnn.hu/2012/09/24/world/asia/nepal-mountains-crowding/index.html?hpt=wo_c2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982508 | 767 | 1.976563 | 2 |
The mission of the Technology Assessment team is to evaluate the status and prospects of the energy areas included in the GCEP technology portfolio. The group analyzes the potential of the various energy resources and technologies to provide energy at a large scale and to enable the reduction of greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere. The assessment includes considerations on resource availability and theoretical efficiency limits, and aims at identifying technology barriers, step-out approaches, and opportunities for fundamental research in a specific energy technology.
Output of the Technology Assessment effort include workshops at Stanford and elsewhere that foster high-level discussion amongst experts about specific technologies, and reports to provide the energy community with updated analyses of the status and opportunities in energy areas.
Technology Assessment Fact Sheet | <urn:uuid:4df3f7e7-9545-4c99-95b3-bfe8216a493e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gcep.stanford.edu/research/technology_assessment.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.902454 | 144 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Get on-the-go access to the latest insights featured on our Trustworthy Computing blogs.
Protecting the general computing ecosystem is a really tough job, and given some of the media headlines, it’s easy to get discouraged and wallow in the problems. It seems like we’re constantly bombarded with statistics measuring the number of bugs, vulnerabilities, or attacks in an attempt to build an accurate “state of the state.” The popular question of late seems to be “Is the ecosystem getting more or less secure?”
In my role, I talk with a lot of customers. In fact, we had recent meetings on Microsoft’s campus with CSOs from some of the world’s largest companies. While the topic sometimes starts with the “state of the state” and recent changes in the threat landscape, they always end up in the same place —customers want to discuss and collaborate on solutions, rather than wallowing in the problems.
We’ve collaborated with many of the thousands of brilliant security researchers across the globe over the years, and they’ve helped us improve the security of our products & services. There are also hundreds of security providers in the industry that we work closely with. In fact, three years ago we took an unconventional approach to security challenges by creating the Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) to help unify this group of defenders. This program shifted advantage to the good guys by promoting collaboration within the industry, even among competitors, in order to quickly build defensive technologies for over a billion of our shared customers around the world.
The success of that program – which inspired industry collaboration - got us thinking about whether we could do something similar for the security research community. Our goal was to inspire new lines of research in areas that have the most impact and leverage in protecting customers. That means not building incentives to find single bugs, but instead rewarding work on innovative solutions that could mitigate entire classes of attacks.
Today, I am pleased to announce the BlueHat Prize to inspire security researchers to seek innovations in exploit mitigation technologies. This is the first and largest incentive prize ever offered by Microsoft, and possibly the industry, for defensive computer security technology. In the age of increased risk of attacks on personal, corporate and government computer systems, Microsoft recognizes the need to encourage and nurture innovation in the area of exploit mitigations. At Microsoft, we believe in hiring the best and brightest minds in security to help us improve the security of our products and services, but also recognize it will take a “global village” to address today’s security challenges.
With over a quarter million dollars in cash and prizes, Microsoft believes the BlueHat Prize will motivate the community and foster even more collaboration with researchers throughout the security industry. To understand more about this competition, please visit Katie Moussouris’ EcoStrat blog or the BlueHat Prize contest page. | <urn:uuid:3ea37837-65a4-4bad-9022-847f1339714f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.technet.com/b/msrc/archive/2011/07/27/bluehat.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947872 | 599 | 1.914063 | 2 |
| Updated at: 1057 PST, Thursday, October 07, 2010|
UNITED NATIONS: United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, expressing concern over the killings in Indian occupied Kashmir Valley, has again called for an immediate end to violence and has urged for restraint while regretting the loss of life.
More than 110 Kashmiris have been killed in the mass unrest that broke out early June following protests over spate of killings by Indian police.
When at his press conference Wednesday, the UN chief’s attention was drawn to the deteriorating situation in Kashmir and asked whether he was prepared to offer his good-offices to resolve the decades-old dispute since bilateral efforts have failed, Ban said he could only use his good offices when both parties - India and Pakistan - agreed to such a course.
“I regret the latest loss of life. I have been calling for an immediate end to violence and urge calm and restraint by all concerned,” Ban however said.
“That is the position of the United Nations at this time.”
“As far as this role of good offices is concerned, the United Nations normally takes that initiative when requested by both parties concerned,” Ban told journalists during his monthly briefing.
“India and Pakistan, they are neighbouring countries, important nations in that region — peace and security would have important implications,” he said.
Last week, representatives of India and Pakistan had a verbal duel in the UN General Assembly after Indian External Affairs Minister SM Krishna accused Pakistan of being behind the current unrest in Kashmir.
Pakistan rejected India’s allegation, urging New Delhi to stop its state-sponsored terrorism in Kashmir and grant the Kashmiri people their UN-mandated right to self-determination.
Later both sides cancelled a scheduled meeting after the Pakistani foreign minister said the talks should be made “meaningful” by including the festering dispute over Kashmir on the agenda. | <urn:uuid:75237a0d-03c7-4c5b-b7fa-a7ae76a39e1b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.geo.tv/10-7-2010/72515.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968376 | 398 | 1.914063 | 2 |
UH Astronomer Lennox Cowie Speaks on the Birth of Stars and Galaxies
Public Lecture on Sept. 22 entitledUniversity of Hawaiʻi
UH astronomer Lennox L. Cowie will present a public lecture entitled "First Light: The Birth of Stars and Galaxies" at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, September 22 at the UH Institute for Astronomy in Manoa.
Telescopes on Mauna Kea, and space telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, are now so powerful that they can see 12 billion years back in time to an age when the first infant galaxies were struggling to light up the Universe. Dr. Cowie will discuss how these faint galaxies merged and grew to make the Universe we see today.
Dr. Cowie has been a member of the IfA faculty since 1986 and was associate director from 1986 until 1997. Born in Scotland, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and subsequently held appointments at Princeton, MIT, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. Dr. Cowie was awarded the UH Regents‘ Medal for Excellence in Research in 1998, and this year he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, the only current UH faculty member to hold this honor.
The Institute for Astronomy is located at 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu. The lecture will be video linked to the IfA‘s facilities at 640 North Aʻohoku Place in Hilo‘s University Park, and to Ka Lama 103 at Maui Community College. The lecture is part of the IfA‘s Frontiers of Astronomy Community Lecture Series. It is open to the public, and admission and parking are free.
The Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii conducts research into galaxies, cosmology, stars, planets, and the sun. Its faculty and staff are also involved in astronomy education, deep-space missions, and in the development and management of the observatories on Haleakala and Mauna Kea. Refer to http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/ for more information about the Institute.
For more information, visit: http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu | <urn:uuid:a376b79d-2c70-41f6-bcfe-db604f82458d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hawaii.edu/news/article.php?aId=902 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942135 | 455 | 2.34375 | 2 |
27 December 2009
December 27, 2009 marks the one-year anniversary of the beginning of “Operation Cast Lead,” Israel’s 22-day assault on the captive population of Gaza, which killed 1400 people, one third of them children, and injured more than 5300. During this war on an impoverished, mostly refugee population, Israel targeted civilians, using internationally-proscribed white phosphorous bombs, deprived them of power, water and other essentials, and sought to destroy the infrastructure of Palestinian civil society, including hospitals, administrative buildings and UN facilities. It targeted with peculiar consistency educational institutions of all kinds: the Islamic University of Gaza, the Ministry of Education, the American International School, at least ten UNRWA schools, one of which was sheltering internally displaced Palestinian civilians with nowhere to flee, and tens of other schools and educational facilities.
While world leaders have tragically failed to come to Gaza’s help, civilians everywhere are rallying to show their solidarity with the Palestinian people, with anniversary vigils taking place this week in New York, Washington DC, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and many more cities and towns in the US and world-wide.
The United States Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel was formed in the immediate aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, bringing together educators of conscience who were unable to stand by and watch in silence Israel’s indiscriminate assault on the Gaza Strip and its educational institutions. Today, over 500 US-based academics, authors, artists, musicians, poets, and other arts professionals have endorsed our call. Our academic endorsers include post-colonial critics and transnational feminists Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Indigenous scholars J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Andrea Smith, philosopher Judith Butler, Black studies scholars Cedric Robinson, Fred Moten, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, and intellectual historian Joseph Massad.
“Cultural workers” who have endorsed our call include well known author Barbara Ehrenreich, Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah, poets Adrienne Rich and Lisa Suhair Majjaj, ISM co-founder and documentary film-maker Adam Shapiro, Jordan Flaherty of Left Turn Magazine, and Adrienne Maree Brown, of the Ruckus Society.
Among the 34 organizations supporting our mission are and the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, the Green Party, Code Pink, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, .Artists Against Apartheid, and Teachers Against the Occupation.
The Advisory Board of the United States Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) has grown to include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Hamid Dabashi, Lawrence Davidson, Bill Fletcher Jr., Glen Ford, Mark Gonzales, Marilyn Hacker, Edward Herman, Annemarie Jacir, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Robin Kelley, Ilan Pappe, James Petras, Vijay Prashad, Andrenne Rich, Michel Shehadeh, and Lisa Taraki.
Israeli academics, listed among the organization’s International Endorsers, have also joined us, including Emmanuel Farjoun, Hebrew University; Rachel Giora, Tel Aviv University; Anat Matar, Tel Aviv University; Kobi Snitz, Technion; and Ilan Pappe now at Exeter.
The USACBI Mission Statement calls for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions in support of an appeal by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Individual Israelis are not targeted by the boycott.
Specifically, supporters are asked to:
(1) Refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions that do not vocally oppose Israeli state policies against Palestine;
(2) Advocate a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels, including suspension of all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions;
(3) Promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by international academic institutions;
(4) Work toward the condemnation of Israeli policies by pressing for resolutions to be adopted by academic, professional and cultural associations and organizations;
(5) Support Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support.
This boycott, modeled upon the global BDS movement that put an end to South African apartheid, is to continue until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
United States Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is a U.S. campaign focused specifically on a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, as delineated by PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel). To find out more visit United States Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel’s website. | <urn:uuid:7a9ae9aa-3745-4234-8d83-07f9eb633c82> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://palsolidarity.org/2009/12/1-year-after-gaza-massacre-over-500-academics-and-cultural-workers-call-for-boycott/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921703 | 1,100 | 1.882813 | 2 |
Have you ever wondered why you see red when you look at some sea-faring creatures? It’s because of a red carotenoid pigment called astaxanthin which is produced by microalgae called Haematococcus pluvialis--a big name for such small organisms. In fact, astaxanthin is found in many marine sea animals, such as salmon, who dine on these microalgae and is what gives salmon and other catches from the sea, such as lobsters and crabs, their red pigment.
But let’s back up the train a little bit and talk about cartenoids. They are naturally-occurring, fat-soluble pigments found in plants that give color to red, yellow, orange fruits and vegetables as well as several dark green vegetables. And while there are a number of them, the most abundant carotenoids in the North American diet are beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, gamma-carotene, lycopene, lutein, beta-cryptoxanthin, zeaxanthin, and our topic for today--astaxanthin.
And while astaxanthin may have us seeing red, that’s not all this carotenoid can do.
Closely related to beta-carotene and lutein, astaxanthin provides antioxidant benefits and, therefore, may play a role in defending cell membranes from free radical attack.† Additionally, some findings have also indicated that astaxanthin can support a healthy heart and healthy cholesterol levels already in the normal range.† Its antioxidant effects extend beyond this, however, and astaxanthin is purported to maintain eye health and support the skin structure during sun exposure.†
Add its ability to support neurological health† to the list of astaxanthin’s positive benefits, too.
And don’t forget its positive effects on the immune system. Astaxanthin is said to support a healthy immune system by supporting normal antibody-producing cells.†
An additional plus for astaxanthin is that it may enhance the burning of fat—especially during exercise—and may support muscle endurance.† That is, at least what was observed in one recent animal study.
Researchers from the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology compiled a report on the astaxanthin animal study in Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Biochemistry. Lead author Mayuni Ikeuchi inferred that there may be a causal link from ingesting astaxanthin and successful weight management.
In short, astaxanthin demonstrated a potential, positive, weight management effect among the mice that were studied. More research, particularly human, is warranted for these exciting findings.
Now that’s a pretty amazing carotenoid--even if it does have us seeing red.
† These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.
These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. | <urn:uuid:3e2ba96b-4312-458d-9cdf-1c96902e3608> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gardenoflife.com/Our-Company/Articles/Daily-Health-Article-Display/ContentPubID/445/settmid/4862.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939617 | 623 | 3.453125 | 3 |
Released: June 4, 2012
Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years
Trends in American Values: 1987-2012
Section 2: Demographics and American Values
Even as party divisions over values have expanded over the last quarter century, gaps between other groups have remained relatively unchanged. Across the 48 values items tracked regularly since 1987, average gender, age, race, education, income and religiosity differences have remained remarkably stable. Several of these demographic characteristics are associated with significant differences in values, but none have shown substantial change over time.
Of particular note is the size of the overall gender gap, which is modest. On average, men and women differ by only six points across these values questions. The size of the gender gap varies on different questions, but it remains relatively narrow across-the-board.
Differences between blacks and whites, college graduates and non-college graduates, high and low-income people and younger and older people are more substantial, although in each case these divisions are now dwarfed by partisan differences.
Age Differences in Social and Political Values
As discussed in detail in a previous report on generational politics (See “The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election”, Nov. 3, 2011), much of the current political dynamic is a result of strong generational characteristics of the Millennial generation compared with Gen X, Baby Boomers and the Silent generation. There have been particularly wide differences in the voting patterns of younger and older Americans in the past few elections because of the contrast between a younger, more Democratically-oriented generation and an older generation that has consistently been more supportive of Republican candidates.
Many of the age differences over values have remained fairly constant over the past quarter century. In 1987, 18-to-29 year olds were considerably less skeptical than those 65 and older about the government’s ability to operate efficiently; that gap has endured ever since. Younger adults also have been consistently more supportive of the social safety net and of environmental policies, and they are significantly less religious.
One emerging age gap is over wealth disparities – 83% of those younger than 30 say it is really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer, compared with 67% of those 65 and older.
But this does not mean there is an age divide over opportunity in America. Only a minority of younger and older Americans alike agree with the notion that hard work offers little guarantee of success. Similarly, fewer than half in any age group believes that success is determined by forces outside their control.
Not surprisingly, the largest gaps between younger (18-to-29) and older (65+) Americans in core values concern issues related to social change such as homosexual rights, single parenting, and racial integration.
While sizable majorities of those in all groups approve of interracial dating, this sentiment is nearly universal among young people (95% agree). About two-thirds (68%) of those 65 and older agree. In terms of current political issues, there is more support for gay marriage among younger people, though support has grown across all age groups.
Some of these age gaps are related to a trend toward secularization in the younger age groups. Notably, people younger than 30 are substantially less likely than older people to say prayer is an important part of their lives (24-point gap). Research on generational patterns shows that this is not merely a lifecycle effect; the Millennial generation is far less religious than were other preceding generations when they were the same age years ago. (See graphic entitled “Rise of Religiously Unaffiliated among Younger Generations”, Nov. 3, 2011.)
Younger people also are less critical of government performance. While 69% of those 65 and older agree that “when something is run by the government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful,” this compares with only about half (47%) of those younger than 30. Related to this, younger people are more supportive of the government’s role in regulating the economy and providing a social safety net.
And younger people express far less negative attitudes about immigrants and the effects of immigration on the country. To be sure, the younger generations are far more ethnically diverse – the latest data suggest that one-in-five U.S. adults younger than 30 are of Hispanic background. But age differences in views of immigrants and immigration are not attributable to demographics alone. The gap in the views of younger and older whites is just as large.
Gender Gaps Modest Overall
Although differences between men and women are evident across many values items, the size of these differences is generally modest, and on many items there is no significant difference at all. Moreover, what gender differences exist have neither increased nor decreased over time.
One of the larger value differences between men and women is in how religiously committed they are. Women are significantly more likely than men to say prayer is an important part of their lives, and to say they never doubt the existence of God. These gender gaps persist among both younger and older generations of men and women, as well as among college graduates and the less educated.
Despite their higher religiosity, women have not been more conservative than men on social issues. Women are about as likely as men to say that they have “old-fashioned values about family and marriage.” And on one of the most divisive social issues – homosexuality – women have tended to be more supportive of gay rights than men.
When it comes to government, men have generally been more skeptical of the government’s ability to act efficiently, and less supportive of the social safety net.
There is a substantial gender gap in attitudes about single parenting: About six-in-ten (62%) women say one parent can bring a child up as well as two parents together; only 39% of men share that view. Additionally, women are less likely than men to agree that “a pre-school child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works” (29% of women vs. 42% of men).
Whites and Blacks Differ Over Role of Government
The differences in the views and beliefs of blacks and whites today are largely the same as when this project began in 1987. African Americans have consistently been more confident than whites in government’s ability to perform efficiently and more supportive of the social safety net and a larger role for the government in society.
Most notably, 62% of blacks say “we should make every possible effort to improve the position of blacks and other minorities, even if it means giving them preferential treatment.” Just 22% of whites agree. Twenty-five years ago, the gap was almost identical, 64% vs. 16%.
When it comes to the social safety net, 78% of blacks today say “the government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep.” That figure was 80% in 1987. Among whites, 52% agree with this statement today, down slightly from 58% in 1987.
One of the defining values gaps between blacks and whites is over opportunity. Currently, half of blacks say “success in life is determined by forces outside our control,” compared with 31% of whites. Again, these figures are little changed from 25 years ago (49% of blacks, 35% of whites.)
While blacks overwhelmingly support a government safety net, they mostly agree with whites that poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs. Currently, 72% of whites and 70% of blacks hold this view. While historically whites have been more likely to feel this way than blacks, the gap has been small relative to other divides over government and opportunity.
Religiosity remains a substantial racial gap. On all measures of religious intensity – the importance of prayer never doubting the existence of God and believing there will be a Judgment Day – the share of African Americans who not only agree, but completely agree, is far higher than among whites.
This religious conviction does not always mean blacks are more conservative on social issues, however. African American support for gay marriage has grown in recent years, but is still below support among whites (39% of blacks and 47% of whites now favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally). (See “Changing Views of Gay Marriage: A Deeper Analysis,” May 23, 2012.)
But there is no difference in the share of blacks and whites who say schools should have the right to fire gay teachers (24% of blacks, 20% of whites). Roughly equal majorities of blacks (69%) and whites (72%) say they have “old fashioned values about family and marriage,” though blacks are more likely than whites (28% vs. 14%) to say that “women should return to their traditional roles in society.”
Education and Income Gaps
As has consistently been the case over the last quarter century, there are clear values divides by socioeconomic status. Apart from differences in financial security, some of the largest education and income gaps concern social issues and religiosity: Just 39% of college graduates believe we will all be called before God at the Judgment Day to answer for our sins, compared with 60% who did not finish bachelors’ degrees and 65% of those who never attended college. Low- and high-income people differ by similar degrees. These divides have been consistent over the past 25 years.
Large income and education divides also have been steady when it comes to questions of personal efficacy: Nearly half of those in the bottom two income quartiles say “hard work offers little guarantee of success,” compared with just 23% of those in the top income quartile. Those with no more than a high school diploma are also far more likely to believe this (45%) than are those with a college degree (25%). Those in lower income and education categories also are the most likely to say that “the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer.”
Income and education gaps are not always parallel. Lower-income Americans always have been more supportive of the social safety net than those in higher income brackets. There is not as much variation across educational lines. In fact, in the current survey, college graduates and those who never attended college have that same view on whether the government has a responsibility to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves. | <urn:uuid:0b0ba5e6-a802-4c8c-91bf-af0bc269fb5d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.people-press.org/2012/06/04/section-2-demographics-and-american-values/?src=rss_main | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966511 | 2,114 | 2.859375 | 3 |
National Research Experience for Undergraduates Program
Funded by the National Science Foundation's Division of Mathematical Sciences and the National Security Agency
The Mathematical Association of America (MAA), through its Strengthening Underrepresented Minority Mathematics Achievement (SUMMA) program, supports the participation of mathematics undergraduates from underrepresented groups in focused and challenging research experiences to increase their interest in advanced degrees and careers in mathematics.
The MAA SUMMA program builds on a history of assisting faculty to provide mathematical experiences for underrepresented groups through summer research programs for undergraduate mathematics majors and enrichment programs for pre-college students. NREUP is structured both to increase undergraduate completion rates and encourage more students to pursue graduate study by exposing them to research experiences after they complete their sophomore year. NREUP is designed to reach minority students at a critical point in their career path – midway through their undergraduate programs – through an undergraduate professor with whom they have a strong connection. At this point in their studies, students have a strong background in calculus and a course such as linear algebra or differential equations with some degree of exposure to the proof-based mathematics needed prior to undertaking a research project.
The program reaches students at the transition point between lower division and upper division studies. As course work becomes more abstract and students are required to work independently, many promising students are not able to adjust to the demands of a major in mathematics. Providing mentoring in a challenging summer program will support students as they cross this juncture. NREUP provides key components to encourage students to pursue graduate studies and careers in mathematics – enriching and rewarding mathematical experiences, mentoring by active researchers, and both intellectual and social networking with peers.
In 2003, NREUP projects were supported at three different institutions. Since then, the program has grown to support projects at approximately eight different institutions each year.
MAA Programs & Services | <urn:uuid:31a06f12-e24c-48f2-99c8-46ea3281706d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.maa.org/nreup/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946941 | 380 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Find a child care facility
Search for a child care facility in a directory of licensed and license-exempt providers in Missouri.
Child care facility types
Learn about the different types of licensed child care facilities in Missouri and how they differ from license-exempt facilities.
File a complaint against a provider
If you suspect child abuse, neglect or exploitation at a child care facility, contact the Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline at 1-800-392-3738. You may also file a complaint online or by mail.
Additonal information for parents about child care in Missouri is available from the Department of Health & Senior Services.
Information for child care providers
Depending on the number of children you will provide care for, you may need a license to be a child care provider in Missouri. Learn if you need a license and how to apply.
Early Education Programs
Parents as Teachers
Parents as Teachers began in Missouri to help educate first-time parents of newborns about child rearing. It then expanded to all 50 states and seven other countries. Learn how to get training from education professionals on the best practices for raising your child. Contact your local school district to participate.
Head Start is a national program that promotes school readiness by enhancing the social and cognitive development of children through the provision of educational, health, nutritional, social and other services to enrolled children and families. Visit a Head Start Center.
First Steps is Missouri’s Early Intervention system for infants and toddlers, birth to age 3 who have delayed development or diagnosed conditions that are associated with developmental disabilities. | <urn:uuid:cf2f9905-7819-492d-86cc-0da88356005e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mo.gov/education/pre-k-and-child-care/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933438 | 320 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Save the Date!
November 3-4, 2011 with optional field trip on November 5
Hosted by Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
Caretakers of public gardens are, in a sense, historians. Whether in a brand new or ancient garden, the decisions we make imprint upon the fabric of the garden, and are written in its history. As stewards we do our best to plan for appropriate, economical, and successful restorations of our gardens. But what happens once the shovels hit the soil? How do we insure the result lives up to our expectations?
If you’re on the ground making day-to-day decisions or an administrator trying to figure out the bigger picture, this symposium will provide you contact with the tools and resources you need to make informed decisions, develop a game plan, and then put those principles into practice. Held at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, a National Historic Landmark in Miami with one of the best Italianate gardens in the United States, you’ll get to see this firsthand in a historic garden that is putting its principles into practice—the first phase of its $50 million restoration!
If you know of a professional development opportunity and would like to share with the section, please email email@example.com with the organization, location & dates of educational opportunity and ay registration/contact information. | <urn:uuid:509a7bd9-a78b-4fc6-8b4a-da4febfe29b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.publicgardens.org/content/historic-landscapes-professional-development | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924236 | 279 | 2.328125 | 2 |
F’ville Council to decide on limits to waste transfer station locations
The Fayetteville City Council last week heard the first reading of a proposed amendment to the Waste Transfer Station Ordinance that would include locating waste transfer stations in districts zoned for heavy industry.
Senior Planner Linwood Robinson said the amendment would help ensure that waste transfer stations are specifically addressed, adequately approved for operation and placed in the appropriate zoning classification.
Robinson said the Heavy Industrial zoning district (M-2) provides for the permitting of sanitary landfills and similar uses by way of a special exception. But a review of the issue noted that there are no specific provisions in the city’s zoning code to allow for the permitted use and placement of waste transfer stations within the M-2 zoning category, Robinson said.
A transfer station is the intermediate stop for your household garbage on its way to a landfill. Usually it is a transfer trailer-sized compactor that takes garbage from the residential trucks and compacts it into a trailer for hauling to an out of county landfill.
“Staff feels that the M-2 zoning district is the appropriate zoning classification for such facilities and that permission should be granted by special exception,” Robinson said.
Also at the meeting, the council approved a $24,332 contract for resurfacing a .52-mile portion of Pinevale Court and Robinson Drive. The work is being funded through the Georgia Dept. of Transportation’s Local Assistance Road Program (LARP) program. | <urn:uuid:6f8b0411-208f-4b50-8fe6-2bee4ff33d4b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thecitizennews.com/articles/09-21-2010/f%E2%80%99ville-council-decide-limits-waste-transfer-station-locations | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934665 | 309 | 1.617188 | 2 |
The ecofriendly fruit powered clock will bring back memories of high school science lab where potato experiments were designed to created an electrochemical battery that would power a clock.
This fruit clock works on the same premise as the potato clock and includes not only a clock, but also a digital calendar into it’s design.
Mom always said that fresh fruits and vegetables were a source of energy for the body. Now see the natural electrical potential of fruit as it powers a clock. Cleanup is supposed to be easy and consists of just a wipe down.
You can buy this clock kit through Urban Outfitters for $9.99, fruit not included. | <urn:uuid:6709f471-f6e6-4144-b04a-1120cbfe2a43> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.coated.com/fun-gadgets-fruit-powered-clock/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98064 | 133 | 1.898438 | 2 |
Federal Funding in the States
States have received a significant influx in federal dollars since the Great Recession began, primarily from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. As a result, state spending from federal funding also has increased significantly since the 2008 fiscal year, hitting 35 percent in fiscal year 2010. The amount of federal funding received per capita varies across states due to a number of factors. State spending from federal sources likely will decrease as Recovery Act dollars run out during the next few years, contributing to fiscal stress in statehouses across the country.
- According to the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO), state spending from federal funds increased significantly in the 2009 and 2010 fiscal years, primarily due to the Recovery Act, also known as the stimulus.
- From fiscal years 2000 to 2007, the annual mean percentage of state spending from federal funds was 27 percent.
- In the 2008 fiscal year, just before stimulus funds started flowing, federal funds represented 26.3 percent of state spending. By the 2009 fiscal year, federal funds accounted for 29.5 percent of total state expenditures. An estimated 34.7 percent of state spending came from federal funds in 2010.
- According to NASBO, states spent $41.2 billion in federal stimulus funds in the 2009 fiscal year and an estimated $114.2 billion in fiscal 2010. Those funds helped cushion states from having to make even more drastic spending cuts than they did, especially in the areas of health care and education.
- The Congressional Budget Office reports that stimulus spending lowered the unemployment rate by as much as 1.6 percent and increased the number of people employed by nearly 3 million.
- Federal domestic spending hit $3.3 trillion in the 2010 fiscal year, an increase of 2.4 percent over the previous year and equal to $10,612 per person living in the U.S.
- From fiscal years 2001 to 2008, inflation-adjusted per capita federal expenditures increased regularly each year, with growth rates ranging from approximately 1 to 5 percent.
- From fiscal years 2008 to 2009, that growth rate jumped to 14 percent, in large part due to the Recovery Act and the effects of the Great Recession.
- In 2010, per capita federal spending ranged from a low of $7,321 in Nevada and $8,367 in Minnesota to a high of $17,762 in Alaska and $17,008 in Virginia. Federal spending per capita in Puerto Rico was $5,668 in 2010.
- In total dollars, Wyoming ($6.2 billion) and Vermont ($7.4 billion) received the fewest dollars and Texas ($225.7 billion) and California ($338 billion) received the most.
- Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security made up 47.4 percent of the total domestic federal funding, or about $1.6 trillion in 2010. Social Security made up $743.2 billion of that total.
- The primary categories for federal domestic spending are direct payments for individuals for retirement and disability (28 percent), other direct payments (25 percent), expenditures or obligations for grants (21 percent), procurement contracts (16 percent), and salaries and wages (10 percent).
- Twenty-eight percent ($915 billion) of federal funding across all states fell into the category of direct payments to individuals for retirement and disability, more than three-quarters of which (81 percent) consists of Social Security payments ($743 billion). Federal retirement and disability benefits ($110 billion) and veterans’ benefits ($40 billion) rounded out the rest of the category.
- On a per capita basis, Utah ($2,180) and Alaska ($2,240) received the smallest payments in this category, while Alabama ($3,761) and West Virginia ($4,177) received the largest.
- Other direct payment categories made up 25 percent ($819 billion) of spending and included Medicare benefits ($512 billion), unemployment benefits ($68 billion), Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program—or SNAP—($65 billion) and student financial assistance ($50 billion).
- On a per capita basis, Alaska ($1,464) and Nevada ($1,657) received the smallest payments in this category, while Kentucky ($3,742) and Connecticut ($6,623) received the largest.
- The federal government also paid out $683 billion in grants to state agencies, more than half of which (60 percent) went to state departments of health and human services ($407.4 billion), which in turn administer one of every state’s biggest expenditure programs: Medicaid. The departments of transportation ($64.3 billion) and education ($58.4 billion) also took up a large chunk of this category.
- On a per capita basis, Nevada ($1,370) and Florida ($1,492) received the smallest payments in this category, while Wyoming ($3,999) and Alaska ($4,878) received the largest.
- Expenditures on procurement contracts made up 15.8 percent of federal domestic spending, or $516.7 billion. Two-thirds of that total ($331.2 billion) came from contracts awarded by the Department of Defense.
- On a per capita basis, Delaware ($404) and Oregon ($534) received the smallest payments in this category, while Virginia ($7,291), Maryland ($4,593), New Mexico ($3,641) and Alaska ($3,469), received the largest.
- Salaries and wages for federal employees made up about one-tenth of spending, or $343 billion. More than half (53.1 percent) of spending in this category went to Department of Defense payrolls ($182 billion), while 29.3 per¬cent went to federal civilian payrolls ($101 billion) and 17.6 percent to the U.S. Postal Service ($60 billion).
- On a per capita basis, Michigan ($485) and Wisconsin ($514) received the smallest payments in this category, while Hawaii ($5,806), Alaska ($5,709), Virginia ($2,638) and Maryland ($2,605) received the largest.
- According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, states are reporting shortfalls for the 2012 fiscal year that total $103 billion, primarily due to declining federal assistance and a weak recovery in revenues. The 2012 fiscal year likely will prove to be nearly as difficult a budget year as 2010, when state budget shortfalls reached their peak, and a more difficult budget year than 2011.
- The impact of big shortfalls and declining federal assistance is clear: State leaders already have made some of deepest spending cuts in their 2012 budgets since the recession began.
- While federal assistance from the stimulus is dwindling, it isn’t entirely exhausted. Although nearly 85 percent of stimulus dollars have been paid out and almost all of the remaining funds have been obligated for projects, the 15 percent left to be spent adds up to a hefty sum: $66 billion as of Nov. 4, 2011. States likely will be placing more scrutiny on how they can utilize these limited remaining funds, making it a hot topic during oversight hearings in many state capitols in 2012.
1 Based on analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Consolidated Federal Funds Report, http://www.census.gov/govs/cffr/ and The Council of State Governments, The Book of the States, Tables 2.6-2.11, http://knowledgecenter.csg.org/kc/view-content-type/1219
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Dr. Mike Moreno, author of The 17 Day Diet: A Doctor’s Plan Designed for Rapid Results, shares easy ways to relieve PMS-related fluid retention.
- Stop eating high-sodium stuff like canned soups, fast food and cured meats. Sodium causes your body to hang on to water.
- Drink more water. Believe it or not, extra fluids will help to flush out the sodium -- and the bloat.
- Avoid simple carbs (think white bread, white pasta, chips, etc.). Carbs get broken down into glucose and stored in the body as glycogen for energy. In order to be stored, a water molecule must attach to that glucose. The more stored carbs you have, the heavier you’ll feel.
- Opt for high-fiber carbs like vegetables and fruit. The longer food sits in your intestines, the more likely you are to retain water.
- Exercise. It sweats out excess water and speeds up digestion. When you exercise, you stimulate the muscles that help move food and water through your system faster. Fight constipation by walking for at least 17 minutes each day to keep food moving through your digestive tract. Working up a sweat also releases fluids. In addition, research shows that moderate exercise soothes cramps, headaches and lower-back pain, improves sleep and reduces fatigue. And exercise boosts endorphin levels, which helps improve your mood.
- Take calcium and magnesium, as I mentioned above. Both compete with sodium for absorption into your body, so if you take in adequate amounts of either, your body is forced to flush out the salt that wasn’t effectively absorbed.
- Be wary of diuretics. When you stop taking a diuretic, your body retains more water, making you bloat for one to two weeks afterward. This can lead to a physical dependency so that your body needs the drug to rid itself of the excess fluid instead of doing it naturally.
- Shun sodas. I just cannot overstate this recommendation. The caffeine in sodas dehydrates you, and phosphorous, a common soda additive, can inflame your intestinal wall, making you feel even puffier.
- Discuss the appropriateness of birth control pills with your physician. Birth control pills may stabilize your level of progesterone, a bloat-inducing hormone.
- Boost your B6. Many PMS symptoms, including water retention, are triggered by a defect in your body’s metabolism of vitamin B6. Take 50 to 100 milligrams of B6 daily to see if it helps.
- Stop the junk. Reduce your intake of foods that are difficult to digest, such as sugary, fatty and fried fare, which can sit in your gut, causing constipation and distention.
- Enjoy water-flushing vegetables.
- To beat bloat, try a natural diuretic drink, such as a cup of chamomile or dandelion tea or a glass of noncarbonated water with lemon or lime.
- The artificial sweetener sorbitol, found in some sugarless gums and candies, can contribute to bloating, as can the consumption of alcohol, caffeine and even nicotine.
- Also avoid dairy products that contain lactose -- milk sugar -- if they seem to worsen your bloating symptoms.
- Up your protein the week before and during your period. Protein has a diuretic effect on the body.
- Take supplemental probiotics.
If the changes I’m recommending seem too daunting, try making just a few at a time. My patients tell me that eating more regularly, eliminating refined sugar and caffeine, plus exercising more, make the biggest difference. Or target your most bothersome symptoms: If your breasts really bother you, for example, try taking evening primrose oil or cutting out salt to see if you get relief.
Dr. Michael Rafael Moreno, a.k.a. "Dr. Mike," practices family medicine in San Diego, CA. and sits on the board of the San Diego Chapter of the American Academy of Family Physicians. His book, The 17 Day Diet Essentials, covers rapid-results weight loss in detail.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, POPSUGAR. | <urn:uuid:06f9585b-22f9-47a2-a9ec-42ffdca0a912> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://moms.popsugar.com/17-Bloat-Busters-27330787 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.905704 | 896 | 1.945313 | 2 |
Jr. Faculty Focus: Leann Kanda
Assistant professor Leann Kanda has been in the Department of Biology at IC since fall 2007. She received her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her research focus is on the movement ecology of mammals.
What do you enjoy most about Ithaca College students?
Engagement—particularly in the upperclassmen I have worked with who really care both about what they are doing in the classroom and how that relates to and can have an impact on the world.
Tell us about your experience at IC so far.
On the whole, I’ve had a very good IC experience. My department is filled with wonderful people who care so much about teaching, are amazing researchers, and are so supportive! (When I came to interview, I left wondering, “Is interviewing supposed to be this fun?”) The strong community extends to our relations with our students. Particularly with research and upper-level classes, I am really getting to know my students individually. The personal connection makes teaching both more effective and more rewarding. Just a few minutes ago, I had one of my students come seek me out just to say goodbye for the summer!
What is your teaching philosophy and how do you bring it into the classroom?
I see the world as a vast intertwined network—if you tug a little on one strand, you’ll find it causes vibrations throughout the rest. I love to show students how humans, our society, and our history fit into the larger natural world. I try to work through concrete examples—how a parasitic fungus led to witch trials or why dams on rivers cause so much disruption to salmon populations. Especially in field classes, I try to couple the joy of discovery with a disciplined scientific framework.
Tell us about a research project you are working on or have worked on in the past with students.
In the summer, we track muskrat in the field to see if the way juveniles explore their environment correlates to how they disperse to their own breeding ranges. This year we are also going to try to track the muskrat’s predator, the mink, to look at the influence each has on the behavior of the other. I also have a captive dwarf hamster colony in which we are examining individual personalities and their heritability. I’m really a field person, but the hamsters are taking over my life.
Originally published in KnowLedges, Volume 10, Number 1, Summer 2009: Jr. Faculty Focus: Leann Kanda. | <urn:uuid:7444c8bb-891d-4803-98e2-44a1b54b711d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ithaca.edu/hs/depts/biology/news/jr.-faculty-focus:-leann-kanda-7917/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963525 | 523 | 1.53125 | 2 |
A Bridge Over Troubled Water
The Hoover Dam at 75, the Hoover Dam Bypass at 0.
What is it about autumn and the dedication of major engineering projects in the American Southwest? Seventy-five years ago, on September 30, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt traveled to the Colorado River just south of Las Vegas to dedicate the Boulder Dam, better known as the Hoover Dam. On October 16, 2010, dignitaries and public spectators will gather 1,500 feet downstream to dedicate the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, better known as the Hoover Dam Bypass.
- Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century by Michael Hiltzik. 512 pages. Free Press. $30.
If you’ve never been to the Hoover Dam, you probably don’t understand why it needs to be bypassed. When I visited this summer, I was driving from the Grand Canyon and asked a park ranger there how long the trip would take. “You’re driving to the dam? On a Sunday?” he asked. “You’re dead meat. You’ll be lucky if you even see the dam.”
I did see it, but traffic was indeed a nightmare. At the dam, Highway 93 — the most direct route between Phoenix and Las Vegas, and a part of the National Highway System’s CANAMEX Corridor, which spans the West from Mexico to Canada — descends both the Arizona and Nevada sides of the Black Canyon with hairpin turns. All traffic then passes directly over the dam in just two lanes. Truck inspections on either side of the canyon, cars’ slowing for pictures on top of the dam, and tourists’ crossing back and forth across the road create a level of gridlock you don’t often get in a major city, let alone the middle of the desert.
The bypass will change all that. It is an impressive structure, to be sure. At 900 feet high, it towers over the Hoover Dam. Visitors on the site now look down and up; the dam, bridge, and electric transmission towers that climb out and over the rim work together to establish the entire canyon as a landscape of modernity. With an arch span of 1,060 feet and a total length of 1,900 feet, the new structure is the longest concrete arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere, according to the Federal Highway Administration. “It’s an engineering marvel,” then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters told the Las Vegas Review-Journal last year.
But when it comes to epic public works projects, the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge is no Hoover Dam. The dam was built for epic purposes. It was meant to end the deadly flooding of the Colorado River, which threatened population and economic growth downstream; it would provide a steady supply of water to California’s agriculturally rich Imperial Valley and numerous Southwestern cities and towns; it would generate electricity to pay off its own construction costs. The O’Callaghan-Tillman Bridge may give some truckers a smoother ride. But Hoover Dam gave us Los Angeles and Las Vegas and iceberg lettuce in winter.
The nature of the dam alone makes it a more dramatic structure. A dam stops. It contains. It dominates. Roosevelt spoke of it as such at Hoover Dam’s dedication. “The mighty waters of the Colorado were running unused to the sea,” he said. “Today we translate them into a great national possession.”
Of course the age of thinking of nature as possessable — or at least of presidents publicly speaking of it as such — has fallen out of fashion. Which is why speakers at the Bypass dedication are unlikely to talk of the bridge as conquering the canyon, and instead will focus on the great cooperation of completely unromantic government agencies including the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Arizona Department of Transportation, the Nevada Department of Transportation, and the Western Area Power Administration. This isn’t totally incongruous with the nature of the structure being dedicated. A bridge strikes one as more conciliatory than a dam. It brings things together. It connects. It feels like the engineering equivalent of a compromise.
Such an impressionistic contrast between the two structures only heightens the drama of Hoover Dam. But even without the bridge, the dam has become an increasingly dramatic place. This summer saw the release of Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century by Michael A. Hiltzik. Hoover Dam, it turns out, has a more complicated history than the Bureau of Reclamation folks reveal on their tours.
Hiltzik appreciates the dam as an engineering wonder. Construction involved novel problem-solving, such as how to cool its concrete, which gives off heat as it hardens. Built as a single mass, the dam would have needed 100 years to cool; it was instead built as 30,000 blocks in 230 columns with a interior network of cooling pipes. Building the dam required a mastery of logistics, including the establishment of a network of on-site plants, railroads, and cable systems to keep materials flowing and work continuing for 24 hours a day.
More broadly, Hiltzik credits Hoover Dam — the largest such project undertaken by the federal government to that point — with shaping not just the parched American Southwest, but an entire national mentality:
The United States became in that post-dam era a country very different from the United States that built it. It was transformed from a society that glorified individualism into one that cherished shared enterprise and communal social support. To be sure, that change was not all the making of the dam itself; Social Security, the Works Project Administration, and other New Deal programs forged in the crucible of the Depression played their essential role, as did the years of war. But the dam was the physical embodiment of the initial transformation, a remote regional construction project reconfigured into a symbol of national pride.
But such a transformation came at a cost. Ironically, a shift to the communal spirit embodied by the dam came at the expense of many individuals. Constructing a dam in a steep gorge in the middle of a desert is clearly dangerous work. But Hiltzik claims that the frenzied pace of work pushed by its builder — a consortium of several individual corporations that united for the project under the name Six Companies — made working conditions especially unsafe (the dam was completed two years ahead of schedule). He argues that the company hospital often attributed deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning to pneumonia to both avoid paying death benefits and to avoid inspection from the government, which would have required the company to ditch its gasoline-powered tunnel equipment for safer electric machines. Those who didn’t die faced the prospect of sudden drops in wages, or payment in the form of scrip that could only be used at company stores. Employees worked grueling schedules seven days a week, all year long, except on Christmas and the Fourth of July.
Adding to Hoover Dam’s image problem is its uncertain future. The New York Times reported last month that the water level in Lake Mead, behind the dam, is falling to historic lows as an 11-year drought continues. The government estimates that in October, the lake will hit its lowest level since 1937, when it was still rising. The problem is that the original water allocation among the seven states in the Colorado River basin — Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California — and Mexico was based on river flow during some of the basin’s wettest years. Lake Mead now releases more water each year than it takes in, a deficit that will grow should temperatures continue to rise, both increasing evaporation and reducing the upriver snows that supply much of the basin’s water. But rather than appearing simply not up for the job, Hoover Dam is increasingly looking like a culprit — spurring explosive growth across the region by making promises it couldn’t keep. “Hoover Dam made a new West,” Hiltzik writes, “but also confined it in a straightjacket.”
Dams in general have taken on a character of destruction, even when they provide the benefits of flood control, irrigation water, and electricity. This can take many forms. Damming of the Colorado River at multiple sites has tamed the river’s turbidity, reduced its silt content, and affected water temperature, harming several species of fish, including the Humpback chub. Dams along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest are referred to as “fish killers” for their impact on upriver salmon migration. China’s Three Gorges Dam required the relocation of more than one million people.
And yet for all the abuse of labor behind its construction, for all its unmet expectations, for all the destruction done by dams overall, I find it difficult not to romanticize Hoover Dam. I think this is in part because the dam sells itself very well. The modern aesthetic — from its intake towers and powerhouses to its artistic embellishments — suggest a more progressive hand behind the dam than Hiltzik’s history reveals. The dam also integrated tourism from the beginning. Its roadway top was designed to include public bathrooms; in the powerhouses, visitors can view the long row of generators from an overlook with marble floors inlaid with Native American-inspired designs. That people would want to look at Hoover Dam has always been a given; visitors flooded the area before it was even completed. The dam’s embrace of this fact gives it an enlightened air; it reinforces the idea that the dam is something worth seeing, an object worthy of pride. How many other infrastructure projects include tourism in their design?
Armed with this knowledge, I feel a bit guilty to be as smitten with the Hoover Dam as I am, especially when I see the more progressive Hoover Dam Bypass overhead. The Bypass represents more reasoned planning and methodical construction and reflects a less man-against-the-natural-world mentality. The dam is killing the Humpback chub, while the bypass route was chosen from several possibilities because it would have the least impact on peregrine falcons, desert bighorn sheep, and desert tortoises. The builders of Hoover Dam rushed worked and finished two years early; the builders of the Hoover Dam Bypass took their time and are coming in two years late. Hoover Dam was named for one man. The Hoover Dam Bypass spread the honor across two. Hoover Dam says, “Look at me!” The Hoover Dam Bypass includes a sidewalk that says, “Don’t look at me — look at Hoover Dam!”
The Bypass is the safer, more responsible achievement of the two. And if it has an image problem, that’s it. Hoover Dam feels dangerous; this makes it undeniably attractive. The brute physicality of the dam — its mass, its sheer face, the volume of water it’s holding back — and the setting’s harsh physicality — the crushing heat; the steep cliffs; the depth of the gorge; the treeless, red rocks — create a visceral experience not easily tempered by any of the dam’s past or present problems.
We live in a Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge world — and I like that world. But the Hoover Dam stirs a deep, fleeting desire to break away from that, to do what you want, when you want, and how you want, and to do it big. In a world of reasoned planning and methodical construction and cooperative attitudes, something as forceful as the Hoover Dam is always going to be sexy, even if it’s not always right. • 13 September 2010
Jesse Smith is managing editor of The Smart Set.
Article photo via s.yume / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Homepage photo via matze_ott / CC BY 2.0 | <urn:uuid:85e18625-cf92-49da-ba52-ca35b584270d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thesmartset.com/article/article09131001.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956847 | 2,490 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Albert Abraham Michelson
|Albert Abraham Michelson|
December 19, 1852|
Strzelno, Kingdom of Prussia
|Died||May 9, 1931
|Institutions||Case Western Reserve University
University of Chicago
|Alma mater||United States Naval Academy
University of Berlin
|Doctoral advisor||Hermann Helmholtz|
|Doctoral students||Robert Millikan|
|Known for||Speed of light
|Notable awards||Nobel Prize in Physics (1907)
Copley Medal (1907)
Henry Draper Medal (1916)
Albert Abraham Michelson (December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931) was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson–Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in sciences.
Michelson was born in Strzelno, Provinz Posen in the Kingdom of Prussia (now Poland) into a Jewish family. He moved to the US with his parents in 1855, at the age of two. He grew up in the mining towns of Murphy's Camp, California and Virginia City, Nevada, where his father was a merchant. Despite his family being Jewish by birth, his family was non-religious. Throughout Michelson's life, he was a lifelong agnostic. He spent his high school years in San Francisco in the home of his aunt, Henriette Levy (née Michelson), who was the mother of author Harriet Lane Levy.
President Ulysses S. Grant awarded Michelson a special appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1869. During his four years as a midshipman at the Academy, Michelson excelled in optics, heat, climatology and drawing. After graduating in 1873 and two years at sea, he returned to the Naval Academy in 1875 to become an instructor in physics and chemistry until 1879. In 1879, he was posted to the Nautical Almanac Office, Washington (part of the United States Naval Observatory), to work with Simon Newcomb. In the following year he obtained leave of absence to continue his studies in Europe. He visited the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, and the Collège de France and École Polytechnique in Paris.
In 1877, he married Margaret Hemingway, daughter of a wealthy New York stockbroker and lawyer. They had two sons and a daughter.
Michelson was fascinated with the sciences, and the problem of measuring the speed of light in particular. While at Annapolis, he conducted his first experiments of the speed of light, as part of a class demonstration in 1877. His Annapolis experiment was refined, and in 1879, he measured the speed of light in air to be 299,864±51 kilometres per second, and estimated the speed of light in vacuum as 299,940 km/s, or 186,380 mi/s. After two years of studies in Europe, he resigned from the Navy in 1881. In 1883 he accepted a position as professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio and concentrated on developing an improved interferometer. In 1887 he and Edward Morley carried out the famous Michelson–Morley experiment which seemed to rule out the existence of the aether. He later moved on to use astronomical interferometers in the measurement of stellar diameters and in measuring the separations of binary stars.
In 1889 Michelson became a professor at Clark University at Worcester, Massachusetts and in 1892 was appointed professor and the first head of the department of physics at the newly organized University of Chicago.
In 1899, he married Edna Stanton. They raised one son and three daughters.
In 1907, Michelson had the honor of being the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid". He also won the Copley Medal in 1907, the Henry Draper Medal in 1916 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1923. A crater on the Moon is named after him.
Michelson died in Pasadena, California at the age of 78. The University of Chicago Residence Halls remembered Michelson and his achievements by dedicating 'Michelson House' in his honor. Case Western Reserve has dedicated a Michelson House to him, and Michelson Hall (an academic building of science classrooms, laboratories and offices) at the United States Naval Academy also bears his name. Clark University named a theatre after him. Michelson Laboratory at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in Ridgecrest, California is named for him. There is a display in the publicly accessible area of the Lab which includes facsimiles of Michelson's Nobel Prize medal, the prize document, and examples of his diffraction gratings.
Speed of light
As early as 1877, while still serving as an officer in the United States Navy, Michelson started planning a refinement of the rotating-mirror method of Léon Foucault for measuring the speed of light, using improved optics and a longer baseline. He conducted some preliminary measurements using largely improvised equipment in 1878, about the same time that his work came to the attention of Simon Newcomb, director of the Nautical Almanac Office who was already advanced in planning his own study. Michelson published his result of 299,910±50 km/s in 1879 before joining Newcomb in Washington DC to assist with his measurements there. Thus began a long professional collaboration and friendship between the two.
Simon Newcomb, with his more adequately funded project, obtained a value of 299,860±30 km/s, just at the extreme edge of consistency with Michelson's. Michelson continued to "refine" his method and in 1883 published a measurement of 299,853±60 km/s, rather closer to that of his mentor.
Mount Wilson and Lookout Mountain
In 1906, a novel electrical method was used by E. B. Rosa and N. E. Dorsey of the National Bureau of Standards to obtain a value for the speed of light of 299,781±10 km/s. Though this result has subsequently been shown to be severely biased by the poor electrical standards in use at the time, it seems to have set a fashion for rather lower measured values.
From 1920, Michelson started planning a definitive measurement from the Mount Wilson Observatory, using a baseline to Lookout Mountain, a prominent bump on the south ridge of Mount San Antonio ("Old Baldy"), some 22 miles distant.
In 1922, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey began two years of painstaking measurement of the baseline using the recently available invar tapes. With the baseline length established in 1924, measurements were carried out over the next two years to obtain the published value of 299,796±4 km/s.
Famous as the measurement is, it was beset by problems, not least of which was the haze created by the smoke from forest fires which blurred the mirror image. It is also probable that the intensively detailed work of the geodetic survey, with an estimated error of less than one part in 1 million, was compromised by a shift in the baseline arising from the Santa Barbara earthquake of June 29, 1925, which was an estimated magnitude of 6.3 on the Richter scale.
The now-famous Michelson–Morley experiment also influenced the affirmation attempts of peer Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity and special relativity, using similar optical instrumentation. These instruments and related collaborations included the participation of fellow physicists Dayton Miller, Hendrik Lorentz, and Robert Shankland.
Michelson, Pease, and Pearson
The period after 1927 marked the advent of new measurements of the speed of light using novel electro-optic devices, all substantially lower than Michelson's 1926 value.
Michelson sought another measurement, but this time in an evacuated tube to avoid difficulties in interpreting the image owing to atmospheric effects. In 1930, he began a collaboration with Francis G. Pease and Fred Pearson to perform a measurement in a 1.6 km tube at Pasadena, California. Michelson died with only 36 of the 233 measurement series completed and the experiment was subsequently beset by geological instability and condensation problems before the result of 299,774±11 km/s, consistent with the prevailing electro-optic values, was published posthumously in 1935.
In 1887 he collaborated with colleague Edward Williams Morley of Western Reserve College, now part of Case Western Reserve University, in the Michelson–Morley experiment. Their experiment for the expected motion of the Earth relative to the aether, the hypothetical medium in which light was supposed to travel, resulted in a null result. Surprised, Michelson repeated the experiment with greater and greater precision over the next years, but continued to find no ability to measure the aether. The Michelson-Morley results were immensely influential in the physics community, leading Hendrik Lorentz to devise his now-famous Lorentz contraction equations as a means of explaining the null result.
There has been some historical controversy over whether Albert Einstein was aware of the Michelson-Morley results when he developed his theory of special relativity, which pronounced the aether to be "superfluous". Regardless of Einstein's specific knowledge, the experiment is today considered the canonical experiment in regards to showing the lack of a detectable aether.
From 1920 and into 1921 Michelson and Francis G. Pease became the first individuals to measure the diameter of a star other than the Sun. They used an astronomical interferometer at the Mount Wilson Observatory to measure the diameter of the super-giant star Betelgeuse. A periscope arrangement was used to obtain a densified pupil in the interferometer, a method later investigated in detail by Antoine Émile Henry Labeyrie for use in "Hypertelescopes". The measurement of stellar diameters and the separations of binary stars took up an increasing amount of Michelson's life after this.
A century later, the specific interferometer instrumentation design produced by Albert Michelson has become the principle means to conduct astronomical interferometry. The "Michelson Interferometer" design is found on modern operational observatories such as VLTI, CHARA – and the U.S. Navy's NPOI.
Michelson in popular culture
In an episode of the television series Bonanza (Look to the Stars, broadcast March 18, 1962), Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene) helps the 16-year-old Albert Abraham Michelson (portrayed by 25-year-old Douglas Lambert (1936–1986)) obtain an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, despite the opposition of the bigoted town schoolteacher (played by William Schallert). Bonanza was set in and around Virginia City, Nevada, where Michelson lived with his parents prior to leaving for the Naval Academy. In a voice-over at the end of the episode, Greene mentions Michelson's 1907 Nobel Prize.
New Beast Theater Works in collaboration with High Concept Laboratories produced a "semi-opera" about Michelson, his obsessive work style and its effect on his family life which ran from February 11 to February 26, 2011 in Chicago at The Building Stage. Michelson was portrayed by Jon Stutzman. The play was directed by Davaid Maral with music composed by Joshua Dumas.
Honors and awards
- 1888 - Rumford Prize
- 1903 - Matteucci Medal
- 1907 - Copley Medal
- 1907 - Nobel Prize in Physics
- 1912 - Elliott Cresson Medal
- 1916 - Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences
- 1923 - Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society
- 1923 - Franklin Medal
Michelson was a member of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
- Albert Abraham Michelson 1852-1931
- Naukowe, Łódzkie (2003). Bulletin de la Société des sciences et des lettres de Łódź: Série, Recherches sur les déformations, Volumes 39-42. Société des sciences et des lettres de Łódź. p. 162. "Michelson's biographers stress, that our hero was not conspicuous by religiousness. His father was a free-thinker and Michelson grew up in non-religious family and have no opportunity to acknowledge the believe of his forebears. He was agnostic through his whole life and only for the short period he was a member of the 21st lodge in Washington."
- John D. Barrow (2002). The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe. Random House Digital, Inc. p. 136. ISBN 9780375726095. "Morley was deeply religious. His original training had been in theology and he only turned to chemistry, a self-taught hobby, when he was unable to enter the ministry. Michelson, by contrast, was a religious agnostic."
- 1984; Dorothy Michelson Livingston, One Pass Productions, Cinema Guild. The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson. University of Chicago Press. p. 106. "On the religious question, Michelson disagreed with both these men. He had renounced any belief that moral issues were at stake in..."
- Levy, 920 O'Farrell Street, 47.
- Nimitz Library's Virtual Exhbits- LibExhibits
- Nineteenth century astronomy at the U.S. Naval Academy
- USNO - Our Command History — Naval Oceanography Portal
- James, I. (2009). Driven to Innovate: A Century of Jewish Mathematicians and Physicists p. 101. ISBN 978-1-906165-22-2. "In 1877, he married Margaret Hemingway, daughter of a wealthy New York stockbroker and lawyer. This marriage lasted twenty years and produced two sons and a daughter."
- Speed of light measurements history
- Optics News - Optics at the U.S. Naval Academy
- Michelson's 1879 determinations of the speed of light
- Facilities | Visual and Performing Arts | Departments | Clark University
- Garner, C. L., Captain (retired) (April 1949). "A Geodetic Measurement of Unusually High Accuracy". U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Journal (Coast and Geodetic Survey): 68–74. Retrieved August 13, 2009.
- Note that while Einstein's 1905 paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies appears to reference the experiment on first glance—"together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the 'light medium,' suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest"—it has been shown that Einstein was referring to a different category of experiments here.
- Holton, Gerald, "Einstein, Michelson, and the 'Crucial' Experiment", Isis, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Summer, 1969), pp. 133–197
- "Henry Draper Medal". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved February 19, 2011.
- Albert A. Michelson - Biography
- Livingston, D. M. (1973). The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson. ISBN 0-226-48711-3.
- Levy, Harriet Lane (1996). 920 O'Farrell Street. Berkeley: Heyday Books. ISBN 0-930588-91-6.
|Wikisource has original works written by or about:
|Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Albert Abraham Michelson|
- National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
- Michelson's Life and Works from the American Institute of Physics
- U.S. Naval Academy and The Navy
- USNA Guide to the Albert A. Michelson Collection, 1803–1989
- From USNA to Nobel: Albert A. Michelson's Life and Contributions
- Michelson House at the University of Chicago
- Michelson's Nobel Prize Biography
- Works by Albert Abraham Michelson at Project Gutenberg
- Experimental Determination of the Velocity of Light
- IMDB: Bonanza episode Look to the Stars
- Norman Maclean: "Billiards Is a Good Game": Gamesmanship and America’s First Nobel Prize Scientist; reprinted in Lapham's Quarterly
- The U.S. Naval Academy Observatory Programs and Times Gone By: A Tale of Two Domes
- NAWS China Lake . Retrieved September 3, 2010.
- Nineteenth Century Astronomy at the U.S. Naval Academy | <urn:uuid:0fd01ce3-411e-4f57-b434-f6639272305f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Michelson | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938235 | 3,537 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Situated at 45 10 N, 15 30 E, Croatia sits near the head of the Adriatic Sea and forms a sideways horseshoe shape on the eastern banks. It stretches from the Istrian Peninisular in the north to Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast in the south.
The coastline is dramatic, with the hills and mountains reaching down to form deep gashes around which the road snakes its way south. To drive this route is breathtaking, as the sun glistens on sparkling seas which are dotted with a plethora of small uninhabited islets, and as the road dips in and out of the small gorges and valleys, small hawks and buzzards circle lazily overhead on the thermals. The many small bays are not sandy, but rocky with crystal clear seas, the water wonderfully warm in high summer.
Imagine yourself, at sunset, walking through the acacia and pine trees, being serenaded by the cicadas, enveloped in the warmth of the coming night.
Croatia is blessed with a Mediterranean climate along its coast, with hot, dry summers and cool winters, whilst the interior is continental with hot summers and snowy winters.
Being such a coastal destination, water sports feature highly with diving, sailing and fishing high on the visitor’s list of ‘things to do’.
Apart from the modern attractions of this beautiful country, Croatia offers an historic footprint which is well worth exploring in places as diverse as the Venetian Istrian Peninsular, the Roman town of Split, early 19th century Zagreb, the capital, Zadar, with its Italian influences, and last, but by no means least, the Medieval delights of Dubrovnik. | <urn:uuid:098359a0-4d4d-4821-8c72-758015b7f7a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sublimetravel.co.uk/destination/europe-70/croatia-48.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95072 | 361 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Located in a former mansion, Trinity High School is a handsome, historic red brick structure that educates 1300 students every year.
The school began as a private home constructed in the 1850s which became a military academy in 1867 and a high school in the 1920s. President Ulysses S. Grant often visited Trinity as a guest of the original owners. Four bricks from General Grant's first vault in New York support a marble plaque over the school's vestibule. Trinity's bell tower is a local landmark.
Today, it is a corner stone to the Trinity Area School District, which serves four communities in rural Washington County.
Facilities include an auditorium which seats over 1000 people where various events and programs are available to the public.
Varies; call for information.
Free, on-site parking is available. | <urn:uuid:fe2ec937-0144-46d7-acc2-c8b3f1e2a532> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://old.post-gazette.com/events/venueinfo.asp?id=2171 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975643 | 170 | 1.96875 | 2 |
For decades, American workers and their machines advanced in tandem. As companies invested in technology, more workers were needed to operate machines.
That relationship is now looking unsteady.
Since 1999, business investment in equipment and software has surged 33 percent while the total number of people employed by private firms has changed little.
The gap between man and machine widened even further after the 2008-09 recession, helping explain why the United States is struggling to bring down an unemployment rate stuck above 9 percent.
The revolution in information technologies is taking a deeper and deeper hold in the U.S. economy.
Throughout history, technology revolutions have paved the way to forms of employment: Britain's 19th century industrial revolution threw artisans out of work but eventually created mass employment in factories.
But a decade-long drought in jobs in the United States is raising questions whether there is a fundamental shift in the structure of the labor market.
"Labor and capital are out of sync," said Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. "It seems be a growing and strengthening trend... (and) suggests there is this longer-term structural change."
This is something I've commented on before, especially when talking about manufacturing employment. It's actually a very big issue going forward. | <urn:uuid:9f230d0d-ecd9-4d65-92af-cfdcafaf209b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bonddad.blogspot.com/2011/10/automation-issue.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951654 | 263 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Founded in 1802, DuPont puts science to work by creating sustainable solutions essential to a better, safer, healthier life for people everywhere. Operating in approximately 90 countries, DuPont offers a wide range of innovative products and services for markets including agriculture, nutrition, electronics, communications, safety and protection, home and construction, transportation and apparel.
What Makes Us Green:
The need for truly sustainable options for 21st century life remains one of the most critical challenges facing the global community. As a science company, DuPont has the experience and expertise to put our science to work in ways that can design in - at the early stages of product development - attributes that can deliver solutions that help protect or enhance human health, safety and the environment. We believe this is a direct route to a successful, profitable business that add value to our customers, their customers, consumers, and the planet.
Greenspiration Home Application
Challenge: The first challenge the Holder-Raines family faced when shopping for sustainable kitchen countertops for the Greenspiration Home was finding a product that could stand up to the rigors of a busy, frequently careless family. This meant finding a hard surface material that had superior stain and scratch resistance and was virtually maintenance-free.
The kitchen countertop layout was also challenging. It included a very deep corner piece that would most certainly have to be seamed in an obvious location. It was important that any adjoining slabs match up invisibly.
Finally, the homeowners very much wanted to avoid any building materials that were imported from overseas.
Solution: To meet the demands of this green-minded yet spill-prone family of four, Jon Orenstein of Carolina Custom Surfaces suggested the DuPont™ Zodiaq® Quartz Countertop Terra collection. This engineered countertop is made up of tiny quartz crystals and at least 25% post-consumer recycled material, including glass. The heterogeneous combination of materials gives the product the look of 100% natural stone but with superior performance characteristics. It resists stains and scratches better than any 100% natural stone material. And it’s made in North America!
Unlike granite countertops, DuPont™ Zodiaq® quartz surface never has to be sealed, so there are no foreseeable maintenance costs associated with the product. Comparable in price to higher end granite, it typically costs less in the long run because it doesn’t require any type of resurfacing.
The DuPont™ Zodiaq® Terra Collection comes in several neutral colors, which lend themselves to many different types of décor, including the traditional, yet somewhat rustic Greenspiration Home. For the kitchen the family chose the coffee-colored “Moroccan Morning” and opted for “Warm Taupe” in the master bathroom. Any seaming is virtually indiscernible, including the large corner piece in the kitchen.
The choice has proven an absolute homerun for the members of the Holder-Raines family, who are often all too tired at the end of the day to clean the kitchen, much less carefully wipe down the countertops. Dried spaghetti sauce and red wine droplets clean up just as easily in the morning. This, plus all the other perks, makes the Zodiaq® Terra Collection a true overachiever in the eyes of these green homeowners. | <urn:uuid:91e14732-81d5-45f5-91fd-cac8904d3ad4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.greenspirationhome.com/dupont/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945895 | 682 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Description - Located on the Monterey Peninsula in Pacific Grove, Asilomar (meaning "a refuge by the sea") State Beach and Conference Grounds offer breathtaking views of the cypress, surf and sand.
Copyright: California State Parks
Ocean view at Asilomar State Beach
- Located on the Monterey Peninsula in Pacific Grove, Asilomar (meaning "a refuge by the sea") State Beach and Conference Grounds offer breathtaking views of the cypress, surf and sand. The Center began in 1913 as a camp and conference site for the YWCA. It has been operated by the State of California since 1956. With buildings designed by the California architect Julia Morgan, the Asilomar Conference Center is a complex of meeting halls, dining facilities, and guest rooms situated on 105 secluded acres of scenic forest and sand dunes. A boardwalk across the dunes gives access to the beach and tide pool area. It is minutes from popular tourist destinations in Carmel and Monterey -- 17 Mile Drive and surrounded by neighboring Carmel, Cannery Row, Monterey Bay Aquarium and Fisherman's Wharf. Served by Monterey Peninsula Airport.
Recreation - Recreational facilities include a heated pool and social hall with ping pong, a grand piano and billiards.
Climate - Climate in the Central Coast varies greatly with elevation and the amount of coastal influence. Areas with more coastal influence experience moderate temperatures year round with fog likely from June through mid-August. Plan your coastal visit in the late summer or fall to ensure the best conditions for viewing the scenery. Also, occasional clear days between winter and spring storms are incomparable. Areas further inland experience greater temperature extremes, with relatively cooler winters and hot summers. Inland areas often receive frost on winter nights. As throughout most of California most of the precipitation comes in the winter months, with April through October normally very dry.
The site is on Asilomar Avenue in Pacific Grove.
From the North (Santa Cruz) -- Take State Highway 1 south through Monterey. Exit at Highway 68, and go West toward Pacific Grove to Sinex Avenue. (Highway 68 is called Forest Avenue) Turn left on Sinex and continue to the Asilomar entrance. There are signs to direct you.
From the East (Salinas/ Highway 101) Take Highway 68 West from Salinas, turn south on Highway 1, continue to the westbound exit, and proceed as above. | <urn:uuid:0127787e-809d-4e56-bd6f-c777166c3b8a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://areas.wildernet.com/pages/area.cfm?areaID=CASPASLIB&CU_ID=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941684 | 507 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Thanks for stopping by for our final article on Perl lists and hashes. This marks our twelfth issue on the subject (at least until we get to some more advanced techniques later on) and in it, we will look at a few of the functions for manipulating two-dimensional lists, how to create lists with more than two dimensions, and finally, how to make a hash full of lists, which is really quite a handy tool.
In our previous article we created a “database” of a bookshelf with some books on it. We then learned how to add rows to it, add a single column, and automate a process to add columns to every row. Here, we will continue working with the @Bookshelf “database.” Just so you don't have to go seeking out our previous article, here is the list of fields:
Number of Stars (how good the book was in a ranking of 1-5, with five being the best) | <urn:uuid:775f9219-74c4-44c3-81a3-a50f20316814> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Perl/Perl-Bon-Voyage-Lists-and-Hashes/ | 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 | 0.955297 | 200 | 2.4375 | 2 |
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Master, of the Legend of St. UrsulaDate of birth and death: active 1475 - 1500
Nationality: FlemishUploaded artworks: 19
The Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula was a Flemish painter. His name is derived from a polyptych depicting scenes from the life of Saint Ursula painted for the convent of the Black Sisters of Bruges; the city appears in the background of a number of the paintings, in which the belfry and tower of the Church of Notre-Dame. Consequently it is possible, given the stages of construction of the belfry, to determine that the altarpiece was painted either before 1483 or somewhere between 1493 and 1499. Today the panels have been dispersed to a number of museums around the world. A few other paintings have been attributed to the Master on the basis of style; these include a triptych of the Nativity in the Detroit Institute of Arts, as well as paintings in Brussels, Cherbourg, Toronto and Rochester. Among his pupils are believed to have been both Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling.
Master of the Legend of ST.Ursula is an emergency name, his real name is Casenbroot,Pieter (actieve 1426-1500) - Wikipedia
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Liz O'Connell for Frontier Scientists
James Cameron seamlessly merged the movie-making world with the science world in his talk at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) December annual conference in San Francisco. While movie goers suspend disbelief as they immerse themselves into this director’s blockbuster worlds in The Abyss, Alien, Avatar, and Titanic, skeptical scientists need the proof, the method, and evidence of ground breaking discoveries to be impressed.
Matching the deepest dive record in the Mariana trench as Cameron did was amazing but not ground-breaking. Nonetheless, the design of the “Vertical Torpedo”, the submarine which carried him to the 11 kilometer depth, is more innovative than its 1960 predecessor the Trieste.
The image below shows the difference between the Trieste and the Vertical Torpedo, dubbed Fat Man and Little Boy.
At AGU, Cameron showed an HD video documenting the manufacture of the Vertical Torpedo sub. His enclosure for the dive was a steel diving ball forged and molded around a global form, soldered together then nested and strapped into its spot on the Vertical Torpedo. The straps mitigated the 5 inch size differential the vehicle encountered when it encountered the pressure of the deep depths. The design of the torpedo illustrated in the break-apart model clarified most questions about power, ballast, and control. Cameron described the configuration in detail as the model sequentially animated to display the vehicle taking him to the record depth. Watch animation of the Vertical Torpedo's descent on National Geographic.
Cameron is brave, to be the guinea pig in his own adventure. Cameron dove solo while Jacques Piccard, a Swiss oceanographer in the Trieste, dived with US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh. Not to be foolish, Cameron tested his Vertical Torpedo in scientific steps, going deeper with each dive. Some of the innovations Cameron broke in: an ultra-small stereoscopic camera able to withstand the ocean depth pressure, structural engineering innovations such as patented syntactic foam, and LED lighting and hydraulics.
“And as with any really good edge cutting contrivance, things break,” Cameron said. And it happened. When he reached bottom, Cameron deployed the hydraulic sampling arm only to note some hydraulic oil floating in his view. Nonetheless, Cameron explored for three hours on the bottom. His three hour time on the seafloor beat the 20 minutes record previously set during the Trieste expedition's time on-the-bottom.
“Deep sea projects are so underfunded that whenever you go down, something new will be discovered,” said Cameron. So Cameron surrounded himself with scientists during preparations for the dive, during the dive and on stage during the presentation at the AGU conference to describe and show photographs of some physical structures and creatures he had encountered in the deep. Scientists Douglass Bartlett, Scripps marine microbiologist, Kevin Hand of the Jet Propulsion Lab, and Patricia Fryer, a marine geologists at the Hawai’i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, described the new findings under analysis. Those findings include bacterial mats fed from serpentine vents, new species of sea cucumbers and a lot of new microbes.
We have much more to learn. The deep ocean is awesome. Thanks Cameron! For a little fun, our readers can also take a look at Randall Monroe’s rendition of the deep. Monroe compares Cameron’s expedition with other deep notables in his creative Lakes and Oceans graphic.
Learn more about this amazing world at Frontier Scientists. | <urn:uuid:e196a517-24af-4b81-817a-5ae81a4d56f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://community.adn.com/node/163035 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931558 | 734 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Last weekend, Esau and I discovered a gray box snuggled up against the retaining wall in Riverside Park.
A round hole at either end led to a small chute and a dark interior.
High in the wall, just south of the box, is a raccoon den. I know it’s a raccoon den because, for the past year, I’ve been regularly watching raccoons as they emerge from this hole to watch the world go by before venturing out on evening raids into the park. I have on occasion seen as many as five or six raccoons pour out of the hole like bulky little clowns out of a clown car.
“Aha!” I thought gleefully, and my heart danced. “I am at long last seeing, with my own eyes, the traps used by the USDA to catch raccoons.” Need I remind you of my fascination with NYC’s dramatic outbreak of raccoon rabies as well as the USDA’s patient and effective program to vaccinate virtually every raccoon residing in Manhattan?
The vaccination program began last spring in Central Park, the epidemic’s epicenter, and branched out into Morningside Park and Riverside Park. (Click to read about the program and about Lee Humberg, the biologist in charge.) By April, over 230 raccoons had already been vaccinated and tagged for future identification.
The current round of trapping allows the USDA to vaccinate any raccoons that may have been missed as well as juveniles that were too young or vagrants that have wandered into the area. If a trapped animal appears unwell, it will be euthanized and tested for rabies. This humane and labor-intensive approach has led to a steep drop-off in the number of raccoon rabies cases with only three confirmed reports in the past three months. Compare that to March 2010 with a monthly high of 38 confirmed cases.
But this trap was targeting my raccoons, and I wanted to know more about it.
I longed for a closer look at the gray box, but was deterred by fencing put up by the Riverside Park Fund to protect their lovely plantings.
So Esau and I walked south on the path near the wall, keeping our four eyeballs peeled.
Sure enough, about four blocks south we found a second gray box, identical to the first, but on an unfenced slope. We drew near and read this intimidating warning
on the hinged and securely padlocked lid
Undeterred but cautious, we peered inside and saw that each round hole led to a separate (empty) wire mesh “Have-a-Heart” trap, baited with … marshmallows
The traps were gone within a couple of days. Whether any raccoons were caught – or were spotted roasting marshmallows and making s’mores – remains just another small NYC mystery. | <urn:uuid:8e65ba6e-997c-4efa-97f9-18f0ce05fe27> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://outwalkingthedog.wordpress.com/tag/raccoon-rabies-vaccination-program/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964913 | 610 | 2.046875 | 2 |
Amid the U.S. housing recovery, signs of another slowdown
As the residential-property market climbs back from the worst collapse since the Great Depression, homebuilders across the nation need more customers for the industry to enter a sustainable recovery and help drive U.S. economic growth.
Rob Gray moved his family of four from Massachusetts to Texas, where he bought a new five-bedroom, five-bath, two-fireplace home built by Toll Brothers.
After completing the deal on July 26 for the $572,000 brick-and-stone house in Allen, about 30 miles north of Dallas, Gray and his wife, Paula, plan to spend about $30,000 on new furniture, appliances, window treatments and an outdoor grill.
"We're not afraid to roll the dice, to take a leap of faith on the U.S. economy," said Gray, an insurance-company recruiter. "Things are on the rebound, and we need to get off the sidelines."
As the residential-property market climbs back from the worst collapse since the Great Depression, homebuilders across the nation need more customers like the Grays for the industry to enter a sustainable recovery and help drive U.S. economic growth.
While orders for new homes are rising at the fastest rate in two years and housing may be a net contributor to the economy's expansion for the first time since 2005, slowing job growth, tight housing inventories and a backlog of foreclosures threaten to put the brakes on a comeback.
"The gun is cocked with insane affordability," said Stan Humphries, chief economist at property-data provider Seattle-based Zillow.
"The conundrum is why more people aren't coming off the fence. Two things are keeping them on the sidelines: economic uncertainty, and the fear of falling home prices. And I think both of those have started to be reduced," Humphries said.
Recent data has been bullish. Builders broke ground on new single-family houses at an annual pace of 539,000 last month, up 4.7 percent from May and the fastest rate since April 2010, the Commerce Department said on July 18.
Confidence among U.S. homebuilders increased in July by the most in close to a decade, according to a National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo index.
In the three months ended June 30, orders swelled 32 percent at PulteGroup, the largest builder by revenue, and 25 percent at D.R. Horton, the biggest by volume. Wall Street has noticed; shares of U.S. homebuilders are up about 50 percent this year.
Housing affordability reached a record high in the first quarter, according to the National Association of Realtors, thanks to record-low interest rates.
The low rates helped persuade Vyonnie Matthews, a retail-store manager in Chicago, to stop renting and buy a home. She opted for a new Pulte house in Yorkville, a suburb south of the city, because the existing homes she looked at were small or in poor condition.
"We started looking to buy based on the interest rates going down," Matthews said. "People are out there, and they're saying, 'Let's do it.' "
The homeownership rate, which reached a record 69.2 percent in 2004, rose to 65.6 percent in the second quarter from a 15-year low in the prior three months, the Census Bureau said.
Still, the recovery faces significant headwinds.
Growth in residential fixed investment, the term economists use for spending on home construction and remodeling, slowed in the second quarter as the U.S. economic expansion decelerated, according to Commerce Department data.
Residential investment increased at a 9.7 percent annual rate, down from 21.5 percent in the first quarter, and contributed 0.22 percentage point to the gross domestic product's (GDP) annualized gain of 1.5 percent. That was down from a 0.43 percentage point contribution to the first quarter's 2 percent GDP growth.
Since 1947, residential fixed investment has added an average 0.1 percentage point to economic growth as the U.S. GDP grew an average of 3.25 percent annually, according to Daniel McCue, research manager at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
After each of five recessions from 1970 to 2001, residential fixed investment (RFI) added an average of 0.9 percentage point to an average growth rate of 4.6 percent, he said.
"The contribution of RFI was nine times normal, or 20 percent of GDP growth," McCue said. This time around, "I don't know if housing is set up to lead the economy back because of the fallout from past excesses."
Working through those past excesses is taking years.
Homeowners had $9.18 trillion in mortgage debt at the end of the first quarter, down 19 percent from a September 2007 peak of $11.3 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.
Home prices have fallen further than the debt. They're 34 percent below their July 2006 peak, according to an S&P/Case-Shiller index of prices in 20 metropolitan markets, including Seattle.
That's left owners of 11.4 million homes underwater, or owing more than their properties are worth, as of March 31, according to data company CoreLogic.
Good time to buy
Some buyers unburdened by debt are jumping into the housing market.
Jenn Zepernick, a property manager in Orlando, Fla., and her husband waited until they had paid off their student debt, felt secure in their jobs and could take advantage of low interest rates before they decided to leave their rental and buy a home.
The Zepernicks are paying about $285,000 for a newly built four-bedroom Pulte house near Orlando.
The family qualified for a loan insured by the Federal Housing Administration because they were considered first-time homebuyers even though Jenn Zepernick had owned a place for a few years in the early 2000s.
"It's always great to have a new home at a great mortgage rate — you can't beat that," she said. "With the market doing so well, we were like, 'This was a no-brainer.' "
Home sales picked up for a few months at a time in 2009, in 2010 and last year, spurred by falling unemployment and government incentives such as tax credits.
Then the revivals petered out as events including the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the March 2011 Japanese earthquake undermined enthusiasm.
This year may bring another repeat, after a weakening of U.S. consumer confidence and job growth in the second quarter. The unemployment rate held at 8.2 percent last month and hasn't been below 8 percent since January 2009.
"Housing demand appears to have hit a soft spot, coinciding with the slowdown in the wider economy," said Paul Diggle, a housing analyst with Capital Economics wrote in a report. "Nevertheless, the market for new homes is still among the tightest it has been in the previous six years and, on past form, is consistent with rising housing starts."
Along with weak demand, a lack of supply may be holding back sales.
There were 144,000 new homes available for sale in June, a 4.9-month supply, down from a peak of 12.2 months in January 2009.
The 2.39 million existing homes listed for sale in June — a 6.6-month supply — is limiting sales of existing properties and driving some buyers to purchase from homebuilders, according to Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors.
While it may be tempering sales, tight inventory is helping to push prices higher in some markets, including the Seattle area. The median price of single-family houses sold in June in King County was $380,000, up 10.1 percent from June 2011, the first double-digit increase in nearly five years.
Material from The Seattle Times archives is included in this report. | <urn:uuid:0307a67f-95ac-482f-83d9-6882e505e165> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://seattletimes.com/html/realestate/2018828854_realrecovery05.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969672 | 1,670 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Joe, Stacey, Cara, Jordyn and Drew
Carol and Steve Lash
Ellyn and Jon Davidson
Sarita & Danny Bagdade
Linda and Myles Lash
Mary and Jeff
Support our mission by creating your own fundraiser.
Research, Awareness, and Support for People Living with Spasmodic Dysphonia!
Spasmodic dysphonia, a focal form of dystonia, is a neurological voice disorder that involves "spasms" of the vocal cords causing interruptions of speech and affecting the voice quality. SD can cause the voice to break up or have a tight, strained, or strangled quality.
The NSDA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing medical research into the causes and treatments for SD, promoting physician and public awareness of the disorder, and providing support to those affected by SD through symposiums, support groups, and on-line resources.
NSDA is comprised of people with SD, healthcare professionals, volunteers, friends, and families. It is the only organization dedicated solely to the SD community. Together, we continue to grow through awareness, advocacy, and outreach; help to improve the lives of people dealing with SD; and work to support research in order to bring understanding to this disorder.
Want to get involved? It'd be amazing if you created a fundraiser for our charity and helped us raise money. Create a Fundraiser | <urn:uuid:1263b22c-f02f-464f-a83b-8ea013aa108b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.crowdrise.com/nationalspasmodicdys | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930073 | 291 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Aikido is more of an art than a sport: it solicits the mind more than the body. Those who want to teach this art have two ways at their disposal to do so: through words and through demonstration. But Aikido originally comes from Japan, and thus, its teaching here in the West is hindered by the language barrier. However, this issue, although significant, is not insurmountable. Indeed, words are actually not the best tools to use in this situation. Why is that? Because the "Master" has to convey his way of thinking to his "disciple." This transmission requires two intermediate between master and disciple: words and reason. If we examine closely the mechanism of transmission of thought through speech, we find that it requires a double operation. As a first step, it is for the teacher to choose the words that he considers most suitable to suggest the ideas that he wants to convey, and as a second step, he must organize these words into sentences so that their meaning can be deciphered by the disciple's reasoning.
(Original blog post may be found here | <urn:uuid:b444658f-bc00-40bb-8cca-7b70d765bcde> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aikiweb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22206 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978389 | 223 | 3.234375 | 3 |
Itsy Bitsy Spider: Listening and Repeating
- To listen to the words of a song and repeat them
- To match movements with words
- To build vocabulary
Picture cards that show a spider, sun, and rain
Read any book that includes a spider.
- Get children ready to use their fingers and arms.
- Show them how to make their moving fingers look like spider legs.
- Have them move their hands and fingers down like rain falling. Tell them to lift their arms high into the air like the sun.
- Ask children to watch and listen carefully. Sing the "Itsy-Bitsy Spider" song, using hand motions to act out the spider, rain, and sun.
- On the second round, invite children to join in. Give extra guidance to children who are having difficulty with the words or the hand motions.
- Repeat the song at least once more, with everyone joining in. Invite children to have fun using broad, dramatic movements.
- Help English Language Learners understand the vocabulary by showing or drawing pictures of a spider, a waterspout, rain, and the sun.
Teach children the song and motions to "Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Turn Around" or "I'm a Little Teapot." Do the finger plays often, until children know them by heart.
- Proficient - Child can sit calmly to listen to and watch the teacher, and can repeat the song and motions.
- In Process - Child has difficulty paying attention to the song and actions, but does so enough to attempt to sing and do the hand motions.
- Not Yet Ready - Child is inattentive and does not yet sing or follow the motions.
More on: Activities for Preschoolers
Excerpted from School Readiness Activity Cards. The Preschool Activity Cards provide engaging and purposeful experiences that develop language, literacy, and math skills for preschool children. | <urn:uuid:11dc2f83-4f8e-4696-8152-9b20375ab129> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://school.familyeducation.com/school-readiness/early-learning/30330.html | 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 | 0.924326 | 400 | 3.359375 | 3 |
All of our nation's veterans are honored on November 11, but it is important to recall that the origin of this observance was revulsion at the horrific casualties suffered by so many countries during World War I. Yes, a second and even more destructive conflict followed all too soon after the "war to end all wars," impelling a name change from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. And the rest of the 20th century was littered with insurgencies, terrorism, and a host of other violent ills -- most of which persist today, guaranteeing the steady production of new veterans, of which there are 22 million in the United States.
But despite the seemingly endless parade of wars waged and fresh conflicts looming just beyond the bloody horizon, World War I still stands out for its sheer horror. Over ten million soldiers died, and more than twice that number were wounded. This is a terrible enough toll. But what makes these casualties stand out even more is their proportion of the total numbers of troops mobilized. For example, France put about 7.5 million soldiers in the field; one in five died, and three out of four who lived were wounded.
The other major combatants on both sides suffered horribly as well: the Austro-Hungarian Empire's 6.5 million soldiers had a combined rate of killed and wounded of 74 percent. For Britain and Russia, the comparable figures totaled a bit over 50 percent, with German and Turkish losses slightly below one-half of all who served. The United States entered the conflict late, and so the overall casualty rate for the 4.3 million mobilized was but 8 percent. Even so, it is more than double the percentage of killed and wounded from the Iraq War, where total American casualties amounted to less than 4 percent of the one million who served.
Few conflicts in all of military history have seen victors and vanquished alike suffer such shocking losses as were incurred in World War I, so it is worth taking time to remember how this hecatomb came to pass. A great body of evidence suggests that this disaster was a product of poor generalship. Historian Alan Clark's magisterial The Donkeys conveys a sense of the incredible stubbornness of high commanders who continued, for years, to hurl massed waves of infantry against machine guns and rapid-firing artillery. All this went on while senior generals stayed far from the front. A British field commander, who went riding daily, even had soldiers spread sand along the country lane he followed, to make sure his horse didn't slip.
But intransigence in the face of failure was not the only source of the tragedy of the Great War; incomprehension was the true cause of disaster. Neither the generals nor those who built the weapons of the time, and especially not the political leaders who sent the troops into battle, understood the likely effects of the destructive capabilities they were unleashing. Many "battle studies" before the war suggested that machine guns would favor attacking forces trying to cover open ground over defenders firing from trenches. And most military experts thought that artillery's extended range and greater accuracy would flatten defenses and greatly ease the task of advancing forces. Wrong on both counts.
The only fellow who called things correctly was a Polish banker -- and sometime logistician to Tsar Nicholas II -- Ivan Bloch. Over a decade before the disaster hit, he predicted the grievous losses that would be suffered. He based his conclusions in large part on simple calculations of the range and rate of fire of weapons versus the pace of advance of infantry. The tsar took Bloch's warnings to heart and lobbied for an international peace movement. Indeed, the first great conference at The Hague was his doing. But nobody else listened, as Bloch's work was considered unduly alarmist and "unprofessional."
By recalling the roots of Veterans Day in this way, as a cautionary tale as well as a remembrance, we may end up honoring our service members in the best way possible -- by making sure that we send them out to fight backed by senior leaders and strategies that fully appreciate the implications of the technologies of war in our time.
In Vietnam we seem not to have done this, relying all too heavily on fixed artillery firebases and heli-borne "vertical envelopment" to engage elusive insurgent forces. But the terrain blunted the American technological advantage, and helicopters proved highly vulnerable to ground fire -- over 4,000 were brought down during the war. The result: a leap in casualties to 14 percent of the 2.6 million who served in Vietnam, more than double the rate from World War II and over triple the loss rate incurred in Iraq.
For all the debate and divisiveness surrounding the Iraq War, what comes through clearly is that it was the persistence and professionalism of American forces -- from the lowest ranks to the highest -- that finally won the battle on the ground there, and with relatively low losses. The record in Afghanistan is even better.
In Iraq, the key to improvement was to de-emphasize costly, larger-scale operations and focus instead on working from platoon-sized outposts located right in the towns in Anbar Province that were at the heart of the unrest. In Afghanistan, even as we draw down our forces to very low levels, we are increasing the numbers of small outposts in rural areas in which our remaining troops will are deployed.
In both campaigns our soldiers -- and their senior commanders -- have demonstrated admirable ability to learn and adapt. However the political endgames of these wars may eventually play out, all Americans can take pride of the performance of their armed forces in the field. Our military is truly mastering the tactical and technical challenges of conflict in this odd new era of seemingly perpetual warfare. Our service members are doing so in a way that can only make the soldier-ghosts of World War I gaze on in frank admiration. | <urn:uuid:6e39d97d-ad14-45d8-ac18-a97862ee1175> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/09/casualties_of_history?page=full | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972323 | 1,194 | 3.578125 | 4 |
Johns Hopkins, University of Baltimore Form New Center for Medicine and Law
The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Baltimore School of Law will jointly launch what is believed to be the nation’s first academic center for medicine and law that focuses on the health care provider.
The center will foster meaningful collaboration between the two professions, so that doctors will better understand the legal issues that affect their daily practice while lawyers will gain a greater appreciation for the real-world issues involved in the practice of medicine.
Frederick Levy, a Johns Hopkins emergency doctor, who also holds a law degree, will serve as the senior co-director of the new center. Gregory Dolin, also a physician and attorney, will serve as the other co-director. Dolin will join the faculty of the University of Baltimore School of Law this year.
Levy said that the center, which is expected to open in July, comes at an important crossroads, as doctors are increasingly faced with keeping up with court rulings and state and regulatory changes that affect their practice of medicine, while lawyers are generally unfamiliar with the complex challenges that doctors must deal with on a day-to-day basis.
“The new center’s goal will be to promote more understanding between the two professions. In today’s world, doctors and lawyers are used to facing each other in a courtroom,” says Levy, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins. “This center will be aimed at shifting some of the focus from the courtroom to the classroom.”
Phillip J. Closius, dean of the University of Baltimore School of Law, says that the school is honored to be collaborating with The Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to establish the center.
“Our institutions believe that health care issues can best be resolved through cooperative efforts by the medical and legal professions,” says Closius. “I am confident that the center will become a significant national voice in the health care law discussions that are certain to come.”
Levy said that the center will be unique in that while some existing health law centers focus on either law students or have a policy or public health concentration, the new center will highlight the health provider and how clinicians and attorneys interact with and understand one another.
Among the initiatives that the center expects to develop:
- graduate-level training and educational programs in legal medicine for attorneys and physicians
- a set of core competencies in law and medicine for health care providers
- the nation’s first peer-reviewed journal in law and medicine
- and health law policy and position statements.
In addition to research publications, and other national platforms, the center will promote and publicize its work via its website, which is expected to be up by July. Finally, the center will sponsor regional and national symposia and conferences on a variety of key health law topics such as:
- access to health care
- patient safety
- medical malpractice and tort reform
- health insurance reimbursement
- informed consent
- and disaster medicine | <urn:uuid:8291a805-67fc-4992-a4e8-9f432cbf0f94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/johns_hopkins_university_of_baltimore_form_new_center_for_medicine_and_law | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95657 | 628 | 1.945313 | 2 |
Organized in 1995, the Connecticut Gravestone Network's purpose is to educate the public on the importance of old graveyards and cemeteries in our history. It also promotes an appreciation for gravestone carving respected for the valuable art form that it is.
CGN was conceived through an effort of the Association for Gravestone Studies members and concerned individuals who wanted to bring to Connecticut an opportunity to unify and support those who are working to preserve a historical resource.
CGN members are encouraged to provide the organization with information about ongoing projects including preservation, recording, photographing, carver identification research, vandalism and any other cemetery related issues or news.
CGN's mission is to provide a resource for sharing information about Connecticut gravestones among individuals working in the gravestone study field, thereby saving time and avoiding duplication of efforts. It also supplies education to the general public on the importance of protecting our old graveyards using burial grounds as a teaching tool, as well as developing programs to do this work.
CGN has established coordination with the Connecticut State Library, the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office, and the Connecticut Office of the State Archaeologist with the mutual goal of documenting and preserving the state's historic burial grounds.
CGN advocates that documentation of old graveyards, whether past or present, should be filed in respective community historical societies and libraries, the State Library, and the Connecticut Historical Commission.
CGN also advocates that these records should be used along with other resources (such as the Hale Collection retained at the Connecticut State Library) to update inventories in the hopes of accounting for and locating lost markers. Now that computers are pervasive, we encourage the use of a database to facilitate better records throughout the state.
CGN also advocates low-tech maintenance and cleaning procedures, when called for, and would appreciate assistance to compile a list of monument dealers, conservators, restoration professionals, legal advisors, and other pertinent contacts with whom we may work. | <urn:uuid:50b8a880-b609-4f41-ba93-fb981730a1f7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ctgravestones.com/aboutCGN.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94327 | 398 | 2.109375 | 2 |
I want to add content from other blogs to my own (with the authors permission) to help build additional relevant content and support articles I've found useful that others have written.
I'm looking into how to do this responsibly - ie, by giving the original content author a boost and not competing against them for search traffic which should go to their site.
In order to keep my duplicate content out of search, and to hint to the search engines where the original content is to be found i've implemented:
<head> <meta name='robots' content='noindex, follow'> <link rel='canonical' href='http://www.originalblog.com/original-post.html' /> </head>
Additionally, to boost the original article and to let readers know where it came from i'll be adding something like this:
<div> Article originally written by <a href='http://www.authorswebsite.com'>Authors Name</a> and reproduced with permission.<br/> <a href='http://www.originalblog.com/original-post.html' target='new'> Read the original article here. </a> </div>
All that remains is a way to 'officially' credit the original author in the HTML for the search spiders to see. Can anyone tell me a way to do this possibly using rel="author" (as far as I can see thats only good for my own original content), or perhaps it doesn't matter given that the reproduced pages will be kept out of search engines? Also, have I overlooked anything in the approach? | <urn:uuid:9e75db2b-70ad-464a-a5df-d6737cb11c85> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/22534/duplicating-someones-content-legitimately-writing-html-to-support-that?answertab=active | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927506 | 329 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Harvard Public Health: Spring/Summer 2011
In this issue
AIDS at 30: Hard lessons and hope
Thirty years after the first official reports about HIV/AIDS, we look back on the human devastation and forward to a changed social landscape. The infection has killed more people so far than has any other discrete epidemic, except for the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 and the Black Death of the Middle Ages. It has destroyed individuals, families, and societies. Yet HIV/AIDS has also raised public health to new levels of science, conscience, and innovation. Review editor Madeline Drexler asked distinguished Harvard School of Public Health faculty and alumni at the forefront of research where the epidemic has taken us and where it is headed.
Also in this issue
Dean’s message: HIV/AIDS at 30: Turning the corner
HSPH researchers have made fundamental discoveries about HIV/AIDS and translated knowledge into action.
Quick updates about public health news from the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Harvard Public Health.
Can neighborhoods hurt our health?
Doctoral student Caitlin Eicher wants to understand how people’s perceptions of their local surroundings shape their health behaviors.
Health care with dignity
Alum Robert Taube helps homeless people build healthier lives—and self-esteem.
A cure for health professional education
The training of doctors and other health care professionals must change dramatically to meet 21st-century medical and public health needs.
Waging peace, saving lives
Renowned physician and Harvard School of Public Health Professor Emeritus Bernard Lown explains how defeating militarism could solve global health problems.
Why public health?
In this video series, Harvard School of Public Health students talk about why they chose to enter the field.
Global health aid during financial crises
If rich countries substantially cut their aid budgets in response to the recession, it would signal a new and potentially worrisome trend.
Coffee: The good news
Recent scientific studies suggest moderate coffee consumption may help reduce some disease risks. | <urn:uuid:3c52c671-ee7f-4b6a-9e88-c3804fc9a32e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/spring-2011/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935055 | 415 | 2.4375 | 2 |
In this exercise we shall calculate the radial distribution function (RDF) for ls, 2s and 2p orbitals, and then normalize the result so the maximum value of each RDF is one. The RDF is 4r2 times the square of the wavefunction. The wavefunctions themselves are given by:
We can divide the problem into a number of distinct steps:
Recall a copy of the above exercise and make suitable additions to include the 3p and 3d orbitals. | <urn:uuid:bd085f5e-43e9-43f0-8fc1-e689e01c5022> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/fortran/exercise-sub.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91087 | 103 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Bird and fish eggs are common food sources. For fish eggs, see caviar. Reptile eggs, particularly turtle eggs, are sometimes eaten as well. Chicken eggs are standard. Duck, goose, quail, and ostrich eggs are occasionally used as gourmet ingredients.
Eggs are frequently used to bind other ingredients together, trap air in the food, or create an emulsion. Depending on the intended product, only the egg yolk, only the egg white, or both may be used for preparing a food. In most recipes, a whole egg may be replaced with two egg whites to make a dish lower in fat and cholesterol.
The primary cooking techniques for eggs are:
Egg wash is also often used in baking and battering.
Eggs are a common food allergy.
The "USDA Large" egg is about the same as the "EU size M" egg. (both being the standard choice in the appropriate locations) So, for normal recipes, it is best to avoid specifying egg size. USDA eggs are specified as the minimum weight of a dozen. EU eggs are specified as per-egg weight ranges, plus a per-100 minimum.
EU weight standard SIZE PER EGG PER-100 MIN XL-very large 73 g and more 7.3 kg L-large 63 to 73 6.4 M-medium 53 to 63 5.4 S-small under 53 g 4.5
USDA weight standard CLASS MIN NET PER DOZEN CONVERTED TO MIN GRAMS/EGG Jumbo 30 ounces 70.9 Extra Large 27 ounces 63.8 Large 24 ounces 56.7 Medium 21 ounces 49.6 Small 18 ounces 42.5 Peewee 15 ounces 35.4
Eggs may also be pickled, hard-boiled and refrigerated, or eaten raw, though the latter is not recommended for people who may be susceptible to salmonella, such as the elderly, the infirm or pregnant women.
When eggs become rotten, the yolk will turn green and the egg will emit a sulphurous smell when broken. Although deemed offensive by most Western palates, fermented eggs are considered a delicacy by some in China, when prepared using a special method which includes letting them sit for three months to age.
It is possible to test an egg for freshness, prior to breaking. To do so, drop the egg into a cup of water. A fresh egg will sink to the bottom of the cup, while an older or rotten egg will float towards the surface due to the build up of gases within the shell.
Raw eggs may carry salmonella bacteria contamination, and should be avoided by those with weak or undeveloped immune systems. The bacteria will be killed in fully cooked eggs, which may be considered safe.
Eggs should always be broken into a cup one at a time and the white and yolk separated from each one, before adding to a mixture, and they should always be strained. Breaking the eggs this way allows for the bad ones to be easily rejected without spoiling the others and cause no waste.
For baking, frozen eggs can be used in place of fresh ones, if used as soon as thawed soft. Drop them into boiling water that has been removed from the heat source, letting them remain until the water is cold. They will be soft all through and beat up as well as fresh eggs do.
The membrane and shell of fresh chicken eggs cling to the egg white when it is hard-boiled, making it nearly impossible to de-shell/peel. This is a common problem with an easy solution. Simply add a couple tablespoons of salt to the water when you boil your eggs and your eggs will peel easily.
The traditional way to separate an egg (into yolk and white) is to crack the egg into two roughly equal parts, and pass the yolk from one half of the shell to the other, letting the white fall into a bowl below. A simpler way is to form a slack fist with one hand, crack the egg into it, and let the white run through your fingers into a bowl. It's a bit unnerving at first, but you soon develop a feel for the yolk. And if you are using the yolk for mayonnaise for example, the heat from your hand will helpfully warm it. Don't forget to wash your hands first!
Of the 71 billion eggs consumed in the United States in 2000, more than 30 percent were in the form of egg products (eggs removed from their shells). Liquid, frozen, and dried egg products are widely used by the foodservice industry and as ingredients in other foods, such as prepared mayonnaise and ice cream.
The term "egg products" refers to eggs that are removed from their shells for processing. The processing of egg products includes breaking eggs, filtering, mixing, stabilizing, blending, pasteurizing, cooling, freezing or drying, and packaging. Egg products include whole eggs, whites, yolks and various blends with or without non-egg ingredients that are processed and pasteurized and may be available in liquid, frozen, and dried forms.
Eggs are used in many recipes; the ones below feature eggs as a primary ingredient. For a full list of recipes using eggs, see egg recipes.
Some people can't eat eggs because of allergies or because of ethical convictions about egg production. People who have allergies are usually allergic only to the egg whites. Often people are only allergic as children and later grow out of it. People with ethical convictions against eggs include vegans and some vegetarians.
All these people must use egg substitutes. No egg substitutes are perfect replacements, and most are very application-specific, but in many recipes an acceptable finished product can be achieved. Common substitutes from scratch include corn starch (2T per egg) or soy flour (1T + 2T water). Many use ready-made substitutes such as Ener-G brand egg replacer, which is largely made from potato starch. Tofu plus seasonings are often used as a substitute for scrambled eggs. | <urn:uuid:99386f47-4f5b-48b0-948d-c4a938da05e9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thefullwiki.org/Cookbook:Eggs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948669 | 1,251 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race.
If it is conceivable, just 57 years after the identification of DNA's structure, for a Canadian poet to imprint his poetry into the DNA of a living organism then isn't it probable that an intelligent designer in the past would have had similar desires and perforce much greater abilities to accomplish the task?
Thus the evidence for intelligent design ought to be readily available in the graffiti of DNA. "Slartibartfast was here," or perhaps "3.14159265," or given what we know of economics, "All rights reserved, MegaCorp. Call for a free estimate."
The fact that we have not found such evidence reduces my belief in intelligent design, although I am not against more investigation. Indeed, one of the few arguments for god that I have ever given much credence to was the putative discovery of codes predicting future events in the Bible. A serious paper on this topic was published in Statistical Science in 1994. The paper was later convincingly rebutted but I still think it was the best evidence ever presented for an intelligent designer.
Addendum One: Interestingly one of the few people who thought as I did, although coming from a quite different direction, was Nobel prize winner Robert Aumann who early on supported the Bible codes research. However, after further research, supervised by Aumann, concluded that the paper could not be replicated Aumann returned to his prior view that the codes were improbable. It's unclear what, if anything, would further shift his prior.
Addendum Two: Steven Landsburg was here yesterday and at lunch suggested that perhaps the great designer's name was in fact 3.14159265… | <urn:uuid:37a5a7c9-7125-4d2c-8b73-adec5826240b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/03/the-slartibartfast-principle.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982301 | 397 | 2.65625 | 3 |
The Bubble of American Supremacy
As American and British troops prepare to invade Iraq, public opinion in these countries does not support war without U.N. authorization. The rest of the world is overwhelmingly opposed to war. Yet Saddam Hussein is regarded as a tyrant who needs to be disarmed, and the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441 which demanded that Saddam destroy his weapons of mass destruction. What caused this disconnect?
Iraq is the first instance when the Bush doctrine is being applied and it is provoking an allergic reaction. The Bush doctrine is built on two pillars: (1) The United States will do everything in its power to maintain its unquestioned military supremacy; and (2) the United States arrogates the right to preemptive action.
These pillars support two classes of sovereignty: American sovereignty, which takes precedence over international treaties and obligations, and the sovereignty of all other states. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. To be sure, the Bush doctrine is not stated starkly; it is buried in Orwellian doublespeak. The doublespeak is needed because the doctrine contradicts American values.
The Bush administration believes that international relations are relations of power; legality and legitimacy are mere decorations. This belief is not false, but it exaggerates one aspect of reality to the exclusion of others. The aspect it stresses is military power. But no empire could ever be held together by military power alone.
Yet that belief guides the Bush administration. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel shares the same belief and look where that has led. The idea that might is right cannot be reconciled with the idea of an open society. Hence the need for Orwellian doublespeak.
But nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. Those who make such claims are bound to be wrong at times, and so can enforce their claims only by coercion and repression. Bush makes no allowance for the possibility that he may be wrong, and he tolerates no dissent. If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists, he proclaims.
Of course, the presence of extremist views in the executive branch does not make America a totalitarian state. The principles of open society are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the institutions of American democracy are protected by the Constitution. There are checks and balances, and the President must obtain the support of the people. Nevertheless, the Bush doctrine could do untold harm before it is abandoned - as eventually it will be.
I see parallels between the Bush administration's pursuit of American supremacy and a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market. Bubbles do not arise out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but misconception distorts reality. Here, the dominant position of the United States is the reality, the pursuit of American supremacy the misconception.
For a while, reality reinforces the misconception, but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable. During the self-reinforcing phase, the misconception may be tested, and when a test is successful the misconception is reinforced. This widens the gap, leading to an eventual reversal. The later it comes, the more devastating the consequences.
There seems to be an inexorable quality about this, but a boom-bust process can be aborted at any stage. Most stock market booms are aborted long before the extremes reached by the recent bull market. The sooner this happens, the better. That is how I view the Bush administration's pursuit of American supremacy.
The Bush administration came into office with an ideology based on market fundamentalism and military supremacy. Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, it could not make much headway in implementing its ideology because it lacked a clear mandate and defined enemy. Terrorism provided the ideal enemy because it is invisible and never disappears. By declaring war on terrorism, President Bush gained the domestic mandate he lacked.
But his policies have already caused severe unintended consequences. The EU and NATO are divided. The United States is perceived as a giant bully throwing its weight around. Afghanistan has been liberated, but law and order has not been established beyond Kabul. Indeed, President Karzai must be protected by American bodyguards. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict festers.
Beyond Iraq an even more dangerous threat looms in North Korea - a crisis precipitated by President Bush in his eagerness to break with what he deemed to be Clinton's appeasement. Bush repudiated the "sunshine policy" introduced by President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea and included North Korea in the axis of evil.
Rapid victory in Iraq with little loss of life could bring about a dramatic change in the overall situation. Oil prices could fall, stock markets could celebrate, consumers could resume spending, and business could step up capital expenditures. America would end its dependency on Saudi oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable, and negotiations could start with North Korea without loss of face. That is what Bush counts on.
But military victory in Iraq is the easy part. It is what comes after that gives pause. In a boom-bust process, passing an early test tends to reinforce the misconception which gave rise to it. That is to be feared here.
It is not too late to prevent the boom-bust process from getting out of hand. The U.N. could accede to chief weapons inspector Hans Blix's request for several months to complete his inspections. America's military presence in the region could be reduced, but it could be beefed up again if Iraq balks. Invasion could take place at summer's end. This would be a victory for the U.N. and for the United States whose prodding made the Security Council act resolutely. That is what the French propose, but that is not what is going to happen. President Bush has practically declared war.
It is to be hoped that Iraq's conquest will be swift and relatively painless. Removing Saddam is a good thing; yet the way President Bush is going about it must be opposed. In the long run, an open society cannot survive unless the people who live in it believe in it.
George Soros is chairman of Soros Fund Management
and of the Open Society Institute. | <urn:uuid:0b05a41c-1407-46dd-8718-85f923c5713f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.redrat.net/BUSH_WAR/soros.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949343 | 1,277 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Hacking democracy: a simple, legal way to put the power in the hands of the people
Literally all the problems in the way we're governed right now are due to the people with decision making power being disconnected from their constituents. No one except those running the military industrial complex want our tax dollars to fund endless war. No one except the bankers want our tax dollars to bail them out.
Occupy wall street, anonymous hacking government emails, peaceful protestors yelling at passerbys on weekends, hundreds of thousands of people signing online petitions, anarchists dropping out of college to go live in the woods, these techniques have not proven at all effective in fixing the broken system. No one seems to want to get to the root of the problem, the power structure itself.
I propose an online direct democracy system that any registered voter can use (not only members of a particular political party) that would allow every citizen in a community to propose, edit, upvote, comment, and vote on legislation that impacts their community. But this system is toothless without the hacking democracy part of my plan.
A person (not a politician) runs for office under the platform that he will exclusively use this decentralized decision making process to make decisions. Imagine that instead of his own brain deciding whether or not to pass legislation, he agrees to submit to the whims of the people. He will still be proposing legislation through this system, but now everyone can. If he has good ideas, the citizens will vote for his legislation. If he doesn't, he can just execute the legislation his constituents come up with.
I have a million bulletproof counter-arguments for any criticism of direct democracy & I have the time to explain them to you, but the most important idea you need to consider is this: we need to incrementally improve the system. No one is going to come up with a plan tomorrow that fixes all of society's problems and instantaneous paradigm shifts aren't practical.
Check out my site: http://hackingdemocracy.wordpress.com | <urn:uuid:27f062d3-1fd9-401e-9907-dba20a0832dd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ted.com/conversations/16654/hacking_democracy_a_simple_l.html?c=611192 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950551 | 411 | 1.546875 | 2 |
During the past 100 years, more than 20 planes and 50 ships have met their doom in the Bermuda Triangle, and area of the Caribbean that boasts corners at Bermuda, Miami, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Also known as the "Devil's Triangle", this unexplained phenomena has provided an ample battlefield for a fierce controversy that has raged since the early 1960's.
First reported as an AP dispatch in 1950 by E.V.W. Jones as a side note to the many ships lost in the area, and reiterated two years later in an Fate magazine article, by George X. Sand. Books on UFOs in the late 50's also spoke of the triangle, suggesting that it was alien in nature. The term "Bermuda Triangle" was not coined until 1964, when it was brought to light as "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle", an article in Argosy magazine by Vincent H. Gaddis. Bermuda Triangle fever peaked in 1974, with a number of books (mostly just re-written versions of the older books) getting national press.
One of the most famous disappearances involves an entire team of five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger Torpedo Bombers, known as "Flight 19". On December 5th, 1945, Flight 19 departed from the U. S. Naval Air Station, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on a routine training mission. All five planes were well fueled with and in top running condition. Later that same date, all five planes were mysteriously lost at sea. Even the rescue plane with 13 crew members sent after them disappeared. No trace of the planes or of the crew members has ever been found. More detailed information regarding Flight 19 can be found on the by visiting "The Naval Historical Center Home-Page".
Here is a partial list of some other disappearances:
The matter of an unusual amount of disappearances in the area of the Bermuda Triangle is not really in doubt; the cause of the disappearances, however, is. Skeptics chalk the "mystery" up to the strong currents of the region, the gulf stream forcing a large portion of the Triangle's tides to flow directly north, throwing many would be sailors off course and out to sea. Also pointed out is the great discrepancy between Magnetic North, and the North Pole in the region (a fact noted by Columbus on his voyage).
But this explanation is not good enough for some. Surely there are many places in the world with dangerous currents and directional difficulties. Why is the Bermuda Triangle host to so many unfortunate accidents?
Aliens are one possible reason. Anti-gravity technology or other otherworldly energies may be sent off by either a downed UFO, as many of the early reports of the Triangle believed. Also, the Triangle may provide an undersea Earth base for aliens who value privacy, and send out energies to confuse vessels coming a little too close to home.
Others believe that the Bermuda Triangle Phenomena is caused by the Lost City of Atlantis, sunk thousands of feet below the water's surface. The advanced state of Atlantis at the time of it's submersion, relied on the power of energy crystals. It is possible that these crystals are still at the bottom of the ocean, in a somewhat altered state, sending out rays of energy that either confuses the instrumentation of vehicles, or disintegrates them all together.
Lastly, many believe the Bermuda Triangle to be a man-made energy field using Tesla based technologies. A VLF-Resonance transmitter (a technology many believe to be in use by the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD) would have an antipode directly in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. This hypothetical system would be capable of recharging speculated secret electric-powered submarine classes, and would definitely provide enough interference to scramble signals that airplanes and boats rely upon.
Generally given less and less credence by experts, it's hard to even get a scholar to mention the Triangle these days, for fear of it dirtying their name. But under the skin of so-called "accepted science" rumbles a scientific underground that will not be put down, logically, or otherwise. | <urn:uuid:85f93a1a-9605-43d7-b494-293f41560e9f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.qsl.net/w5www/bermuda.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958829 | 841 | 2.890625 | 3 |
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Reducing Underage Drinking: A Collective Responsibility
a boomerang effect. At the end of 2002, the message focus of the anti-drug campaign was redefined with additional attention to the negative consequences of marijuana use. The effectiveness of that new campaign focus is not yet known. There are published results, based on a much earlier period of the anti-drug campaign sponsored by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, which show positive effects (Block et al., 2002), and there is also evidence of success for a field experimental anti-drug campaign in Kentucky (Palmgreen et al., 2001). Thus, the appropriate conclusion is that the national ONDCP-sponsored campaign has not been successful, through mid-2002, not that the general approach is always unsuccessful.
If the anti-tobacco efforts are a positive model and the anti-drug efforts are not encouraging, wouldn’t it be possible to model a campaign against youth alcohol use on the first and avoid the mistakes of the second? This question requires a careful consideration of how the tobacco and drug campaigns were different from one another and how the behaviors they addressed are different from alcohol use.
The expenditures for advertising expenditures for the youth parts of both national campaigns were in the range of $60 to 100 million per year. But there are a number of important differences in the two campaigns. First, the styles of the two campaigns have been quite different. The anti-tobacco campaigns have focused on a variety of messages, but a particularly striking set focused on anti-industry arguments—the tobacco industry kills people and is trying to manipulate you. The anti-drug messages focused (through the end of 2002) on positive alternatives to drug use—“What’s your anti drug?”—and on the negative consequences of drug use.
Second, the American Legacy Foundation’s anti-tobacco advertising has adopted an edgy style, with youth apparently in control. The anti-drug advertising has had a more conventional style, with clear sponsorship by ONDCP and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
Third, the tobacco messages were launched in the context of broad media coverage of tobacco issues as Congress and the states’ attorneys general struggled with the tobacco industry toward legislation and the eventual master settlement of 1997. In contrast, anti-drug general media coverage was likely declining during the period of the national anti-drug campaign directed toward youth.
Fourth, there were important changes in the environment surrounding youth tobacco use that were complementary to campaign efforts, including price changes related to tax increases, increasing public concern with second-hand smoke, and increased restrictions on where smoking was permitted. There also was substantial change in public norms about the acceptability of smoking. While these other changes do not completely account for the reduction in tobacco use among youth, they had some direct effects | <urn:uuid:cdbb0404-a749-432d-91be-370608d0c911> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10729&page=190 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967992 | 620 | 2.421875 | 2 |
President Obama Meets with King Abdullah II of Jordan
Independent Films, Politics
President Obama and King Abdullah II of Jordan speak to the media after meeting in the Oval Office
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Transcripts / Production notes / Scripts
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
May 17, 2011
Remarks by President Obama and His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan After Bilateral Meeting
12:17 P.M. EDT
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, it is a great pleasure to welcome once again my good friend King Abdullah to the White House. The United States and Jordan have had a longstanding friendship, an extraordinary relationship of cooperation on a wide range of fronts. I have valued His Majesty’s advice on numerous occasions, and obviously this meeting was an opportunity for us to share our views on the extraordinary changes that are taking place throughout the Middle East, throughout the region.
We discussed the situation in Libya, and are grateful for the support of a wide range of Arab countries in our efforts to make sure that humanitarian assistance and humanitarian protection occurs inside of Libya. We discussed the rapid transformation that’s taking place in places like Egypt and Tunisia, and we both agreed that it’s critical that not only does political reform proceed, but economic reform accompanies those changes there, because so much of what’s taking place has to do with the aspirations of young people throughout the Arab world for their ability to determine their own fate, to get an education, to get a job, to be able to support a family. And that means some of the old structures that were inhibiting their ability to progress have to be reworked.
His Majesty discussed the reform efforts that are taking place inside Jordan as well, and we welcome the initiatives that His Majesty has already embarked on, and feel confident that, to the extent that he’s able to move these reforms forward, this will be good for the security and stability of Jordan, but also will be good for the economic prosperity of the people of Jordan. And so we’re very pleased to support him on that front.
Along those lines, one of the things we discussed is how the United States can continue to be supportive of these economic efforts that His Majesty has embarked on, and so I’m pleased to announce that we have mobilized several hundreds of millions of dollars through OPIC, and that will leverage ultimately about $1 billion for economic development inside of Jordan. In addition, because of the huge spike in commodity prices throughout the world, we are going to be providing 50,000 metric tons of wheat to Jordan. All of this will help to stabilize the cost of living and day-to-day situation of Jordanians and will provide a foundation so that these economic reforms can move forward and long-term development can take place. So we’re very happy to be partnering with His Majesty on that issue.
We also discussed the situation with respect to Israel and the Palestinian conflict. And we both share the view that despite the many changes, or perhaps because of the many changes that are taking place in the region, it’s more vital than ever that both Israelis and Palestinians find a way to get back to the table and begin negotiating a process whereby they can create two states that are living side by side in peace and security.
Jordan, obviously, with its own peace with Israel, has an enormous stake in this. The United States has an enormous stake in this. We will continue to partner to try to encourage an equitable and just solution to a problem that has been nagging the region for many, many years.
Finally, I just want to say that we continue to appreciate all the security and counterterrorism cooperation that we receive from the Jordanians. It is very important in terms of our own security, and that partnership we expect to continue.
So Your Majesty, you are always welcome here. The American people feel great affection for the Jordanian people. And we trust that during this remarkable time of transition in the region that Jordan will be at the forefront in being able to move a process forward that creates greater opportunity and ensures that Jordan is a model of a prosperous, modern, and successful Arab state under your leadership.
So thank you very much.
HIS MAJESTY KING ABDULLAH: Thank you. Mr. President, I’m delighted to be back here and again take this opportunity to thank you and your government for the tremendous support that you’re showing Jordan economically and the support of the United States and a lot of our friends internationally on really being able to push reform in an aggressive manner in our country, and again your continued interest and support on the core issue of the Middle East, which is the Israeli and Palestinian peace.
We are very, very grateful to the President’s role in all these issues. I’m delighted to be back here. And I will continue to be a strong partner with you, sir, on all the challenges that we face. Thank you.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Good. All right, thank you very much, everyone.
END 12:23 P.M. EDT
Year of Production: 2011
Country: United States | <urn:uuid:c16a1d70-f66b-4915-b4cf-16b18ab898f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.filmannex.com/webtv/thewhitehousewire/movie/president-obama-meets-with-king-abdullah-ii-of-jordan/27025 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954303 | 1,143 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Warm and dry weather allowed for significant haying progress over the past week. Saskatchewan livestock producers have 44 per cent of the 2012 hay crop cut and 20 per cent baled or put into silage, according to Saskatchewan Agriculture's weekly Crop Report. Ninety-two per cent of the hay crop is rated as good to excellent in quality.
Eighty per cent of the fall cereals, 62 per cent of the spring cereals, 57 per cent of the oilseeds and 70 per cent of the pulses are at their normal stage of development for this time of year. Most crops are in fair to excellent condition.
High temperatures throughout the province have resulted in thunderstorms in some areas, producing strong winds, hail and varying amounts of precipitation. Disease, flooding, hail and wind are causing the majority of crop damage.
Farmers are busy haying, scouting crops and controlling disease. | <urn:uuid:caa0a41b-b465-441a-839f-5de76b9eab26> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.swbooster.com/News/Local/2012-07-13/article-3030793/Hay-crop-makes-progress/1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930402 | 182 | 2.390625 | 2 |
The open position on the resource advisory council is for a seat held by a representative of a nationally or regionally recognized environmental organization, archaeological and historical organization, dispersed recreation activities, or a wild horse and burro organization.
The BLM’s resource advisory councils are made up of citizens who are selected for their expertise in natural resource issues, BLM officials said in the news release. Members of the RAC help the Bureau carry out its stewardship of public lands.
The BLM has 24 RACs across the West. Each RAC consists of 12 to 15 members, including conservationists, ranchers, outdoor recreationists, state and local government officials, tribal officials, and academics.
Nominees must be residents of Utah. The BLM will evaluate nominees based on their education, training, experience, and knowledge of the geographical area. Nominees should demonstrate a commitment to collaborative resource decision-making, according to the news release.
Individuals who are currently federally registered lobbyists are prohibited from serving on Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) and non-FACA boards, committees, or councils.
All nominations must include the following information:
• Letters of reference from represented interests or organizations;
• A completed background information nomination form;
• Any other information that addresses the nominee’s qualifications.
For more information, call 801-539-4195.
Nominations must be submitted by July 29, to Sherry Foot, Special Programs Coordinator, Bureau of Land Management, 440 West 200 South, Suite 500, Salt Lake City, UT, 84101. | <urn:uuid:b5020c76-b16a-44d4-9810-db87887cce80> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://moabtimes.com/view/full_story/8111824/article-BLM-seeks-nominations-to-resource-advisory-council?instance=special_coverage_bullets_right_column | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932205 | 326 | 1.734375 | 2 |
All about orchids
Hudson – Lynn Ackerman brings along about 10 different types of orchids as she speaks to flower fans April 19 at the Hudson Public Library. Ackerman, from Lyman Estate Greenhouses in Waltham, guided those in attendance about selecting types of orchids, and about proper lighting, temperature and watering. For more information, visit www.waltham-community.org/Lyman.html.
Short URL: http://www.communityadvocate.com/?p=2340 | <urn:uuid:7ce8c833-8db6-4133-9805-c511853e1203> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.communityadvocate.com/2008/04/25/hello-world-2237/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907277 | 110 | 1.648438 | 2 |
William Henry Chapman, a practitioner of law at the bar of San Francisco, is one of California's native sons, his birth having occurred in Sacramento county on the 19th of October, 1856. He is a son of Daniel H. and Martha Jane (Coolidge) Chapman, whose family numbered two sons and four daughters. Three of the sisters of Mr. Chapman are yet living, but his brother has passed away. The father was born in New York and is a representative of an old American family of English lineage. He came to California in January, 1850, attracted by the discovery of gold on the Pacific slope and the business opportunities afforded by the great and growing west. He made the journey across the plains with ox teams and took up land near Folsom, turning his attention to agricultural pursuits, which he followed consecutively until 1857, when, on making a return trip to New York by water, he was lost at sea on the steamship Central America, off Cape Hatteras. His wife, who was born in Maine, still survives him and is now living in Sacramento at the age of seventy-six years. She too is of English descent, and her ancestral history is one of long and close identification with America.
William Henry Chapman was less than a year old at the time of his father's demise. He began his education in the public schools of Sacramento and there continued his studies until he had completed the high school course. In 1875 he entered the University of California, where he remained as a student for four years, and was graduated in 1879 with the degree of Bachelor of Arts. He continued his work there through the succeeding year and won the degree of Master of Arts. With broad general knowledge to serve as the foundation upon which to rear the superstructure of professional learning, he took up the study of law and was admitted to the bar in January, 1881. Since that time he has engaged in practice, and to-day has a distinctively representative clientage in San Francisco, his devotion to the interests intrusted to his care and his thorough preparation of cases having gained for him a reputation that enables him to command a good patronage.
In July, 1881, Mr. Chapman was united in marriage to Miss Lulu E. Medbery, a native of Wisconsin and a daughter of William C. and Mary E. Medbery, who came to California about 1860, locating in Sacramento. In the family are three sons and a daughter: Alice Mabyn, who is now a student in the University of California; Lester H.; Charles Carroll; and Philip Stanard. Mr. Chapman belongs to the Masonic fraternity, and is also identified with the Native Sons of the Golden West, while his political allegiance is given to the Republican party. He and his wife have a wide acquaintance in the city where they make their home, and his record is one which reflects credit upon his native state, for laudable ambition and strong purpose have characterized his professional career and gained for him a desirable position in the ranks of the legal fraternity of the metropolis of the west.
Source: History of the New California Its Resources and People, Volume II
The Lewis Publishing Company - 1905
Edited by Leigh H. Irvine
Return to California AHGP home page
Return to Sacramento County AHGP home page | <urn:uuid:f722ed7b-2183-4318-8552-5409eccc1121> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ca/state1/biographies/whchapman.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986709 | 672 | 2.234375 | 2 |
Spread betting is similar to futures trading. It is regulated by the Securities and Futures Authority (SFA). The SFA is the British equivalent of the American CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) and SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) rolled into one.
Spread betting is not one market. It is a style of trading that applies to many markets. Spread bettors can use trend following to trade shares, metals, oil, currencies, etc.
What are some spread betting specifics?
- Frequently asked questions in Adobe .pdf
- Markets to trade listing in Adobe .pdf
- Spread betting jargon in Adobe .pdf
- Broker example #1
- Broker example #2 | <urn:uuid:d68a6bf0-5b27-4284-938f-f3519982c73e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://turtletrader.com/turtle-bet.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918865 | 147 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Records dating back to 1885 suggest that the United States endured the warmed March through May in history. The National Climatic Data Center indicated that record and near-record warmth dominated the eastern two-thirds of the nation during spring. They noted that thirty-one states broke records for the season. Only Oregon and Washington had spring temperatures near normal. The warmth lead to an unusually early blooming of the cherry trees in Washington. Apple and peach trees bloomed two months early in the Midwest.
Click one of the pictures below to see more pictures or to upload your own photos and videos.
Prepare Now for Emergencies Visit Site
National Hurricane Center's Archive of Hurricane Seasons Visit Site | <urn:uuid:f75d1d86-cca2-49c3-9ce3-afc8d1a9ae46> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.witn.com/weather/headlines/Warmest_March_Through_May_On_Record_157922255.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946562 | 139 | 3.140625 | 3 |
Learning Resources Center
Spelman Hosts 'Tutorpalooza'
As a part of our long standing collaborative efforts, the Peer Tutoring Program of the Learning Resources Center and the Mathematics Laboratory will host "Tutorpalooza" at Spelman,
on Friday, September 19 and Saturday, September 20. The event will be held in the Albro-Falconer-Manley Science Center Room 233.
During Tutorpalooza, students and peer tutors will be trained and certified nationally by Dr. Sandi Ayaz, executive director of the National Tutoring Association.
Morehouse College, Green Forest Academy, Atlanta Metropolitan College and various departments and organizations on campus will participate.
Most recently, during the2007 fall tutor training, the tutors achieved National Tutoring Certification at various levels and both programs received National Accreditation from NTA.
In April 2008, each program was recognized and awarded a plaque as the outstanding tutoring program at a four year college. For additional information about Tutorpalooza and the National Tutoring Association, please visit, http://www.ntatutor.com/tutorpalooza.htm
Ms Lula Roberts, a learning resources specialist at Spelman College says, "Our theme at Spelman is 'A Choice to Change the World;' and national certification of the tutors and membership in the National Tutoring Association will not only effect a 'change' in how tutors will interact and assist their peers locally, but this opportunity will enhance their self-esteem and motivate them to offer service nationally and globally."
For questions, please contact Ms. Katrina Harden Williams at (404) 270-5831 or e-mail her at email@example.com; or Ms. Lula Roberts at (404)270-5584 or
National Tutoring Association Honors Spelman Programs
The Peer Tutoring Program of Spelman's Learning Resources Center and the mathematics laboratory have been named the 2008 National Tutoring Association Programs of the Year for a four-year institution. Under the leadership of Lula Roberts, learning resources specialist with the Peer Tutoring Program, and Katrina Harden Williams, director of the mathematics laboratory, Spelman students tutor in a variety of disciplines, including mathematics, humanities, social sciences and fine arts.
In 2007, 27 Spelman peer tutors received national certification from Dr. Sandi Ayaz, executive director of NTA. Formed in 1992, the NTA currently represents more than 5,000 tutors and tutorial administrators across the United States and internationally.
The Learning Resources Center of Spelman College was created
July 1, 1993. Since its inception, the Center has provided
students with a comprehensive and diverse program for academic
support. The Center’s services complement the courses
taught at the College and assist students in achieving their
full academic potential. Any student enrolled at the College
may use the Center.
This comprehensive center is designed to serve the College-at-large.
It offers learning and enrichment opportunities at several
levels including regularly scheduled courses, laboratory
instruction, academic advisement, peer tutoring and academic
workshops. The Center also assesses students’ academic
needs and makes referrals to appropriate campus resources.
Additionally, the Center provides instruction in study
techniques and the application of learning strategies that
students need to complete assignments, master course content
and ultimately attain their academic goals. The major objective
is to EMPOWER students who will become creative, independent
learners and problem solvers capable of processing and handling
volumes of information.
Peer tutoring is available by appointment on a regular or drop-in basis throughout
the academic year. Our peer tutors are certified by College Reading and Language
Association (C.R.L.A.) and properly trained to assist students in mastering
their areas of difficulty. Students may receive assistance in study techniques,
content area reading, note-taking, test-wise strategies, problem solving and
communication skills. Our peer tutors are
positive, enthusiastic and sincere about helping their peers. Students may come to the Learning Resources Center for assistance or they may send an e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.org.
As a service, the Learning Resources Center offers academic advising. The Center
serves as an initial resource for students who are interested in exploring
the various academic options at the College. For those students who have not
declared a major (first year students and sophomores), the Center clarifies
the College’s general and core educational requirements. For those students
wishing to change their major, the Center provides suggestions for combining
academic options with personal interests.
Reference materials are available for student use to assist them in becoming
efficient in their studies and research skills. Videotapes and/or handouts on
specific study strategies and selected Student Success Workshops are also available
for student use. | <urn:uuid:56fd1981-2605-4bf1-b326-4dafa1419de2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www5.spelman.edu/academics/enrichment/learning/index.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910997 | 1,025 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Telecommuting is becoming the “mainstay of corporate America,” according to a recent MSNBC story. Telecommuters are 25% more productive than people who work in an office, meaning your company is more profitable.
Come discover the keys to making telecommuting a success for you and your organization. For those new to telecommuting and those already working from home, get advanced how-to tips not available anywhere else from experienced teleworkers with more than 12 years’ experience working from home. This course includes a 100-page guide to telecommuting.
One month course, Julie Coates and William Draves, instructors.
Introduction to Telecommuting
The office as the factory of the Industrial Age of the last century
The advantages of telecommuting for businesses and work organizations
The advantages of telecommuting for workers
Why telecommuting is growing
Planning to Telecommute
Discussing telecommuting within your work organization
Redesigning your job description for telecommuting
Developing a plan for transitioning to telecommuting
Space, equipment and computer requirements
Working from home
Work flow, time, overwork, cabin fever
Are some people ‘not right’ for telecommuting?
Time off, vacation, working 9-5 issues
Communicating via distance with work colleagues
Issues in Telecommuting
Face-to-face meetings with work colleagues
Developing local professional contacts
Creating social contacts in your community
Rebuilding Community: community issues related to telecommuting
About online learning
Online learning is a fun, enjoyable and very productive way to learn. Millions of people are learning online each year. You will engage with the instructor and other participants. You will get to know your instructor and other participants. You may make friends. It’s easy. It’s fun.
How the Course Works
It is easy to participate in your online course. After you register, you will be given a web address to go to get into your online classroom. You will have a password and use your email address and password to gain access.
Once inside the online classroom, here’s what you can expect.
Participate when you want
You can participate any time of day or evening. The online classroom is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
There are no live real-time requirements or meetings. You decide when you participate.
For the best learning, participants should log into the course on 2-3 different days of the week.
What you will do
For each Unit, you will:
For best learning, you should make one or more comments at 2-3 different times each day, since it is a week long course.
The content (readings, audio lectures, slides) and self quizzes are accessible for the entire course, so you can work ahead, or go back and review again, at your convenience.
The Discussion for each Unit lasts one week. All comments are made in writing and can be made at any time of the day or night.
Your instructor will log into the Discussion area at least once a day and answer questions, make comments, and respond to comments by you and the other participants.
We encourage you to make 2-3 comments each day to maximize your learning and enjoyment of the course.
It’s easy. It’s fun.
Keys to Telecommuting Success
June 3 - 28
September 3 - 27
July 1 - 26
October 7 - November 1
$195 for individual course ($395 for Managing Telework Certificate)
Ave. hours 16, 1.6 CEUs/ILUs
About Your Instructors
Julie Coates has been working from home for over ten years. She is a speaker, consultant, and Vice President for Information Services at the Learning Resources Network (LERN). The organization is one of the first in the world to convert to a virtual organization, and now has staff and consultants in 8 states and 3 countries. More than half of the staff members telecommute.
Ms. Coates has taught online classes for more than five years. She is author of the pioneering book, Generational Learning Styles, and co-author of Nine Shift: Work, life and education in the 21st Century.
Having been on the senior management team to convert her organization from an office-based organization to a virtual organization, she has trained staff in telecommuting, has addressed social and organizational issues in telecommuting, and is one of the foremost experts on telecommuting.
William A. Draves is a leading futurist, speaker and co-author of Nine Shift: Work, life and education in the 21st century.
He has been working from home for over ten years and worked with his Board of Directors and Senior Management Team to transition to a virtual organization in 1998.
He has keynoted conferences and done professional development seminars in Russia, Germany, England, Slovenia, Japan, Australia, Mexico, and all over Canada and the United States.
His Nine Shift blog has more than 2,000 readers per month, and he is the most-quoted authority on lifelong learning in the nation’s media, having been interviewed by The New York Times, BBC, Wall Street Journal, NBC Night News and other news organizations.
-To provide organizations with background information on the growth of telecommuting, the data on productivity and profitability gains of telecommuters, and the reasons why companies and organizations benefit from telecommuting
-To provide those interested in telecommuting with the knowledge necessary to transition from an office work situation to working from home, including preparation, job description analysis, and physical-space planning
-To address the most commonly asked questions about telecommuting, including socializing and social contact, overwork, cabin fever, reporting, and communicating with others
-To provide expert experience and perspective to those already telecommuting, and to discuss advanced issues in telecommuting
-To have those currently working from home share their experiences with those interested in telecommuting
At the end of the course, you will:
-Possess the information necessary to discuss the advantages of telecommuting in your organization, including trend data, information on productivity and profitability, and the reasons why businesses benefit from telecommuting.
-Know the key steps in how to prepare to work from home and plan for a transition to working from home.
-Get answers to the most advanced questions about telecommuting.
-Have addressed and discussed the most commonly asked problems and issues related to telecommuting.
-Have the knowledge necessary to successfully telecommute. | <urn:uuid:67cba1e6-47b9-48d1-be47-9184bd38a9df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yougotclass.org/courses.cfm/Southeastern/Managing-Telework-Certificate/Keys-to-Telecommuting-Success?CFID=18404567&CFTOKEN=3ca9489807e408b5-3B9691F4-B8AC-6F12-C8CF760B8B588EAF | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924624 | 1,376 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Brussels, 16 October 2012— WorldAutoSteel announced today the addition of SSAB as a new member of its ongoing programme to demonstrate the contribution of steel to sustainably reduce vehicle carbon footprint.
“WorldAutoSteel welcomes SSAB to its membership and looks forward to including their expertise in the area of high-strength steels within our strong automotive steel application experience,” says Cees ten Broek, WorldAutoSteel director. “Their joining our membership is a clear indication of the value our seventeen members have generated since our inception in 1995 that draws world-class steel companies such as SSAB. Together we hope to continue the fine work of nearly two decades, and the advancement of steel solutions for low carbon vehicles, such as the FutureSteelVehicle completed in 2011.”
SSAB is a leading global producer of value-added high-strength steel, and employs approximately 9,000 employees in 45 countries around the world. SSAB will have the opportunity to actively participate in WorldAutoSteel and have full access to all its future outcomes and deliverables.
Through its global partnerships, WorldAutoSteel combines existing best practice as well as the latest and future in automotive steel development around the world to help customers solve the demands for safer, lighter vehicles that lower emissions and are affordable to manufacture. This is made possible through the support and intellectual inputs of all its members—comprising some of the largest steel-producing companies in the world—to create the broadest possible knowledge base and intellectual insight.
Contact: Kate Hickey, Communications Consultant, WorldAutoSteel E: email@example.com | <urn:uuid:1de7dca9-68b9-459f-9150-f3db09562c75> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.worldautosteel.org/ssab-ab-joins-worldautosteel/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935651 | 338 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Despite Liberia’s significant gains over the last decade, the benefits of the growth have not reached the country’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, says World Bank Country Manager, Madam Inguna Dobraja.
Even with robust economic growth, Liberia cannot fully address the needs of vulnerable people without a clear, comprehensive social protection intervention, she said. The fact is, approximately 50,000 households in Liberia live in extreme poverty fuelled by lack of jobs, she said.
Her comments opened a three-day forum in Sinkor, Monrovia, to discuss the draft of a new social protection strategy and policy for Liberia. The Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs organized the event – with the theme “Restoring human dignity and fostering cohesion” — at the Belle Casa Hotel.
“Inclusive growth is fundamental in addressing poverty in any post-conflict society,” Madam Dobraja said. “Liberia is no exception. An essential part of any social protection system is risk prevention. “Having a job that pays and provides an income source to a family is a risk prevention measure — it prevents the family from falling into poverty and making sure those children in that family will go to school and receive good health care. Jobs are also important for the entire region as they contribute to stability,” Madam Dobraja noted.
The World Bank Country Manager further noted that tackling the issue of jobs and employment is one of the major priorities of the government. According to her, “working together with the private sector and designing innovative ways to create jobs, especially for youth, will have to be an integral part of the social protection agenda in Liberia.”
She said the Social Safety Nets in Liberia represent just 1.5% of GDP. She stated that is not good enough. As a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), expenses on Liberian SSN are higher than the regional West African average, the World bank official further stated.
Madam Dobraja disclosed that in Liberia, Social Protection interventions are heavily funded by international donors. “Strengthening institutional capacity of the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs (MOPEA) is necessary to undertake the development of a national Social Protection Policy and Strategy; and designing a Strategy is just the beginning – Strategies are only as good as their implementation. Therefore, we will continue to work together with the Ministry in building national Monitoring & Evaluation System that will help to oversee and coordinate social protection interventions in the country,” Madam Dobraja said.
In a related development, the World Bank Country Manager has pledged the bank’s commitment to the public financial management system of Liberia. She said preventing and reducing corruption in Liberia is critical at this stage of the country’s development process.
“The front pages of the Liberian press remind us every day that preventing and reducing corruption in Liberia is critical at this stage of Liberia’s development process,” she said. “The World Bank recognizes Asset Disclosure Systems as an important tool for countries in preventing and detecting corruption and conflicts of interest, and will continue to support this program.
This is important in Liberia now in view of the country’s potential extractives sector boom. Experience has shown that development of the extractive sector tends to result in an increase in corruption in countries where safeguards and preventive measures against corruption are weak.” | <urn:uuid:04758c40-0622-431c-a286-24b6f844a103> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.africanglobe.net/business/liberias-economic-gains-reaching-poor/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934901 | 699 | 2.125 | 2 |
Share & Connect
Los Angeles, U.S.A — When darkness falls, our eyesight fails us and our imaginations run wild. In the US premiere of the Discovery Channel/BBC/Terra Mater Factual Studios co-production “The Dark”, airing Saturday, October 27 at 9PM ET/PT, one group of brave individuals faces the most primal of human fears, fear of the dark, and utilizes technology to unveil the world after dark and shed light on the riveting nighttime dramas of some remarkable animals such as jaguars, pumas, owl monkeys, and vampire bats.
A team comprised of biologists, wildlife experts, and specialist camera crews venture into Central and South America armed with thermal imaging, infrared cameras, and a fierce determination to unravel the mystery of what life is like after dark for the majority of animals who are nocturnal.
The team’s filming technology allows them to capture natural behavior without disturbing the wildlife, even in pitch black conditions, and throughout the course of their six-month expedition they will have to become creatures of the night themselves. They will wade through crocodile-filled rivers, brave shark-infested waters, discover bizarre creatures and witness never-before-seen behaviors, and come face-to-face with predators in some uncomfortably close encounters.
The resulting footage is exhilarating, immersive, and provides viewers a completely new perspective on wildlife at night. This is a hair-raising view humans have rarely been able to witness…until now. “The Dark” premieres Saturday, October 27 at 9PM ET/PT.
“The Dark” is a Discovery Channel/BBC/Terra Mater Factual Studios co-production. For BBC, Tim Martin is executive producer; Jonny Keeling is series producer; Rowan Musgrave, Susanna Handslip, and Will Ridgeon are the director/producers. For Discovery Channel, James Manfull is writer and executive producer with Meghan Keener; Christine Weber is vice president of production. | <urn:uuid:65e8faad-dfe9-4e77-a619-54ebf7b5694e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.toonaripost.com/2012/10/entertainment/the-dark-a-chilling-nighttime-perspective/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914599 | 421 | 1.898438 | 2 |
Eating and Drinking
Reducing food packaging
Buying unwrapped is okay
Most fresh fruits and vegetables don't need those layers of plastic.
Avoiding bottled water
It's healthy to drink water, but packaging and shipping it requires energy.
Limiting disposable containers
Plastic take-out containers and utensils, plastic bags and individualized packets all require energy to manufacture.
Factoring in transportation
Flying, trucking and shipping foods around the world uses oil, so buying local foods can reduce "food miles" emissions. But there are tradeoffs: sometimes growing foods close to home creates as much or more CO2.
Considering food choices
Buying seasonal foods
Eating more fruits, grains and vegetables
The livestock sector emits about 2.8 billion metric tons of CO2 each year--roughly 9 percent of the world's total--and is responsible for about 7.2 billion metric tons of all greenhouse gas emissions (including methane), or roughly 18 percent of the total. | <urn:uuid:2c45e3a1-5e77-4832-8c0b-53c74d969261> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/climate-change/making-a-difference/eating-and-drinking | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91835 | 206 | 2.890625 | 3 |
POETS @ PLAY
Sunday, June 9, 1:00pm
Edwin Markham House in History Park
1650 Senter Road, San José, CA 95112
Free parking in the Staff/Volunteer lot on Phelan Avenue
Questions? Call 408-368-0353
RSVP recommended but not required: email@example.com
Wednesday, June 19, 2013, 7:00pm
Featured poets: Renee Schell, Ken Weisner, Kevin Shlosberg, and Jasper Haze
An inspiring evening with four accomplished area poets.
at Works/San José
365 South Market Street
in downtown San José
doors open 6:30pm
$2 suggested donation, no one turned away
Works is on the Market Street edge of the San Jose Convention Center, just to the right of the parking garage entrance.
Complete information about the Featured Readers in the calendar.
POETRY READINGS @ WILLOW GLEN LIBRARY
Third Thursday of Every Month
Thursday, June 20, 2013, 7:00pm
Featured Reader: Bob Dickerson
Open Mic reading to follow
Willow Glen Library
1157 Minnesota Avenue, San José, CA, 95125
(408) 808-3045 or (408) 266-1361
Free and open to the public
see the calendar for full details on all events
PCSJ SUMMER CAMP Registration Open!
Classes in June and July, 2013
at History Park San Jose
1650 Senter Road, San Jose, CA 95112
Summer Writing Camp for Youth, sponsored by Poetry Center San Jose and History Park San Jose, is a creative writing camp for middle school (10-13 years old) and high school (14-17 years old) students. We believe that creative writing is the best way for young people to express themselves. Through this writing camp, students will explore the creative writing process by learning, analyzing, and creating poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Students will also engage in understanding the environment of Santa Clara County and writing about it, using poetry, memoir and journaling. By the camp’s conclusion, students will be better creative writers and understand the importance of the environment we live in.
June 14 - 21 Middle School (10-13 years old)
July 15 - 19 High School (14-17 years old)
Morning and Afternoon Sessions:
10:00am - 12:00pm, and 1:00pm - 3:00pm
$150 Morning or Afternoon Session
$250 Full Day (both sessions)
Poetry Center San Jose believes that all children should have access to quality writing programs during the summer. We offer partial scholarships to students with an annual household income of 80% or less of the Median Household Income for Santa Clara County. Please ask about scholarships when you register.
End of the World issue
The 2012 issue of Caesura is here! If you missed the release party, get your member copy at an upcoming PCSJ event such as the Willow Glen Library Reading or Poets@Play.
A look at SHARON OLDS with PCSJ on October 4, 2012.
Renowned poet Sharon Olds was brought to San José by PCSJ to lead a sold-out workshop and give a reading at the Petit Trianon. Olds read a wide range of her work and took questions from the enthusiastic audience. After the reading she signed books and spoke individually with many audience members. Olds, who lives in New York City, spoke warmly of "coming home" to San José and the Bay Area, where she grew up and attended Stanford University. PCSJ is proud to have presented Sharon Olds, one of contemporary poetry's leading voices, and winner of several prestigious awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Sharon Olds answering questions about her work at the reading
Olds signing books after the reading
To see what PCSJ has been up to lately, see the event archive. | <urn:uuid:90937bdf-204c-4a1a-9ab7-b6e5ca08256e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pcsj.org/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929811 | 839 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Zionism and Israel - Biographies
Biography of Ehud Olmert (Ulmert, Ohlmert)
Biography of Ehud Olmert (Ulmert, Ohlmert)
Olmert's political career is marked by quiet innovation and independent opinions. In November 1993, Olmert was elected Mayor of Jerusalem, ousting the popular but aging Teddy Kolleck on a platform of unified Jerusalem. As mayor, he did not succeed in halting the progressive impoverishment of Jerusalem, nor did he succeed in equalizing the level of services and development provided to Arabs in East Jerusalem with those provided to Jewish sections of the city. He broke with right-wing members of his Likud party by advocating Palestinian self-rule. He resigned from the Knesset in 1998. In 1999, his insistence that he believed opposition party leader Ehud Barak would not divide Jerusalem was a material help in Barak's election campaign.
Olmert's career has not been untouched by hints of scandal. In the 1970s he was involved in a complex libel suit. Critics say he tried to get the Likud to pay for his defense, even though his lawyers were from his own firm. The Israel police also investigated his involvement with irregularities in campaign financing in the 2003 campaign.
In February 2003, Ehud Olmert was appointed Minister of Industry and Trade, and Deputy Prime Minister. Olmert became an influential member of the Cabinet. In November 2003, he gave a speech foreshadowing the disengagement plan of Ariel Sharon. Soon after, he gave his views in an interview:
"We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: we have been won over. We agree with [National Union leader Avigdor] Liberman. There is no room for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All that we want is the right to vote.
"The day they do that, is the day we lose everything. Even when they carry out terror, it is very difficult for us to persuade the world of the justice of our cause. We see this on a daily basis. All the more so when there is only one demand: an equal right to vote.
"The thought that the struggle against us will be headed by liberal Jewish organizations who shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa scares me."
"Had I believed that there is a real chance of reaching an agreement, I would have recommended making an effort. But that is not the case. The choice we will be facing will be between less than a Geneva Accord -- which means a return to the 1967 border, the crushing of Jerusalem, and a struggle to our last breath to ward off the international pressure to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees into the shrinking State of Israel -- and a comprehensive unilateral move, and I stress the word comprehensive. Through such a move we will define our borders, which under no circumstances will be identical to the Green Line and will include Jerusalem as a united city under our sovereignty."
Disengagement, modified to a much smaller scope, became announced Israeli government policy a few weeks later. Olmert worked closely with PM Ariel Sharon to advance the idea in the Likud party, in the face of stubborn opposition.
In the summer of 2005, when Benjamin Netanyahu resigned in protest over disengagement, Olmert became finance minister.
In November 2005, Sharon decided to leave the Likud party and found the Kadima Party. Olmert joined with Sharon. Skeptics insisted that Kadima was a "Sharon party," dependent on the leadership of Sharon.
On January 4, 2006, Sharon suffered a massive stroke hemorrhagic stroke and was hospitalized under anesthesia. Olmert assumed the powers of acting prime minister, holding a cabinet meeting on January 5 to signal the transfer of power. On March 28 2006, Ehud Olmert's Kadima party won an election victory sufficiently decisive to allow him to form the government, becoming PM in his own right.
After the unsatisfactory conduct of the Second Lebanon War; in the summer of 2006, Olmert and his government came under increasing criticism. Despite plummeting popularity ratings for Olmert and the Kadima government, Olmert held on. However, police investigations began to uncover several damaging cases of corruption attributable to Olmert. In the most sensational of the cases, Morris Talansky, an American millionaire, testified that he had regularly passed enveloped containing cash to Olmert to finance in his political campaigns. It became increasingly difficult for Olmert to retain control of the Kadima party and to lead the nation. On July 30, 2008, Olmert addressed the nation and announced that he would resign after the Kadima party had chosen a new leader in primaries. The primaries were set for September 17, 2008. The leading candidates were Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni and Transportation Minister and former IDF chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz. Olmert rather obviously backed Mofaz. Tzipi Livni won a narrow victory in the primaries.
Ehud Olmert is married to Aliza. They have four children.
Updated September, 2008
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ZioNation - Zionism-Israel Web Log Zionism & Israel News Israel: like this, as if Albert Einstein Bible History of Zionism Zionism FAQ Zionism Israel Center Maps of Israel Jew Israel Advocacy Zionism and its Impact Israel Christian Zionism Site Map Albert Einstein | <urn:uuid:7ccc1481-969a-470f-a603-15b242e7a5df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.zionism-israel.com/bio/Olmert_biography.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956998 | 1,390 | 2.015625 | 2 |
The CAPlines program for loans up to $5 million is designed to help small businesses meet their short-term and cyclical working capital needs. The programs can be used to finance seasonal working capital needs; finance the direct costs of performing certain construction, service and supply contracts, subcontracts, or purchase orders; finance the direct cost associated with commercial and residential construction; or provide general working capital lines of credit that have specific requirements for repayment. There are four distinct loan programs under the CAPlines umbrella:
- The Contract Loan Program finances the cost associated with contracts, subcontracts or purchase orders. Proceeds can be disbursed before the work begins. If used for one contract or subcontract when all the expenses are incurred before the buyer pays, it will generally not revolve. If used for more than one contract or subcontract, or for contracts and subcontracts where the buyer pays before all work is done, the line of credit can revolve. The loan maturity is usually based on the length of the contract, but no more than 10 years. Contract payments are generally sent directly to the lender, but alternative structures are available.
- The Seasonal Line of Credit Program supports the buildup of inventory, accounts receivable or labor and materials above normal usage for seasonal inventory. The business must have been in business for a period of 12 months and must be able to demonstrate that it has a definite established seasonal pattern. The loan may be used over again after a “clean up” period of 30 days to finance activity for a new season. These loans also may have a maturity of up to five years. The business may not have another seasonal line of credit outstanding, but may have other lines for non-seasonal working capital needs.
- The Builders Line Program provides financing for small contractors or developers to construct or rehabilitate residential or commercial property that will be sold to a third party that is not known at the time construction/rehabilitation begins. Loan maturity is generally three years, but can be extended up to five years, if necessary, to facilitate the sale of the property. Proceeds are used solely for direct expenses of acquisition, immediate construction and/or significant rehabilitation of the residential or commercial structures. Land purchase can be included if it does not exceed 20 percent of the loan proceeds. Up to five percent of the proceeds can be used for community improvements that benefit the overall property.
- The Working Capital Line of Credit Program is a revolving line of credit (up to $5,000,000) that provides short-term working capital. Businesses that generally use these lines provide credit to their customers or have inventory as their major asset. Disbursements are generally based on the size of a borrower’s accounts receivable and/or inventory. Repayment comes from the collection of accounts receivable or sale of inventory. The specific structure is negotiated with the lender. There may be extra servicing and monitoring of the collateral for which the lender can charge additional fees to the borrower. | <urn:uuid:0afde52f-36bb-4a86-9ef4-685660996a8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sba.gov/content/caplines | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949071 | 605 | 1.507813 | 2 |
In the late 19th century during the Belle Epoque era in Paris, the renowned Absinthe culture was at its height of infamy. Absinthe was the trademark drink of artists like Degas, Manet, Picasso, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Oscar Wilde. To recall this glorious time, Grande Absente, Absinthe Originale is one of the oldest traditional Absinthe recipes from the south of France.
Hand crafted in Provence like it was from 1860-1912, Grande Absente is made exclusively with the highest quality spirits and select botanicals from the region, including the legendary botanical Wormwood, also known as Artemisia Absinthium. Grande Absente is 138 proof so please drink with extreme caution! | <urn:uuid:f3d6264e-0338-4457-86c1-4e25e8c67bf1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.crownwineandspirits.com/grande-absente-absinthe-originale-750ml/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951679 | 161 | 2.140625 | 2 |
I'm happy to report that since our first chlorine report came out in January, 2005, a third mercury-based chlorine plant has announced it will stop using the polluting mercury technology that has been the focus of our campaign! From the Nasty Nine to the Slimy Six!
Here is a clip from the recent story in the Florence, Alabama TimesDaily newspaper:
On Friday, Larry Meriage, vice president of communications and public relations for Occidental Petroleum, confirmed that the company plans to stop mercury cell production, which the Muscle Shoals plant uses to produce various chemicals.
"We have not yet determined how this will affect Muscle Shoals," Meriage said.
After Occidental Petroleum's senior management meeting Thursday in Los Angeles, speculation began circulating about the fate of the Muscle Shoals plant once the company halts mercury cell production.
An audio recording and accompanying presentation from the management meeting was published on the company's Web site.
A slide in that presentation did confirm that the company has plans to eliminate mercury production but did not mention the Muscle Shoals plant by name.
Meriage said there are multiple reasons that the company wants to halt mercury cell production.
"Part of it is environmental, and there are also newer technologies that are available," Meriage said.
The news was encouraging for several environmental groups.
Jackie Savitz, pollution control director for the Washington, D.C.-based environmental organization Oceana, applauded Occidental's plans.
"We hope Occidental will share with the public their timeline for making this shift, and when they do, we look forward to offering them our most sincere congratulations. This would be the third of the 'nasty nine' mercury-based chlorine plants to stop using mercury since we launched our campaign just over a year ago, and two of them were Occidental plants. The other six plants should follow Occidental's lead so we can take mercury out of the chlorine picture, once and for all."
The organization, which bills itself as "Protector of the World's Oceans" had targeted the Muscle Shoals plant as one of the nine most toxic chlorine producers in America because of the mercury cell production process used there.
It contends the mercury-cell process is 19th century technology and is a leading cause of mercury contamination in seafood.
Savitz said Oceana's goal has never been to see any of the chlorine plants that use the mercury cell process close. Instead, it was to see them switch to the mercury-free technology used by more than 90 percent of the chlorine industry, she said.
As part of their effort to call attention to the issue of mercury pollution in the Shoals, Oceana took hair samples from more than 75 residents to test for mercury contamination.
Savitz said Friday that Oceana only recently received results of the hair testing and has yet to compile them into a report. In looking over the results, Savitz did not notice anything alarming, she said.
Charles Rose, of Sheffield, president of the Shoals Environmental Alliance who helped organize the hair testing, said he also was pleased with Occidental's announcement that it is abandoning the mercury cell process in Muscle Shoals. "It's a step in the right direction."
We are still waiting to hear more details from the company as to their time frame for the shift, but we are all quite happy to see the number one mercury source in the state of Alabama, and the 19th biggest mercury air emitter in the United States, saying they'll clean up their act!
- What Do Historic CO2 Levels Mean for the Oceans? Posted Tue, May 14, 2013
- U.S. Coast Guard Captures Illegal Fishermen in Texas Posted Tue, May 14, 2013
- Victory! Delaware Becomes Seventh State in U.S. to Ban Shark Fin Trade! Posted Thu, May 16, 2013
- It's Endangered Species Day! Posted Fri, May 17, 2013
- Stocks Show Signs of Recovery, But Still Work to Do Posted Fri, May 17, 2013 | <urn:uuid:6be6cade-015b-42c1-a530-35b60e456d18> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oceana.org/en/blog/2006/03/another-chlorine-plant-to-go-mercury-free | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959295 | 822 | 1.9375 | 2 |
Sugar beet is a root crop which is made up of sugar, fibre and contains a large amount of embedded water. Each year we survey the source and level of water our growers use to grow their crops; currently less than 5% of the crop receives any irrigation during the growing season.
British Sugar purchases around 7.5 million tonnes of UK sugar beet annually, which means our factories receive over 5.5 million tonnes of embedded water in beet. We extract that water and put it to work in our factories to maximise efficiency. We use water for cleaning, heating, cooling and transportation.
In total, over 60% of our water currently comes from beet, whilst the remaining sources are from rivers (27%), bore holes (6%) and town mains (6%).
Each factory has its own water treatment facilities, where water is held in a number of ‘lagoons’ before it is treated and returned to source. Water treatment and purification is carried out in accordance with strict Environment Agency standards before release.
All of the water we receive is either reused within our manufacturing process, returned to its immediate source or evaporated to air as steam. | <urn:uuid:58ab823a-632e-4d5e-8173-251411bdea00> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britishsugar.co.uk/water.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974917 | 237 | 3.53125 | 4 |
Are you known for your healthy cooking habits and tasty but nutritious meals?
If so, the Greendale Schools are hoping you will share those recipes for inclusion in a new community cookbook. The new 'Nourish - Mind, Body, Community Cookbook' is part of the school district's wellness goal and is a project that is currently being integrated into the health curriculum at all grade levels in the Greendale schools.
The district is looking for healthy recipe submissions from students, familes and community members.
A recipe template can be found on the district website and completed recipes should be submitted to email@example.com. The deadline is February 1. Recipe inclusion will depend on how many total recipes are received.
The finished cookbook will be available at the upcoming Greendale Nourish - Mind, Body and Environment Expo on Saturday, March 3 from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at Greendale High School. There will be vendors, demos, speakers, resource booths and student projects to help students, families and community members learn about living a healthier lifestyle and keeping Greendale Green. | <urn:uuid:d1fd0402-aab9-46f9-bb07-3433fcea3efc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://greendale.patch.com/articles/community-cookbook-planners-seek-recipes | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956293 | 236 | 2.03125 | 2 |
The WSJ and Washington Post both appear to have gotten their hands on the Administration’s financial regulation “white paper” (the Post even has a pdf of it). I’ll write more on the subject tomorrow, but a couple of thoughts for now.
First, the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency seems like a big deal, and a good idea. It is also, reports the WaPo, already getting critics riled:
They … are concerned that a consumer agency could be overly restrictive, limiting access to loans and constraining financial innovation.
“This consumer protection agency would be deciding how people get to live as opposed to people getting to decide for themselves,” said Kelly King, chief executive of BB&T, a large commercial bank based in North Carolina.
What a load of hooey. We already have lots of regulations that decide how people get to live financially. It’s just that right now they’re all administered and in some cases written by agencies also charged with making sure banks are profitable. Guess what—protecting consumers and keeping banks profitable don’t always go together. There’s a lot to be said for separating the two tasks.
Another reasonably bold—and sensible—part of the proposal concerns over-the-counter derivatives. Reports the WSJ:
OTC derivatives that are considered “standard” will be required to be centrally cleared and executed on an exchange, according to the senior administration official. Customized contracts will face “high capital” charges, the official said, with additional transparency for all OTC derivatives either through depositories, clearing houses or exchanges. The move appears aimed at encouraging standardized OTC derivatives.
What’s missing from the proposal is any kind of plan for breaking up too-big-to-fail institutions, or for dividing the financial sector between firms that take big risks and those that provide essential services (a modern-day version of Glass-Steagall). The Obama Administration would apparently prefer to keep dealing with the handful of big banks (among them a couple of former investment banks) that have survived the crisis, hoping that more stringent capital requirements will keep them from getting us all into trouble again. But gaming capital requirements is what banks do. For the next decade or two I imagine regulators will do a pretty good job of policing this. Eventually they won’t. | <urn:uuid:9deb96f2-92ce-4b4d-bac0-71ffae887083> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://business.time.com/2009/06/16/the-financial-regulation-plan-mixing-the-timid-with-the-not-so-timid/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951863 | 491 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Aimee Copeland, the Georgia student recovering from flesh-eating disease, is pleading for painkillers after surgery to replace swaths of bacteria-ravaged skin and muscle, her father said.
Copeland, 24, was hesitant to take morphine, telling her father she felt like "a traitor to her convictions." But her preferred method of pain management, meditation, proved no match for the sting of skin grafts and muscle flaps to close a gaping wound on her abdomen and groin.
"Aimee is now taking pain medication in as liberal a dose as can be prescribed," Copeland's father, Andy Copeland, wrote in a blog post. "If she even dared to refuse taking it, which she wouldn't, then the doctors would most certainly administer it in an IV drip."
It's been nearly seven weeks since Copeland cut open her calf in a fall from a homemade zipline near the Little Tallapoosa River, inviting a flesh-eating infection that claimed her left leg, right foot and hands. Doctors also removed part of her torso, leaving a wound that was dutifully cleaned and covered with sterile bandages in advance of reconstructive surgery Friday.
"During the most recent skin graft, her surgeons were forced to take muscle from Aimee's abdomen to create a flap over the iliac artery in her groin," Andy Copeland wrote. "She says that she feels like a patchwork quilt, because her body is a collection of skin grafts and bandages."
A skin graft transplants a thin patch of skin surgically shaved from elsewhere on the body onto a wound.
"We can get sheets between 10 and 12 thousandths of an inch thick," said Dr. J. Blair Summitt, assistant professor of plastic surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. "Within two or three days, tiny little blood vessels start to grow into the graft. It's a fairly straightforward procedure."
Straightforward, but not painless. Summitt said narcotic painkillers like morphine and Fentanyl help patients power through the painful reconstructive surgery. But Andy Copeland said no drug is powerful enough to relieve his daughter's pain.
"The allowable doses of Morphine, Fentanyl and Lyrica are often inadequate to deal with the pain that Aimee is now experiencing," he wrote. "Please believe me when I say that Aimee's refusal to use pain medication has ceased following her most recent surgery. She is now requesting it ahead of schedule."
Despite the pain, Copeland's character shone through as she wished her dad a happy Father's Day Sunday.
"Sometimes being a parent is not easy and this is one of those times," Andy Copeland wrote. "I would much rather be the one in that bed. If I could take that pain away from her I would do it in a heartbeat." | <urn:uuid:2a9cfab6-eadf-47b9-9c19-902966af87fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/aimee-copeland-pleads-painkillers-feels-patchwork-quilt/story?id=16594112 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974533 | 589 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Infant mortality is babies who die during the first year of their life. In 2002 there were 7.2 million infant deaths worldwide; 5.4% of all babies born died within their first year, including 2.3% in their first week.
The territory with the most infant deaths was India, at 1.7 million, or 24% of the world total. In India, for every 100 babies born alive, almost 7 die in the following 12 months.
In 22 territories the rate is over 1 infant death for every 10 live births. All of these 22 territories are in Africa. The highest infant mortality rate is in Sierra Leone where 16.5 babies die, of every 100 born alive. | <urn:uuid:77693541-979c-487c-94b1-e2a06b09ddea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=261 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977281 | 143 | 3.140625 | 3 |
Social media are the tools and platforms that people use to publish content and interact socially online. User generated content includes conversation, articles, images or pictures, recipes, and anything that an individual might share with others in their daily lives.
Increasingly social media provide a platform for recruiting employees, serving customers, professional networking, personal and professional branding, and marketing products and services.
Popular Social Media Sites
Thousands of social media sites exist and appeal to various groups for a variety of reasons. The most popular social media sites include the following.
- LinkedIn is the premier site for professional networking, group discussions, publishing content, and advertising jobs.
- Facebook started out as a site for sharing pictures and chat among college students but has evolved into a significant platform for businesses. Facebook provides a way for families and friends to stay in touch and share their daily lives and pictures. Facebook also allows you to create business pages that are separate from your personal page.
- Twitter is a platform where in 140 characters or less, people share their thoughts, share recommended reading, signal businesses that they need product help, and advertise jobs.
- Ning allows users to build and maintain their own social networking site.
- Flickr allows users to easily post pictures to share.
- Google+ recently arrived with a flourish, and once the option of business pages is added, will rival Facebook for participants. On Facebook, you have one list of friends with whom you share. Google+ brought the concept of circles to the forefront. You can add different people to different circles and decide what and how much you want to share with the people in each circle.
Using Social Media Sites
To use social media sites, most require that you register, create a profile, and then, add friends or followers to create your network. Social media sites provide a variety of privacy options and you can decide whether to make your additions and profile public or private.
Whatever your goals for your business in participating in social media, do have goals so that you can measure the success of the time you invest in social media. For many, sites such as Facebook are platforms that allow them to stay in touch with friends and family. For others, the goal is to tap into another opportunity for professional networking.
If you're interested in how much traffic social media drives to your business or website, this recent study says that content and news sites are more likely to drive traffic than social media sites.
Social Media Goals for Employers
For employers, these are social media goals that make sense for your business or career.
- Develop a life-long network of professional contacts and easily stay up-to-date and in touch.
- Recruit potential employees with your business page, your professional and personal social network, and the professional and personal social networks of your employees.
- Search on candidate names and credentials to confirm your gut feelings about the person you want to hire Check that he or she presents an online image that is consistent with the person who showed up for your interviews.
- Reinforce your personal and your professional brand and strengthen your business brand.
- Network with people who share your interest in a career, a profession, or a topic.
- Create a space around which users of your product or service can interact with you and develop a relationship to build loyalty, word-of-mouth, and repeat use.
- Solicit feedback, provide customer service, and solve consumers' problems.
Social media is in its infancy. The only prediction that I can make, given the current proliferation of social media opportunities and participants, is that the uses of and participation in social media will continue to grow. When your 80 year old grandma has a Facebook account, your business needs to take advantage of the opportunities online social media present. | <urn:uuid:00dc5a5d-56a3-4217-8ea8-94f955e7c5ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://humanresources.about.com/od/glossarys/g/social-media.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937365 | 767 | 2.25 | 2 |