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Today is my first contribution to "Garden Bloggers Bloom Day". A great big thank you to Carol at http://maydreamsgardens.com for letting me know about this event. As I understand it, on the 15th of each month garden bloggers photograph what is blooming for them that day.
I thought for sure that I would not find any blooms as I walked around our chilly garden this morning. While I didn't find anything actually blooming, I was pleasantly surprised to find some plant material worth photographing.
While the crocuses and the snowdrops still have a chance to sneak up and surprise me, the first flower bud visible is on the stand of Hellebores out front. This one clump of Hellebores gives me the most wonderful bunch of seedlings each year. Two years ago it was almost decimated when the oil delivery truck backed up through this bed (OUCH) but it is finally starting to fill in that spot again. Here you can see lots of little black berries still on the Liriope. These berries must taste awful or must be poisonous because we have tons of birds and bunnies look for nibbles around here.
More Hellebores, this one looked so nice with the sun shining through and the crispy brown oak leaves. I also love the way the Hellebore foliage looks in the summer when they are finished blooming.
Lots of Sempervivum (Hens & chicks) in the garden. They look so frozen right now. This one here turns a deep red once the season warms up but for now almost all the varieties have this grayish greenish coloration.
Here's another Sempervivum, I didn't bother to copy down the names for this post as they don't look like they will during growing season. While their fuzzy webs aren't visible in the winter, the light frost gives them a similar appearance.
More buds here on the Pieris japonica by the back shed. I can't wait to smell them when they begin to bloom.
The Silene armeria seedlings are everywhere, just carpeting the ground. This year I think I will have to pot them up and share them with friends. They're not at all invasive, one year I almost lost them. Now I leave them be so they can seed about to their hearts content. A simple pass with a cultivator pulls them out any undesired location. To see what they look like in bloom you only have to scroll down to my Valentine Pink post and see them combined with the Edelweiss.
So, no pretty eye candy today but who cares...my daughter Lauren is coming home for the weekend! Homesickness has struck again and she's taking a bus and a train to get here. I've got to stock up on some of her favorites and hang her bedding outside so it smells like "home".
Ok, I doubt this is an original blogger topic. I'm guessing that many of you garden bloggers out there will be posting some kind of photo with Bleeding Hearts in them.
First of all, the botanical name for bleeding hearts is Dicentra. There is Dicentra spectablis which I grow in pink and white and the smaller, more delicate Dicentra eximia which I have in white and probably red (somewhere). Today I'll break my rule about using botanical names since the nickname fits so perfectly here.This photo is a lousy shot of some foliage (daylily perhaps?) and the lovely blue/green cut leaf of Dicentra eximia. I don't know if I still have red bleeding hearts in the garden, I can't wait to find out!
When my Dad was alive he loved to be outdoors and putter around his garden although nobody would call him an "experienced" gardener. Dad had the largest clump ever of these little bleeding hearts in full sun. The only thing Dad added to the soil was his grass clippings and you should have seen the worms he had (they were like hot dogs).
For years in my own garden I had a monster clump of Dicentra spectablis (the larger bleeding heart) growing in full sun along my gravel driveway. The spot was the lowest in our property so it always got the most moisture and it was amended every year with manure. I finally dug that clump out and divided it. It would stop you in your tracks when it bloomed but because it was so large it created a huge ugly spot in mid summer.
I really had no intention of following the herd and writing about bleeding hearts today but something happened that changed my mind. Last night I was cruising by here when I stopped suddenly. My daughter Lauren, who is away at college in Pennsylvania actually left me a message on my Valentine's Day Pink posting. Not only did she leave a message but it was gardening related! I tell you, the earth almost moved under my feet when I saw that :-) Anyway, Lauren loves bleeding hearts, we've always grown huge clumps here so this Valentine's day I dedicate my bleeding heart post to her and of course my husband Don who puts up with all my idiosyncrasies and my younger daughter Emily.
The white bleeding hearts grow quite happily here too. Most fortuitous for me, they also self sow (although not as readily as the pink variety). In early spring when they first break through the soil the white variety has a much lighter green foliage than the pink bleeding hearts have. It's easy to differentiate the two and know in advance what color the seedling will become. I don't always try to save the pink seedlings but I separate out every white seedling that I can find. Come Mother's Day weekend when we hold our plant sale, these bleeding hearts sell out before we even officially open the door.
To answer Lauren's question, I did not include a photo of bleeding hearts in my pink posting only because I don't have one that I like! For all the photos I do have of them, not one of them is very well composed (as you are probably now noticing).
This little white bleeding heart with the pink tip showed up one year in a bed where I thought I only had a red variety. For many years I thought it was a unique seedling and I've been trying to increase it. Just this year I saw images online that show the same traits so now I think maybe it's a plant I just forgot I planted there. Bet that never happens to the rest of you :-)
My personal experience in growing these bleedings hearts is that they have an amazingly long bloom season for a perennial. As I mentioned earlier in this post, the larger varieties will die back in the summer heat and leave an awful hole behind which you need to disguise with later growing perennials. The eximia variety though does not lose it's foliage in the summer and I think it would actually prefer more sun and more compost than I've given it in the past. We'll see if I remember to move it around this year and do some experimentation.
Thursday's are my day to volunteer up at our high school so I'll sign off now. I wish all of you a heart filled Valentine's Day.
It's February. After a wild evening of snow, wind, ice and a crazy drive to the high school and back (1 hour to go 3 miles and come home again) we are being deluged with rain. With all this water around me, I thought I'd make some lemonade with these lemons and post about water in the garden.
Water in the garden can have the most amazing effect. Moving water creates soothing sounds that can mask the man-made sounds that seem to fill our world. But, even still water can calm us. The photo above shows a sight I came across while touring a garden in Michigan. Not too many of the visitors even saw this water feature, it was tucked away in a corner of the garden.
When I asked the home owner about this water feature she quickly explained that it was therapeutic. She told me that whenever she went into town and the woman at the bank was nasty to her, she'd come home, walk up to this spot and dunk the manikin's head under water. Sounds very therapeutic to me :-)
There are no water features here in my own little piece of heaven other than a monstrous swimming pool and a kiddie pool for our wonder-doodle Calie. Maybe that's why I find myself so drawn to water features where ever I go, I need one of my own! This second photo was taken at Wave Hill in New York City. I don't know what caught my eye first, the amazing plant material, the charming children that were entranced by this pond or the young man that was in the pond working so hard!
I would totally be remiss if I didn't encourage everybody to go on garden tours. Yes, tours of the public botanical places such as New York Botanical Gardens or Old Westbury Gardens are amazing, but the tours I'm talking about are through smaller, private gardens. Many plant societies and garden clubs run annual and regional tours. Most of my tours have been as a member of the American Hemerocallis Society (that means Daylilies, not a blood disease). Even if you aren't crazed with daylily collectoritis you will find many things totally unrelated to daylilies on those tours. You can go to the site at www.daylilies.org and click on "Conventions/Meetings" to find a tour that might be near you. You do not have to be a member of a local club or the American Hemerocallis Society to be on the tour but be forewarned, you might want to join after the tour :-)
So, on to the photo above. I took this photo in a garden in Mississippi and I wish I still knew the name of the man who had created this amazing garden. He dug canals all around his garden (it was on a lake if I remember correctly) and in the canals he had barges with daylilies growing in them! Now that's a man who likes to keep busy.
This last photo shows a pond in Ed's garden. Ed is a coworker of my husband Don and he has the most delightful garden here on Long Island (truthfully though I took this photo at least 10 years ago). Just under Ed's kitchen window he put in a small pond. First he dug the hole, then he layered it with carpeting he had found at the curb. On top of the carpet he put a rubber liner and around the edges he put small rocks he had found.
Although it's not in the photo, there was a small waterfall so that when the family ate at the kitchen table they could open the window and hear the water. How delightful is that!
Right now the only sound of water here is rain pelting the south side of our house. I will just sit here and be thankful. When steady rain comes in from the north, we end up with some of it in our basement.
Today's post is an early tribute to Valentine's Day.
One of my favorite blogs at www.blotanical.com is Cottage Magpie at www.cottagemagpie.com.
Angela's posts are so beautiful, even the ones not about gardening just tickle the senses and warm the heart. Angela has asked other bloggers to join in and submit pink garden photos for Valentine's Day. I've never joined in on a blogging event like this, what fun!
Of course everybody sees the color pink differently, and there are so many different shades of pink. There's hot pink, Barbie pink, pale baby ribbon pink and lavender pink such as I see echoed in the above combination of Echinacea (Purple cone flowers which have no purple to my eye) and Hemerocallis (Daylily) 'Eggplant Escapade'. Hmm, that doesn't seem right with two plant names that sound quite purple but they look pink to me.
Zinnia's are such simple, happy flowers. I love this hot pink bloom, wish I could cut one and put it right next to my computer monitor right now!
Sheesh I'm suffering CRS today. I been really wracking my brain to come up with the botanical name for this plant and I'm still drawing a blank. Honestly, I'm giving my self a headache just trying to remember what this is. Guaranteed I hit the "publish post" button and then I remember :-)
And finally...tah dah...I saved my favorite for last. A pink sweet pea. Don't know where I photographed this as I don't think I've ever grown sweet peas. Sure makes me want to try though!
So why don't you join on in? Swing by Angela's place at www.cottagemagpie.com, read what it's all about. Then scroll down and read the comments people leave there as they will link you to more gardening sites that are posting pink flowers too.
(Taken in 2001, this photo shows my old cottage garden.)
After somewhat balmy February temperatures (for Long Island), we woke up this morning to 8 degrees (-13.3 Celsius). Brrrrrrr! My poor plants have no warm snowy blanket on them, I hope they are all sound asleep right now.
(2007 brought us beautiful walkways (safe too) but no more cottage plants here.)
So what's a garden crazed person to do when it's too cold to even go for a walk? Visit other gardeners online! Last fall my blog was added to a gardening blog site at www.blotanical.com. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of a garden funk, burnout after years of planning and participating in a national garden tour. With no posts being made to my blog and no visits on my own, my blog at www.blotanical.com lingered at the bottom of the list, almost in no-man's land.
Ah ha! Once the holidays finally barreled through here, that feeling began to creep up on me. You know that feeling...you begin to haunt the 635 section at your public library. When it comes time to check out your books you always seem to have the heaviest stack in sight! Scraps of paper begin to appear all over with mysterious words scribbled on them such as "Lysimachia ephemerum - Must have!". It's times like this I'm thankful I don't have a house keeper. She'd probably find these notes and think I have some rare disease.
At this time of year your car automatically stops at the local hardware giant where even though you know it's awfully early, you find yourself lingering at the gardening section trying to avoid the fact that it's still stuffed with Christmas clearance items.
(The view from our breezeway out to the street, summer of 2007)
Once back at home, you can't stay away from your computer. Stored in this little box that sometimes drives me insane are thousands of glorious photos of gardens, perennials, bulbs, trees, shrubs, herbs, annuals, tropicals and so much more. Better yet, you are only a click away from visiting others. Others who understand this itch you can't scratch, the need to get out in the garden and get some dirt under your fingernails.
(Luscious plants waiting to be adopted by winter crazed gardeners)
The first sign of spring around here is almost always a visit to Hicks Nursery Flower and Garden show. This morning I was sure I'd have another six weeks to wait for that event but after visiting www.hicksnurseries.com I was thrilled to find out that opening day is February 29th!
Hooray, that's not far away at all. Of course, I know that the first week of March is too early for most plant purchases. Still, the smells, sights and sounds of that show are the best tonic for this spring fevered individual. Pots of Hellebores in full bloom, seeds galore and lots of summer bulbs will come home with me. Oh yes, of course some deliciously scented Primrose and Pansies for the kitchen table come home too.
Best of all, there's always a new idea or concept to see at Hicks. It may not be the Philadelphia flower show, but it's here on Long Island and we love it. This last photo (number 5 for those of you counting photos) shows a concept that I loved at last year's show. I've already got the iron gazebo but it disappears from view in my garden. By bordering this one with moss rock and tucking those plants in, you have an instant (almost instant) garden oasis.
Off to dream about the garden, and don't forget, come visit us at www.blotanical.com. While you're there, browse around, hit the favorites and popular tabs and don't forget to click on me and say "hello" while you are there!
So, what do you do if you have lots of foliage but it just doesn't have any pizzazz? Add some whimsy and you will suddenly have a spot that will put a smile on your face, even on gray, lousy weather days.
I came across this woman "swimming" in a garden while on tour in Michigan. If I ever see this for sale I just have to get one for my own garden!
Bowling balls were everywhere in a garden I had toured in North Carolina. Luckily for me they were easy enough to find and I too have added bowling balls in my own garden. They sell for about $5 at garage sales around here. Just stay away from the plain black ones and look for some patterned or glittered balls.
The foliage in this shot isn't the prettiest but you can see one of my pink bowling balls. It's been in my garden for almost 4 years now, longer than any gazing ball has ever lasted.
Scratching your head about what you want to add to your garden? Surely you can find something whimsical :-) | <urn:uuid:d356f51f-5eb4-47e1-87c5-49dc32f7a7de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://melaniesoldcountrygarden.blogspot.com/2008_02_10_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970071 | 3,773 | 1.601563 | 2 |
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"He makes me feel like dancing!" For more than 20 years, that's what thousands of excited children throughout the country have been saying after participating in Jacques d'Amboise's National Dance Institute. Appropriately, it's also the title of the 1984 documentary about this revolutionary program that introduces children to the arts through the magic of dance. As one of the finest ballet dancers of our time, d'Amboise inspired geniuses like George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton to create some of their best works for him. As one of this country's leaders in the field of arts education, he now inspires children to lead healthy, creative, and vital lives. One of the school principals said after witnessing the transformative power of dance on his at-risk students, " What Jacques d'Amboise is doing extends far beyond his lifetime to generations of future Americans."
What he teaches to children today, he learned from experience. At seven, growing up in a rough New York neighborhood, his mother insisted he attend his sister's dance classes--not so much to participate as to keep him from joining one of the many gangs that roamed the Upper West Side. He went from fidgeting disruptively on the sidelines to out-jumping everyone else in the class. Six months later the wise teacher realized he deserved better than what she could offer, and in 1942 he joined George Balanchine's School of American Ballet. Within a few years he was dancing children's roles. By 15 he was a member of the New York City Ballet. By 17 he was a principal dancer, and by 21 he had made movies (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Carousel) and danced in Broadway shows. " What an extraordinary thing for a street boy with friends in gangs," says d'Amboise. " Half grew up to become policemen and the other half gangsters--and I became a ballet dancer!"
D'Amboise has created roles in Balanchine's Western Symphony (1954), Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1963), and Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet (1966), among others. For Ashton he premiered Picnic at Tintagel (1952). Some of his other triumphs as a dancer include leading roles in Balanchine's Apollo, Stars and Stripes, and Scotch Symphony, Lew Christensen's Filling Station, and Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of the Faun. He first choreographed for NYCB in 1963, and several of his works continue in the repertory.
In 1976, while still a principal with New York City Ballet, d'Amboise founded the National Dance Institute. The inspiration was the hope that perhaps he could do for young children what that first dance teacher had done for him. " Not necessarily to prepare them to be professional performers, but to create an awareness by giving them a chance to experience the arts. My interest, my belief, my obsession," says d'Amboise, " is that arts liberate a person's heart and mind to all kinds of possibilities. He started with 30 little boys, $3,000 out of his own pocket, and talked Balanchine into letting him use the stage of the New York State Theater between performances." Within three years, he had 300 children in the program. NDI continues to grow in cities around the country. Asked why dance is so often the key to turning around young lives that are headed in the wrong direction, he responded, " Dance is the most immediate and accessible of the arts because it involves your own body. When you learn to move your body on a note of music, it's exciting. You have taken control of your body and, by learning to do that, you discover that you can take control of your life."
For his extraordinary contribution to the arts education of this country's young people, d'Amboise has been honored with a 1990 MacArthur Fellowship, the Capezio Award, the first Producer's Circle Award for public service in enriching the lives of New York City children, the Governor's Award for outstanding contributions to the art and culture of New York State, and the distinguished Paul Robeson Award for Excellence in the Field of the Humanities. | <urn:uuid:2a8d606c-7d88-4393-83a6-a7599dad89a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/artists/?entity_id=3716&source_type=A | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97024 | 921 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Strings in C++?
I'm new here, so please don't be so harsh on me hehe.
So basically, I went out and purchased "C++ For Dummies, 5th Edition", and read the variables section. It says for strings, you use it in the following format:
However, when I put this in, I get a compiler error. I don't think string is recognised as a variable type because it doesn't get highlighted.
So I was wondering, what's going on? Does C++ even support strings? Is there some sort of different header apart from the iostream I need to include?
Oh, happy new year everyone, hope you've all had an excellent Christmas.
You need to #include <string>. Also, unless you have a using directive like using namespace std; or a using declaration like using std::string;, you should fully qualify the name as std::string.
Thanks a lot!
Originally Posted by laserlight
Have an excellent new year.
The cool thing about strings are that you can even access individual characters like char string arrays, like so: szString[i];
If you need to convert to char array: szString.c_str();
And if you need to cut up sections, use .substr()!
That's not cool, that's the biggest headache in trying to produce a std::string-compliant proper unicode-based string implementation. | <urn:uuid:5e945c17-f5bd-42c9-8742-5688fb94e692> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cboard.cprogramming.com/cplusplus-programming/110625-strings-cplusplus-printable-thread.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908993 | 303 | 2.890625 | 3 |
I’ve obtained copies of the birth certificates for two of the children of William and Fanny Sarah Robb (nee Seager) , my 2 x great grandparents. The latter were married in May 1836 . Their first child, Fanny Margaret Monteith Robb, was born in February 1838 but died in 1840, aged 2.
William Henry Robb was born on 7 April 1841 – at 11 a.m. according to the certificate. His father is described as a clerk and the birth took place at 12 Old Compton Street, in the sub-district of Saint Anne Westminster in the County of Middlesex. Two years later, on 1 December 1843, Fanny gave birth to Elizabeth Margaret. This time the birth took place at the City of London Lying-in Hospital, which I understand was in Old Street (the birth was registered in the sub-district of City Road, St. Luke). William is described on the certificate as a ‘law stationer’. I wonder if the location of the birth means that Fanny suffered complications?
It’s interesting to discover that William and Fanny were living in Compton Street as early as 1841 – perhaps they had been there since their marriage five years earlier? By 1851, when my great grandfather, Charles Edward was born, they were living at another house – No.33 – in the same street.
It seems unusual (for this period) for the couple to have waited so long between their marriage and the birth of their first child. Did Fanny have problems conceiving, or were there other reasons why the arrival of children was delayed? In an earlier post, I pointed out the oddity of William and Fanny being at different addresses for the 1841 census, and Diane Babington tells me that there are family stories of William being a gambler and a drunkard.
I’ll try to locate the birth certificate for the short-lived Fanny Margaret Monteith Robb, to see if that throws any light on their early married life. | <urn:uuid:bdf1f8bd-cf3b-4582-b2c3-bcd6cb4623f2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mprobb.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/births-of-william-henry-1841-and-elizabeth-margaret-robb-1843/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=9916d21231 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987957 | 417 | 2.0625 | 2 |
Sun-Dial.net is housed in a data center that is not only environmentally friendly in design, but designed to use the efficiency of the environment. Our walls are over 12 inches thick and filled with insulation that has recycled content. When the need for lighting occurs we use energy-efficient LED lighting instead of Compact Fluorescent or Fluorescent Light Bulbs. Our power is generated from our solar panels and stored in our battery plant. We use ambient and forced air cooling. Co-generation provides the power for support system.
Not only is our center designed to have the smallest ecological footprint possible, the systems are inherently stable. As a customer, your web site will be hosted on a server that does not suffer from energy spikes, frequency fluctuations, variable cooling that prematurely destroys servers at other hosting companies. Our efficiency provides Sun-Dial.net the ability to provide superior serving at a better price to you. | <urn:uuid:33c1cca8-5abd-41b9-bcb1-61e96a35ab71> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sundialhosting.net/about-2/sun | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937966 | 181 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Memories of a 1980 visit to Dachau concentration camp are seared in my mind. They all came back as I read a travel story about Boston. The visitor was walking the Freedom Trail and at one point it passed through an area of old pubs. He spotted a small green space across from one and he followed a small pathway. It led to 5 hollow glass towers that rose 3 or 4 stories. Each tower’s four sides, top to bottom, were covered with scratches. A closer look showed they were tattoo numbers of 6 million Jews killed by Nazis in WWII along with many quotes written by survivors or family members.
Recently many articles have appeared about the evils of bullying. I read another small story on January 27 reminding readers it was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Wasn’t that frightful period of the Holocaust, known to Nazis as the Final Solution, simply bullying at its very worst?
An evil leader used his power to bully the citizens of Germany into believing there was one group in their midst to treat with hate. It was not until 1945 when the concentration camps were liberated that the world saw the evidence of how easily the majority had accepted that false teaching.
Jews have lived through centuries of persecution so this was not a unique historic event. Few of those outside the Jewish faith knew about those atrocities. It took too long but this time the Holocaust will be remembered annually. In 2005 the United Nations acted and named January 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In 1980 I was in Munich, Germany for a conference and I made a pilgrimage to Dachau. At the train station I had trouble finding where to get a ticket to this place. The operator spoke almost in a whisper as she did the transaction. It was a short ride and then a bus ride to the camp. It was still encircled with barbed wire and guard’s machine gun towers were still in place. Near the entrance a barracks-type building held exhibits of photos and documents. There was no guide so visitors wandered across the huge area where daily roll calls were held and into barracks which housed the unfortunates.
Originally each building had 208 narrow bunk beds but eventually each held up to 1600 beds. In the prison barracks there were large meat hooks overhead where prisoners were hung and beaten. The crematorium was enlarged in 1942 by prisoner labor because the number of deaths was so large.
Dachau was established in March 1933 to house 5,000 Communists and other enemies of Hitler. It was one of the earliest concentration camps and when it was liberated in 1945 more than 200,000 humans from at least 30 countries had suffered its cruelty.
A Chattanooga man was a 20-year-old private in the 42nd Infantry Division which liberated Dachau. In 1995 he joined about 90 other members of that division to return and take part in the 50th anniversary reunion of former Dachau prisoners and other Germans. The local newspaper wrote about his trip and I was heartened to hear the many positive steps that have been taken in that 15 year period since I was there.
1980 marked 35 years since the liberation but it was clear the local citizens had not accepted the reality of Dachau. By 1995 there were guides at the camp and high school students were taught what happened there. Those former American liberators were sent to talk to students about their experience and feelings on that day. The attitude of the students was best expressed in these words. “It’s our duty to overcome it. There will be no cover-up.”
And yet world-wide, only 67 years later, the same intolerance, hate and violence against those who are different in color, belief or any other way is not covered-up but shown on the news daily. Will it ever stop? | <urn:uuid:afd8b4bc-ab7b-4386-a17b-2c5d7515b844> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://crossville-chronicle.com/opinion/x741509702/RANDOM-THOUGHTS-Will-the-bullying-ever-stop | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989442 | 770 | 2.546875 | 3 |
I need to create a mirror maze. The problem is that I don't know how to make facing walls that reflect each others' reflections as well as the objects in between them. I found an example in C++ which uses the stencil buffer, but as far as I can understand, it works in a way that draws the reflection first (the drawing is restricted to the mirror surface) and then the original object, therefore I assume that my problem cannot be solved this way because it would involve drawing an infinite number of layers in all the mirrors. I've also found another example in C which I still don't understand, but I'm working on it, and I'll paste that if needed. I'm an absolute beginner, the coding language can be any. Any help would be highly appreciated. | <urn:uuid:2b988489-8527-4ee3-be49-6a6f63fb717b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/showthread.php/179836-Alternatives-to-GLEW-Is-GLEW-neccessary?goto=nextoldest | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980159 | 160 | 2.875 | 3 |
Handling Social Media With Your Kids
Set Appropriate Boundaries and Provide Intentional Oversight for Social Media.
• Follow Website Rules and Safety Tips, and Set Privacy Settings.
If you allow your kids to have access to social media, be sure to follow the rules and tips provided on specific websites. Additionally, when setting up a social networking account, be sure to access the security settings area, click on "privacy settings" and then set the desired settings to make sure you're child's profile is private to ensure only designated "friends" can access their profile.
• Set-up a closed circle of "friends."
On social networking websites, only allow your kids to designate as "friends" people whom they know and of whom you approve. This will only allow your kids to communicate with a specific, closed group of people.
• Don't allow kids to add new "friends" without your permission.
It's likely that over time, your children will want to add additional "friends" to their social networking profile. Also, understand that it's likely that your children will receive requests from people they don't know to be added to their "friend" list. Set an expectation that no person can be added to the "friend" list without your permission.
• Don't allow your kids to provide any personal information.
Don't allow kids to post any information that would make it easy for a stranger to find them like addresses, phone numbers, where they regularly hang out, where they work and what time they get off work.
• Don't allow kids to set up multiple profiles using multiple email accounts.
From the beginning, set the expectation that your child is allowed only one account on a social networking website. Make sure your child understands that a violation of this expectation is cause for disciplinary action.
• Make it clear that you intend to be a "friend" and will regularly check your child's profile.
Your child will likely balk at this rule, as he or she will want their profile to be private, free from a parent's view. Don't give in. This will serve a couple of good purposes, both to ensure your children think through what to post on their profile before they do so, and it also gives you the opportunity to view the content that others post on the profile, as well. Be sure to follow through. "Friend" you child and visit their profile frequently.
• Have your kids agree to tell you if they receive any inappropriate or threatening messages.
The possibility exists that your child will receive uninvited, inappropriate or threatening messages from others. So, set the expectation that you need to know if this occurs, so that you can deal with these messages.
• Set clear expectations about cell phone use.
These expectations should include all issues associated with today's cell phones, from when it's okay to talk on their cell phone, to texting, to taking and distributing photos and videos. Tell your kids that if they should receive inappropriate photographs from others, you expect them to notify you. | <urn:uuid:fce0d888-1a2a-497a-a847-54d6b8620a3d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thefishhawaii.com/Article.asp?id=1565968&spid=18442&page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946957 | 621 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Deborah L. Jacobs, Forbes Staff
I cover personal finance for baby boomers.
Summertime, and the living is easy–unless you have teenage kids. Few events summon as much anxiety as a phone call from the police station letting you know that your child has been arrested, is in custody, or is just being questioned. Even if things don’t get quite that far, end of school pranks, daring friends and too much free time can tip even good kids over the line.
The best way to head off trouble is to educate yourself and your child before a crisis occurs. In 2009, nearly two million children between ages 10 and 18 were arrested in the United States. And many of these kids did the things they were arrested for doing.
Let’s hope it never comes to that. Meantime, here’s what you both need to know.
1. Your child is not an angel. Even good kids on occasion do dangerous or stupid things. Your child might be in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong friends. Sometimes kids do things out of character, and sometimes parents mistake their own child’s character.
2. The police are not on your side. In fact, they shouldn’t be on anyone’s side. They respond to complaints and to what they see. They open cases and try to close them. They may try to arrest only people who commit a crime, but that doesn’t always work out.
3. Cooperation and respect go a long way. The best time to explain this to your child is before an arrest or police interview. Cover these basics:
These last lines are the hardest to say. But saying them is the most important thing for your child to do. Police can be intimidating. They may try to wheedle a child into talking– for example, by saying that they want to help; that the child has nothing to fear; that not talking makes it look like the child is hiding something. Sometimes the officer thinks all this is true, but it often isn’t true.
4. Your rights as a parent right may be limited. Though some states require parental consultation for questioning, you have no federal right to be present when your child is questioned. Your child has a right to have a lawyer, but not a parent, present. Many departments will allow the parent to be present, but it’s up to the investigating police officer or that officer’s superiors.
5. When in custody, ask for a lawyer. If your child is in custody and says, “I want a lawyer,” the police must stop asking questions and your child can stop talking.
Asking for a parent is not the same thing, and the police can continue to question. So children should know that if they are taken into the custody, they should say they want to get a lawyer.
6. Parents shouldn’t play lawyer. Listen to your child’s story. If the child was questioned, you need to know if he or she is under investigation for a crime. In some jurisdictions, the police will tell a parent, but in most they will not. Still, it can be worthwhile to have an attorney contact the investigating officer and ask. | <urn:uuid:a59e57f9-6f3c-49cc-9b93-ad574d0f15d5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahljacobs/2012/06/22/8-hand-holding-tips-if-your-child-gets-in-trouble-with-the-law/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969729 | 676 | 1.953125 | 2 |
Ultraviolet, or UV, (U-V) radiation is an invisible wavelength of light whose major source is the sun. There are several categories of UV light, including UVA (U-V-A), UVB (U-V-B), UVC (U- V-C), and Vacuum UV. Of these, only UVA and UVB reach the earth from the sun, with the other types being absorbed by the atmosphere. UV radiation is a concern because excessive amounts can harm your skin and eyes. In addition to the sun's natural radiation, UV light is also generated by many artificial sources, including black lights, mercury vapor street lamps, welding torches, and certain lasers. Special devices called germicidal lamps emit UVC light to kill bacteria. Phototherapy lamps that are used to treat skin diseases give off primarily UVA light. Tanning beds are a potent source, providing three times the sun's UVA radiation during an average session. Incandescent bulbs and halogen lamps emit low levels of UVA. Fluorescent bulbs, however, give off traces of both UVA and UVB light. While some researchers have speculated that fluorescent lights could tire the eyes or age the skin, the long-term effects of such lights are unknown. | <urn:uuid:0ddf2e73-a9e9-4af1-8698-f0cb76f5df45> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.local12.com/guides/health/skincare/story/Sources-of-ultraviolet-radiation/3339tUNZ0ku6jNpHv--xzQ.cspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946466 | 256 | 3.671875 | 4 |
This has to be my favourite spot in all of the FBS study area – Hemlock Lake. Officially, the lake has no name but the abundance of hemlock here made for a convenient and appropriate namesake. I always visit in May, even though we haven’t conducted any fieldwork here since our trial MAPS station was shut down in 2009. It’s just one of those places. It has skinks and otters, lots of Winter Wrens, Brown Creepers and other South Frontenac goodies. On the downside it does seem to have a lot of Deer Ticks. I’ve been bitten twice, both times requiring doses of Doxycycline. It would be an incredible spot for a cottage if not for the aforementioned bloodsuckers and also the tangled mess of downed trees and thick coverage of raspberry canes (the site has endured what appears to have been an outbreak of Hemlock Borer). It’s a rugged place indeed. So rugged that it forced us to discontinue our MAPS station here after only two visits. At the end of each of those field days we felt well and truly knackered. I do hope that no road or cottage ever ends up at Hemlock Lake – it’s rampant wildness is its charm.
After a prolonged and complicated change of address it felt good to stroll through Frontenac woods again! The field season has begun. Our plans are full, as usual, but our focus will shift from the more specific pursuits of recent years back to the bigger picture. Point counts, point counts and more point counts are in order. In addition to widespread surveying there will also be demographic monitoring (MAPS and nest searching/atlassing) and a role in a collaborative project with Bird Studies Canada and Canadian Wildlife Service to examine the current population status of Cerulean Warblers in Ontario. The Frontenac Arch is THE hotspot for Cerulean Warblers in Canada. About a half dozen were heard singing this morning amongst the emerging foliage of the forest canopy.
I still marvel at the number of species with provincially or nationally critical connections to the Frontenac Arch region. The Gray Ratsnake (Pantherophis spiloides) is a perfect example. This is Ontario’s largest snake, growing up to 2.5 meters in length. This species has retracted considerably from its historical range but they seem to be holding on in the Arch – a familiar trend. I found this meter-long individual warming itself on the road this morning. After a bit of resistance from it I was able to move it off the road to safety. Unfortunately, collisions with vehicles are one of its main threats.
Frontenac Bird Studies – 2013
Time flies when you’re having fun studying birds! We launched FBS with our first season no less than five years ago. This year, our fifth consecutive, we will be branching into some new and exciting territory and also revisit all of the familiar survey routes that we established way back in 2009 – it promises to be a big year for FBS. Read on for more information on our activities this season.
In 2009 we completed surveys at over 150 point count stations throughout our study area. We surveyed along roadways, off the beaten path, and in everything from rock barren habitat to mature Sugar Maple-Oak forests. This June we will return to these routes for another round of counts, which will be a key contribution to our growing dataset on local population trends.
Since the beginning we’ve made it an annual priority to address locally occurring rare and declining species through monitoring and research. After three years dedicated to Prairie Warblers and Louisiana Waterthrushes, we are now turning our attention to Cerulean Warblers in collaboration with an Ontario-wide initiative led by Bird Studies Canada. Cerulean Warblers are now considered Threatened in Ontario and have been recommended as nationally Endangered by COSEWIC. Frontenac Provincial Park has a substantial percentage of Canada’s breeding Ceruleans, further evidence of the importance of the park and the Frontenac Arch overall to Species at Risk.
Filling in the Gaps
As if we need more to do! Our focus on Prairie Warblers and Louisianas over the last four years has carried us to familiar haunts, largely the rock barrens and pristine stream valleys in Frontenac Provincial Park. Key sections of the 5000 ha wilderness park have yet to be explored and as a result, some of the less common nesting species have only been rarely encountered if not missed altogether. Providing that our feet can take the punishment, our plan is to close some of these gaps with exploratory searches for these “missing” species in 2013.
For the past three years we’ve had great success with our annual Frontenac Biothon, which was both a valuable data gathering event and also a fundraiser. This year we will stay true to the same basic formula but with a focus on collecting breeding evidence for the park’s bird species – essentially a 24-hour mini-atlas! Thanks a bunch to all who have supported us in the past. We hope you’ll make another pledge this year! Click here for more information and/or to make a donation to the Frontenac Avian Atlas Day.
The 2012 season of our Frontenac Breeding Birds program is officially wrapped. All reports and data have been submitted and our attention has already shifted to 2013. We are particularly excited about this upcoming season, our fifth, as we will be turning our attention to new subjects after having just completed three consecutive years of monitoring Louisiana Waterthrush and Prairie Warbler. We will reveal our plans in the coming months once our preparations are completed.
A big thanks are due to all of our readers, sponsors and friends who continue to make FBS possible!
Our fourth consecutive season of Monitoring Avian Productivity & Survivorship (M.A.P.S) is well underway; nearly half finished, actually. We’ve now completed our third of seven visits to each station. As previously discussed results from our first three years of M.A.P.S indicated a sharp, incremental decline in abundance and diversity of terrestrial avifauna in Frontenac woodlands and rock barrens since 2009. The breadth and severity of the decline was foremost in our minds as we walked the trodden paths from usual empty net to empty net in 2011. Hope springs eternal and a new season began in early June 2012. Below is an update on this year’s results to date for Maplewood and Rock Ridge.
First the good news. Numbers of birds are up from last year at MABO, although still considerably lower than in 2009. For comparison, in 2009 we captured 91 birds total through visits 1-3 (72 new/19 rec) while we’ve captured 60 (39 new/21 rec) for the same period in 2012. Very pleased to see that Nashville Warblers and Northern Waterthrushes have returned to the site. We banded a whopping eight Northern Waterthrushes here in 2009 but didn’t even hear or see one a year ago. We’ve banded two adults of each species so far in 2012. Annual totals of Veery and Wood Thrush have been relatively consistent in abundance since 2009 and have returned in expected numbers again this year. Two new species have been recorded for the site; a singing Brown Creeper was detected on June 7 and White-throated Sparrows have been recorded singing on each visit. Notable absentees so far include cuckoos, Hermit Thrush and Field Sparrow.
It’s been a strong year for Yellow-rumped Warblers at MABO. I’ve also observed an unusually high number of adults feeding fledged young in Frontenac Provincial Park this spring/summer – good signs for this northern species in the region. While it’s still too early to judge this M.A.P.S season at MABO, with less than half of the work completed, we are seeing some positive signs of a possible rebound. Weather conditions have been closer to normal during this breeding season than any previous season since our studies began.
American Redstarts are one of the most commonly sampled species at MABO, although they are infrequent nesters within the station boundaries proper. They mainly occupy habitats at the edges of the station but we do manage to capture them later on in the summer when adults and young disperse. In 2009 at least two pairs nested along the shrubby perimeters of small wetlands within the station but they’ve not returned since. Gorgeous bird – one of my favourites.
Rock Ridge (RRID)
While things seem promising at MABO, the same cannot be stated for Rock Ridge (RRID) where numbers are a little down from last season and at least a few species seem to be struggling: most notably Eastern Towhee and Field Sparrow. Both are species of conservation concern due to significant negative trends evident in continental BBS and MAPS data. At our stations these species have consistently decreased in abundance annually since 2009. Urban expansion and changing rural landuse practices seem to be the most commonly suggested causes for the declines in both species, although these issues are less applicable in our region. On the other hand, White-throated Sparrows appear to have rebounded nicely after a near no-show in 2011. Also, the only Pine Warbler that we’ve banded during M.A.P.S was spotted feeding fledged young on June 28, 2012. The bird was originally banded as an immature male on July 18, 2010.
2011 was not a good year for cuckoos. For the first time we failed to capture one during a M.A.P.S season. This Black-billed was a welcome capture on June 18, 2012 at RRID. However, their numbers are clearly down from our first two seasons. This is true for most species at the station – present but substantially fewer in number. Rock Ridge begins to shine in July when birds abandon territories in search of food with their young so it will be interesting to see how the year will pan out at the station.
Our annual Frontenac Biothon was held the weekend of June 9-10, 2012. We were rather nervous about the unstable weather forecast for the weekend but we managed to stay relatively dry and comfortable for the 24-hour blitz. During the inaugural biothon in 2010 we tallied a respectable 431 floral and faunal species in the Big Clear Lake area in the northeast zone of Frontenac Provincial Park. Last year we conducted an extensive tour spanning the rock barrens in the southeast to more mature forest habitats closer to the northwest section of Frontenac. In all, 466 species were identified in 2011. Results from both years combined comprise 727 unique species identified within the boundaries of the park!
This year we opted for less strenuous travel, focusing instead on the lively woods and meadows south of Slide Lake. As the vast majority of the park has succeeded to second-growth and mature forest, the once plentiful meadow habitats that were created by early settlers have gone – except for a few small fields in the Slide Lake area. We found an abundance of insect and plant life in these fields, many of which we hadn’t recorded during previous biothons. Fortunately, our bug guru Seabrooke was on hand to sift through a seemingly infinite sea of invertebrates. Our results for moths and butterflies was considerably higher this year, which will be evident by the photo selection in this post!
Diversity of birds during the event was a little lower than in 2011, although this is more a reflection of the much smaller area coverage this year. Indigo Buntings are the dominant species in the meadow areas where they occupy scrubby woodland edges. Sightings of Blue-winged Warbler and Blue-headed Vireo were noteworthy and an evening nightjar concert was a highlight.
A session of skipper watching was interrupted when two of us caught a glimpse of a very young Black Bear in the meadow – another biothon first! Mammals are certainly the leanest group of species on an annual basis (6-8 species average) but we’ve not yet attempted any nocturnal trapping and or searching – perhaps next year.
The weather on Saturday afternoon alternated between short periods of low dense cloud and sunshine with a moderate breeze. Luckily for us, the winds subsided enough to make for a decent session of mothing in the evening. A total of 77 species were counted in a couple of hours, which was considerably better than the previous year when the moth sheet rippled in the wind and light showers. Seabrooke reports that the best moth of the night was a Silver-spotted Ghost Moth – just her second ever!
This year’s biothon was another success – a productive 24 hours of counting and some much needed dollars raised for Frontenac Bird Studies! Our unofficial total of species counted for the 2012 biothon is 463, just a few shy of our final tally in 2011. It is remarkable how consistent our annual totals have been (431, 466, 463). With the completion of each biothon we make a substantial contribution to a cumulative database on species occurrence information for Frontenac Provincial Park – a valuable asset for Ontario Parks and Frontenac Bird Studies. Having just finished up our third consecutive we are now approaching 1000 species of flora and fauna identified by a small group of friends passionate about the land and its living things.
On behalf of the Migration Research Foundation I wish to extend our thanks to this year’s many sponsors who donated to the three biothon teams. Of course, the whole event would not have been possible without the efforts of our dedicated volunteer biothoners; Chris Dunn, Steve Gillis and Seabrooke Leckie! Lastly, thanks to the following Ontario Parks staff for their continued support of Frontenac Bird Studies and the Frontenac Biothon fundraiser; Corina Brdar, Peter Dawson and Bert Korporaal. Special thanks to Ken and Vera Shepherd for allowing us access through their beautiful farm for the biothon this year.
Below is a small selection of species recorded during this year’s biothon – hope you enjoy!
Our annual Frontenac Biothon event will be held this weekend, June 9-10, 2012, in Frontenac Provincial Park.
The Frontenac Biothon was created to raise important funds for our work and make a beneficial contribution to science and conservation at the same time. Held annually in June or July, the Frontenac Biothon is a sponsored event where three teams of naturalists identify as many species as possible within an allotted 24-hour period. Since the inaugural event in 2010, over 700 species have been identified in Frontenac Provincial Park, which includes nearly 600 species of plants and invertebrates! These exhaustive searches have also led to some significant discoveries including occurrence records for many regionally rare species and designated Species at Risk.
This year our teams will take to the woods, meadows and lakes on June 9-10, 2012. Our biologists will be identifying all plants, mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and insects encountered but will have a specific focus on rare species and designated Species at Risk.
How you can Help
While our biothon teams have all the fun battling bugs, swamps and steep terrain – it’s the sponsors that make the event happen! Frontenac Bird Studies is a program of the Migration Research Foundation – a registered charitable organization in the U.S and Canada. All sponsors receive a tax-creditable receipt for donations over $10. You can sponsor the Frontenac Biothon by mail (see below for details) or online through Paypal. 100% of donations will go directly to support FBS programs.
Sponsor a Biothon Team
You can also sponsor the biothon by cheque through regular mail. Please complete the cheque to Migration Research Foundation Inc. Simply include the name of the biothon participant you wish to sponsor on the memo line of the cheque and send the envelope to our address below.
Frontenac Bird Studies
2386 Bathurst 5th Concession
RR7, Perth, ON. | <urn:uuid:129a5ed3-6901-445c-9629-c9919ad85417> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://frontenacbirds.ca/blog/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951086 | 3,396 | 2.28125 | 2 |
Climate Change: Public Skeptical, Scientists Sure
Filed by KOSU News in US News.
June 21, 2011
The American public is less likely to believe in global warming than it was just five years ago. Yet, paradoxically, scientists are more confident than ever that climate change is real and caused largely by human activities.
Something a bit strange is happening with public opinion and climate change.
Anthony Leiserowitz, who directs the Yale University Project on Climate Change Communication, delved into this in a recent poll. He not only asked citizens what they thought of climate change, he also asked them to estimate how climate scientists feel about global warming.
“Only 13 percent of Americans got the correct answer, which is that in fact about 97 percent of American scientists say that climate change is happening, and about a third of Americans just simply say they don’t know,” he said.
Most Americans are unaware that the National Academy of Sciences, known for its cautious and even-handed reviews of the state of science, is firmly on board with climate change. It has been for years.
Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy, paraphrased its most recent report on the subject.
“The consensus statement is that climate changes are being observed, are certainly real, they seem to be increasing, and that humans are mostly likely the cause of all or most of these changes,” he said.
That’s not just the view of the U.S. National Academies. There’s also a consensus statement from the presidents of science academies from around the world, including the academies of China, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Russia, France, Brazil, the list goes on.
Cicerone also points to strong statements about climate change from the leading professional organizations in the United States, including from the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society and others.
Of course, it’s still possible to find a few scientists who reject the consensus. Cicerone says it is appealing to think they are right when they say there’s no need to worry about complicated cap-and-trade policies or otherwise fuss about climate change.
“I think rooting for the underdog, the David against the Goliath, is something that we all do — I think it’s particularly American, although it happens everywhere,” he said. “And in fact, this is the way scientists work.
“Scientists don’t gain respect, and attention, and fame, if you will, by going along with the mainstream, and I don’t know of many scientists who try to go along with the mainstream — they’re trying to go the opposite direction.”
Though a few are still finding reasons for doubt, Cicerone says he and most of his colleagues find the science of climate change is stronger the harder they look. So does this public disbelief mean that Americans are becoming more anti-science?
Leiserowitz of Yale University says that’s not what his polls show.
“Most Americans have overwhelming trust in the science and trust in scientists,” he said.
But the public is largely unaware of the consensus because that’s not what they’re hearing on cable TV or reading in blogs.
“They mostly get exposed to a much more conflicted view, and that’s of course not by accident,” he said.
Leiserowitz is now starting to ask how public opinion changes when people actually know that the National Academy of Sciences and other groups consider climate change to be a big concern.
“So far the evidence shows that the more people understand that there is this consensus, the more they tend to believe that climate change is happening, the more they understand that humans are a major contributor, and the more worried they are about it,” Leiserowitz said.
He says if you drill down a bit, the American public actually is not split when you ask them if they’d like to see a gradual transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.
“We find overwhelming bipartisan agreement about that,” he said.
As it happens, that transition is a step toward slowing the pace of global climate change. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio] | <urn:uuid:2f2222b8-30b3-4f52-a14c-b2da414b528d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kosu.org/2011/06/climate-change-public-skeptical-scientists-sure/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960139 | 895 | 2.234375 | 2 |
MojoKid sends in a piece that takes a step back from Google's much-analyzed OS to look at what it is trying to accomplish. "Last week, Google open-sourced its Chromium OS project, more than a year before the operating system is scheduled for release. In doing so, Google hopes a variety of developers and companies will become involved in the project, and has pledged to release regular updates as well as a comprehensive log of bug reports and fixes. This article takes a look at Google's design vision for Chromium, the unique benefits it offers, and a bit of why Google is throwing its hat into this particular ring in the first place. Chromium, after all, is a Linux-based OS entering the smartbook/netbook market at a time when the product segment is already being well served by a variety of Linux distros, XP, and Windows 7. In the midst of all these options, do we need another operating system? We just might." | <urn:uuid:3240b451-b009-4e9e-9679-0d58ec251ea5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/12/01/2123218/What-Googles-Chromium-OS-Is-Reaching-For?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957234 | 200 | 1.789063 | 2 |
With its new glass-donned successor looming large nearby, the 88-year-old Preston Grandview Public School came down, red brick by red brick.
Demolition crews tore through the exterior of the Hamilton Street elementary school this week, exposing what is left of barren classrooms.
With every passing hour, a section of the school’s structure was added to a pile of rubble, finally snagged by giant loading claws and laid to rest in dumpsters.
This week is the one of the last and most dramatic steps in the school’s journey toward its future in a brand new $8-million building that’s under construction just a stone’s throw away. The old and new stand side by side, providing a stark picture of a then-and-now story.
Faced with aging facilities at Grandview that were prohibitive to upgrades and repair, the Waterloo Region District School Board opted to rebuild on the same site and transfer students in from the Deer Ridge community to counter the school’s declining enrolment.
The school is set to open this September. Architectural features, including the majestic entrance to the school’s front door are expected to be incorporated into the new school’s design. | <urn:uuid:403277cb-6336-49a4-aa75-671807e1c371> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cambridgetimes.ca/news/local/article/1415185--grandview-school-sees-last-days | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958372 | 255 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Index of all articles, click here
By Luc Loranhe (2006)
Even though I have written many theoretical articles, I am a practical man. In this respect, too, I like to follow the advice of the man who said that it's not important to just explain the world; we also must change it.
Therefore, in this article, I will summarize some very practical ideas on how we can create a society that allows a higher degree of sexual freedom, not just personal freedom, to both man and women.
It appears that in matters of sexual desire, there is a biological disproportion between the males and females of the human species.
Healthy males who are not socially threatened are genetically not determined to be monogamous. Even if they are committed to a monogamous relationship (because it may be a requirement of the society they live in), they can easily be aroused by other females, provided these other females possess sexual attributes in accordance with the taste of the man in question.
I say "healthy males who are not socially threatened" because males who have health problems and those who are socially threatened may have other requirements and will be more inclined towards a genuinely monogamous relationship.
Females, even when they are healthy and not socially threatened, are more inclined to be genuinely in favor of a monogamous sexual relationship, as this probably matches their genetic disposition more than it fits the genetic disposition of males. This doesn't mean that females would not be capable of enjoying the thrill of sexual variety. It's just that the variety-seeking tendency isn't as pronounced as it is in men.
And while men and women may be different in many aspects, and may have different sexual strategies, and may commonly find optimal fulfillment in different sexual settings, in one way, women are exactly the same as men: sexual satisfaction is the only real purpose in life, and orgasms are the principle sense-providing, metaphysical events.
There is an obvious reason why the females of our species are genetically more (though not entirely) in favor of monogamy, and men more (though not entirely) in favor of polygamy. It comes down to the word "risk".
For as long as humans have realized the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth, women have rightly considered a sexual encounter as more risky than did men.
"Sleep with the wrong man, and pay for it by having to raise his child for the rest of a (traditionally short) life."
"Sleep with the wrong man, give birth to his child, and be far less attractive to potentially better men."
There has always been less risk for men.
"Sleep with a beautiful girl today, and with another beautiful girl tomorrow, and again another one the next day; and if one has a child, oh well, that's primarily her problem."
But it's not just that the comparatively new awareness of the fact that sexual encounters are more risky for women make them more inclined to monogamy.
I assume that there even is a genetic basis. Natural selection, even from times before humans realized the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth, would have favored women with a more careful mating strategy.
On the other hand, natural selection would likely have favored men who pursued sexual intercourse with many women, and would thus have sired more offspring than they would have been able to support (there are some other factors, such as offspring survival, which would have been in favor of monogamous men, but these factors probably did not set off the procreative advantages of promiscuous men).
My political agenda is the pursuit of a society of greater sexual freedom. Designing such a society requires practical steps which are to be outlined as policies.
An overriding concern must be that such a society of greater sexual freedom is not disadvantageous for women. Therefore, while I am indeed convinced that there is a biological conflict between the sexual strategies of men and women, I am more than willing (this would be: determined) to contribute to the social bridging of these biological differences.
Thus, in order to compensate women for the inherently greater risk sexual conduct means for them, I support, in general, policies that are favorable to women: more favorable to women than to men.
First policy - general safety
An unsafe society is detrimental for the sexual freedom of both men and women, but for women even more so than for men. If we have to fear physical violence on the street, armed break-ins into our homes, weapons-bearing lunatics, and mafia gangs ruling neighborhoods, the normal impulse of everybody, especially women, is to seek steady partnerships, simply for protection. Thus, a strong state is a requisite for sexual freedom, especially the sexual freedom of women.
Second policy - no religious enforcement whatsoever
Unfortunately, we live in a world in which religions have not yet entirely been discarded. A strong state that guards the personal and sexual freedom of its citizens ought to stringently protect everybody from the imposition of whatever religious mandates that may exist in a geographic region. Again, this is more important for women than for men.
Third policy - risk preemption for sexual pleasure, especially for women
Free availability of all methods that disengage love-making from pregnancy and childbirth. Free contraception; easily available or free abortions. No social stigmatization or discrimination against women who are not in a monogamous relationship with a man, or who raise a child or children without a present father or substitute father. A comparatively high degree of economic security for women, especially when they have given birth to children. Economic support for women who are pregnant or have given birth by compelling biological fathers to pay up. In case this does not materialize, economic support by the state.
The less economic pressure is on women to emphasize the monogamous tendencies in their character, the more likely they are to give in to own promiscuous inclinations. This can be a substantial enrichment of their lives, and apart from that, is supportive of a sexually free society (which needs sexually active women as well as sexually active men).
Fourth policy -sexual health
While sexual conduct, and the motivations for it, should not be policed, tight policing of sexual health is imperative if we want to build a society of greater sexual freedom (this is just another aspect of why freedom needs a strong state, which nevertheless is based on an ideology of granting its citizens optimal freedom). Sexually transmitted diseases are one of the most important metaphysical negations of sexual satisfaction for all.
Apart from preventing violence among the members of a society, the state has an important function in safeguarding public sexual health. Not only should the state provide regular, free sexual health check-ups for all members of society who have reached sexual maturity.
Treatment should also be free, and the occurrence of sexually transmitted diseases should be closely monitored. Infecting another person with a sexually transmitted disease should be defined as crime, and should be punished.
Fifth policy - no age discrimination
In as much as cosmetic surgery advances, a youthful appearance is in reach for much of a woman's and man's life. This effect of sexual attractiveness ought not to be diminished by the necessity to show a recorded age in passports or other documents. A strong state should be capable to establish a person's identity solely from his genetic fingerprint. In order to preempt discrimination on grounds of age, no birthdates shall be recorded of citizens (just as a citizen's race no longer is recorded).
Sixth policy - no artificial age barriers
There is nothing wrong and nothing unnatural for people having sexual contact bridging one or two generations. This must not be demonized. Just as older men can derive enormous pleasure from sexual contact with substantially younger women, older women can have great enjoyment with substantially younger men. It may even be that the sexual potency of older women and younger men match more closely than the sexual potency of older men and older women, just as the sexual patience of older men and the sexual reservations of younger women match more closely than the impatience of younger men and the lack of experience of younger women. That a large age gap in any way is unnatural is a myth circulated by anti-sexual religious lunatics and feminazis (the usual anti-sex coalition).
Seventh policy - exchange of sexual and material gratifications
Just as a large age gap between sexual partners is demonized, so is the exchange of sexual for material gratifications. Because the exchange of material and sexual gratifications happens all the time, and because it has happened all the time throughout history, the demonizing of this exchange is actually a rather new attempt of brainwashing by those who want to moralize as much sexuality out of the human life as ever possible.
Even in a society that bridges the differences between male and female mating strategies, men will probably display a stronger polygamous sex drive than women. Superficially, this seems to put a limitation on the engineering of a human society that allows optimal sexual satisfaction for men as the polygamous willingness of women would be limited even when the differences in mating strategies are bridged. The reason for this is genetic imparity.
However, there is a biological basis for females of our species to grant sexual favors to males in exchange for protection and economic favors. I say that the basis for this deal-making is biological because it predates any form of sophisticated human society.
By all indications, even when our early human ancestors still roamed African grasslands as hunters and gatherers, or as scavengers, there was a trade-off in which males obtained sexual gratifications and females, in exchange, obtained protection and access to food. This kind of arrangement has persisted throughout history.
I do not believe that this is unnatural, and I don't even think that it is immoral per se. It's an aspect that helps to establish a sexual balance between males and females. It could probably even be proven that nature reduced the sex drive of females in order to put them in a better position to calculate granting sexual favors for economic ones (a necessity for their survival).
Extensive studies of arranged marriages have come to the conclusion that sexual partnerships that are entered into for practical reasons (to provide a sexual outlet for a man with a strong sex drive, and to provide economic security for a women with a yet not very developed sex drive) are just as likely to result in a working love relationship as are partnerships that start out with being in love. Love probably isn't as metaphysical as modern Western romanticism wants to make us believe. Treating each other well in a family-supported environment, and having an intimate relationship at the same time, historically goes a long way in establishing love.
While this historical model is inappropriate in today's world for a variety of reasons, it is nevertheless an indication that some economic interests on the part of the women when entering a sexual relationship is not preemptive for love, but can well be a supportive element.
Index of articles, click here.
Copyright Luc Loranhe | <urn:uuid:2a401aad-e9c7-4e7b-99da-f2340a262a0d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://phantomfood.com/implementing-sexual12345.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961285 | 2,234 | 1.59375 | 2 |
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- A city of southeast Spain on the Mediterranean Sea south of Valencia. It is a port and tourist center. Population: 323,000.
- n. A province of Spain
- n. The capital city of the Alicante province
- From Spanish Alicante. (Wiktionary)
“The widest avenues, such as La Rambla or Doctor Gadea will lead you to Alfonso X el Sabio Street with the Luceros on one side and the Central Market on the other, just opposite the School of Spanish. junior courses in alicante, spain zador spanish school in alicante Zador Spanish language institute in Alicante occupies the first floor of a restored historical building, situated right in the Alicante city centre.”
“Am a bit peeved because I've just discovered a group has announced me as doing an event in Alicante on Nov 9.”
““Explained why we brought a vampire with us to Alicante, which is, by the way, expressly against the Law.””
“It was fantastic and we really wanted to get over the defeat in Alicante.”
“It's located in the Spanish region of Alicante which is on the Casablanca, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.”
“We are fortunate in Ajijic that the Guadalajara restaurant featuring the cuisine of the Alicante region on the Mediterranean coast in Spain just south of Barcelona has opened a branch in West Ajijic and is serving up some of the finest seafood and accompaniments this town has ever seen.”
“Cristalhombre wrote me asking for further references on "foodie" places at Lakeside after my review of the wonderful Tabarka Restaurant featuring splendid Spanish Mediterranean seafood from the Alicante Region and I told him I knew of few places that met those standards at Lakeside but Dawg has just discovered another place that is new and special beyond belief so here goes:”
“He himself relies on a producer in the neighboring Alicante region.”
“The helpful Mr Beach rounds off a most informative dispatch by revealing that the Dutch side Heracles Almelo, Greek club Iraklis of Salonica and recently-relegated Spanish minnows Hércules Alicante are all named after the demi-god son of the father of gods and men, Zeus.”
“Scotland's motivation is without question; victory in Alicante would guarantee them a Euro 2012 play‑off place.”
‘Alicante’ hasn't been added to any lists yet.
Looking for tweets for Alicante. | <urn:uuid:8226144a-cfe3-45e2-bfe3-4d5bd351400b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wordnik.com/words/Alicante | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939178 | 571 | 2.390625 | 2 |
Don't Look Back
Don't miss What's UnBEETable below!
Click here to order a Heart Beet!
And, here to order a painting!
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way."
~ Henry David Thoreau
This week, The Weekly Beet reports straight from the beginnings of 2010. Mary Kent doesn't look back, revealing a few tips on letting the past go and how to move forward with grace and ease into the New Year!
It's a new year, a new time, and a new space. Where we go from here is all in the hands of the creator of your experience, which I am here to say is you! We are now in a moment where we are all being asked to cut the chords of the past, make healthier decisions and resolutions, and put into practice nothing better than a fabulous version of you. But, how do we become better versions when our rickety, old past keeps us from becoming anew? I am the first to admit it's not an easy thing this not looking back and mentally walking away from past loves, experiences, and creations. Afterall, we are humans who came to Earth feeling deeply connected to people, places, and things by the energies that lie deep within our emotions. Living in various cities has forced me to move physically, yet emotionally and energetically I have had to learn to cut ties with certain people and places that has proved quite challenging. Why? Because I, like everyone else on this planet, have invested emotional energies of the heart and soul into people, places, and things and the mind, which has created a million reasons not to be free, loves to keep us from letting go, instead of not looking back. In essence, we become hooked and baited by our emotional reactions, which keep playing out until we learn how to cut the emotional line or choose a new way.
Our past, which truly lies no where else but in the mind, loves to call us back for more and will put up a fight to keep us stuck in its silly recreations. I am ure you'll know precisely what I'm talking about when the past starts creeping in in the presence of a new love or perhaps even in the personality of the new boss at work. The situation or the person that presents itself in your life will very quickly start to feel ever so familiar and that is most likely when the opportunity to handle things differently arrives - if you will stand knowingly aware of what is happening. So, when that past comes ringing in loud and clear, it's time to pick up with an internal message that says, "OK, I've been here before and I remember I went down that road once with that reaction which made things pretty difficult. So, even though it might feel weird, I'm not choosing thaaaat again." And, literally by making a NEW choice of how to react, you make a sharp turn to the right of your past and into a world of new possibilities. And, that new possibility may mean to walk out, to cut the chord, and never look back. Or, it may simply mean to stay, to breathe, and to work through the situation, which will put you in your heart, a place that intuitively knows how to unconditionally accept and to never look back.
So, choosing a new reaction in the present is only the first stop in learning to move forward. Here are my top 5 tips to help you walk the road to empowerment and to help you never look back:
- Join a spiritual group. If you are Christian, join a prayer group or Bible study. Hold tight to the notion that we all have the potential within to be a Christ and that Jesus' message and example was that if we observed how he operated, we could and would do greater things than he. I truly believe this. For the New Ager, Eckhart Tolle has created a stir with his NOW books. Neale Donald Walsh, the author of Conversations with God, has done the same. Becoming spiritually empowered is the greatest gift you can give yourself to make changes and to help you move forward.
- Become the watcher of your mind, which is dying to recreate the past over and over again. I have recreated my past so many times, especially with boyfriends, it makes me laugh out loud! Know that your mind wants to stick you back in the same relationship. Know that your mind craves the same old patterns. Know that it is your mind that is truly the only thing keeping you from moving forward. It's as simple as this. If you need help reprogramming the thoughts of your mind, call my great friend Laurie Lamson who does something called Theta Healing. It's AMAZING!!! She is great at helping to cut those emotional ties between people.
- Know where you going. When I returned from living in England, I was most confused about what to do next and my mother just happened to recommend a movie called I Know Where I Am Going. The message was perfect for me. Just make a goal or know what it is that you are trying to achieve. Write it down and with faith it will come to fruition. I know this! I know this!
- Master your fears. Fear is the emotion that appears within to keep us from moving forward. The only way you can truly face your fears is to write them all down and tackle them one by one. I started with a fear of public speaking and the only way I got over this was to go out and do it. I faced that fear and was on to the next one. Letting go of fears is a great way to keep you moving forward and not looking back!
- Letting go of judgment. This one is HUGE!! If you find yourself judging you, then it's time to ask yourself why. Judgement keeps you from moving forward. By accepting the situation you have found yourself in, you will begin to clear the energy and as a result things will start to shift. But, you can not move forward unless you have released alot of the judgement of yourself and others. There is seriously liberating and will push you forward rapidly.
- And, you know me! I always like to add a #6. Learn to forgive. Forgiving yourself, others, and situations are important factors in freeing you to move forward. It is a process so don't think that forgiveness comes easily. This one was brutal for me because I tend to think I am always right and have been the queen of moving on without forgiving. But, forgiving isn't at all about condoning other's behaviors or becoming BFFs again. Give me a break! It's all about you and about freeing yourself from the emotional energy that is keeping you in a stand still. It is VITAL to forgive - not just for the psyche, but for your future. An unforgiven past makes for a slow step towards the future, not to mention an uncomfortable moment in the now. So, I say, forgive, forget, and mooooove on! Click here to learn the art of forgiveness.
Not looking back is definitely a test that I have been put to many times. 2009 was a year that ended with alot of beautiful pushes to move me forward, but, there were definitely a few tricks that tried to get me to turn back from where I knew I was meant to be going. The Beet felt Gooped all over, but learned it was a lesson in flattery! My little English cottage flooded on Christmas Day and I had to find a new place in a matter of days. Best present from St. Nick! I lost a few close friends, but was revisited by some old loves that reminded me just how much love really does endure. I got sick again, but managed to push through it with a lot of self-love, care, and attention. So, with a lot of wild and crazy pitfalls trying to trick me and keep me down in the dumps, there was always a heavenly ladder that appeared right when I needed to climb out the most. And, each time I climbed out, I found a little miracle waiting on the other end. My Heart Beet came to life, The Beet hit E! and major newsstands in the US and even across the world to India, paintings were sold, and lots of new and exciting doors started opening. Let me be the first to testify that no matter how hard we get hit by the flood, God and the universe that is operating on behalf of our highest good always has something to dry up the rain, to make it all much much better, and, yes, to keep us moving forward.
Cut the cord!!! Don't look back! It's time let it all go! Don't miss a Beet. Stay tuned for next week.
PS. Mary Kent is wearing dress by Eden Boheme available in Charleston, SC. She is NOT looking back and running forward towards the new. Photographic credit goes to Michael Kadlubkiewicz, who worked alongside Diana Deaver the day of the shoot.
My Healthy Tip: "Cook with coconut oil. It won't hydrogenate and is super tasty."
My Favorite Quote: "When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened."
~ Winston Churchill
My Favorite Snack: Rice & Adzuki Bean Chips
My Favorite Movie: Leap Year
My Favorite Guru: An Old Boyfriend
My Favorite Song: I Still Care For You by Ray LaMontagne
The Heart Beet in Sterling Silver with chain is $165.
The Heart Beet in 14K Gold with chain is $385. Click here for purchase. | <urn:uuid:6b967b08-4a42-4751-a684-4ff53c7f22df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theweeklybeet.com/beets.php?beetid=208 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974044 | 2,002 | 1.625 | 2 |
The new state regulation, which goes into effect at the start of 2013, makes it illegal for a boat in one river or lake to pick up plants and then go into another body of water — at least without being cleaned first.
Some boaters are likely to see the rule as a burden, but Jared Teutsch of the Alliance for the Great Lakes — an advocacy group — says the law is in everyone’s best interests.
“That beautiful body of water is not going to stay that way if some of these aquatic invasive species get in there,” he says.
Teutsch adds that because recreational vehicles are the number one reason invasive plants are spread, it’s important to keep boaters informed about the threat of invasives in Illinois waterways. That's one reason the state now stipulates that owners of public docks post information about keeping boats free of invasive plants and animals.
The law also allows police to pull over vehicles that are hauling boats with plant debris. | <urn:uuid:b873e745-db8f-4084-86fd-06b66af8ad74> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wbez.org/sections/water/illinois-boating-law-takes-aim-aquatic-invaders-104583 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954869 | 203 | 2.28125 | 2 |
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Why not quit smoking for a day?
That’s part of the idea of Thursday’s Great American Smokeout: To try being smoke-free for just 24 hours to give it a try.
This is the 37th year of the event, that the American Cancer Society says quitting even for a day reduces the risk of cancer.
“Tobacco use remains the single largest preventable cause of disease and premature death in the U.S.,” according to the cancer society, “yet about 43.8 million Americans still smoke cigarettes.” That’s almost one out of five adults.
Quitting smoking isn’t easy, but it’s doable, especially with help. We would run through all the economics of quitting smoking, but the fact is, if you are a smoker, you know exactly how expensive it is. And you know how damaging to your health it is. And you know whether you want to quit.
No matter your age, you know that quitting now will help you to feel better and live longer. It’s not a shortage of information about smoking that stops people from quitting. It’s just sometimes difficult to take that first step.
Luckily, wanting to quit is a big step toward quitting. Another: Try it. Just for today, why not quit smoking?
Help is available to keep on quitting if you want to, after today. You can go to the American Cancer Society’s website at www.cancer.org for ideas, or, of course, talk to your own health care provider.
This would be a fine day to take that first step. | <urn:uuid:2a919926-8637-41b6-b76d-61d739ce5d54> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ketchikandailynews.com/free/local-edit-thursday-smokeout2012-11-15T09-15-17 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923211 | 371 | 1.929688 | 2 |
Autoimmune Liver Disease
The Importance of Epidemiology in Determining Environmental Causes
A better understanding of the populations primarily affected by autoimmune liver diseases can help elicit the environmental triggers of these disorders.
Autoimmune liver (hepatic) diseases include primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC), autoimmune hepatitis (AIH), and primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). In addition, a number of systemic autoimmune disorders such as sarcoidosis and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) can result in liver disease. Unfortunately however, although autoimmune liver disorders were discovered more than a hundred years ago, little is known about their epidemiology or distribution throughout the world. A better understanding of the populations affected by these disorders would contribute to our understanding of their environmental triggers.
Most studies relating to the epidemiology of autoimmune liver diseases have focused on primary biliary cirrhosis and of sarcoidosis of the liver. In both of these conditions, the incidence in Sweden and Norway are fairly high when compared to cases reported outside of northern Europe. In addition, the incidence of PBC in Australia and Canada is lower than the incidence in England despite the strong British heritages seen in both countries.
Data on all three autoimmune liver diseases show the incidence to be much lower in people of Asian descent compared to those of European descent. Studies also show that African-American patients with autoimmune hepatitis are more likely to progress to cirrhosis than Caucasians affected with autoimmune hepatitis. More research is needed to understand the reasons behind these discrepancies.
Patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis tend to have a stronger familial association than patients with other autoimmune liver diseases. And although men between 20 and 40 years of age are most likely to be affected, an increased incidence of PSC has recently been reported in children, including infants. Compared to the general population, PBC is more likely to occur in families although the genetic link is lower than that seen in PSC. The greatest familial association seen in PBC occurs in mothers and daughters. Autoimmune hepatitis has the weakest familial association among the autoimmune liver diseases. However, people with autoimmune hepatitis are more likely to have a family member with autoimmune diseases in general.
The three autoimmune diseases have been intensively studied for links to immune system markers. The most common finding has been with HLA-DR8 acting as a risk factor for primary biliary cirrhosis. However, the link is not as strong as that seen with other autoimmune diseases. Among patients with autoimmune hepatitis the strongest link is seen with HLA DR3/DR4, and in primary sclerosing cholangitis the strongest link is with DRw52a.
Autoimmune Disease Influences
The autoimmune liver diseases have also been studied for their association with other autoimmune diseases. The strongest link has been found with primary sclerosing cholangitis occurring in patients with inflammatory bowel disease. A strong link also occurs between people with autoimmune thyroid disease and autoimmune hepatitis, and with primary biliary cirrhosis and the disorders autoimmune thyroid disease and systemic lupus erythematosus.
Studies have shown a lower incidence of the inflammatory bowel disorder ulcerative colitis occurring among smokers and among people who had a previous appendectomy. Because of the link between inflammatory bowel disease and PSC, researchers studied these risk factors in PSC. Their investigations showed a lower incidence of PSC among smokers and no influence from previous appendectomy.
Primary biliary cirrhosis has also been reported to be associated with cancer, particularly breast cancer. The risk of hepatocellular cancer is also high in patients with PBC as it is in patients with cirrhosis from any cause.
Recent reports have shown a marked association between 2-nonynoic acid, a cosmetic ingredient and primary biliary cirrhosis, a disease 9 times more likely to occur in women. Other suspected triggers of PBC include smoking, bacterial and retroviral proteins, hormone replacement therapy, and the use of nail polish. It’s thought that chemical degradation in the liver causes a loss of immune tolerance that predisposes women to developing PBC. Similarly, a process of molecular mimicry induced by hepatitis viruses, is suspected of triggering autoimmune hepatitis.
However, a better understanding of the epidemiology of autoimmune liver diseases is necessary to unearth a complete listing of the various environmental factors that contribute to autoimmune liver disease as well as those that offer protection. ♦
© 4 Jun 2007 Copyrighted by Elaine Moore
JJ Feld and EJ Heathcote, Epidemiology of Autoimmune Liver Disease, J Gastroenterol Hepatol 2003; 18(10): 1118-1128.
Elaine Moore, Autoimmune Diseases and Their Environmental Triggers, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2002. | <urn:uuid:15f8db16-2695-4fd8-8809-cdf84f1aca51> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.elaine-moore.com/Articles/AutoimmuneDiseases/AutoimmuneLiverDisease/tabid/92/Default.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937118 | 989 | 2.90625 | 3 |
Hamilton Hume (1797 – 1873) explorer
Hamilton Hume and William Hovell made many important discoveries including the Murray River, many of its tributaries, and the valuable agricultural and grazing lands between Gunning and Corio Bay in Victoria. In 1860 Hamilton Hume was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He became a magistrate and attended to his duties in Yass almost to the day of his death. An Anglican, he was a foundation trustee of St Clement’s, Yass, and other institutions in the township.
At the request of Governor Macquarie, Hume in 1818 accompanied Charles Throsby and James Meehan to the ‘New Country’, virtually the area already referred to but taking in more of the County of Argyle. The party split up; Hume and Meehan pressed on and discovered Lake Bathurst and the Goulburn plains. Whilst at the lake Meehan discovered and traced the course of the Mulwaree River for some distance while Hume made an excursion to the Gourock range. Rejoining for the return journey they passed close to the site of what became Goulburn. Next year Hume accompanied John Oxley and Meehan to Jervis Bay; Hume and Meehan, who worked well together, returned overland.
Hume agreed to lead a party overland to Spencer Gulf, but was unable to finance the journey wholly himself. As government backing was not forthcoming he was on the point of abandoning the project when Hovell offered to accompany him and share the cost. Hovell, an English sea captain, eleven years older than Hume, had settled on a grant at Narellan. He had little experience in the bush but could navigate. An agreement was signed but the arrangements were loose and unsatisfactory. The government contributed a few bare essentials: a tent, tarpaulin, pack-saddles, firearms and ammunition, but everything else was provided equally by the two principals, and each brought three assigned servants. Such instructions as the government’s contribution permitted it to give were a bone of contention between Hume and Hovell almost from the start, and by mutual consent their objective was changed to Westernport. On 17 October 1824, a fortnight after leaving Hume’s home at Appin, the party left his station at Gunning, then the farthest out. In the next sixteen weeks the party made many important discoveries including the Murray River, which the explorers for different reasons named the Hume, many of its tributaries, and the valuable agricultural and grazing lands between Gunning and Corio Bay in Victoria. It was a rich return for the distance travelled. They arrived back at Gunning on 18 January 1825. For his services Hume received a grant of 1200 acres (486 ha), which he was forced to sell to pay outstanding expenses; he had had to sell ‘a fine iron plough’ to pay for essentials before setting out.
Both Hume and Hovell convinced Governors Sir Thomas Brisbane and (Sir) Ralph Darling that the farthest point reached by the expedition had been Westernport. Hume’s failure to voice his suspicions that the point reached was Corio Bay in Port Phillip was a grave error. On the evidence available his later statement that he was ‘aware of it all the time’, must be considered an afterthought.
The government in 1827 offered a grant or other indulgences for the discovery of a new road over the Blue Mountains. This attracted Hume and he was successful. Though his line of road was not adopted he received a grant of 1280 acres (518 ha) for his services and as additional remuneration for his work with Hovell. In 1828 he was attached by Darling to Charles Sturt’s expedition into the interior. The party reached the Darling River. On this trip Hume showed his ability to work well and enthusiastically under a man he liked and respected. They became lifelong friends and Hume’s ability to handle the Aboriginals was never better illustrated than on this journey.
In 1860 Hamilton Hume was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He became a magistrate and attended to his duties in Yass almost to the day of his death. An Anglican, he was a foundation trustee of St Clement’s, Yass, and other institutions in the township. As the years advanced his health declined; another pointless quarrel resulted in the parting of uncle and nephew in 1865. From then on the explorer’s deterioration was rapid. Almost totally deaf, with a failing memory, and now obsessed with the idea that his place in the 1824 expedition had not been restored in the public’s estimation, he was preparing a second edition of his Statement when he died at his home, Cooma Cottage, Yass, on 19 April 1873.
Hamilton Hume’s Grave :
William Wilberforce and his impact on Australia Celebrating 200 years since the Abolition of Slavery -
Public Lecture (mentioning Hamilton Hume) by Associate Professor Stuart Piggin given on 26 March 2007 at Parliament House, Canberra :
Leave a Reply, comments are welcome. | <urn:uuid:3d12970d-a085-4508-ab56-1c473f38e05e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://atributetoaustralianchristians.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/hamilton-hume/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980292 | 1,064 | 3.15625 | 3 |
NCSU Institutional Repository >
NC State Theses and Dissertations >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
|Title: ||Use of Soybean Oil and Soybean Products for Groundwater Bioremediation|
|Authors: ||Lindow, Nicholas L.|
|Advisors: ||Joel Ducoste, PhD, Committee Member|
Wei Shi, PhD, Committee Member
Robert Borden, PhD, Committee Chair
|Keywords: ||anaerobic respiration|
acid mine drainage
|Issue Date: ||7-Jul-2004|
|Discipline: ||Civil Engineering|
|Abstract: ||Recent laboratory and field studies have shown that injection of soybean oil and related materials into the subsurface can provide an effective, low-cost alternative for enhanced anaerobic bioremediation. The purpose of this laboratory study is to further evaluate the effectiveness of emulsified soybean products for the reduction and immobilization of nitrate, chromate, and acid mine drainage.
Batch microcosm screening studies were first conducted to evaluate the potential of several different substrates to enhance in-situ anaerobic biodegradation of nitrate. The substrates evaluated were food-grade materials, including molasses, liquid soybean oil, fully hydrogenated soybean wax, blown soybean oil, soy methyl ester, and mineral oil. With the exception of mineral oil, the tested substrates were all able to support nitrate degradation with the slowest degradation rates occurring for fully hydrogenated soybean wax.
Intermittent flow through soil column studies were also conducted to evaluate the substrate degradation rate, nitrate removal efficiency, and lifespan of different soybean treatments. The soybean oil treatment stimulated denitrification removed nitrate and nitrite concentrations below detection in the liquid and fully hydrogenated soybean wax treated columns without the addition of a denitrifying bacterial inoculum. No apparent benefits or disadvantages were observed for either treatment.
An identical study was conducted for chromate. Microcosm results were favorable, showing aqueous chromium (VI) removal even in no added carbon control microcosms. However, soil column experiments yielded mixed results. No removal of influent chromium was observed in columns treated with liquid or fully hydrogenated soybean oil at high influent chromate concentrations. A second set of columns were tested with lower concentrations of chromate, and resulted in complete removal of effluent chromium to below detection.
Batch microcosms were also constructed with acid mine drainage (AMD) generating spoils from a former coal mine in Sequatchie Valley, TN. The bottles were amended with simulated acid mine drainage and a small liquid inoculum from an anaerobic treatment wetland. Several combinations of treatments were evaluated including easily degradable sugars (molasses), more slowly degradable oils (soybean), yeast extract, and partially neutralized with sodium bicarbonate buffer. Despite the low pH and presence of toxic metals, in-situ reduction of AMD was significantly enhanced with a soybean oil substrate. Sulfate declined from 1,800 mg/L to 10 mg/L, pH increased from 2.6 to 6.4 and iron was precipitated in a 2:1 molar ratio with sulfate removal. Lesser removal of some iron and sulfate also occurred in bottles amended with only molasses and yeast extract. These results demonstrate that soybean oil addition can be very effective in treating AMD and the initial pH of the AMD is not a significant problem if an appropriate microbial inoculum is provided.
Laboratory soil columns packed with mine spoils were also studied for AMD degradation. Treated columns received a one time amendment of the commercially available soybean emulsion EOS® (Edible Oil Substrate) and were bioaugmented with the bacterial consortia developed from the microcosm studies. Simulated AMD was then pumped through the columns with a six to seven-day hydraulic retention time (HRT). During passage through the EOS® treated columns, pH increased from <3 to ~6, SO₄ was reduced by 75%, and aluminum, copper and zinc were reduced to below the analytical detection limit. Amendments were later made to the influents to include greater concentrations of manganese, zinc, aluminum, copper, and sulfate with less iron. The effect of the added sulfate increased electron donor usage and effectively shortened the potential lifespan of the treatment.
Changes in permeability were monitored for all the column experiments to evaluate the potential for fouling of an edible oil barrier with biomass and/or inorganic precipitates. Significant loss in permeability was observed in most of the treated columns. A mass balance of the carbon added through soybean treatment and potential carbon use due to biological redox reactions is also evaluated for all columns. The rate of carbon use appears heavily reliant on the electron acceptor loading rate, but only gross estimates of treatment lifespan are possible due to high mass balance error.|
|Appears in Collections:||Theses|
Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. | <urn:uuid:59d1942e-b5b1-4fec-900c-120782c32d98> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/handle/1840.16/614 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946984 | 1,066 | 2.078125 | 2 |
One if the books that has made a big impact on me lately is The Gift, subtitled “God gave you more than you’ll ever know” by Kim Allan Johnson. I don’t think I can come up with a better way of summarizing the content of the book than to quote the back cover:
When was the last time you lay awake at night, too captivated by Christ’s love to sleep? When was the last time you wrestled with the astonishing risks involved in Jesus sacrifice? When was the last time your mind stretched to grasp the many layers of suffering He endured?
This book does just that. It starts with painting a picture of Jesus before His incarnation, then delves into the different aspects of His life that show what becoming a human actually cost Him. The author highlights key events in Christ’s life that trace the evidence of the gathering storm that broke with unbridled fury on the evening of His arrest in Gethsemane. Then instead of diving directly into a discussion of Christ’s physical sufferings, as so many writers and speakers do, he starts out with amplifying the internal pain that Jesus would have experienced every day: the pain of being misunderstood. He spends one chapter looking at The physical torture He endured, then in the next he tries to imagine what it must have been like for those that witnessed His sufferings and death. He spends a whole a whole chapter trying to grasp what kind of pain Jesus must have endured from the verbal abuse He suffered.
Up to this point, he has looked at the very human side of Jesus; He endured pain and misunderstanding much like any human would. But this book goes deeper, exploring what the depths of Christ’s internal sufferings.
If you are familiar with Ellen White, then you are probably familiar with statements like this one:
How few have any conception of the anguish that rent the heart of the Son of God during His thirty years of life upon the earth. The path from the manger to Calvary was shadowed by sorrow and grief. He was the man of sorrows, and endured such heartache as no human language can portray.
Human language may not be able to portray it, but Johnson comes pretty close as he looks at the various aspects if this world that caused Jesus pain–things like brutality in nature, human disease, the evils in human nature, and especially His pain over the lost of the world. Then he goes deeper into the sufferings that nearly crushed out His life in Gethsemane and broke His heart on the cross–being forsaken by God and feeling so helpless and alone, crushed by the weight of our sins. Finally, he sums up some of the lessons that Christ’s sufferings have to teach us.
This book is like none I have ever read on this topic. Some books use a narrative style that just talks about the subject, leaving the reader with the responsibility of trying to imagine everything. Other books use stories and word pictures the help the reader visualize the scene, kind of like watching a movie. This book has a good balance of both. Let me give you an example of each style. First, the narrative:
It was only because of His connection with God that Christ survived the relentless torrent of hate, criticism, and abuse that beat against Him from His earliest days. Intimate communion with God was as natural and necessary to Him as breathing. Ellen White reveals, “Jesus sought earnestly for strength from His Father. He regarded communication with God aside essential than His daily food.”
Here is a portion of one of the scenes he paints in graphic detail:
As Jesus hung on the cross, bleeding and gasping for air, the mob and the Jewish leaders had a field day mocking and ridiculing Him.
One of the many onlookers pointed at Christ and yelled, “What happened to all Your boasting, Mr. Carpenter? How can you destroy our great temple and build it again from up there? Can I get you a hammer so you can take out those nasty nails?” Hearty laughter ripples through the crowd.
Someone else cupped their hands over their mouth and shouted, “For a wretch like you to claim to be Israel’s holy Messiah makes me sick. Son of God? You’re the son of passion, the son of Mary’s lust!”
This mixture of narrative and story appeals to both the intellectual and emotional levels of our being. That mixture makes it a very powerful book. More powerful than any movie, because you can get a peek behind the scenes, as it were, to catch a glimpse of Jesus heart. But then it allows you to feel with your heart as well.
I haven’t even finished it yet, but I must say I highly recommend this book. It has given me a deeper appreciation for of Jesus love for me, and awakened in my heart a deeper love for Him. And that, I think, is the purpose of the book.
You can buy the book here: | <urn:uuid:a6e0de04-9d67-4253-a9b0-3f84359712d7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lifeofahappymom.com/blog/2010/12/24/book-review-the-gift/ | 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 | 0.963215 | 1,044 | 1.601563 | 2 |
By Pete Kasperowicz - 10/19/12 03:04 PM ET
House Republicans say new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines aimed at forcing students to eat fruits and vegetables are a failure because students across the country are simply tossing the healthy fare into the trash.
"[T]here remains great concern with the amount of food waste generated at school cafeterias, much of it brought on by requiring students to take fruits and vegetables rather than simply offer them," Reps. John Kline (R-Minn.), Kristi Noem (R-S.D.) and Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) told USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack in a letter sent Thursday.
"This is a waste of federal, state and local funds and is contrary to the law's goal of feeding as many low-income and hungry children as possible," they said. "Once again, we are aware USDA has attempted to address this situation by allowing greater choice in reimbursable meals, but students should not have to take additional food if they have no intention of eating it."
Republicans have been criticizing USDA school lunch guidelines for the last few months, in particular USDA rules that set maximum-calorie guidelines for all meals subsidized by taxpayers. Last month, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) introduced the No Hungry Kids Act, which would repeal these calorie restrictions.
The three GOP members hit on that issue again in their letter this week.
Specifically, they wrote that while a committee in the Institute of Medicine found that the 850-calorie maximum for high schoolers is "appropriate for the level of physical activity of most children," there have been reports of athletes "going hungry a few hours after lunch" because of this limit.
"While we appreciate that USDA has attempted to provide leeway to school officials wishing to calculate the calorie maximum as an average over the week, these minor adjustments are poor substitutes to the major changes needed to meet the diverse needs of students," they wrote.
USDA has defended the guidelines by saying they only apply to taxpayer-subsidized meals, and said schools can still sell items like cheeseburgers.
Kline, Noem and Roe told Vilsack that USDA has failed to address how states will pay for the $3.2 billion cost of complying with the rules.
The three members asked Vilsack to answer a series of questions about its guidelines, including what assistance USDA is providing to help schools comply with the rule, whether USDA will try to evaluate the rule as it is implemented and whether financial assistance will be offered to schools trying to comply with it. | <urn:uuid:a9fde580-ab64-4fab-ba05-d52dd1016d63> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.conservativeunderground.com/forum505/showthread.php?52850-GOP-sees-food-fight-as-kids-trash-USDA-fruit-vegetable-guidelines&p=533087&viewfull=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972411 | 535 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Alexander the Great: (Unofficial Movie Tie-In) (Paperback)
$17.09 - Save $0.90 (5%) - RRP $17.99 Free delivery worldwide (to United States and
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Short Description for Alexander the Great Fox's accessible and erudite life of Alexander searches through the mass of conflicting evidence and legend to focus on the living actuality of the man and his experience.
- Published: 05 October 2004
- Format: Paperback 576 pages
- ISBN 13: 9780143035138 ISBN 10: 0143035134
- Sales rank: 145,072
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Full description for Alexander the Great
Tough, resolute, fearless. Alexander was a born warrior and a ruler of passionate ambition who understood the intense adventure of conquest and of the unknown. When he died in 323 B.C.E. at age thirty-two, his vast empire comprised more than two million square miles, spanning from Greece to India. His achievements were unparalleled--he had excelled as leader to his men, founded eighteen new cities, and stamped the face of Greek culture on the ancient East. the myth he created is as potent today as it was in the ancient world.Robin Lane Fox's superb account searches through the mass of conflicting evidence and legend to focus on Alexander as a man of his own time. Combining historical scholarship and acute psychological insight, it brings this colossal figure vividly to life. | <urn:uuid:2fc4b966-fc98-48a1-97b6-899b60693799> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Alexander-Great-Robin-Lane-Fox/9780143035138?a_aid=ahencyclopedia | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926769 | 409 | 2.0625 | 2 |
Prune spring-flowering shrubs such as forsythia, lilac, and quince, as soon as the bloom is finished. Remove older stems, broken, dead, or crossing branches.
Watch for aphids on new growth of roses, perennials, and spiraea. Spray them with a strong stream of water or use an insecticidal soap to control the insects.
Plant trees, shrubs, and perennials obtained from the nursery now. The cool weather and spring rain we usually receive is optimal for new plants.
It is not too late to apply a pre-immergent herbicide to control crabgrass and other annual weeds. Be careful not to use the chemical on vegetable garden or flower beds that will be seeded later as the weather warms.
Cut the spent flowerheads of spring flowering bulbs such as daffodils and tulips. Do not cut back the leaves of these plants until the foliage begins to fade and turn brown since the bulbs need the food produced by the leaves to feed the bulb for next year's bloom.
After the first grass mowing of the season, raise mower blades to their proper cutting height. For Kentucky bluegrass and other cool season turf grasses, that is from 2" to 3" inches high. Keeping the turf grass at this height will promote root growth, conserve water, reduce weeds, and provide for a healthier lawn.
Mulch bare ground to conserve moisture and control weeds.
It is not too late to aerate lawns to improve supply of air, water, and nutrients to turf root systems. Power raking should only be done where extreme amounts of thatch have built up in the turf.
As soon as garden beds are dry enough to allow working the soil, apply and dig in compost or peat moss to increase water-holding ability.
Begin setting out hardier potted plants such as geraniums on decks, porches, and patios. Wait until danger of frost is past to pot-up other tender, less hardy plants. Want to learn about native plants for water conservation, perennial and herb care, or how to use stone in the landscape? Check out our May calendar for useful classes! | <urn:uuid:660ee417-e747-41b3-82d5-3530220956c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.redbuttegarden.org/may_tips?mini=calendar%2F2013-02 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945937 | 451 | 3.1875 | 3 |
|Tangelo Park, Florida|
|— Census-designated place —|
|Orange County and the state of Florida|
|• Total||0.3 sq mi (0.9 km2)|
|• Land||0.3 sq mi (0.9 km2)|
|• Water||0 sq mi (0 km2)|
|Elevation||95 ft (29 m)|
|• Density||7,400/sq mi ( 2,500/km2)|
|Time zone||Eastern (EST) (UTC-5)|
|• Summer (DST)||EDT (UTC-4)|
|GNIS feature ID||0292013|
Tangelo Park is a census-designated place and an unincorporated area in Orange County, Florida, United States. The population was 2,231 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Orlando–Kissimmee Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Tangelo Park is located at .(28.456028, -81.447243)
According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 0.9 km² (0.3 mi²), all land.
The neighborhood is built on land formerly used for orange groves and named after the tangelo, a particular hybrid of citrus that mixed tangerines and pomelos. Originally built as housing for workers at the nearby missile testing grounds, it has become an isolated residential area surrounded by big-box stores and tourist traps on International Drive, as well as office parks and resorts to the east. There are few services nearby that serve residents and few public transit options.
As of the census of 2000, there were 2,430 people, 747 households, and 595 families residing in the CDP. The population density was 2,759.5/km² (7,115.0/mi²). There were 784 housing units at an average density of 890.3/km² (2,295.5/mi²). The racial makeup of the CDP was 7.41% White, 89.05% African American, 0.12% Native American, 0.21% Asian, 0.08% Pacific Islander, 1.15% from other races, and 1.98% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.63% of the population.
There were 747 households out of which 37.8% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 42.3% were married couples living together, 30.8% had a female householder with no husband present, and 20.3% were non-families. 15.5% of all households were made up of individuals and 4.6% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 3.25 and the average family size was 3.58.
In the CDP the population was spread out with 33.5% under the age of 18, 9.5% from 18 to 24, 26.5% from 25 to 44, 23.0% from 45 to 64, and 7.4% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 30 years. For every 100 females there were 93.6 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 80.0 males.
The median income for a household in the CDP was $32,568, and the median income for a family was $33,710. Males had a median income of $22,379 versus $20,027 for females. The per capita income for the CDP was $11,744. About 11.3% of families and 13.9% of the population were below the poverty line, including 16.4% of those under age 18 and 7.1% of those age 65 or over.
Here you can share your comments or contribute with more information, content, resources or links about this topic. | <urn:uuid:42375091-bda1-4b0f-9bfe-2433eb0d6d66> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mashpedia.com/Tangelo_Park,_Florida | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973311 | 830 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Armadillo Aerospace Interview
Armadillo Aerospace (Neil Milburn) [NM]
V: What do you do as manager at Armadillo Aerospace?
NM: Well, I’ve got lots of different roles. I’m vice president of Armadillo Aerospace, and I handle most of the legal and business issues. I go out and find new business for the company, and I also do all the DONs for the government, people like the FAA, who regulate our flights, and Departement of Defense, and NASA, and other folks like that.
V: We know you recently competed in the Lunar Lander X-Prize challenge. Could you tell us about the experience, how you prepared for it, and what happened? Could you tell us how much it cost to be in the Lunar Lander challenge - if not it is O.K.
NM: When we first started Armadillo Aerospace it was just a bunch of guy getting together, kind of like a hobby. There were four of us originally, going back seven years now, and as we started building larger and larger vehicles, we decided to turn it into a company. About five years ago we formed Armadillo Aerospace. And we were making some launcher rockets for what was the original X-prize, the Ansari X-prize, which was for the first private company to put someone up into space twice in the space of two weeks in the same vehicle, so we decided we would compete for that, but we were just too slow getting things together. A guy named Burt Rutan won the competition. He’s based out in California; he’s got one of the new space companies. And then shortly thereafter, the X-Prize announced a new prize, the lunar lander challenge, and that was for the first private company that could duplicate the capabilities of a vehicle similar to the original lunar lander, the one that they put on the moon back in the 1960s and ‘70s. So the vehicles we were building at that time were ideally suited for it, so we started building vehicles specifically for that competition. We competed the first time in October of 2006 at Las Cruces in New Mexico. And then last year we competed again, this time at Holloman Air Force Base at the big show there. We didn’t win the prize money either time, but we were the only company that managed to even get vehicles that qualified for the competition. We got proper permits from the FAA to fly and at the moment no one else has a single permit.
V: Can you tell us how much it cost to be in the lunar lander challenge?
NM: We spent about a quarter of million dollars on the first vehicle and we probably spent about that much again on the second time around, about a half a million dollars total over two years. But it’s not just for the lunar lander challenge because the vehicles that we build are capable of doing lots of other things apart from just competing for the prize. Right now we just won a contract with NASA for the use of some of those vehicles. And we’ve gotten two other projects, which I can’t tell you much about because they really are top secret; they’re worth a lot of money, probably 10 times as much as we put into those vehicles.
V: Are you entering another contest?
NM: Well we’re going to be competing in another lunar lander challenge, because that comes around once every year. But I think other than that our next focus will be on our manned space program. We have several projects that we’re working on this year to make money for us and then we’ll (work) on a vehicle capable of putting somebody up into 100 kilometers, which is what’s classified as the edge of space now.
V: What problems have Armadillo overcome?
NM: Well, we’re still all part-timers, we don’t work full-time at Armadillo Aerospace. It’s all volunteers. Nobody gets paid for doing this. We just do it because it’s something we enjoy and we think we can turn it into a business in the long term. But we’ve had lots of technical problems, but that’s what we enjoy; it’s a challenge. We don’t go out and play golf and we don’t go to the gym as often as we should. But we do spend a lot of time figuring out problems, making use of our science and engineering and math skills that we all learned when we were at school and college.
V: When do you expect to put people in space?
NM: Mr. Milburn: Well, we may be able to do it in 2008 but I think with that all the other projects we’ve got going at the moment, I think it will probably be 2009. I think that’s a sensible date for us to shoot for.
V: What other things should the lunar lander be used for?
NM: We’ve got a lot of neat projects going on right now. NASA wants us to help them develop a new kind of engine that they’ll be using on the lunar landing for the return to the moon in the next ten years. And we think the easiest way for them to do that is to fly it on one of our vehicles. So we’re going to be using our lunar lander for that application. And then a lot of folks would like to do the same kind of thing. They’d like to build the real lunar lander that will go back to the moon, the one that will carry people and equipment, and they need to test a lot of technology, things that will look down and see what the surface of the moon looks like where they’re trying to land the ship. And again, the least expensive way to do that is one of our vehicles. So we’ll do a lot of testing for folks over the next couple years.
V: Thank you for letting us interview you. | <urn:uuid:d45cff2d-3416-4b40-a1ca-ba30cd69cfba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://library.thinkquest.org/07aug/00861/aai.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967355 | 1,276 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Sunday, June 8
It's Apricot Season, So That Means Fresh Apricot Muffins
Do you know what happens when you buy a quart size container of fresh apricots? You get about 14 apricots that ripen at the same time (and about two that don't). As much as I love fresh apricots, eating 14 of them within a day or two isn't practical or appealing. Apricot muffins, however, are enormously appealing.
Apricot season runs from May-August, so now is the time to buy them. Unlike hardier peaches or nectarines, apricots are finicky. They like mild temperatures and dislike intense heat, which is why they grow so well in California. When selecting fresh apricots look for somewhat firm (not hard) fruit that is brightly colored (they range from light yellow to a deeper orange-yellow). The skin should be velvety smooth without wrinkles or blemishes, and they should yield slightly when squeezed. If you're still in doubt, then take a good whiff -- a ripe apricot emits a sweet fragrance. After all, it is a member of the rose family.
Apricots should be stored on the counter top until ripe then refrigerated if not eaten with a day or two. For the fullest flavor, it's best to allow the fruit to come to room temperature before eating.
A fresh, ripe apricot is sublime--its creamy, perfumed flesh is subtly sweet with hints of tartness. Since I don't have the heart to toss apricots that are slightly bruised or mushy, I decided to bake with them. I had success with some fresh strawberry muffins, so I thought I'd try another fresh fruit muffin recipe.
These low-fat fresh apricot muffins are moist and cake-y with little juicy bits of apricot and crunchy nuts in each bite. Of course, with redolent cinnamon, nutmeg, and fresh ginger, you'll be enticed by them long before you even take a bite.
Fresh Apricot Muffins (low-fat)
Makes 12 regular size muffins.
Print recipe only here.
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup low-fat buttermilk
3 tablespoons honey
1 cup light brown sugar
5 tablespoons smart balance butter substitute, melted
1 large egg and 2 egg whites
2 teaspoons fresh minced ginger
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3/4 cup fresh diced apricots
2 tablespoons sliced almonds
1 apricot, thinly sliced for the tops of the muffins
Place rack in center of oven, and preheat to 375 degrees F. Spray a 12 mold regular size muffin pan with cooking spray.
Combine flours, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a large bowl, and stir well.
In a separate bowl, combine buttermilk, honey, sugar, smart balance, eggs, ginger, and vanilla, and whisk well. Add to the flour mixture, stirring until just combined. Fold in apricots and almonds.
Spoon the batter evenly into the into 12 muffin cups. Add an apricot slice to the top of each muffin. Bake for 18-20 minutes, or until the tops are golden and a cake tester inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Transfer the pan to a rack to cool for 5 minutes before removing each muffin and placing on a wire rack to cool.
Here are more deliciously sweet recipes featuring fresh apricots:
Anna's Apricot Jam
Clotilde's Apricot Coffee Cake
Elise's Rustic Apricot Tart
You might also like these baked goods:
Banana Coconut Almond Bread
Fresh Strawberry, Almond, and Coconut Muffins
Honeyed Orange Ginger Muffins (Quat, Optional)
Save This Page on Del.icio.us | <urn:uuid:6bb65950-ab91-4fd3-aae9-8c04c553173b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://foodblogga.blogspot.com/2008/06/its-apricot-season-so-that-means-fresh.html?showComment=1212994320000 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904871 | 856 | 1.53125 | 2 |
“I always make sure my gun is good and oiled beforehand if I’m expecting rain,” said Dave Frederick, a deer and waterfowl hunter as well as a wildlife biologist with the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. “You can save yourself a lot of work by making sure it’s well-oiled before hunting.”
Frederick cautions hunters not to over-oil their guns, as this can cause the action to stick. But a light coating of oil will help protect a gun from the elements.
“I use a good oil with Teflon, to help bead up the water and protect the metal,” he said. “Afterwards, usually when I’m duck hunting in the rain, I’ll pull it apart and dry it off.”
Muzzleloader hunters who leave the field with a wet gun should pull the stock and barrel apart and dry both. Water can get between the stock and barrel and quickly lead to rust. Hunters should not put a wet gun in a case.
“That will cause the gun to rust that much faster,” said John Brunjes, a waterfowl hunter and Kentucky Fish and Wildlife migratory bird biologist. “Not only that, your gun case will also get wet. Then you’ll be getting the gun wet over and over when you put it in the case.”
Guns can sometimes get completely submerged in water during a waterfowl hunt. This is one instance when a wipe down with light oil won’t get the job done.
“If you drop your gun down in water, you need to quickly take it apart and clean it,” Brunjes advised. “If it’s just a light rain or a splash, you can wait until you get home to break it down.”
It’s a good idea to wipe down a wood gunstock, using the same lightly-oiled rag used for the barrel. Wood stocks are finished with a sealant, but over time the sealant will break down.
“If you keep a thin layer of oil on the stock, it will help keep water out,” said Frederick. “I always wipe my stock down. You’re just adding oil to the wood to give it a little bit of water resistance.”
Synthetic gunstocks don’t need any special care when they get wet. Hunters who spend a lot of time in wet conditions may want to go a step further and consider having their entire gun dipped in a synthetic coating. For less than $150, you’ll end up with a gun that is practically waterproof.
Late muzzleloader deer season runs Dec. 13-21 statewide. Zone 4 deer hunters should note that only antlered deer are legal for harvest Dec. 13-18 in that deer zone, while either sex deer may be taken Dec. 19-21. For complete deer hunting regulations, including bag limits, equipment restrictions and hunter education requirements, pick up a copy of the 2008-09 Kentucky Hunting & Trapping Guide.
Most waterfowl seasons are currently open. For complete waterfowl hunting regulations, including season dates, zones and bag limits, check the 2008-09 Kentucky Hunting Guide for Waterfowl. Regulation guides are available wherever hunting licenses are sold.
Author Hayley Lynch is an award-winning writer for Kentucky Afield magazine, the official publication of the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. She is an avid hunter and shotgun shooter. | <urn:uuid:1ba29f15-e16b-4e26-8c0f-ae320be70556> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cadizrecord.com/pages/full_story/push?article-Gun+care+in+wet+conditions%20&id=14823798&instance=left_column | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939558 | 743 | 1.59375 | 2 |
February 11, 2011
Franciscan Begins Nicotine-Free Hiring Policy March 1
Franciscan Health System, one of the largest private employers in the South Puget Sound region with hospitals and medical clinics in Pierce, King and Kitsap counties, announced today that it is implementing a nicotine-free hiring policy starting March 1, 2011.
Nicotine is an addictive drug in cigarettes, cigars and other tobacco products.
“Our mission calls us to create healthier communities,” said Franciscan Chief Operating Officer Cliff Robertson, MD. “As part of fulfilling our mission, we are creating a culture within our employee community that encourages good health and supports well-being. We cannot in good conscience simultaneously be a champion for healthy communities and continue to hire people who smoke and use tobacco products.”
Franciscan Health System is the first member of the Washington State Hospital Association to make nicotine-free a condition for employment. A positive test for nicotine will eliminate potential job candidates from consideration. They may be encouraged to reapply in six months.
“I applaud Franciscan Health System for taking this important step to protect the health of its employees and patients,” said Anthony Chen, MD, MPH, director of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department. “By causing cancer, heart disease, stroke and lung disease, smoking is the No. 1 cause of death. Second-hand smoke causes all the same health problems and even the residual smoke on clothing, hair, carpeting and furniture can cause asthma attacks and ear infections in children.
“I encourage other organizations and businesses to follow Franciscan Health System’s lead in creating a smoke-free workplace and providing resources for employees who want to quit smoking,” Dr. Chen added.
Implementing a nicotine-clean hiring policy is just the latest step that Franciscan has taken to promote the health of its employees and to help them, and the self-insured organization, control their health-care costs. Other initiatives include:
- Franciscan and Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), the national organization that Franciscan is a part of, support robust print and electronic resources that provide employees with free, valuable information regarding preventive care, disease management and other essentials necessary for physical, mental and spiritual well-being. This program is CHI Healthy Spirit.
- Earlier this month, Franciscan introduced a service for its benefit-eligible employees and their eligible dependents that enables them to use a phone or web cam to access medical advice and treatment for minor illnesses and injuries, rather than incur the cost of going to a doctor’s office or hospital emergency department. Called Franciscan Anytime, this innovative service connects employees with board-certified family medicine physicians and advanced registered nurse practitioners (ARNP) who address a range of health concerns. Phone consultations are fully covered by Franciscan employees’ medical insurance. Their co-pays for Franciscan Anytime webcam consultations and house calls are only a fraction of co-pay amounts for conventional medical visits.
- The Breathe program provides a step-by-step guide to help Franciscan employees stop smoking. The plan, sponsored by Franciscan’s health-and-wellness partner, Carewise, supports staff members who are giving up tobacco products, managing withdrawal symptoms, coping with cravings, and overcoming relapses.
- Franciscan provides free and reduced-cost cessation medicines for its employees who quit tobacco.
- For nearly 20 years, Franciscan has been a leader in helping men and women to quit using tobacco products. Its Freedom from Tobacco program was established in 1992 by Tacoma neurologist Patrick Hogan, MD, who remains medical advisor to the program. This free weekly support group has helped thousands of people in the community, including many Franciscan employees, to stop using tobacco.
- Franciscan has prohibited smoking and the use of all tobacco products inside its hospitals, clinics and other care facilities, as well on Franciscan-owned property outside those facilities, since 2006.
For several years, Franciscan has conducted mandatory post-job offer/pre-employment drug testing for all new hires. Starting March 1, nicotine will be added to substances looked for in this urine test. The test will pick up tobacco use from cigarettes, cigars, chew tobacco, nicotine patches and heavy second-hand smoke. Only job applicants who pass will be considered for employment.
“Not only are cigarettes bad for your health, they drive up costs for employers like Franciscan,” said Dave Lawson, vice president for human resources. “A typical employee that smokes costs his or her employer an additional $4,000 a year or more in increased medical costs and lost productivity.
“Smoking is not illegal but it is clearly dangerous and potentially deadly behavior,” he added. “We will not continue to hire people whose choice to use tobacco products hurts them and costs us more than those who do not. As good stewards of our resources, we must control costs and eliminate unnecessary spending.”
Franciscan is a self-insured organization, which means that employees, through premiums and co-insurance, and the organization pay the costs of health care services provided to employees and their covered dependents.
Individuals hired at Franciscan before March 1 will not be affected by its nicotine-clean hiring policy unless they leave the organization and later apply for re-employment.
“Our current employees will not be required to become nicotine-free as a condition of their employment,” Lawson said. “Still, we hope all individuals who smoke would stop for their health’s sake.”
Based on recent Washington State Department of Health data that shows 14.8 percent of adults in the state are smokers, Franciscan estimates that approximately 1,200 of its 8,100 employees do smoke at least occasionally. Franciscan Health System includes St. Joseph Medical Center, Tacoma; St. Francis Hospital, Federal Way; St. Clare Hospital, Lakewood; St. Elizabeth Hospital, Enumclaw; St. Anthony Hospital, Gig Harbor; and Franciscan Medical Group clinics throughout Pierce, South King and South Kitsap counties.
“Congratulations to Franciscan Health System for taking an important stand on the health of their employees, patients and visitors,” said Washington State Secretary of Health Mary Selecky. “Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the nation, and an addiction that is very hard to break. Health care providers and the public health system are key partners in the work to help adults quit smoking, and encourage kids to never start.” Franciscan joins a growing list of organizations that have embraced nicotine-clean hiring policies. Others include the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department; Cleveland Clinic in Ohio; Summa Health Systems, Akron, Ohio; Truman Medical Center, Kansas City, Mo.; Saint Francis Medical Center, Cape Girardeau, Mo.; St. Luke’s Hospital & Health Network, which has hospitals in several Pennsylvania cities; and Memorial Healthcare System, Chattanooga, Tenn. Like Franciscan, Memorial Healthcare is affiliated with Denver-based Catholic Health Initiatives, one of the largest non-profit health systems in the nation.
Cigarettes and other tobacco products are proven health hazards, linked to fatal conditions such as emphysema, lung cancer and heart disease. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and that smoking tobacco is the major risk factor for lung cancer. A 1988 report by the U.S. Surgeon General concluded that cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are addicting and that nicotine is a drug that causes this addiction.
“I applaud the Franciscan organization for taking steps to champion a healthy workplace and healthy living,” said Rick Allen, president of United Way of Pierce County. “It seems to me their position on smoking makes perfect sense, given their vital role in our community as a highly visible health institution.”
United Way is planning its own initiative designed to discourage teenagers and younger children from smoking and to provide help for those who want to kick the habit.
“Our own Health Impact Team, composed of citizen volunteers, has analyzed the impacts of smoking,” Allen added. “Our research confirmed that smoking creates a huge cost right here in Pierce County in terms of illness and lives lost, and a huge cost in terms of business costs and health insurance costs to individuals. For that reason, the United Way Board of Directors has made decreasing smoking one of our health priorities. We will join with others to help create strategies to reduce smoking among youths.” | <urn:uuid:0e346996-064c-462b-b5b8-2985434acb61> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fhshealth.org/news/Franciscan-Begins-Nicotine-Free-Hiring-Policy-March-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949798 | 1,800 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Excerpt from Mr. Adnan Oktar's interview on A9 TV dated 13 March 2012
ADNAN OKTAR: “Say to the believing women that they should lower their eyes” They will not look at the unlawful. “...and guard their private parts” That is to say, they will not engage in a sexual relationship with someone who is unlawful. “...and not display their adornments” Devout women do not show their adornments to people.
...except for what normally shows – That is to say, those that are seen naturally, “and draw their head-coverings across their breasts.” Their breasts must be closed, not be out in the open. The women in those times were totally out in the open, that is to say, they do not wear bras, so Allah tells them to cover their breasts. They used to walk the streets without bras. Now Allah cites to whom these women can display their “adornments”. “To their own husbands”- they can display their adornments to their wedded husbands. Who else? They can show it to their fathers. Who else? Their fathers in law. Who else? “sons, sons of their husbands, their own brothers, sons of their brothers, sons of their sisters or their own women or those under their own hands, which means their maids- these maids have no potency, but when that guy hears about these, he rejects them outright. When we say, “That is what Allah says”, they still say, “I would still not accept it even if Allah says.” Bigots would never accept such things. They would not accept Allah’s provision.
Excerpt from Mr. Adnan Oktar's interview on A9 TV dated 10 April 2012
ADNAN OKTAR: Some people ask me, “How should women dress in front of their fathers?” They can look at verse 31 of Surat an-Nur and see. But what happens when you tell this to hypocrites and bigots? The bigot will say, “If Allah said that, then I am not a Muslim.” May Allah forbid. Allah tells us in the Qur’an how a girl should dress in front of her father, or a mother in front of her son.
Look, it says, “Say to the believing women that they should lower their eyes and guard their private parts,” they should avoid illicit relations. “and not display their adornments – except for what normally shows.” What is normally visible. “and draw their coverings across their breasts.” They must cover their breasts. Women who wander round totally uncovered with their breast exposed, must cover them up, says Almighty Allah. “They should only display their adornments to their husbands or their fathers or their husbands’ fathers, or their sons or their husbands’ sons or their brothers or their brothers’ sons or their sisters’ sons or other women or those they own as slaves or their male attendants who have no sexual desire,” who have no sexual urges “or children who still have no awareness of women’s private parts.” Who have no knowledge of women’s sexual organs or female sexuality. They should only display them to children. Allah’s commandment is explicit. For example, there were Adam and Eve when Almighty Allah first created the Earth. They were twins. Almighty Allah had the brother marry the sister. That is lawful. Allah determines what is moral. But this is immoral for us now. But it was moral at that time. Morality is what Allah says. Then Allah made it immoral after a certain time. Allah says that brothers and sisters should not enter into relations together.
Excerpt from Mr. Adnan Oktar's interview on A9 TV dated 25 April 2012
ADNAN OKTAR: "They should only display their adornments to their husbands or their fathers or their husbands’ fathers, or their sons or their husbands’ sons or their brothers or their brothers’ sons or their sisters’ sons or other women or those they own as slaves or their male attendants who have no sexual desire"... People with no sexual desire. Seeing a necklace is not going to turn anyone on. There is a detail here. What happens when someone sees a necklace or beads to mean that he should not see them? I would like to understand, which is why I am asking. “or children who still have no awareness of women’s private parts.” Children who are ignorant of women’s sexual organs. Children who are unaffected by sexual desires, who are not aroused by women. But they should not show them to anyone else. What is wrong with a child seeing beads or earrings? Why should such a child not see them? Why should they not show these beads and earrings to anyone apart from children who are unaware of women’s sexual organs and are not aroused by women? That would mean that men start trembling when they see an earring. They lose control. This verse is referring to servants unaffected by sexuality and children who are not aroused by women. How can earrings or beads or bits of glass arouse anyone? If someone could tell me that, then I could answer. | <urn:uuid:58f91ea2-eaa9-4072-933e-d5e36762102b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.harunyahya.com/en/Some-secrets-from-the-Quran/116308/Surat-an-Nur-31 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982192 | 1,118 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Starting Wednesday, Maryland’s veterans will be able to have their military service noted on their driver’s licenses, one of several new laws that took effect on New Year’s Day.
While newly legal same-sex weddings in the state, which began Tuesday, may be drawing the most attention, the other laws cover topics ranging from Baltimore city elections to carcinogens in chicken feed.
Driver’s license applications from the state Motor Vehicle Administration will now give veterans the option of having their veteran status marked on their license, a move that could help some ease back into civilian life after returning from combat, according to Sen. James N. Mathias Jr. (D-Dist. 38) of Ocean City, who sponsored the bill along with Del. Norman H. Conway (D-Dist. 38B) of Salisbury.
“There’s the whole issue with returning troops of post-traumatic stress disorder,” Mathias said. If veterans suffering from the condition get into trouble with law enforcement, police will immediately be able to take their military service into consideration, he said.
The notation also will allow the state to keep veterans apprised of benefits or programs for which they may be eligible, according to the Department of Legislative Services.
A prohibition on chicken feed that contains arsenic — a known carcinogen — also takes effect Wednesday, due to a law sponsored by Del. Tom Hucker (D-Dist. 20) of Silver Spring.
The law — the first of its kind in the nation — bans the use of roxarsone, a chemical added to chicken feed to protect the animals from parasites, and most other arsenic-containing additives.
Arsenic can build up in the chickens’ bodies as well as in their manure, which the rain can wash into the Chesapeake Bay, Hucker said, adding that arsenic has been linked to diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
“This is a big win for Maryland residents,” Hucker said.
Pfizer, which produces roxarsone, voluntarily suspended sales of the product in 2011, but the ban remains important in case the drug is sold again or another company markets a similar product, Hucker said.
And while roxarsone is no longer used by Maryland chicken farmers, the poultry industry has expressed concern that if the drug is put back on the market, the new law could stick Maryland chicken farmers with higher feed costs than those borne by their competitors in other states.
Another new law changes the year in which Baltimore city holds its municipal elections so they coincide with the presidential election cycle.
A pair of city charter amendments during the past 15 years put city law at odds with state law regarding when the city’s elections should be held, and resulted in city elections being scheduled for the year after gubernatorial elections.
But the new law, sponsored by Sen. Nathaniel J. McFadden (D-Dist. 45) and Del. Nathaniel T. Oaks, both of Baltimore, changes the election year. The move is expected to save the state $270,000 and the city $3.7 million in costs associated with holding off-year municipal elections, according to Department of Legislative Services.
Another new law requires credit-reporting agencies to put a “security freeze” on a minor’s credit report if requested by a parent. The law, sponsored by Sen. John C. Astle (D-Dist. 30) Annapolis and Del. Craig J. Zucker (D-Dist. 14) of Brookeville, is an effort to protect children from identity theft. | <urn:uuid:184838b2-79fe-459e-ae74-0f84008547e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gazette.net/article/20121231/NEWS/712319987/1122/veterans-health-care-has-evolved-with-the-times-medical-director/New-Maryland-laws-target-veterans%E2%80%99-licenses-chicken-feed-elections&template=gazette | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953284 | 740 | 1.75 | 2 |
September 22nd, 2011
10:34 AM ET
By Richard Allen Greene, CNN
(CNN) – A rare Bible that's been to the moon and back will have a new owner Thursday night - the complete King James version, framed in gold leaf, is under the hammer at an auction house in New Hampshire.
But whoever takes it home won't be able to leaf through it. It's a piece of microfilm, with the text of 1,245 pages shrunken down to the size of a postage stamp.
"It's the whole King James (Bible) on there. It's really cool," says Bobby Livingston, vice president of sales and marketing at RR Auction, which is handling the sale.
The Bible was taken into space three times before it reached the lunar surface, he said - first on Apollo 12, when it was stored in the wrong part of the spaceship and orbited the moon, but didn't land on it, then on the ill-fated Apollo 13, which had an explosion on board that forced it to turn back, and finally on Apollo 14.
Lunar module pilot Edgar Mitchell brought 100 microfilmed copies of the Bible to the surface of the moon on February 5, 1971, Livingston said.
"Most of them were given away when they came back, or were cut into pieces as presentation pieces for dignitaries from the U.S. and from other states," Livingston explained. At least a dozen complete versions still exist.
Bringing a Bible to the moon had been a dream of a group of committed believers in the space program since the beginning of the Apollo mission efforts to reach the moon, said Carol Mersch, author of "The Apostles of Apollo."
"Through the centuries, explorers have carried the Bible across countries to far off lands, pushing the boundaries of exploration. It was not unnatural then that NASA chaplain John Stout and a group called The Apollo Prayer League would undertake a quest to see it carried to another celestial body," she said.
Apollo 1 astronaut Ed White wanted to bring the first Bible to the moon, but died in a fire on the launch pad, Mersch said.
"After his death, fellow astronauts and The Apollo Prayer League took up White's quest, so that, as Apollo 15 astronaut Jim Irwin said, 'those who came after would know that we came from a world of believers,'" Mersch told CNN.
The moon Bible now under the hammer went from Mitchell, the astronaut, to a "well-known space collector from Texas," Livingston said.
He expects it to go for about $50,000 by the time the auction closes at 7 p.m. ET Thursday.
At least one top Bible-collecting expert said he wasn't interested at that price.
Scott Carroll, the director of the Green Collection, one of the world's largest collections of ancient texts, called the moon Bible an "oddity."
"You could pick up a 13th-century Bible for that (price), so it's a tough call," he said.
It wouldn't make a good piece for museum display, he said, because it's so small.
"You gaze into it and say 'wow,' but you can't see anything," he said.
But there will be some people who want to buy it, either as an investment or out of personal interest, Carroll said.
"Of course people who may be people of faith that are interested in astronomy, in aerospace exploration, it would be of great interest," he said.
Several of the Apollo astronauts were just such men, RR Auction's Livingston said.
"What's really interesting about Mitchell is he said he had an epiphany looking out the window" of Apollo 14, Livingston said. "It's not just the death-defying part of it. They talk of the spirituality of the moment of being on the moon, the moment of standing on another planetary body."
Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan, one of the last men to walk on the moon, put it starkly, Livingston said.
"He said to me, 'Bobby, I know infinity exists,'" Livingston recalls. The auctioneer asked how Cernan knew, and got a simple answer: "I've seen it."
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About this blog
The CNN Belief Blog covers the faith angles of the day's biggest stories, from breaking news to politics to entertainment, fostering a global conversation about the role of religion and belief in readers' lives. It's edited by CNN's Daniel Burke and Eric Marrapodi with daily contributions from CNN's worldwide newsgathering team and frequent posts from religion scholar and author Stephen Prothero. | <urn:uuid:5a4b9191-baa2-45a5-b105-2ae80b82ea57> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/22/moon-bible-goes-on-sale-in-auction/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968567 | 966 | 1.945313 | 2 |
When we think of gardens, we think of flowers and trees. The plants are our stars and the reasons we love our gardens.
The plants, however, are only part of what makes an exceptional garden or landscape, and they may have less impact than you think. Consider a painting without a frame, or a stage play without a set: Impressive? Dramatic?
In a garden, the frame and the set are what we call “hardscape.” Carrying the analogies further, a shabby frame or a distracting stage set can totally undermine the impact of that painting or play. Bad or absent hardscape can ruin or diminish the beauty of your plants.
Mistakes and missed opportunities: An elementary garden design class first exposed me to basic elements such as backdrop, line and focal points. We looked at pictures of a perennial garden in an open lawn, and the same garden with a fence behind it. We saw flower gardens without décor, and the same gardens containing a statue, fountain, bench or path. It became obvious how hardscape makes or breaks the effect of a garden.
Yet one of the biggest errors that gardeners or homeowners make – myself included – is to ignore structural elements. Instead, that is where we should start – considering paths, walls, arches, pergolas, raised beds or islands, with our vision of the plants in mind. Build first; plant later.
Hardscape does not have to come from a professional. Many gardeners build good beds and structures. A fine path may be made of mulch or found flagstones; an attractive garden bed can be built by stacking loose stones. But whoever does the job – skilled amateur, qualified professional or their opposites – can make a huge difference in the appearance and durability of the project.
I asked some CNLPs (certified nursery and landscape professionals) to comment on common landscaping mistakes they see. Two themes emerged.
The first: bad technical and foundation work. Steve Bakowski (CNLP, Beaver Landscaping Inc.) said he commonly sees “improper installation of sub base (stone) and drainage underneath and behind hardscape.” Done correctly, he says, means that “the structures can withstand the freezing and thawing that moves them during our changing seasons.”
But people tend to make the above-ground structure look good, in the summer, without regard to what’s happening underground.
Second, untrained gardeners or landscapers typically miss design opportunities. Joseph Han (CNLP, The English Gardeners) notices how rarely he sees hardscape elements used to create “destinations ... for people to relax in.” Consider building a deck, gazebo or pergola out in the yard, away from the house, where it’s attractive to see from your windows.
Or, he says, use hardscape elements “to create dimension in a composition, and let us see it from different views when moving through the garden.” He also suggests we look for “focal points to define the view. Garden art – urns and statuary and pergolas – deserves a place in every garden.”
At least that element has entered the Western New York gardening scene dramatically in recent years. Garden Walk Buffalo and other National Garden Festival gardens featuring art have been photographed for national magazines; our artful gardens even led to the phrase, “a Buffalo-style garden.” We’re getting it. Gardens aren’t just the plants.
Costs and choices: Professionals give different answers on how much homeowners should budget for hardscape features, compared with plants. At the basic level – say, a good walkway and some enclosed planting beds – a couple of CNLPs said the hardscape would cost nearly half of a new installation (figure $2,000 on a $5,000 job), depending on height and length of walls and walks. But if you are purchasing entertainment centers, night lighting and hand-crafted pergolas, the hardscape cost could be three times the cost of the plants and soil. For the do-it-yourselfer, allow at least double your plant budget and time for the structural work and hardscape.
Develop your vision and plant list, analyze your style and find pictures of gardens you love before hiring anyone, and then communicate what you want.
Products and taste: One of the most polarizing topics, when landscapers and homeowners talk in generalities, is the subject of hardscape materials and taste. The stereotype – gardener speaking about landscapers – is: “Those landscapers all put up the same fake-looking walls and paver sidewalks, no matter the style of the house!” The landscaper stereotype of the gardener’s job: “They make these walls that fall down, sidewalks that crack and weedy paths that they can’t keep up!” Both statements are true some of the time, and neither is necessarily true.
Landscape pavers first came to America 37 years ago and have come a long way since. Products like polymeric sand and sealers eliminated many problems such as weeds and durability. More dramatically, the concrete industry had a significant breakthrough recently.
Dave McIntyre, general manager of Unilock Corp., explains: “Pavers and walls now have 1.5 times the strength and less than half the water absorption of the older units. The increase in long-term durability and life cycle cost will truly be incredible.” Steve Bakowski added that some of the new natural-faced stones and pavers are the best new thing in many years, for attractiveness, cost, ease and speed of installation.
If you prefer natural materials, you can find bamboo, natural stone and hand-crafted wood structures – plus professionals who design with them – more readily than ever. Check out the Western New York landscape and nursery professionals at Plantasia in March and find your own hardscape style.
Sally Cunningham is a garden writer, lecturer and consultant. | <urn:uuid:31d8941e-770d-44ce-addd-242da1f237df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130117/LIFE03/130119253/1046 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933128 | 1,252 | 2.21875 | 2 |
Children with Cancer Have Complete Responses in a Children's Oncology Group Phase 1 Trial
A pill designed to zero in on abnormal genes that drive specific cancers has produced encouraging early results in children with an uncommon but aggressive type of lymphoma, as well as in children with a rare form of neuroblastoma.
A phase 1 clinical trial of the drug crizotinib achieved remissions, with minimal side effects, for 10 of the children participating in a clinical study carried out by the multicenter Children’s Oncology Group (COG). The results were “an exciting proof-of-principle” for the targeted treatment, said the study leader, Yaël P. Mossé, M.D., a pediatric oncologist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Mossé presented study findings today at a press program organized by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in advance of its annual meeting in early June. In addition, the society selected the research for its Best of ASCO program following the meeting, and has announced that Mossé will be the first recipient of its James B. Nachman ASCO Junior Faculty Award in Pediatric Oncology.
Mossé previously led a team at Children’s Hospital that discovered in 2008 that aberrations in the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene are present in 14 percent of cases of high-risk neuroblastoma, the most common solid cancer of early childhood. The same gene is disrupted in some cases of anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL), a cancer of the lymph cells, and in patients with non-small cell lung cancer. Because drug manufacturers had already developed crizotinib for use in adult lung cancer clinical trials, Mossé and colleagues were able to quickly move crizotinib into an initial pediatric trial.
A new era of cancer therapy
“We are entering a new era of cancer therapy, in which we use knowledge of basic biology to design very specific drugs that target cancer cells with potentially less side effects on healthy tissue,” said Mossé. “In addition, as we concentrate on targets in molecular pathways, we move away from an exclusive focus on one form of cancer to customizing treatments according to biological activity. Abnormal ALK activity occurs in subtypes of neuroblastoma and subtypes of lymphoma, so identifying ALK activity in individual patients may enable us to provide the most effective care.”
The current trial was not restricted to patients with known ALK abnormalities, but was open to children with certain refractory or relapsed cancers. There were 62 patients enrolled who could be fully evaluated for drug toxicity. Toxic side effects were minimal, even though many of the dosages were relatively high.
For 8 children with ALCL, 7 had complete responses — no cancer could be detected with imaging scans. Within days of taking the oral medication, said Mossé, fevers and chills stopped in many children, and their pain diminished or disappeared.
Twenty-seven patients enrolled in the trial had neuroblastoma, a difficult-to-treat cancer of the nervous system. Of the two patients with known germline mutations in ALK—mutations occurring in every cell in their body, which can be found in the very rare form of neuroblastoma, familial neuroblastoma, one achieved a complete remission. Of the 19 neuroblastoma patients in the trial whose ALK status was not able to be studied in the molecular diagnostic lab at Children’s Hospital, a second patient had a complete remission.
“The current study shows the great potential for targeted therapy in children with anaplastic large cell lymphoma,” concluded Mossé, “and the COG is now planning a larger scale trial for these patients.” Additional studies are also underway to determine whether children with forms of neuroblastoma other than familial neuroblastoma, as laboratory studies suggest, might benefit from crizotinib.
Financial support for this Children’s Oncology Group study came from the National Cancer Institute and from Pfizer, Inc. Co-authors with Mossé included researchers from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital Boston, the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Baylor College of Medicine, and Texas Children’s Cancer Center.
“Efficacy of crizotinib in children with relapsed/refractory ALK-driven tumors including anaplastic large cell lymphoma and neuroblastoma: A Children’s Oncology Group phase 1 consortium study,” Abstract 9500, American Society of Clinical Oncology, 2012 Annual Meeting.
About the Children’s Oncology Group
The Children’s Oncology Group unites more than 7,500 experts in childhood cancer at more than 200 leading children’s hospitals, universities, and cancer centers across North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe in the fight against childhood cancer. The COG research has turned children’s cancer from a virtually incurable disease 50 years ago to one with a combined 5-year survival rate of 80% today. Our goal is to cure all children and adolescents with cancer, reduce the short and long-term complications of cancer treatments, and determine the causes and find ways to prevent childhood cancer.
Contact: Rachel Salis-Silverman, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Phone: (267) 426-6063, Salis@email.chop.edu | <urn:uuid:6d695c3c-9525-4502-9014-15108cf001f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.research.chop.edu/publications/press-releases/?ID=684 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952308 | 1,154 | 2.484375 | 2 |
By 2038, there will be more than 177,000 people living with dementia in B.C., with family caregivers providing an estimated 118.7 million hours of unpaid care each year.
While these figures are staggering, it is important to remember that the rising tide of dementia in B.C. will reach a crisis point, not down the road or at some far-off point in the distant future, but during the mandate of the next B.C. government.
I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in early 2007 at the age of 58. I am touring the province with the Alzheimer Society of B.C. to campaign for a comprehensive, funded dementia-action plan.
In 2008, the year after I was diagnosed, caregivers in B.C. provided an estimated 33.1 million hours of informal care. This number is set to more than triple by 2038 if the next B.C. government does not take a leadership role in creating a comprehensive, funded plan. At present, 15,000 people develop dementia each year in B.C. That is just the individual. In the majority of cases, each diagnosed person has two or three close friends or relatives whose lives are also affected by the diagnosis.
The cause of Alzheimer’s disease is unknown and there is no cure. If we continue along our current trajectory, by 2038, it is estimated that there will then be more than 35,000 people who develop dementia each year.
As I tour the province, I am meeting people in communities where the Alzheimer Society has resource centres. These are places where staff members work directly with people with Alzheimer’s disease or another dementia, as well as with families and caregivers.
Along the way, I am speaking with sitting MLAs and candidates from all parties in the provincial election scheduled for May 14.
People are often surprised to learn that within 30 years, the economic burden associated with dementia in our province is projected to reach a total of $130.2 billion. This is why B.C. needs a comprehensive plan. We need a plan to ensure that our province, government and hospitals are ready to support and provide care for the increasing numbers of people with Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias.
The plan I’m pushing for promotes early diagnosis so families can organize their affairs and maybe even investigate drug trials. The earlier their diagnosis, the earlier they can adapt and learn that there is indeed life after diagnosis.
The plan will ensure that families have access to support, so family caregivers are able to sustain their caring.
The plan I envisage includes health-care providers getting the education they need to provide the best care possible, both in the home and in a residential-care setting.
It will almost guarantee that everyone in our province facing a diagnosis of dementia, along with their families and caregivers, are connected to the Alzheimer Society of B.C. as soon as possible after diagnosis under the auspices of the First Link program.
On May 14, we elect the next B.C. government. Our elected officials will need to remember that the leading risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias is age. They will need to remember that a huge wave of B.C. baby boomers is starting to crash into that risk. And that if nothing is done now, the prevalence of dementia in the province will more than double, and the impact will be felt by everyone, socially in the fabric of our society and financially as it cripples our health system. The need for a plan now is all the more dire.
With a comprehensive, funded and extremely detailed dementia-action plan, we can change and, I dare say, improve the future for individuals, health-care providers and our provincial economy.
A former communications consultant diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Jim Mann has become an Alzheimer advocate as a member of the board of directors for the Alzheimer Society of B.C. and the Alzheimer Society of Canada.
© Copyright 2013 | <urn:uuid:0ee69242-7f67-4397-8ed4-bef20e80b5f2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-b-c-to-see-dementia-crisis-in-coming-years-1.81124 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951748 | 818 | 2.3125 | 2 |
May 3, 2009, 11:00 AM
Post #16 of 27
“Calling México City the “D.F.” is kind of a misnomer and it will mark you as an outsider in, or near the city. Not all of México City is in the D.F., The city has grown out and some of it is in México State. My wife is from Mexico City, D.F., and while we have relatives all over The Republic, many of them live in México City. At least two of her aunts live in sections of the city that are not in the D.F., but are in México State.
Certainly calling México City the D.F. Will not confuse anyone, but it is not usual in the city, or the closer you are to it. None of my wife's family or my wife ever refer to México City as the “D.F.”, but just as “México.” We used to live there and I never once heard any resident call it the D.F., newcomers, sometimes, permanent long time residents, never. México should be pronounced as though it had a heavy English letter H in the center instead of an X, thus: Meh hico. The original Spanish spelling of the name is: Mejico. The Spanish J is usually pronounced like a heavy, throaty English letter H.
I pronounce it that way myself, I never say México City, or the D.F. It seems a little strange to type México City instead of simply México when referring to México, the city, but I know that many readers do not live in this country or near México, the city. My wife and her mother go to México City once per month to pay bills and take care of family business. If someone calls for her on the phone, or rings the doorbell, I simply say “Doris es en México, regreso Lunes, Martes, etc. (will return Monday, Tuesday, etc.)
Richard Ferguson is right, on the few occasions that you see a road sign that simply says “México”, it indicates the direction to México City.
"The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved" - Victor Hugo | <urn:uuid:43631bfa-9b2e-4602-853d-4e4c4adf0347> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mexconnect.com/cgi-bin/forums/gforum.cgi?post=127848;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;guest=45931335 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947761 | 504 | 2.25 | 2 |
- Historic Sites
The Seventeenth Largest Army
The old Regular Army, part fairy tale and part dirty joke, was generally either ignored or disdained. But its people went about their work with a dogged humdrum gallantry—and when the storm broke, they helped save the world.
December 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 8
“What do you want to go back to the Army for?” she cried. “What did the Army ever do for you?”
“What do I want to go back for?” Prewitt said wonderingly. “I’m a soldier. ”
“A soldier, ” Alma said. “A soldier. ” She began to laugh. “A soldier, ” she said helplessly. “A Regular. From the Regular Army. A thirty-year-man. ”
“Sure, ” he said.
—James Jones, From Here to Eternity
When Westmoreland reported to the 18th Field Artillery at Fort Sill, they put him to breaking remounts destined for pulling Model 1897 French 75s with wooden wheels. Sometimes he supervised horses grazing on the flat Oklahoma plains. He was then 2d Lt. William C. Westmoreland, fresh from the United States Military Academy at West Point, and his days of commanding an overseas force five times the size of the army he had entered were unimaginably far into the future.
His social duties, he found, were as demanding as his military ones. There were formal dances, failure to attend which would result in a black mark on his record, affairs at the officers’ club on weekend nights, participation in bridge games. Horses were all-important: shows, hunter trials, polo, Sunday-morning chases in pink coats, hunt breakfasts with singing of hunt songs and ballads. He had become a member of what was the seventeenth army of the world—as Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur repeatedly pointed out to congressional appropriations committees. (When George C. Marshall officially became chief of staff, on the day Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it was said that the country had dropped to having the nineteenth army of the world.) Surpassing the United States in military power were, among other countries, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Spain, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Romania.
Officers lived under constant scrutiny—and so did their wives.
Marshall was serving on the West Coast when ordered to Washington to take up his new duties. It was summer, and he asked if it was possible for the War Department to provide funds for Mrs. Marshall and him to go cross-country by train, avoiding travel via lead-footed Army transport through the blast-furnace heat of the Panama Canal. He did not make his request by telephone or telegraph; such money-consuming practices were forbidden except in cases of extreme emergency. Four letters went back and forth before the man he would replace, Gen. Malin Craig, was able to write that the cash had been scraped up.
The annual Army budget in those years, the years between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second, averaged in the $300 million range. That included provision for the Army Air Corps, whose pilots usually communicated with the ground by dropping notes wrapped around stones and checked their flight progress by swooping down to read town designations on railroad-station signs. The Army’s total research and development budget amounted to $5 million dollars when Marshall took over. That was one four-hundredth of what was going to be spent on the development of the atomic bomb.
It hardly amazed Marshall that the price of two railroad tickets was a matter of some importance to the Army he was soon to head. American military practice had always been to fight by using volunteers, quickly raised and as quickly disbanded, and to rigidly keep down all expenses in peacetime.
Only twice had this rule been abrogated. The first time was when Fort Sumter was fired upon. There ensued four years of unrestricted spending followed by Appomattox and the Grand Review of the Union Army in Washington, then the dispersal of its members home to spend the rest of their lives talking about how they licked Johnny Reb. (South of Washington the former opponents talked about the Lost Cause.) With the shedding of the uniforms blue and gray, the Army became an unseen distant force shepherding Indians about, occasionally shooting them, and, in the Spanish-American War, doing things in Cuba with the assistance of volunteers. The manner in which Regulars were regarded by the population was expressed by a turn-of-the-century congressional measure that made it illegal for taverns and hotels to put up notices saying No Soldiers Admitted. It is said, however, that parks near posts or bases bore signs announcing No Dogs or Soldiers. | <urn:uuid:461a947c-a095-49b3-9e0b-80a9c1a09682> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.americanheritage.com/node/57801 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981689 | 1,009 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Building on the achievements of the Open House Project, today we are launching a parallel initiative, the Open Senate Project. This bipartisan, collaborative project will study the Senate's current information-sharing practices to recommend how to improve public access to the Senate's work on the Web.
We hope that you to join us in figuring out what technological reforms we should recommend to the Senate so it can make its work more accessible and user-friendly online. You can do that by subscribing to Google group listed on the top right-hand corner of the Open Senate Project's homepage. Through that online group, we'll have an ongoing conversation and collaborative preparation of our recommendations.
John Wonderlich, program director for the Sunlight Foundation, will lead the effort in collaboration with project coordinators Josh Tauberer, creator of the nonpartisan Web site GovTrack.us, and Jon Henke, a former Senate staffer who now blogs at TheNextRight.com.
As John blogged recently, with your help, the Open House Project was successful in jumpstarting a public discussion that prompted the House of Representatives to make its work available online in new ways, including releasing legislative data in more user-friendly formats and establishing new rules that allow lawmakers to use Web services like YouTube and Twitter to communicate with their constituents.
But, we can't do it without you. Together, we can open the Senate. | <urn:uuid:44ae6d88-7775-4e9c-aa8f-f85b6dfa6a04> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2008/10/21/help-sunlight-open-up-the-senate/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919582 | 278 | 1.9375 | 2 |
21 December 2011
Artisan Distilling Revoltuions - So what exactly is Artisan Distilling all about?
Posted by DFact
Written by and in collaboration with Jamie Baxter. Jamie was a master distiller at Chase Distillery where he was responsible for designing, installing, commissioning, running and then developing products. He now works as a consultant, working around the UK and South America aiding in start up small scale artisan distilleries.
If you are lucky enough to be shown around the Beefeater Distillery in South London, you will see some huge great pot stills that have been mothballed. These were originally used to clean up the alcohol coming in to the distillery as it was not of a good enough quality to make their wonderful gin. Nowadays however, the base spirit that they buy is excellent, and this is just one other ingredient that they purchase in addition to juniper berries, coriander seeds and all the rest of the botanicals. You see, Beefeater, in common with virtually every other gin distiller in the country, do not make their own base alcohol, but ship it in from elsewhere before re-distilling it with the botanicals to convert the neutral alcohol into gin.
EU Regulation 110/2008 sets out the legal definition of all spirit types within Europe, and gin (and indeed vodka) has to be made from “ethyl alcohol of agricultural origin”. This in turn is defined as ethanol with no flavour other than that of the raw material and at a minimum of 96.0% ABV. (The regulation also sets out maximum levels of certain residues, but I won’t bore you with that other than to say that these maximum allowed levels are lower in the finished product for London Gin than for other distilled gins). Every gin distiller therefore has to decide whether to make their own base ethyl alcohol, or to buy it in.
If you have read this far, you will be wondering why on earth I am telling you all this. The reason is that I have recently been drawn into a transatlantic discussion as to what artisan distilling is all about, and the point of view was very forcibly put across that a distiller who buys in neutral spirit rather than making it themselves is somehow cheating. Now, my gut feeling was to disagree with this, but it did start me wondering why I felt that way, and what therefore I would think is the defining characteristic of an artisan distillery. Most of us could probably write a list of artisan distillers in the UK and not argue too much over those distilleries on it. For example, I don’t think that anyone would argue that Ian Hart, the wonderful distiller of Sacred Gin, is not an artisan distiller, and he uses bought-in alcohol in his tiny still. But it is more difficult to decide why these names are on the list.
So if it is not making your own base alcohol, is it the size of the still? Again the answer is no, this is too simplistic. Different products and different methodologies require different sized stills. When Sipsmith Distillery started up they advertised their beautiful pot still as being 300 litres. The fantastic Chase Distillery pot that I know so well is 2300 litres, and yet Sipsmith could produce more bottles of finished product than Chase at that time because they were using bought-in alcohol whereas at Chase we were making it all from potatoes and apples.
Is it the use of a pot still rather than a continuous still? Again no. The thing about designing stills is that there are many different ways of getting to the same point. Pretty much every still is unique, and the distiller must decide what system best meets his requirements (see my earlier blog). Now this might be a continuous still, or a pot still, or various combinations of the two - and this is without considering vacuum distillation and other more esoteric methods. I would argue that a pot still is generally “more artisan” than a continuous still, but this has rather more to do with the way it is run rather than the still itself. With continuous stills it is important to keep the flow rates, temperature profiles, steam pressures, refux etc. relatively even. Pot stills are more forgiving, and so continuous stills would tend to have rather more sophisticated control systems, which nowadays means a computer. Plc controls take the craftsmanship out of running the still – indeed these stills are usually run without an operator even being there, and the dictionary definition of an artisan is “a skilled workman” or “a handicraftsman”. At the risk of alienating computer programmers it is hard to see how this definition can apply to a computer controlled still. So it is not the continuous still itself that moves it away from the realm of the artisan, but the control systems often (but not always) associated with it.
So if I haven’t yet nailed down what defines an artisan distiller, what might disqualify a distillery from being one? Obviously big industrial scale plants are out, and so too are small plants owned by a large organisation – they should be privately owned and independent. This allows for greater risk taking and sheer bloody-mindedness.
The truth is that although everyone is talking about the new wave of artisan distilleries, they have been around for a while. They almost died out with tight excise controls, but the Somerset Cider Brandy Company has now been going for over 20 years. Edradour in Perthshire is capable of producing 2500 bottles a week. Their spirit is produced by just 3 men without automation and claims a history going back 170 years. But it is very true that this is relatively rare in this country. Scotland has around 100 distilleries of various sizes. By contrast, Austria has a similar population and 20,000 registered distilleries, including my cousin who has a tiny still in the shed in his garden where he distils a wonderful Zwetschken Schnapps from the half dozen plum trees there. Every now and again he produces something that he is incredibly proud of, and rightly too. I have come to realise that this is one of the defining characteristics of an artisan distiller for me. Every distiller perfects his recipe and strives to make each batch identical, however variation is inevitable and some batches are better than others. In a larger distillery these variations are blended away to maintain consistency, but the artisan distiller embraces the variability and indeed celebrates it by putting batch numbers on bottles. What is the point of that if each batch is identical?
So celebrate the difference with us. Keep close to the distiller, ask what’s new, what’s recommended, how the runs are going and buy direct if possible. In short, treat your distiller just like your local butcher. It’s a little time-consuming but worth it to get the best drop, and if the distiller can’t make time to talk to you, then that’s not an artisan distillery. | <urn:uuid:e6673125-815b-4fdc-b68a-a4edeebb8b84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://drinkfactory.blogspot.com/2011/12/artisan-distilling-revoltuions-so-what.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967156 | 1,454 | 2 | 2 |
|BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : OCTOBER 16, 2000 ISSUE|
|LETTER FROM BELARUS
Seeking Roots in Chernobyl's Shadow
I heard the news the other day: Fourteen-plus years after the big explosion, the last of the nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl complex was finally going to be shuttered. The global media reprised stories of the catastrophe. But I thought of my town. That would be Starobin, the village of my ancestors.
Poor Starobin. Located in a region known from antiquity as White Russia, or Belarus, it has missed few of the calamities that afflicted this patch of the world in the 20th century. Its agriculture was forcibly collectivized after Belarus was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1917. During World War II, the Nazis massacred its Jews and shipped its girls to German labor camps.
And then Chernobyl. It was a fluke. Chernobyl lies in Ukraine, to the south, on the border with Belarus, but the winds blew north when the reactor exploded on Apr. 26, 1986. Starobin, and Belarus, will suffer the consequences long after the last reactor is shut down. I had visited Starobin twice before--in 1994 and 1998--and recently decided to make a third trip, with Leslie, my sister. This time, I wanted to visit a rest-and-treatment center for Belarussian children suffering from radiation exposure from Chernobyl. And there is always the draw of my family's past--a past I have grown increasingly absorbed in exploring, along with the history of Starobin itself.
A village of 6,000 or so, Starobin is a 90-minute drive south of Minsk. But it's another world. Minsk is a big city, the capital of Belarus, which became an independent state after the Soviet Union expired in 1991. Starobin is countryside. As Minsk recedes, drivers have to start watching out for horse-drawn carts along the shoulder of the road. In Starobin itself, the favorite mode of transportation is the bicycle.
BELCHING SMOKE. Visitors are welcomed by the Starobin lady--a kind of Mother Earth hospitality statue, fashioned of local stone. Her outstretched arms offer bread and salt to the weary traveler. The village is a collection of ramshackle wooden cottages, most with no indoor plumbing, and of cheaply constructed Soviet-style concrete apartment blocks. Chickens and the occasional cow wander the dusty streets, some unpaved. Smoke belches from the peat-processing plant, the town's main employer. The River Slutch skirts Starobin, and to the south runs a nearly unbroken forest stretching for 100 miles to the border with Ukraine. The clouds in these parts aren't like those in my native Worcester, Mass.: They're bigger, puffier, and lower--ever suggestive of rain. And it does rain a lot here.
I don't know much about my own family's story. That's my own fault, since I was never particularly curious until I reached my late 30s, by which time my Zadi, my father's father, was dead. Leslie used to talk to Zadi about the Old World, though. We know that Zadi, a tailor, came to America from Lithuania in 1921, at age 27. He didn't talk much about his own parents, to anyone, but he once told my dad that his father, Simon, my great-grandfather, hailed from Starobin. Just when Simon left the village, we don't know.
One reason I first headed down to Starobin six years ago was to see if I could fill in some of this sketchy past. I was also propelled, although I only dimly sensed this at the time, by a kind of midlife identity quest. There are lots of places to seek a wider grounding for personal identity. Why not search in a patch of ancestral ground? Perhaps I was just looking for an alternative to suburban Worcester, an environment I came to find alienating. I was intrigued, in any event, by the idea of identity as a particular physical spot--a solid, unambiguous connection in a world that often affords few.
THYROID CANCER. Leslie and I drove down from Minsk with Viktor, a medical student I've known for a few years now. His father, Vasily, was Starobin's mayor through the 1990s. Vasily has supplied me with no fewer than three possible versions of how Starobin acquired its name, in 1646. My favorite comes from an old book of Belarussian folk legends. ''There lived a man, and he had a son who was so experienced and smart that everyone called him Starobin,'' the tale begins. According to this story, Starobin can be translated from the Belarussian to mean, ''to complete 100 deeds.''
Our first stop was the sanitarium for the Chernobyl children, just across the lazily flowing Slutch. In Russian the place is called Zeloni Bor (''green forest''). Dug out of a pine-and-birch grove, it used to be a camp for Soviet youth pioneers. The children, 6 to 16, look healthy. But they are suffering, in some cases, from direct radiation poisoning. Among those who were born after the accident, there are numerous inherited diseases. Thyroid cancer is a particular danger.
Nobody knows how their offspring, the children of Chernobyl's children, will fare. These children--nearly 400 at any given time--come to the center for stays of almost a month, receiving treatments including herbal drinks and massages with special salts. Everyone gets a manual of dietary tips: eat fiber-rich products such as pearl-barley porridge to purge radioactive substances in the alimentary canal. ''The children don't understand how sick they are,'' a pediatrician told us. ''And maybe that's for the better.'' Life at Zeloni Bor isn't all medical drudgery. There's a disco room, a swimming pool, a soccer field. As much as anything else, the idea is to give the kids a break. The center is supported entirely by the state, with an annual budget of $525,000.
Leslie and I drove on to see my favorite feature of Starobin: the goats. For as long as folks here can remember, there has been a communal goat herd in Starobin. The animals look like innocent rascals in their coats of white and their stringy beards. They're kept mostly by the older people in town, one or two to a household, and everybody who owns one takes a turn with the shepherding. Each morning, they're led out to pasture by the Slutch. There the herd spends the day in grassy languor. In the evening the goats are brought home for milking. Each doe yields two to three liters a day; this is a prime source of nutrition for the community.
TORAH SCHOLARS. Thus does Starobin, so ill tended by the outside world, take care of itself. It has to keep doing so, because independence from the Soviet Union has done little to improve conditions. The Starobin peat plant, like all other energy companies in Belarus, is a state enterprise. Its 400 workers receive a salary of just over $100 per month, plus a company apartment for which they pay a token monthly rent of about $1.50.
We headed back to Minsk--no hotels in Starobin--and returned the next morning to explore the Jewish part of Starobin's history. Our first stop was an abandoned Jewish cemetery, where mossy gravestones lay toppled in a field of grass and pines dotted with wild mushrooms and strawberries. It's conceivable that a relative of ours, a Starobin, is buried here, but we can't tell, because the Hebrew lettering on the stones isn't legible.
Starobin was once mostly Jewish. This we do know. A census taken in 1897 recorded 1,494 Jews in a total population of 2,315 people. According to a rabbi's chronicle, written after the Holocaust and translated from the Yiddish by my Uncle Sidney, turn-of-the-century Starobin was known far and wide for the excellence of its Torah scholars. Starobin's Jews were shoemakers, tailors, and grocers--typical trades for East European Jews--and also something befitting their rural station: They were cucumber growers. They planted large gardens of them, and after the harvest the dried seeds, packed in 40-pound bags, fetched 30 or 40 rubles from traveling Russian merchants--not a lot of money, but enough to eke out an existence.
The Jews lived in peace with, if mostly apart from, the Gentiles. But the Russian Revolution divided Starobin's Jews. Some were among the Bolshevik activists who Sovietized the town and then joined the Red Army to fight in the Civil War against the White Guard forces. Many others simply left for good.
NAZI MASSACRE. Well that they did. On the outskirts of town, just down the road from the Starobin Lady, is a monument that commemorates the Nazi massacre of the town's Jews. I took Leslie there for a look. The memorial was erected in 1967 by the Soviet government of Belarus--not out of any particular sympathy for the Jews, but as a propaganda symbol to remind the town of the fascist brutality that had nearly destroyed the Soviet Union. ''In memory of those who gave their lives for the Motherland,'' the inscription reads.
I heard the story of the massacre on my first visit to Starobin, six years ago, from an eyewitness, an elderly woman named Trushinskya. The Germans arrived in Starobin just days after their invasion of Belarus in June, 1941. With help from local collaborators, the soldiers lined up the town's Jews, as many as 1,000 men, women, and children, and had them dig a pit. Then the victims were lined up and shot, the bodies shoveled into the hole and covered with sand. A botched job: The sand, Trushinskya said, moved for three days.
Among those murdered that day was one Chaim Starobin. A relative? Could be. Trushinskya knew him. Chaim was a feeble old man in his 70s, and when the Nazis came to his house, they found him in bed. Just kill me here, he told the soldiers, and they did. Trushinskya heard about this from a clergyman who lived in a room of the Starobin house, and she had seen the body herself. Trushinskya also told me that others in town, including her own family, risked their lives in a futile effort to hide their Jewish friends. In any event, many sons of Starobin were to die fighting the Germans. Their deaths are commemorated in a separate memorial, up the road from the one for the Jewish massacre.
Town residents are a bit guarded about all of this. But just before Leslie and I left Starobin this past summer, Vasily gave us a surprise. He said he had been told by town elders about an old building, now a warehouse for a furniture factory, that at the turn of the last century housed a flour mill owned by a family of Jewish Starobins. We drove out to the building and poked around. Hmm. The brick looked pretty old. But the present owners couldn't find records of any previous proprietors. There's probably no way of ever telling for sure whether this place was occupied by Jewish Starobins, much less flesh-and-blood relatives.
So it goes with roots searches. Mine, at least, is more like an archaeological dig--the recovery of various buried shards of intriguing but indeterminate origin. I can live with that. I can't say that I have found my identity here; in fact, the questing impulse that led me here has ebbed. But Starobin stills exerts a powerful and personal draw. The tragic elements, from the Jewish massacre to the Chernobyl children, pierce me in a way that my native Massachusetts never has. And then there is the deep, timeless beauty of the tranquil aspects. A gentle river. Brooding clouds. Wild strawberries. And the goats. I have this fantasy about going to live there someday. Well, maybe for six months. With a goat or two. Starobin, I'll be back.
By PAUL STAROBIN
Starobin is BUSINESS WEEK's Moscow bureau chief. Leslie Starobin is a fine-arts photographer in Needham, Mass.
EDITED BY PATRICK SMITH
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Seeking Roots in Chernobyl's Shadow
E-Mail to Business Week Online | <urn:uuid:56a73953-e313-4551-b997-acfa9e828b5e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_42/b3703038.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968027 | 2,759 | 1.546875 | 2 |
II think this whole streaming issue will spell itself out. I’ve been thinking about it lately and one thought I have is this. Spotify et al are still relatively new companies and services. Whenever any new digital music company launches; musicians, labels etc. think they are some kind of instant savior that will make all artists and labels finally rich and famous.
But how can that be? Any other new business that launches on a national or international level has massive startup costs, from research and development to salaries and all the other costs of being and growing a business.
Non-digital companies, we have said for years, take at least 3 years to get established, but is that true for digital companies? I think not… I think it takes 4-5 years, if they’re lucky.
Imagine too all the legal and very complicated contracts these companies have to deal with, plus can you imagine dealing with one big record label, or publishing company, let alone hundreds of other big and smaller music companies?
I don’t know. I think Pandora, Spotify etc. as fairly new music businesses, are doing pretty well by the artists considering each recording act has a unique contract with their label/publisher which really is a huge factor when it comes to getting royalties paid to them.
So, in short, streaming music is in its infancy, and acts that complain about how much money they are NOT getting should cool out and look at the long range picture. Look ten years down the road… things will improve as streaming continues to grow and become a true fixture in our world culture.
In the meantime, I think recording artists should just pay attention to the many, many other income streams their music can tap into and basically shut up about streaming rates at this very early stage.
Digital music companies may look like grown-up companies, but they’re not! Babies are babies, and you don’t beat up babies, or toddlers, or teens… let the streaming music industry learn from its mistakes, grow into an adult, and then if crappy royalties are still an issue, which they won’t be down the road, deal with them not as whiners but as responsible and professional businessmen and women.
Christopher Knab © 2013 | <urn:uuid:a7c445dc-c92b-42f2-a39e-3fa662f95034> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dottedmusic.com/2013/music-industry/streaming-music-royalties-suck-but-wait/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970587 | 462 | 1.5 | 2 |
November 07, 2006
The Mouse that Roared
In an opinion delivered in Klamath Siskiyou Wildlands v. Bureau of Land Management on November 6th, the Ninth Circuit enjoined two timber sales from going forward, finding that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) violated the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act in its treatment of the red tree vole (the rodent at left). In 2001, the BLM created a six-category Survey and Manage species classification system within the Northwest Forest Plan. The red tree vole was assigned to Category C, which afforded the critter some habitat protections. One year later, the vole was downgraded to Category D, and in 2003 the vole was removed from the Survey and Manage designation system entirely.
Because of the changes in the categorization of the vole, the BLM did not conduct pre-disturbance sruveys for the vole in connection with the two challenged timber sales, and it issued Findings of No Significant Impact with respect to both sales. In connection with one of those sales, the BLM acknowledged that if vole nests existed within the units to be harvested, they would likely be destroyed.
The court concluded that because the two challneged timber sales did not "conform to the approved [resource management] plan[s]" (43 C.F.R. s. 1610.5-3), they are invalid and must be enjoined.
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4 Simple Steps to Benchmark Library Energy Use
Libraries are invaluable community spaces that can be found in virtually every town in the US. While libraries come in all shapes and sizes, there are a few things that they nearly always have in common:
1) Incredibly dedicated librarians are keeping the doors open.
2) Operating costs are an ongoing concern.
3) Libraries are located in some kind of physical structure.
According to the EPA, buildings consume 40% of the energy used in the U.S. and 72% of the electricity generated. There is a direct link between the amount of energy your library consumes and the annual operating expenses for your building. Once you manage your library’s energy consumption and loss, your utility expenditures will go down, allowing funding to be directed to other programs.
The recent blog post titled, Free Tools for Determining Your Library’s Energy Use, featured on Tech Soup for Libraries not only highlights the 4 Simple Steps for benchmarking your library’s energy use, but also helps you to understand how to use this valuable information to better manager your energy consumption and lower your utility spending. | <urn:uuid:9bc393db-9bfd-4909-b20d-2d211d8213aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sustainingstructures.com/2012/05/4-simple-steps-to-benchmark-library-energy-use/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953531 | 236 | 2.65625 | 3 |
The Divine can only be found in deep rest (meditation).
Do you know what the obstacles to deep rest are? It is the cravings and aversions in the mind.
If the mind is filled with cravings and aversions, rest is not possible. And if there is no rest, the goal of Sadhana (spiritual practices) cannot be achieved.
That is why we need to be free from the cravings and aversions in our mind.
So, how do we do that?
'I don’t need anything from anyone', this is what we need to keep in our mind.
Don’t think of anyone as a
bad person. There is no
bad person in the world.
If people do something
bad, it is because of their
ignorance or lack of
awareness, or because
their mind has been hurt.
So, don’t have negative
opinions about anybody.
When we don’t need anything from anyone, we will not have cravings towards anybody. When there is no craving, there will be no aversion.
Don’t think of anyone as a bad person. There is no bad person in the world. If people do something bad, it is because of their ignorance or lack of awareness, or because their mind has been hurt. So, don’t have negative opinions about anybody.
Q: Gurudev, you just said that we should not consider anyone as bad. If others treat us badly, how do we react to that? Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: If others have a negative opinion about you, it is their problem, not yours. From your side, do not consider anyone as bad.
By doing this, your mind will be clear and pleasant and your intellect will be sharp. Otherwise, the people whom you consider as bad will begin to haunt your mind like a ghost.
When such thoughts get into your mind, you will not be able to do something creative.
Q: If somebody has really done something wrong towards us, what should we do? Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: When someone does something bad to you, think, why would they do it?
One reason could be that they are not healthy.
Do you see a fool or a mentally ill person as a culprit? No!
If a mentally ill person says something bad to you, do you take their words seriously? No. You just move on knowing that he is mentally ill.
So, when someone says something bad to you, think of it in the same way. When a disturbed person says something bad, why should you feel disturbed?
Q: In order to be peaceful, we have to learn not to expect from others. But in day-to-day life, at the office or at home, different people are supposed to do different things. If they don’t do it, then problems arise. Everyone has to do his or her job.
Please guide us on this. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: If someone does not do the job that he or she is supposed to do, then we need to tell them to do it. We need to exercise our authority there.
If there are lazy people who don’t do their work, we cannot sit quiet. We need to make them aware of their duty.
If we have craving or aversion towards them then we cannot bring awareness in them. It will only make us angry.
Q: What is the meaning of Cause and Effect? Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Cause and Effect are called ‘Karana’ and ‘Karya’.
Cow is the cause, milk is the effect. If there is milk, it is because of the cow.
The cause for the cow is grass. The cause for the grass is the Earth. The cause for the Earth is the Sun.
Behind every happening, there is a cause. Paramakarana, the cause of all causes is the Divine. That is why, it is said, ‘Tasmai Namah Paramakarana Karanaya.’
The cause of all causes is Shiva.
Assume that you have
Devotion is not an object
that can be obtained.
If you drop all the doubts,
devotion is already there.
Q: Gurudev, we say ‘Achamanyam Samarpayami’. Water is known as ‘Apa’, so why do we call it as ‘Achamanyam’?
What is the significance of offering water? Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Yes, water is also known as Achamanyam.
This is a practice that has been going on since ages. Before starting and ending anything, Achamanyam is offered.
It is the process where we do Abhimantra (mantra chanting on the water. You take a pot of water, place your hand on top and then chant mantras. The mantras are supposed to be absorbed into the water) and then offer it. It is not just plain drinking water. The water is charged through the mantra vibrations.
Whenever a guest comes home, water is used to wash their feet (padya). Then, water is given into their hands (arghya). After this, they are given water to drink to quench their thirst (achamanyam). These three practices were practiced in olden times.
When someone comes to your house, don’t you ask, ‘What would you like to drink? Would you like some lemonade, milk, tea or coffee?’
Don’t you give them some water to drink?
In the same way, in olden times, they used to have the practice of Padya, Arghya and Achamanyam. Padya means washing the feet of the guest at the entrance of the house, so that the dirt on the feet does not enter the house. Arghya is to wash their hands. Achamanyam is giving them water to drink, indicating that the discussion can begin.
Q: What is the significance of ‘Panchamrita (mixture of five foods used in Hindu worship) Abhisheka’? Why were only these materials chosen? Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: These five are like nectar: Milk, Curd, Honey, Jaggery and Ghee. Though jaggery needs to be used, sugar is being used instead of jaggery nowadays.
Five Devatas (Deities) reside in them. Savitru resides in Sugar, Vishwedeva in Honey, Surya in Ghee, Vayu in Curd, and Soma in Milk.
So, when you offer them as Abhisheka, the intention is that – may the qualities of the Devas blossom in our life.
We pray for peace in everybody’s mind.
Let there be joy in everybody’s mind.
Let there be strength, courage and longevity in people’s lives.
Let there be contentment and prosperity in people’s lives.
Let there be radiance in life.
Let the winds and rivers flow in sweetly.
Let our days and nights be sweet.
Let every soil particle bring sweetness to us.
Let us get sweetness from the Akasha, Devatas and Pitrus (departed ancestors).
Let our speech and thoughts be sweet.
Let the society bring us sweetness.
Let the Vanaspati (Lord of the forest) bring us sweetness.
Let the Sun bring sweetness to our lives.
Let our whole life bring sweetness to other people’s lives.
Let us bring sweetness to the collective consciousness.
Q: Please tell us the way to attain never-ending and unshakable devotion. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: Assume that you have unshakable devotion. Sage Narada says in the Bhakti Sutras that devotion is not an object that can be obtained. If you drop all the doubts, devotion is already there.
For one who walks
the spiritual path,
you will only move
higher and higher.
Q: If we study law, there is a guarantee of becoming a lawyer. If we study engineering, there is a guarantee of becoming an engineer if we put in our efforts. However, there is no guarantee of getting liberation if we keep doing our Sadhana and keep walking this path. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: It is definitely guaranteed.
Arjuna asks the same question in the Bhagavad Gita. So, Lord Krishna replies, ‘Na hi kalyana-krt kascid durgatim tata gacchati’, (Chapter 6, Verse 40).
For one who walks the spiritual path, you will only move higher and higher.
Q: Many great saints, though they attained enlightenment, did not give it directly to anybody. They just preached about the steps to attain it.
Why does God not give enlightenment directly to everyone? Are samskaras (impressions) necessary for this? Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:Samskaras are necessary. If you are here, it means that somewhere you had the interest and curiosity to come. Without that interest, how could you come here? So, a little bit of samskaras are necessary.
However, only samskaras are not enough. In life, samskaras, opportunities and grace are all needed. Along with these, self-effort is also required.
If you want to come to the satsang but keep lying in your bed, will it help?
So, self-effort, samskaras, opportunities and grace are all needed.
Q: Are there chances of epilepsy attacks even for people who do Sadhana regularly? Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: It depends on what the person eats, drinks and does the whole day. It is possible if eating, drinking and living habits are not proper.
If there is too much stress in the nervous system then there are chances of such attacks.
If one lives a healthy life, it will not happen. | <urn:uuid:f44397c4-2ad5-4d47-bb5f-b66eed6cecf9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.artofliving.org/there-are-no-bad-people | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957054 | 2,134 | 2.140625 | 2 |
The European Union and Russia
The European Union has agreed on what it wants from Russia. But not how fast
WHETHER it was brave or clumsy depends on your point of view. But Lithuania (population 3.5m) has nudged the European Union (population 500m) into a slightly tougher stance towards Russia. Talks on a (long overdue) partnership agreement were first postponed because of Russia's embargo on Polish meat. When that was lifted, the obstacle became Lithuanian demands for firmer terms concerning energy, judicial co-operation and Russia's treatment of countries such as Georgia.
EU diplomats fumed about Lithuania's tactics, complaining of belated timing, poor preparation and unrealistic expectations. A few said this was just the sort of thing to strengthen the view in “old Europe” that letting neurotic and primitive ex-communist easterners into their club had been a mistake. Certainly some foreign ministers' meetings discussing the issue have been remarkably stormy by EU standards.
But a meeting on May 27th agreed upon a new negotiating mandate, with small but significant changes on some points sought by Lithuania. “They have attracted attention to Russia's behaviour in Georgia, which is timely and good,” says an official from a neighbouring country. The talks on the partnership agreement will start at an EU-Russia summit in Siberia next month.
The question is how fast they will go. Germany wants things sewn up, at least in principle, within a year. That seems too soon to countries that are hawkish on Russia, as well as to the European Commission. This camp wants a more detailed deal, in which Russia would have to make big changes on such contentious issues as its energy monopolies, investor protection and illegal migration. In return the EU would offer a laxer visa regime and let Russian energy companies expand westwards more easily.
Other countries are moving to counter what they see as Germany's overly Russia-friendly policies. Poland and Sweden this week launched their own plan, called the “eastern partnership”, to offer generous trade and other co-operation to Ukraine and Georgia, as well as to other interested countries. The aim is to recreate the model of the “Visegrad” group of four central European countries in the early 1990s, which helped ex-communist states to prepare for what at the time seemed the highly uncertain prospect of EU membership.
For the first time in any EU initiative, the plan explicitly includes Belarus (albeit only on a “technical” level for now). Russian regions such as Kaliningrad are also welcome to apply for some of the goodies that a partnership agreement can offer, such as better border crossings and environmental projects. Ex-communist Poland and rich, neutral Sweden may prove an effective combination. Their forceful foreign ministers, Radek Sikorski and Carl Bildt, get on well. Bravery is good. But brains are even better. | <urn:uuid:21db4c8f-ef38-43ad-8b67-57132ae8126d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.economist.com/node/11460118 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969812 | 598 | 1.960938 | 2 |
Lin Kuchler served as the executive secretary of the AMA from 1958 to 1965. After serving as a top executive for NASCAR for 13 years, Kuchler returned to head the AMA for a second time in 1978 and retired in 1981. Kuchler guided the AMA during a transitional period when British, and later, Japanese makers first came to be major influences in the American motorcycle market. During both of his terms, Kuchler helped steer the AMA out of financially troubling times and set the association on a path that led to growth and stability.
Kuchler oversaw a period of steady escalation of AMA membership, in part due to his efforts at increasing the visibility of the association through innovative media and public relations campaigns. He also commissioned the first study about creating a museum that would preserve the history of motorcycling in America. Those early studies eventually led to the founding of what would later become the Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum.
Kuchler was liked and well respected by all segments of the AMA membership. He cultivated close relationships with the country’s motorcycle dealers and was appreciated for his evenhanded approach to dealing with the needs of all the motorcycle manufacturers.
Linton Kuchler was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 18, 1916. The son of an appraisal company executive, Kuchler grew up just two miles from the Harley-Davidson factory. He got his first motorcycle when he was 18. He bought a used 1928 single-cylinder Harley-Davidson from a buddy whose family owned one of Milwaukee’s many breweries. As it turned out, Kuchler had purchased a very rare Harley-Davidson motorcycle of which only four were made.
"That’s one bike wish I would have held on to," he said with a laugh.
After one year at the University of Miami, Kuchler moved back to Milwaukee and applied for a position at the Harley-Davidson factory. Two years after he applied, he got a call to interview at Harley-Davidson. He was hired in 1938 and his first job was factory tour guide.
"I gave two tours a day," Kuchler recalled. As a tour guide, he found himself to be a de facto liaison between the factory workers and some of the company's founding fathers.
"I got to know everyone on the production floor very well doing the tours. Once, during a factory strike threat, Walter Davidson, Sr. asked me every day how things were going on the floor. Another time the factory went through a major re-tooling and again he wanted to know how things were going with the new machines. I pulled a few samples from a new automated screw machine out of my pocket and said ‘Here, see for yourself.' "
Kuchler was promoted to the parts and accessories department just before the outbreak of World War II. He enlisted in the Air Force and trained as a bombardier on B-24s. Just prior to being shipped to the Pacific, he was given a routine vaccination shot and his heart rate went up abnormally high. Doctors diagnosed a congenital heart condition and he was grounded and served stateside during the war.
After the war, he moved back to Milwaukee and applied for a Harley-Davidson dealership. An opening came up in 1950 and he established a small dealership in East Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was not the best of times to have a motorcycle dealership.
"The Korean War was going and no one had any money for motorcycles," Kuchler recalled.
During his stint as a motorcycle dealer, Kuchler became highly respected by fellow Michigan dealers and he assumed positions of leadership in local dealer associations. By the mid-1950s, longtime AMA Secretary Manager E.C. Smith made it known that he would soon retire. The AMA’s board began looking for an eventual replacement for Smith. William H. Davidson, president of the Motorcycle & Allied Trades Association, backed Kuchler and in 1956 he went to work for the AMA as Smith’s assistant.
In 1958, Kuchler took charge of the AMA from Smith, who had served as the head of the AMA for 30 years. Kuchler was only the third executive secretary of the AMA following A.B. Coffman (1924-1928) and Smith.
Upon taking over the reigns of the AMA, Kuchler discovered that the association’s financial condition was poor. AMA annual membership dues remained at $1, the same price since the founding of the association in 1924, due to Smith’s belief that it would keep membership numbers at a high level. Despite the low annual fee, membership was stagnant at around 50,000 due in large part to the sluggish motorcycle market of the 1950s.
Kuchler recognized that immediate action was needed to put the association on better financial footing. He also argued the AMA would not be able to accomplish its mission without sufficient funding. He requested that the board raise dues to a more reasonable level, but at first his request was turned down. He was able to approval of an increase in the subscription rate for American Motorcyclist from $1 to $3 per year. Eventually, in 1959, the board agreed to a dues increase and AMA membership dues were raised to $2. He also raised racing sanctioning fees to a more realistic level.
With the additional funding, Kuchler went into high gear improving the AMA. He greatly increased the recognition of the association by hiring a respected New York City-based public relations firm. Those efforts resulted in broader coverage of AMA racing in newspapers and magazines across the country. The campaign also helped improve the image of motorcyclists by spotlighting the charity fundraising efforts by many of the AMA clubs.
One of the most visible highlights of these public relations efforts was when CBS filmed and broadcasted an hour-long special on the Loudon Classic road race during the early 1960s. All of this took place during a time when motorcycling’s image needed all the help it could get, due to growing public perception of the phenomenon of "outlaw" biker gangs.
Another campaign, titled, "Put Your Best Wheel Forward'" went a few steps further. "What we are planning,'' said Kuchler at the time, "is a program to encourage all motorcyclists to present a good appearance to the public -- not only by their personal appearance, but also by their riding habits ... in such measures as safety, mufflers, special consideration of quiet zones, and in many other ways.''
Kuchler greatly raised morale of AMA employees by increasing salaries to competitive levels. He also brought about much needed modernization of the association's woefully outdated office machinery. In the early 1960s, he oversaw a move to more spacious headquarters on North High Street in Columbus, and the staff was increased to 17 employees.
Despite Kuchler’s close association with Harley-Davidson, he was considered very fair by all of the manufacturers in helping to shape competition rules that leveled the playing field for the European and later Japanese manufacturers. He also brought representatives of foreign manufacturers into the AMA board to help in the decision making of the association.
In 1966, Kuchler left the AMA to take an executive position with NASCAR. He rapidly moved up the ranks of NASCAR from competition director to executive director and eventually to vice-president. Kuchler was a key figure in the growth of NASCAR during the 1970s.
Even while he was with NASCAR, Kuchler continued to look out for the AMA. In the early 1970s, RJ Reynolds Company became the major sponsor of NASCAR racing. Kuchler convinced RJ Reynolds marketing executives to take a look at working with the AMA national racing program as well, and as a result, Winston (and later Camel) became a series sponsor of AMA racing.
By the mid-1970s, the AMA was once again in need of strong leadership. It had fallen on hard times financially again due in large part to an overly ambitious racing insurance plan of the early 1970s that nearly bankrupted the association. After an AMA director was forced out in 1973, the board essentially ran the association for several years through interim manager Ed Youngblood, who had been the editor of the association’s American Motorcyclist magazine (then known as AMA News). Youngblood, just 29 when he was made interim manager, did an admirable job of running the day-to-day operation of the association, but the financial situation was still tenuous and the AMA needed a leader with the experience to turn things around. The board called upon Kuchler, and in 1978 he left a very comfortable position at NASCAR to return to his previous position with AMA.
Initially, Kuchler was worried that he might not be able to right the ship. His interest in the cause of motorcycling and his loyalty to the AMA helped him overcome his doubts. He told the board that he would take over the reigns of the AMA for two years. If things were heading in the right direction at the end of those two years he agreed to stay on one more year.
"I figured if we couldn’t get things straightened out in that time frame, then I’d never be able to fix it," he said later.
Kuchler’s charge was to get the AMA’s finances under control. He lobbied for, and got approved, a small $2 increase in membership dues, and he implemented a hiring freeze and a temporary stop to employee cost-of-living raises. Kuchler also brought the spiraling cost of professional racing under control by aggressively seeking competitive bids for insurance and other services.
Kuchler’s direction saw the AMA gradually return to a solid financial footing. In just three years, he had accomplished what he’d set out to do. Even though the AMA board wanted him to continue, Kuchler stuck to his guns and resigned after three years.
"My decision was made easier by the fact that Ed Youngblood was doing such a great job in government relations," Kuchler remembered. "I was 100 percent behind Youngblood taking over my position and the board recognized his leadership skills as well."
After leaving the AMA, Kuchler worked briefly for California real estate developer Warner Hodgdon, who was heavily involved in NASCAR as a team owner and track owner. By the mid-1980s, he’d retired to Florida. He and his wife, Lorry, had three children.
Kuchler will always be remembered for his dedicated leadership of the AMA and for twice bringing the association through challenging times. | <urn:uuid:91b0b49e-6c32-4828-bb69-577fcb1b0893> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ama-cycle.org/halloffame/detail.aspx?RacerID=302 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986167 | 2,179 | 1.8125 | 2 |
I recently purchased the Master Club Tu-160 kit - the following is a brief look at the kit, before I start making it.
The kit comes in a plain, stout cardboard box with a B&W photo of a Tu-160 on the front. Inside, the parts are packaged in a large plastic bag, inside of which are a number of poly-seal bags containing the smaller parts - all very professionally done !
The major components are the main fuselage upper and lower halves in a soft, almost polythene like resin :-
The surface detail is superb, with fine engraved panel lines. The wings are single-piece, left & right and are packaged in their own plastic bag with a cardboard spine to prevent them being bent. Also in their own bag are the two halves of the tailplane, the upper fin and the two sections of wing that fold upwards when the wings sweep back.
Above : The wings have pivot holes and the instructions give details of how to make them sweep - although it looks like it may take some figuring out on how to do it !
Above : It took some head scratching to work out what this piece was ! It is the upper rear fuselage and lower fin - moulded as a single piece that has to be separated along the groove.
The engine nacelles are in their own poly bag and come complete with intakes, exhausts and fan faces.
The cockpit is in another poly bag - with instrument panel complete with engraved detail, two K-36 ejection seats (courtesy of Neomega) and two control columns and their plinths.
Another poly bag with nosewheel bay and front undercarriage leg.
Above : Components of the main undercarriage - with detailed bays, doors and multi-part legs.
Resin wheels - all 14 of them and not a bubble in sight !
Two vacformed canopies - plus a part that I haven't yet figured out
I think it is neoprene and can be used in making the working wing sweep.
Want to know how big a Tu-160 is compared to a B-1 ??
The black silhouette is the B-1.
Instruction sheet - a little crude, but once the Cyrilic is translated using my handy dictionary, it all seem to make sense - except for the wing sweep, that needs a little more thought !
I have added a drawing showing a complete side-profile in 1:72 scale, complete with the relevant cross-sections for those who have the kit and wish to add the bulkheads.
My ideas for the wing-fold mechanism. Using trial & error, I have made a test version from plastic card
to get the correct dimensions etc - and it works ! I now need to make the 'real' one using sheet brass
for the top & bottom plates. The advantage of this method is that a working wing sweep can be made
OUTSIDE the model - and once it is thoroughly tested, it can then be placed into the fuselage.
All in all this is a very well produced kit, with superb detail and presentation. There is no painting guide, nor decals, but I am aiming for an all-white scheme with the Illya Mouromets logo - I can't wait to get started. I will report progress as I go along.......
Progress report .............
The kit is very expensive - but worth it IMHO.
You can order from Master Club in Moscow at Tushino Aviapress
or in the US - Linden Hill
or from the UK - Modelspot
For some pics of the real thing, as well as details of the names given to some of the Tu-160's and some close-up & interior details, go here. | <urn:uuid:21e560a6-1a47-4af9-aa0f-a85d441b84ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.flankerman.fsnet.co.uk/modl_tu160.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943929 | 777 | 1.710938 | 2 |
J.H.S. McKintyre is one of the most well-known names in Mornington Crescent of the 20th century. Unlike his contemporaries, however (Ruttsborough, Trellis, Ould, Favisham) his repute does not lie in his genius or tactics, nor in his outrageous character. He was a quiet, modest man, whose playing career, covering some forty-five years, was one of little consequence. Indeed he frequently failed to even qualify for major tournaments, and was seldom seen past the third round. He did, however possess an amazing ability to defy the laws of Network Physics and pull off ridiculously complex moves.
Born in Bracknell, Berkshire, on the 4th August 1919, McKintyre always gravitated towards London, and became interested in MC at the age of fifteen, when he accidentally stumbled across the IMCS HQ while lost in London one day. Young McKintyre entered many competitions but was frequently outplayed by the straight-network type of play that had yielded so many champions. He began to study value-based play and used his mathematical strengths to try to outmanoeuvre his opponents.
He soon realised that the theories which surrounded value-play were not entirely comprehensive, as it had always been thought. There were, he discovered, anomalies in values which appeared when certain game conditions were satisfied, or, in some cases, seemingly randomly. He began to study these anomalies and came up with a theory of 'pits'. At first, he submitted the theory as a suggestion that value theory should be looked at again and that his 'pit' calculations could help formulate a new values Codex to iron out the problems that many value-players were having. As he looked closer, however, he found that he could use these 'pits' in his play, to extraordinary effect.
He first tested this in a World Championship Match in 1952. Martha Jameson had McKintyre on his knees: knipped at Amersham with only 3 puce podumes and falling LV meant that MC was imminent. McKintyre had spent 15 minutes with his Fronsky Diagram and was running out of ideas when he saw that something strange had happened in Quadrant 3. The line faltered, seemingly leaving an LV pocket from which he could start a cascade on Jameson's podume stack. Recognising a 'pit' he probed further and returned to the table to deliver a crushing blow to Jameson: Straddling at Euston, he reversed Jameson's driveback of 3 moves earlier and shot down the district line to Richmond, catapaulting Jameson to East Ham. Any analyst will tell you that this is not possible without inducing 3rd level strick on the entire network, yet McKintyre managed to exempt Quadrant 2, leaving him free to romp home. The victory was sensational, and although he did not defeat Hans Thomas Grenz in the next round - despite winning several of the individual games of the match from equally unlikely positions - he ensured his place in MC history.
MC Player, the following month, ran the article "James McKintyre and his Incredibly Flashy Moves", which MC players now use as a title for a game to celebrate his style. Throughout the rest of his career, McKintyre made many of these ridiculous moves, although unfortunately the 'pits' which precipitated them did not occur often enough for him to win a tournament. He died, on 6th February 1989, aged 69. A note on his bedside table in hospital read "Tried to counter the snoods and half-twist to Lancaster Gate - one flashy move too many". | <urn:uuid:0717cec7-1c74-43b7-aae8-6b8704ef0a7c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kevan.org/morningtonia.pl?McKintyre,_James_Henry_Simeon | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986714 | 752 | 1.828125 | 2 |
As we know Apple is about to introduce its own mapping application, something similar in type to Google Maps as part of the new iOS6. It will obviously replace Google Maps on Apple’s own hardware. Which is a problem for Google:
Apple’s expected move to replace Google Maps with its own mapping application is a particularly dramatic example of how the rivalry between the companies has been evolving.
Google has invested huge sums in its mapping technology over the years, and about half of its map traffic now comes from iPhones and iPads. Among other things, the traffic from those devices reveals valuable location data that helps improve the mapping service and provides features like real-time traffic reports.
More to the point, Google charges Apple for having Maps loaded onto that Apple hardware. And as I’ve noted before, this is a substantial sum: rather more than Google currently makes from Android for example.
The figures also suggest that Apple devices such as the iPhone, which use products such as its Maps as well as Google Search in its Safari browser, generated more than four times as much revenue for Google as its own handsets in the same period.
Google is obviously making changes to its own business practices at the same time:
But beyond Apple, Google has begun to charge developers for API access to Google Maps data, which heretofore has been free for all but the biggest customers, like Apple.
But as and when Apple no longer preloads Google Maps onto the Apple mobile hardware that is going to be a revenue stream that Google will lose.
Time perhaps to start the speculation about when Apple will look for a new search partner? | <urn:uuid:c5dc4900-752c-4a56-9617-b7c830846b8c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/06/09/apple-is-about-to-reduce-googles-revenues/?commentId=comment_blogAndPostId/blog/comment/1560-4073-4265 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966328 | 332 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Beef prices could see big increase
Supply is down as beef herd declines in U.S.
A national shortage of beef could double prices this summer at butcher shops.
Dan Schaefer, an animal sciences expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it's all about supply and demand, and it starts with a shrinking U.S. beef herd.
He said that since 1996, the nation's herd has been dwindling, from 100 million in 1996 down to 89 million now.
"The decrease in the U.S. cow herd is related in large part to a drought, which has been widespread in the west for the last decade. We experienced it with intensity this past summer," Schaefer said.
At Jim's Meat Market on Madison's north side, owner John Lehman said Monday that for several cuts of meat, his costs are more like what they should be in June or July -- traditionally the most expensive months of the year -- because more people are grilling.
"There seems to be very little doubt that beef prices are going to be high this spring and summer," Lehman said. "We're kind of worried about what's going to happen. June is my highest prices -- what are they going to be at?"
Lehman has been telling customers to stock up on their meat now. He said that with the of rib-eyes, they're getting some good deals with suppliers, but in the next month or so, those deals will be hard to come by.
Experts said some cuts are expected to double in price.
Producers are closely watching trade practices in Japan. Experts said policy changes could soon happen that would make it more attractive for Japan to import U.S. beef, which would again bring down supply and raise prices.
Copyright 2013 by Channel 3000. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:4e925d87-8285-4db7-a253-01e8277ffcbb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.channel3000.com/news/Beef-prices-could-see-big-increase/-/1648/18314578/-/view/print/-/7fhqyb/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980514 | 387 | 2.1875 | 2 |
By July 10, 2010, all radio and television broadcast stations, both commercial and noncommercial, must prepare and place in their public inspection files a list of important issues facing their communities, and the programs aired in the months of April, May and June dealing with those issues.
Currently, these reports comprise the only legally required documents that demonstrate how a station has met its public service obligations to its community of license and service area. However, the FCC has adopted new rules for television stations that, among other things, will require the use of a standardized form (Form 355) for reporting quarterly issues programs lists and significantly increase the recordkeeping and reporting requirements facing television stations, as noted in this advisory.
The failure to have a complete set of Quarterly Issues Programs lists that were prepared and placed in the station's public file at the proper time can lead to significant fines at license renewal time. Moreover, the failure to produce and document programs responsive to community needs could cause even greater problems for a broadcast licensee.
Please note: New FCC Form 355
Form 355 would require detailed reporting of Quarterly Issues Programs lists by TV stations.
On Jan. 24, 2008, the FCC released a Report and Order adopting a number of enhanced disclosure requirements for broadcast television stations. The Order adopted rules requiring that television stations: 1) post their public inspection files on their Web sites (if they have one), and 2) file a new form, FCC Form 355, on a quarterly basis detailing their programming in minute detail. The implementation of this new form has been delayed thus far; however, stations should be aware of this possible change in the FCC's rules.
Form 355 would require TV stations to break their programming down by specific program categories, as well as certify that the station has complied with a number of FCC programming rules. The new form would require a significant effort by broadcasters to document their programming. The degree of detail that would be required is more substantial than that ever required of broadcasters—far more detailed than the information broadcasters were required to gather prior to the deregulation of the 1980s—though, at least for the time being, much (though not all) of the information is not tied to any specific programming obligations set by the FCC. For details on the requirements, see our earlier Enhanced TV Disclosure Requirements advisory.
As the new Form 355 has not yet been approved, the current rules remain in effect, and television stations will continue to follow the procedures outlined in this advisory. It is possible that the Office of Management and Budget will not approve the use of Form 355; however, broadcasters should be alert for further guidance, as the new form would require licensees to track and provide much more detailed information about the programming aired on their stations.
Who must prepare Quarterly Issues Programs lists?
All radio and television broadcast stations, commercial and noncommercial, must prepare these lists and place them in their public files within 10 days of the end of each quarter. Unlike Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) reports, which are prepared on behalf of the local station group, the Quarterly Issues Programs list is station specific. Each station should have its own Quarterly Issues Programs list, reporting on programming broadcast on that station, which addresses issues of importance to the viewers or listeners of that particular station.
Why are Quarterly Issues Programs lists significant?
In the 1980s, the FCC “deregulated” radio and television. However, deregulation did not mean that broadcast stations were free to ignore their public interest obligations. Instead, the FCC determined that there did not need to be one set of rules for all stations mandating how stations should determine what issues were of importance to their communities, or a single set of rules mandating how much time each station had to devote to issue-responsive programming. The FCC also did away with the requirement that program logs be retained as official records by broadcast stations.
However, the FCC did not eliminate the requirement that stations produce programs that serve the public interest. Nor did the FCC do away with the underlying requirements that stations determine what issues are important to their community and produce programming responsive to those issues. And, most importantly, the FCC required that broadcasters document those efforts through Quarterly Issues Programs lists.
Thus, the Quarterly Issues Programs list embodies the underlying requirement of the ascertainment of community needs and the demonstration that a station has met those needs. These lists are the only legally mandated documents demonstrating how the station served the public interest by serving the needs of the audience within its service area. If a station's service to its community is ever challenged, the station will have to rely on the information contained in its issues-programs lists to prove the extent of its service to the public.
As mentioned above, the Commission has enacted rules for television stations that will significantly increase the reporting requirements they face with respect to their programming. The Commission is also conducting a rulemaking proceeding on Localism, which seeks input on a number of far-reaching questions, such as whether formal ascertainment procedures need to be reinstituted and whether standards or guidelines for certain types or amounts of programming should be imposed at renewal time. Depending on the outcome of that proceeding, local issue-responsive programming could become much more important. With the renewed emphasis on, and scrutiny of, issue-responsive programming, stations should insure that they carefully complete the currently required paperwork to demonstrate how they are serving their communities.
What happens if stations don't have Quarterly Issues Programs lists?
In the recent renewal cycle, broadcasters were fined between $4,000 and $10,000 for not having a complete set of timely Quarterly Issues Programs lists in their public file. While the Commission was less severe for stations missing only an isolated quarter—or if there were isolated instances where the reports were prepared late—the fines were imposed in cases in which there were multiple missing or late-filed reports. This was the case even if the missing lists were from the early part of the eight-year license cycle. Six years of perfect reports will not absolve a station from a year or two when the station was not diligent.
More importantly, though isolated, there have been a few cases in which stations have had license renewal issues, going to the very issue of whether a licensee deserved to have its license renewed, if the lists were non-existent, or if the lists did not demonstrate that the licensee had taken the time to determine the issues of importance to its community, and to air programs responsive to those issues. In these days of increased concern on the part of the FCC about consolidation and the supposed lack of public-interest programming by broadcasters, there is always the fear that more scrutiny may be given to a broadcaster's public-interest programming in the future. These Quarterly Issues Programs lists are very important documents to establish a station's service to the public.
What should be contained in the Quarterly Issues Programs lists?
In the FCC's words, the Quarterly Issues Programs list should reflect the “station's most significant programming treatment of community issues.” Thus, a station needs to identify issues of importance to its community that it has in its good faith determined to be of significance to its audience in that quarter, and the programming it has broadcast responsive to those issues. In the past, the FCC had mandated that 5 to 10 issues should be identified each quarter. While the FCC has backed away from any specified number of issues, the 5 to 10 range remains a good target for stations to meet.
While broadcast stations are given a great deal of discretion in deciding what programming to air to address the identified issues, all stations must broadcast some programming that does so. While the FCC does not mandate minimum amounts of issue-responsive programming, the programming must be sufficient, in the station's judgment, to address the issues of importance to its audience in a meaningful way. We would suggest that the station document several different programs that are responsive to each identified issue. Since these Quarterly Issues Programs lists are the only legal proof of what a station has done to meet the needs and interests of the community, we would urge stations to be over-inclusive when deciding the programs to list in the quarterly report. It is always better to have too many programs responsive to the community's needs than too few.
While there is no mandated form for the Quarterly Issues Programs lists, the FCC has said that a station must identify the specific issue that each identified program addresses. Thus, it is not sufficient to simply put into your file a list of issues, and a separate list of your issue-responsive programming. Each program must be identified by the issue it addresses. In one case, the FCC faulted a station for relying exclusively on a network-generated list of issue-responsive programming. The Commission said that, while network programming can be responsive to local issues, a station must specify the local issue each identified network program addressed. Unless the network program addresses some identified local issue, it should not be listed on the Quarterly Issues Programs list.
Each program must also be identified with the title of the program. For each program the station must list the time and date on which it was broadcast, and its duration. A brief description of the contents of the program, sufficient to demonstrate how the program addresses the identified issue, should also be included. An excerpt from a sample Quarterly Issues Programs list is included as Attachment A. This format can be adopted by stations to report on issues of importance to your community and programming you have broadcast to meet those issues.
What programs are issue-responsive?
It is not just the traditional long-form public affairs discussions that many stations run on Sunday morning that are sufficient to address community needs. Instead, a station may determine that any of its programming that seriously addresses an identified issue is responsive to that issue. Thus, a report on a news program about an issue would be responsive to that issue. Short segments, like PSAs, can be issue-responsive, but should never alone be relied on to address an issue. Some other longer programming should also respond to the issue.
Even entertainment programming can be issue-responsive, if it addresses the identified issues in a serious manner. Thus, a segment on a morning radio show, in which the DJs discuss an important local issue in a substantive or meaningful way, can be claimed as issue-responsive. Similarly, a segment of an entertainment television program can be identified as issue-responsive if it contains such a serious discussion of a local issue.
It is best to include a mix of program types to address every issue. While network programming can be issue-responsive, it is suggested that stations also make every attempt to include locally produced programs to meet each issue, as clearly a locally produced program is more likely to adequately address a local issue. Similarly, not all issue-responsive programming should be buried in the early hours of Sunday morning. Diverse broadcast times reaching a station's entire audience are best to demonstrate that the public was truly served by a station's programming.
How does a station identify issues to include on the Quarterly Issues Programs list?
More than 20 years ago, the FCC abolished the formal ascertainment process that mandated interviews with a pre-established list of community leaders and a general public survey. However, the FCC did not abolish the requirement that stations ascertain the issues of importance to the community. Instead, only the rigid methodology was abandoned.
Stations should have replaced the Commission-mandated program with their own program designed to determine the needs of their communities. For instance, the employees of most stations are involved in a wide array of civic and community activities, e.g., political, social, religious and educational groups and activities. Stations should have their employees regularly report back to the responsible station management about issues raised at the meetings and activities of such organizations, or in formal or informal discussions with organization members.
Station management may also want to formally engage in talks with community officials and members of significant community organizations either in meetings or calls designed specifically to identify issues, or when other opportunities arise (for instance, if such officials are at the station for on-air appearances or other events). General community sentiments on the issues of importance to the community can be gleaned by calls, letters or e-mails from the public.
Most importantly, a station should maintain documentation of the feedback that it gets from these sources and the process it goes through to sift through the information to determine which issues it will address in its programming. This documentation should not be placed in the public file, but should instead be maintained in internal station records that can be produced as evidence of the station's efforts should these efforts ever be challenged during license renewal or at some other time.
The station should gather this information throughout the quarter, and should plan the issue-responsive programming around the issues it is determining are important to the community. The station is supposed to design programming to address community needs that it has identified, and not address issues based solely on programming that has already aired.
Stations should also assure that they are serving the needs of their community of license. While stations have service obligations to their entire service areas, their primary public service obligation is to their city of license. Thus, stations that may be licensed to outlying suburban communities, while competing for listeners and advertisers in a major metropolitan area, should remember their city of license when compiling the list of issues and programs responsive to those issues. Make sure that issues relevant to your city of license have been identified, and that specific programs address issues and events in that city.
How long should the documentation be retained?
The Commission requires that all Quarterly Issues Programs lists be maintained for the entire renewal period, and until the license renewal application based on those reports is granted. Internal documentation on the steps taken by the station to identify local issues should be retained for the same period.
What happens if a report is not completed on time?
If a report is not completed on time, the station should reconstruct the information and place it into the public file, dated as of the date on which it was actually completed. Since the document is a legally required public document, the public file should be clear that the late-filing took place so that no one can accuse the station of fabricating or back-dating these legal documents.
Special rules for Class A TV stations
In addition to the Quarterly Issues Programs lists discussed above, the FCC requires that Class A TV stations maintain in their public files sufficient information to demonstrate their continuing eligibility for Class A status, e.g., that they have broadcast three hours per week of local programming, broadcast 18-hours a day, and otherwise observed the rules that apply to full-power TV stations. While the FCC has not mandated that this report be done quarterly, the preparation of the Quarterly Issues Programs lists would seem to provide a good opportunity to prepare such documentation.
Interested in what's happening in the broadcast industry?
Check out our Broadcast Law Blog | <urn:uuid:5fb93454-0944-44c5-820c-0cb9607ecb18> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dwt.com/advisories/Broadcast_Station_Reminder_Quarterly_Issues_Program_Lists_Due_July_10_06_28_2010/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970046 | 3,009 | 1.96875 | 2 |
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The Baylor Scoliosis Center is involved in ongoing research focused on improving the understanding of scoliosis, its origin and treatment. The Baylor Scoliosis Center works in conjunction with the Baylor Research Institute on developing new technology and treatment options for scoliosis.
The Baylor Research Institute, located in Dallas, TX, is a dedicated research center for finding prevention therapies and treatments for diseases and illnesses. Our research focuses on the patient. This means our efforts are more than microscopic studies - they bring the research to the patient's bedside. We work to understand the base of a disease, identify potential treatments or preventive therapies, and enroll patients in research trials.
Established in 1984, Baylor Research Institute matches its research efforts with the strengths and expertise of the medical staffs at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas and other Baylor medical centers throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Our mission is to develop innovative therapies to improve the care and well-being of our community.
The Baylor Research Institute collaborates with the medical industry to develop its technology and intellectual property. The Institute is supported by philanthropy through the Baylor Health Care System Foundation and by grants from the National Institutes of Health and other national organizations. Baylor Health Care System also provides financial support.
Baylor Research Institute staffs approximately 250 employees, including scientists, laboratory assistants and research coordinators, which are located throughout the Baylor Health Care System. Michael Ramsay, M.D., is president of the Baylor Research Institute.
The results of the Institute's research - basic, applied and clinical - are reported in major scientific publications and at national and international medical meetings. Currently, more than 650 research projects are under way. Baylor receives millions of dollars in research funding annually, which helps further our current studies and chart new territory.
Copyright © 2013 Baylor Health Care System All Rights Reserved. | 3500 Gaston Avenue, Dallas, TX 75246-2017 | 1.800.4BAYLOR | <urn:uuid:9f251325-666a-4829-8038-f91fa225a8cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.baylorhealth.com/PhysiciansLocations/Plano/SpecialtiesServices/ScoliosisCare/Research/Pages/Default.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923918 | 420 | 1.726563 | 2 |
"Almanac"—the word comes from the Arabic al-manakh, meaning "the calendar," earlier "the weather," deriving ultimately from ma-, "a place," and nakha, "to kneel," or a place where camels kneel, a seasonal stopping place, a camp or settlement. Coming as it does from a nomadic human society, it is a fitting word as we talk about our bird life, and their travels and destinations, all as they are influenced by the season of the year.
In order to understand the vital interplay of time and space as they determine which birds they'll bring us, let us first set aside time to deal with space. For birds, Ohio's longitude has less to do with time, except as it determines the diurnal rhythms of night and day, and as it figured eons ago in the shifting of continents, where our present longitude marks our place between mountain ranges, at the edge of the feathering-out of the great prairies and the great forests, and consequently midway between the great north- and southbound rivers of birds in the Mississippi and Atlantic flyways. Our latitude, by contrast, is all about time for birds—their seasonal movements north and south, their life cycles along the way, the timing of migrations and even vagrancy, the changing length of daylight and the intensity of Earth's magnetic fields, even their habitats as developed in the topography of our land as formed by mile-high glaciers moving latitudinally thousands of years ago, forming our plains and hills, Lake Erie, and the Ohio River.
Survival for birds means successful breeding, and for this success timing is everything. For migrants, early arrival at the breeding grounds is balanced against the risk of arriving too soon to find adequate food; attempting a second brood must be balanced by the risk of an early reduction in food sources. The phenology of predators, frosts, food sources, leafing of local plants, rain cycles, etc., all affect breeding success, and the species we see have successfully adapted to these influences to remain with us today.
Humans have recently (here, over the past two hundred years) radically influenced some of these influences, upsetting delicate balances, and our bird life is changing as a result.
We have removed some predators, and encouraged the proliferation of others. We have apparently caused climatic warming, with earlier springs and later winters. We have introduced exotic animals and plants. We have bulldozed and burned and filled in and poisoned bird habitats. We allow birds to be killed in great numbers, but not, we reassure ourselves, in numbers too great to diminish them. Our effect on the life cycles of birds is dramatic, ongoing, and uncertain as to ultimate outcome.
Reassuringly, it is still possible to discern primeval patterns of birds' natural life cycles throughout the year. Birders find the continuation of these cycles deeply satisfying as a continuous manifestation of the renewal of life, and a way to measure and better understand, during our short span, the passage of time.
Fifty or more species of our birds remain pretty much equally abundant year-round, present in good numbers in every month. Many are the most familiar of our familiar birds, but even to them the calendar brings profound changes. The crows, robins, blue jays, and song sparrows we see year-round are not always the same birds, as these are at least in part migratory species, with different cohorts inhabiting different places at different times of year. Their behavior, too, may change radically over the calendar year: robins that are solitary worm-eaters in summer will flock in winter to eat fruit. The breeding cycle, with all its changes over times, governs all—migrating, singing, incubating, fledging, flocking, molting. Many species have expanded their ranges over recent time—mockingbirds, titmice, cardinals, house finches—and many once-common birds have receded beyond Ohio's borders: prairie-chickens, Bachman's sparrows, and Bewick's wrens are no longer to be found here. Time has claimed some of our birds forever—the passenger pigeon, the Eskimo curlew, the Carolina parakeet—but there is time to save the rest. | <urn:uuid:1439912f-f481-4834-9bfb-531cc6451f12> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ohiobirds.org/site/library/almanac/introduction.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960016 | 892 | 3.671875 | 4 |
This is the final week of oral argument in what is shaping up to be one of the most significant Supreme Court terms in memory. Today, the high court hears argument in California Democratic Party v. Jones, involving a challenge to California's open primary law. On Wednesday, the final day of argument for the term, the Court will consider in Boy Scouts of America v. James Dale whether New Jersey may compel the Boy Scouts to reinstate an avowed homosexual as an adult assistant scoutmaster. Both cases involve freedom of association rights that lie at the core of the First Amendment and, ultimately, at the heart of our republican form of government.
It is axiomatic, but bears repeating, that the only legitimate government among human beings who are created equal, to borrow the language of the Declaration of Independence, is one based on consent. In a republican form of government such as ours, that consent is manifested primarily through elections, in which candidates with differing ideas about the role and priorities of government compete for support. The First Amendment's protection of the freedom of speech was designed primarily to protect political speech because, as the Supreme Court has previously recognized, such speech "is the essence of self-government."
Inherent in the freedom of speech, and also in the parallel First Amendment protection of the right peaceably to assemble and petition the government for the redress of grievances, is the right to associate with others of like mind in order to magnify such political speech and render meaningful the consent that results from free elections. And there is perhaps no more fundamental tenet of the freedom of association than the right of the association itself to determine who shall be admitted to membership.
During debate in the convention that gave us our Constitution, for example, Gouverneur Morris noted that "every Society from a great nation down to a club had the right of declaring the conditions on which new members should be admitted." As the Supreme Court has recognized, "there can be no clearer example of an intrusion into the internal structure or affairs of an association than a regulation that forces the group to accept members it does not desire" because "[f]reedom of association . . . plainly presupposes a freedom not to associate."
The California Democratic Party case involves the quintessential political association — the political party. Primary elections in California are the vehicle by which such political parties select their standard-bearer. Until Proposition 198 was adopted, the freedom of political parties to associate "plainly presuppose[d] a freedom not to associate." In other words, political parties were free to require that only party members could participate in the most fundamental choice made by the association, the choosing of a candidate to represent the party's views in an election. After Proposition 198 was adopted, political parties no longer have that right and, to that extent, the consent function of elections is undermined.
Much more is at stake than just the associational rights of political parties. The lower court noted that Proposition 198 was designed to decrease the "election of party hard-liners," promote the election of "more moderate problem-solvers," and avoid "legislative gridlock." Our founders did not see legislative gridlock as a problem, however, but rather as security against government tyranny and majority faction. They designed a constitution with checks and balances, deliberately promoting partisan strife and legislative gridlock in order to block single-party domination, because they believed that majority tyranny was a much greater threat than legislative gridlock.
Boy Scouts involves a different kind of association, but it still implicates issues that are central to our republican form of government. For nearly a century, the Boy Scouts has been successful in its mission of instilling in young boys a sense of their moral obligations to God, country, and family, teaching certain virtues such as honesty, frugality, and reverence. The organization also stresses the importance of being "morally straight," which, for the Boy Scouts, includes the long-established view that extramarital sexual relations and homosexual conduct is immoral.
Our Founders viewed such moral training as essential in a republican form of government. The Declaration of Rights affixed to the beginning of the Virginia Constitution of 1776, for example, provides "[t]hat no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 echoes the sentiment: "[T]he happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion, and morality."
Perhaps the clearest example of the Founders' views was penned by James Madison, writing as Publius in the 55th number of The Federalist Papers:
Republican government presupposes the existence of [virtue] in a higher degree than any other form. Were [people as depraved as some opponents of the Constitution say they are,] the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.
The Founders viewed a virtuous citizenry as an essential pre-condition of republican self-government, and they encouraged the development of private associations that, like the Boy Scouts, were devoted to the development of moral character.
The New Jersey Supreme Court ordered the Boy Scouts to reinstate an openly gay adult as an Assistant Scoutmaster, undermining the organization's mission and forcing it to convey a message about the morality of homosexual conduct fundamentally at odds with the message it wishes to convey. New Jersey may be free to advance a different view of morality than that fostered by the Boy Scouts, but the Constitution forbids it from compelling the Boy Scouts to carry its message.
Justice Jackson wrote more than 50 years ago that
if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
Government-imposed orthodoxy, whether fostered by California's mandate that political parties allow cross-over voting or New Jersey's court order forcing the Boy Scouts to alter its views, infringes liberty and undermines the consent that gives legitimacy to government. The Supreme Court should not countenance either threat to republican liberty. | <urn:uuid:9320c230-7824-4dbd-9863-16dbbcde63d5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.claremont.org/projects/pageid.1805/default.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959832 | 1,304 | 2.046875 | 2 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Deaths and the risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease have risen significantly in the United States during the last decade, according to two reports released on Tuesday.
The trend comes as scientists and drugmakers are increasingly focused on patients with few or no symptoms of the memory-robbing disease after efforts to halt progression in those who already have symptoms failed over the past few years.
Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed the risk of death from the degenerative brain disease rose 39 percent between 2000 and 2010 even as mortality rates for other conditions such as cancer, heart disease and stroke fell significantly.
Separate findings from the Alzheimer's Association based on CDC data, but looking at actual deaths, found mortality up 68 percent over the same decade.
While the risk of death depends on a patient's age, gender, race and even where they live, it is clear that it has been increasing steadily for a long period of time, the CDC said in its report.
Those 85 and older are far more at risk of dying from Alzheimer's than those age 65 to 84, CDC said. Whites and women are also at higher risk, it added.
"Compared with other selected causes, Alzheimer's disease has been on the rise since the last decade," the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics said, adding that "mortality from Alzheimer's disease has steadily increased during the last 30
"The Alzheimer's epidemic is clearly an urgent issue that needs to be addressed," the Alzheimer's Association, which advocates for patients and helps fund research, said in a statement accompanying its annual report.
Both findings come amid a new push by U.S. health officials to combat the disease as government and industry researchers work to find more targeted therapies that could help patients sooner.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last year released a national action plan to address Alzheimer's following a 2011 law signed by President Barack Obama requiring federal agencies to coordinate their research and accelerate efforts to target the disease. The president also highlighted the issue in his annual address to lawmakers in January.
Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration last month issued guidelines to make it easier to test potential treatments in patients earlier when there may be a greater chance for them to work.
There is currently no cure for the disease, which the CDC said is the fifth leading cause of death for Americans age 65 and older and the sixth leading cause overall.
That is particularly a concern as Americans continue to live longer and the nation faces a wave of older citizens as the so-called baby boomer generation ages.
While it is not immediately clear what is behind the increased mortality, such a shift in aging could be a likely factor. Increased attention could also affect diagnosis rates and those who would have in the past simply been thought of to die from "old age" are found to have the disease.
HIGH COST OF CARE
The healthcare costs are also significant.
Treating those with Alzheimer's disease and other dementia conditions cost about $200 billion in 2012, CDC said, including $140 billion in costs to the government's Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs. By 2050, the costs could reach $1.1 trillion, it added.
Drugmakers are trying to develop effective treatments for what could be a potentially large market, but so far current pharmaceuticals only treat symptoms and do not keep the disease from worsening.
Many have already shifted from targeting people who already have dementia to potential treatments for early-stage patients where they see more hope for successful intervention.
Scientists are also working to discover new information about the elusive and complex disease that could also help spark new therapies. Last year, international teams of researchers identified a new risk gene linked to inflammation that they said represented a major breakthrough.
Another initiative, highlighted by Obama in his January speech, includes efforts to "map" the human brain to gain better insight.
"Without the development of medical breakthroughs that prevent, slow or stop the disease, by 2050, the number of people with Alzheimer's disease could reach 13.8 million," the Alzheimer's Association said in a statement, adding that other estimates put the figure as high as 16 million.
This year, an estimated 450,000 Americans are expected to die with the disease, it added.
Robert Egge, the group's vice president of public policy, called it a national crisis. He also called upon the National Institutes of Health "to reset its priorities and focus its resources" on the disease and on Congress to fully fund the U.S. action plan. | <urn:uuid:304c48fe-cccc-46ca-953d-1a6ed6031c6e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.reporterherald.com/lifestyles/health/ci_22824557/alzheimers-deaths-growing-significantly | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96878 | 928 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Q. I read about Archway Coconut Macaroons helping relieve diarrhea associated with Crohn's disease. I don't have Crohn's, but I've had diarrhea for more than two years. Even the Mayo Clinic can't explain why. I tried all sorts of things with no relief. I really didn't believe cookies could help, but my family nagged me until I finally tried them.
They are nothing short of a miracle. At last I don't have diarrhea anymore. I have to eat more than two, though. I rely on four to six cookies a day, seven days a week. My gastro doctors are amazed. I could have saved several thousands of dollars and avoided much weight loss had I known about this sooner. When I can't find the cookies, I buy bulk shredded coconut and eat four or five tablespoons a day.
A.Thank you for your story. We have heard of a few problems with this home remedy, though. One person with diverticulitis got ill eating coconut macaroons. Another person with narrowed intestines reported that the cookies caused blockage.
While we love to hear from people like you who find relief from diarrhea by eating coconut, we suggest that anyone with diverticulitis or intestinal stricture should steer clear of such cookies.
Q. I am concerned about my sister, who takes pills for high blood pressure. She seems more forgetful now than before she started taking medicine. I read in a magazine that blood pressure drugs destroy the brain. The article suggests using an Asian herb, Rauwolfia, instead of drugs. Should my sister take this instead?
A. Rauwolfia serpentina is native to India, where it was used in traditional medicine. Indian doctors prescribed it for high blood pressure and "insanity." In the mid-1950s, reserpine, a chemical from Rauwolfia root, became the first treatment for hypertension in the United States. It was also used to treat mental illness.
Although still available, reserpine is not commonly prescribed because of side effects such as sedation, low blood pressure, digestive upset, depression, stuffy nose and difficulty concentrating.
Some medicines can cause forgetfulness, but blood pressure pills do not destroy the brain. Untreated high blood pressure is far more likely to cause lasting damage.
Q. You recently wrote that people taking Lanoxin or Lasix should avoid licorice. I thought licorice candy does not contain real licorice. Why scare people out of eating something that doesn't threaten their health?
A.Some black candy is flavored with anise or artificial flavors, but other candy is made with real licorice. One man developed a serious complication, pulmonary edema, after over- indulging in black licorice twists.
Licorice can cause potassium loss, which is especially dangerous in combination with Lanoxin. Lasix and several other diuretics can also deplete the body of potassium.
Less than an ounce of licorice candy daily should be safe for most people. But those on such medications may need to be extra cautious.
Q. My 8-year-old hates to fly. Every time the plane starts to descend he cries because of the pain in his ears. Someone told me that you once mentioned a home remedy for this problem. Please share the secret again so we can get to the wedding without tears.
A.A commercial product called Ear Ease was invented by a pilot to make descent easier. The device contains a reservoir for hot water and is placed over the ears during descent. It helps to equalize the pressure and reduce pain. You can see it by checking the Web site at www.earease.com, or order it from the catalog Masune at 716-695-4999.
To make your own version: Soak a paper towel in hot tap water. Wring it out and put it in the bottom of a Styrofoam cup. Place the cup over the ear.
Write to the Graedons in care of The Sun, 501 N. Calvert St., Baltimore, Md. 21278, or e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.org.
King Features Syndicate | <urn:uuid:693db92b-91f7-46f1-8b7c-e8ef4c053a15> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1999-04-18/news/9904220451_1_real-licorice-licorice-candy-blood-pressure | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964745 | 864 | 1.5625 | 2 |
On 15 January 1934, at 2:21 pm IST, there was a massive earthquake of magnitude 8.3 on the Richter scale with its epicentre located at latitude 26.6 °N and longitude 86.8 °E on the Bihar-Nepal border (Ref. 1).
Tremors of the Bihar earthquake were felt as far as Allahabad, where Jawaharlal Nehru had been standing in the verandah of his house talking to a group of farmers. He could hardly keep his balance and had to cling to a column nearby. Doors were banging and the tiles over the roof of Swaraj Bhawan were sliding down. The shocks ended after some time and the episode was soon forgotten. Nehru wrote that he could not have guessed what those two or three minutes had meant to the millions of people in Bihar (Ref. 2).
In fact, as many as 7,000 people were said to have perished in Bihar and another 3,000 in Nepal, although unofficial estimates put the casualty figures much higher. The district towns of Monghyr and Muzaffarpur suffered the maximum damage and loss of lives, but Kathmandu and Darjeeling were also badly affected.
Nehru later went on a tour of the earthquake-affected areas, when he read with a great shock a statement of Mahatma Gandhi to the effect that the earthquake had been a punishment for the sin of untouchability. On this, Nehru raised several rhetorical questions like: If the earthquake was a divine punishment for sin, how are we to discover for which sin we are being punished? Why did not the earthquake visit the land of untouchability itself? Was it a judgment on the prevailing zamindari system since many rich land owners had suffered losses in the earthquake? Could the British rulers interpret it as a divine punishment because Bihar had been taking a leading role in the freedom movement? Since Nehru did not attempt to answer these questions, it is obvious that he had posed them just to indicate that Gandhi’s logic was flawed or difficult to understand. Nehru concluded that it was astounding to suggest that human customs could cause movements in the earth’s crust (Ref 2).
There was another person who was equally surprised and disturbed by Gandhi’s statement about the Bihar earthquake: Rabindranath Tagore. However, Tagore took the cautious route of first checking with Gandhi whether he had really said what had been ascribed to him. True to his character, Gandhi did not disown his statement, nor did he give any excuse of being mis-reported, but confirmed that he had indeed linked the Bihar earthquake with the sin of untouchability while he was at Tinnevelly. He added that he had spoken with great deliberation and out of the fullness of his heart, and he had spoken what he had believed.
Gandhiji responded to Tagore with fairness and openness. He printed Tagore’s criticism in his own journal, Harijan, but followed it with a spirited rejoinder (Ref. 3). Accusing Gandhi of unreason, Tagore had argued that physical catastrophies must have their origin in physical facts. He believed in the inexorableness of the universal law in the working of which God himself never interferes. He felt that our own sins and errors, however enormous, could never have enough force to drag the structure of creation to ruins.
Gandhi’s defence was that we do not know all the laws of God nor their working. Taking a broader view, Gandhi expressed his belief that visitations like droughts, floods, earthquakes and the like, with seemingly physical origins, were somehow connected with man’s morals, though this connection cannot be proved. While the physical effects of an earthquake would be forgotten and repaired, the moral lessons would have to be learnt. Disagreeing with Tagore, Gandhi asserted that human sins do have the force to ruin the physical world. His message was that natural disasters should draw us nearer to God, humble us, and make us readier for facing God (Ref. 3).
The questions raised by Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru in the aftermath of the Bihar earthquake of 1934, were not new. These issues had been a subject of debate for thousands of years before the event, and such questions are put forth even today. In the Holy Bible, there are literally hundreds of references in the Old Testament which make no secret of God’s intentions to bring disaster on the nations of the earth. God seems to be ever ready with his package of sword, plague and famine, with earthquakes and hailstorms added. But He also acts fair in the sense that He gives the vulnerable populations sufficient advance warnings of the impending disasters, either directly or through His messengers. He always explains to the people the reasons behind His decrees and also what He expects to accomplish by inflicting the planned disasters. Out of His many purposes behind disasters, the most common one is to make people leave their sinful ways and realize that He is God.
Even in the New Testament, where God’s image changes to that of a loving father, no respite is offered to humanity from disasters. The package of sword, earthquake, famine and pestilence would be unleashed at the end of the age. It is interesting to read an account of how Jesus reacts to the news of two local disasters, the slaughter of some Galileans by Pontius Pilate and the collapse of a tower in Jerusalem killing several people. Jesus’ audience is perhaps expecting from him an explanation about the role of a loving God in a suffering world. Instead, Jesus confronts the gathering around him with a question of his own: Do you think that those who suffered were worse sinners or more guilty than all the others? He then goes to answer his own question: I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish (Ref. 4).
Historical records tell us that down the ages, millions of human beings have perished in natural disasters. At the same time, we also know that in the day of disaster, countless people have sought refuge in God, dwelt with Him in safety, and received His protection, comfort and consolation. To me, the key issue here is to try to comprehend that neither God’s wrath, nor His love, nor His forgiveness, nor His grace, is limited by or is in proportion to the degree of human sinfulness. Had it been otherwise, divine judgment would have been a terror for the earth and human salvation an impossibility.
References: (1) IMD web site www.imd.gov.in, (2) Jawaharlal Nehru: An Autobiography, Chapter LVIII Earthquake, 1936, (3) Sabyasachi Bhattacharya: The Mahatma and the Poet, Part IV, Documents 3-6, 1997, (4) Holy Bible, New International Version, Luke 13:1-4, Luke 21:10-11.
P. S 1: Another earthquake struck almost the same place on the Bihar-Nepal border on 21 August 1988 but it had a lesser magnitude of 6.4 on the Richter scale. It took a death toll of 850, caused structural damages to thousands of buildings and totally ruined many villages in Bihar. But this time there was no speculation about the earthquake having been the result of a divine intervention. Perhaps secular India had come of age.
P. S. 2: If human beings are really incapable of interfering in natural processes, then what is all this talk of climate change about? | <urn:uuid:d3675fc7-3fd0-429a-b53f-5d6039ab172e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rrkelkar.wordpress.com/2007/07/28/gods-role-in-natural-disasters/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982244 | 1,567 | 3.765625 | 4 |
Jeff Morgan is responsible for Covenant Cabernet Sauvignon, widely regarded as the greatest kosher wine made in the United States – and sometimes the world. It is certainly the greatest kosher wine I have ever tasted. So he seemed an ideal person to answer questions about kosher wine-making.
The first concerned pricing. Kosher wines are often relatively expensive, and I assumed that the wine-making requirements acc-ounted for the extra cost.
Not necessarily, says Morgan. There are additional expenses, such as paying the local certifying rabbinate and buying equipment to perform mechanised operations automatically on Shabbat. But they are not that important.
Keeping kosher in the winery, he went on, is less about expense than inconvenience. Finding Sabbath-observant Jews who know their way around fermentation tanks and barrel cellars – that’s a problem. Many holy days fall in the winemaking season – that’s a problem.
Morgan says that these are “the greatest challenges”. He wonders “what God was thinking” when He made those scheduling decisions.
My other big question was about mevushal — wine that is flash-pasteurised so that it can be handled after bottling by gentiles, such as staff in restaurants. Covenant’s wines are not mevushal, and I wondered if Morgan thought that wines that underwent the pasteurisation process were inherently inferior. Not at all, he says.
“Some are very good. The issue is not whether mevushal is bad. The issue is, why jeopardise the wine using an unnecessary technique?”
Morgan would rather avoid that intervention, out of a respect bordering on reverence for the Napa Valley grapes he uses. And I suspect that using the method would not do his wines any favours if he did.
Covenant Cab – and some of their four other wines – can found at retailers such as www.kosherwineuk.com and www.kosherwinecellar.co.uk. It is definitely not cheap, at £80-85. But it is kosher, despite the difficulties.
And it’s really, really wonderful.
Splurge and find out for yourself. | <urn:uuid:fecff186-ba69-43ab-a8e2-fa42af3b76b8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thejc.com/print/102310 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9652 | 465 | 1.585938 | 2 |
You went to the bar, had a few drinks, stumbled out onto the sidewalk and suddenly found yourself in handcuffs. What possibly could be illegal about enjoying a few adult beverages at a local establishment? After all, it is not as if you were attempting to drive while intoxicated.
The legality of your enjoyment comes into play when you have overimbibed to the point that you are considered publicly intoxicated. But that exactly does that mean?
Public intoxication is really just a fancier way of saying drunk and disorderly. And the definition of "drunk and disorderly" conduct varies depending on which state you are located in.
Generally, to be considered publically intoxicated you have to be intoxicated (or appear to be) while in a public place. Intoxication in most jurisdictions does not solely mean that you are under the influence of alcohol - it could also mean that you are under the influence of drugs.
In New York, the idea of public intoxication applies only to intoxication from drugs, not alcohol. New York penal law defines public intoxication as annoying others or endangering oneself, others or property while appearing in public under the influence of drugs. New York state laws do not prohibit public drunkenness, although local laws may differ.
The purpose of public intoxication laws is to protect bystanders and intoxicated people from causing injury to themselves or others.
To learn more about possible defenses to public intoxication and related offenses, check back for our next blog post.
Related resource: New York Penal Law, Chapter 40, Article 240.40. | <urn:uuid:fadbcd64-15b0-4e1e-be23-c4e432544888> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nysdwilawblog.com/2012/03/public-intoxication-in-new-york-what-it-is-part-i.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95749 | 309 | 2.15625 | 2 |
From this page you can not only search and retrieve details on the 124 NABO projects, but if you register you can also enter details of any projects you are working on. These details can include the location, persons involved, a summary of the project and supporting files (e.g. Word, Excel, PDF, KML and images). VISQUE, a new Google Earth-based GIS is available here.
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You can also choose specific countries and regions from the list on the left. By default, both the parent projects (rectangles) and individual projects (markers) are shown, but you can choose which would like to display using the links immediately below the map. You can also select which baselayer is displayed on the maps by clicking on the + symbol on the upper right-hand side of the map. NABO uses OpenLayers.
There has been 1 new or edited project added to the database in the past month.
The NABO Project Management System was created by David Bruce at the School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh and is based on the Geographical Information Projects Registry (GIPR). As part of his MSc in GIS he reviewed and enhanced the already existing GIPR system to create a self-sustaining user-driven service. The purpose of the GIPR is to provide a service via which members of the Scottish GI community and beyond can share knowledge about their projects and initiatives and create new partnerships. Many thanks to David for all his work. | <urn:uuid:b2ea8688-2287-4b9f-acef-8c974731ed1c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nabohome.org/cgi-bin/projects.pl?coverage=north%2520atlantic | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945445 | 342 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Despite what the public believes about the rate of gun violence, our report finds that compared with 1993, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew. The victimization rate for other violent crimes with a firearm—assaults, robberies and sex crimes—was 75% lower in 2011 than in 1993. Violent non-fatal crime victimization overall (with or without a firearm) also is down markedly (72%) over two decades.
Mark Twain said there are “lies, damn lies and statistics.” What’s worse is reporting half the story, which is beneath the credibility of the Pew. If firearms were poison or carcinogens would they be acceptably tolerated? Yet, they inflict more damage than many diseases I as a physician must treat.
So what the Pew Research failed to do, CONTEXT, reporting I include in this post with credible references!
Semi-automatic pistols were the weapon of choice for juveniles, with 58% traced among youth under age 18 and 60% for those ages 18-24, compared to 47% among persons age 25 or older.
Most firearm injuries caused by assault or legal intervention are nonfatal. In 2007, 79% of firearm injuries resulting from interpersonal violence were nonfatal
Firearm injury disproportionately affects young people. Among the leading causes of death for those ages 15-24, homicide ranks second and suicide ranks third, with the number of firearm- related homicides and suicides outnumbering the next nine leading causes of death combined.
The rate of firearm homicides peaked in the early 1990s. The firearm suicide rate has declined, dropping below 6/100,000 in the 2000s. Both the firearm homicide rate and the homicide suicide rate are higher than the corresponding non-firearm rates.
Source: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, CDC, 2010. | <urn:uuid:9990f8b1-5218-45c0-a004-fa69d8df7767> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dlwillis11.tumblr.com/tagged/dlwillis11 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958677 | 389 | 2.359375 | 2 |
Kevin Matthew McKay Week 5
- Expression is regulated by carbon sources
- High expression in presence of glucose and ethanol
- Expression regulated by carbon sources
- High expression in presence of ethanol, repressed by glucose
- Homo Sapien Homolog:
- GLUD2 and GLUD1
- Deficiency has been linked to hyperinsulinism-hyperammonemia syndrome and various neurological disorders.
- Expression regulated by nitrogen catabolite repression and intracellular ammonia levels
- Also regulated through transcription in the promoter
- Expression regulated by nitrogen source and amino acid limitation
- Expression regulated by glutamate-mediated repression and GLN3P/GCN4P-mediated activation, availability of nitrogen and glutamate, and when amino acids are limiting, GLT1 expression is activated by GCN4P.
- Parameters related to our chemostat model were found in many of the papers related to these five genes including amounts of nutrients carbon and nitrogen (carbon being held constant in the ter shure paper), flux rate, (which was also held constant in the ter shure paper).
- All pf the genes in the reference pathway are in the yeast pathway on the website
- The KEGG website gave the amino acid and nucleotide sequences of the genes while the other website did not
- The reactome website was hard to use, after searching for quite some time I was able to find the part of our pathway where glutamate is converted back into glutamine by the addition of nitrogen in the form of ammonium. Reactome did not provide the gene involoved (GLN1) or the enzyme (GS), it did show that one ATP was dephosphorylated. | <urn:uuid:bd920804-ad6b-4b94-af3e-59ae87bce640> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://openwetware.org/wiki/Kevin_Matthew_McKay_Week_5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947991 | 347 | 2.15625 | 2 |
CEO of Kelly Services, Carl Camden, has an excellent piece up on The Huffington Post making the business case for health reform. Camden made a similar argument at an event earlier this year co-sponsored by New America, the Committee for Economic Development, and Better Health Care Together. Check out video from that event below and read excerpt from Camden’s latest piece after the break:
Skyrocketing health care costs are a burden on small businesses and harm their workers, says a new U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Escalating health care costs are damaging small businesses and the people they employ by consuming more payroll dollars and limiting business growth, the report states. Perhaps the grimmest news is how rapidly and sharply health insurance offered by small businesses has declined. From the executive summary:
In the past two years, more than half of small businesses that offered coverage reported switching to plans with higher out-of-pocket costs in response to rising premiums. Another third switched to a plan that covered fewer services, and 12 percent dropped coverage entirely.
The decline in quality and coverage of health insurance by small businesses is well-documented, but that's still a startlingly rapid decline in coverage for the millions of Americans working in small businesses.
Recently, the Business Roundtable, an alliance of CEOs who companies provide more than 35 million Americans with health insurance coverage, released a report adding to the evidence that the U.S. health system is in trouble. And it's causing trouble for business. Paying for health care, the group said, was seriously hurting the ability of U.S. firms to stay competitive in the global marketplace.
Weighted against leading economic competitors, the United States spends more and receives less value than both G-5 countries (Canada, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France) and emerging industrial BIC countries (Brazil, India, and China). On average, U.S. workers and employers receive 23 percent less value from our health care system than G-5 workers and employers, and 46 percent less value than Brazil, India and China. For every dollar spent on health care by U.S. firms, G-5 firms spend only 63 cents, and BIC countries spend just 15 cents. Per capita, the United States spends $828 more per person than G-5 countries and $1,654 more per person than BIC countries. Despite paying much more, the Business Roundtable reports that the U.S. does not have a healthier workforce.
For small businesses the economic hits just keep coming, and as the New York Times reminds us, the hardest hits are often from health care.
The Times' Kevin Sack profiles several small business owners faced with a difficult choice: cut health care benefits or close their doors. Amberly Allen, who runs her own direct-mail firm, spends 17 percent of her firm's payroll on employee health benefits. Thomas L. Fritts, who owns a sporting goods store in Illinois, saw his company's health care costs rise 30 percent last year while his business's sales plummeted 60 percent.
Small business owners are shifting a greater share of health care costs onto their employees. In the past two years, for businesses with fewer than 200 workers, the percentage of employees enrolled in a plan with an annual deductible of $1,000 or more jumped from 16 percent in 2006 to 35 percent in 2008. See the chart below from the 2008 Kaiser HRET survey:
There were no bald eagles or the Boss, and our hopes for a surprise appearance from the Jonas Brothers didn't pan out (sigh), but the lunch forum we attended last week on business and labor perspectives on health care costs had more than its fair share of star power (at least in the health care world).
The event, organized by the Committee for Economic Development with the help of New America and Better Health Care Together, brought together a variety of voices to make the business case for health reform.
After introductions, representatives from Better Health Care Together set the stage with perspectives from business and labor on health reform. SEIU's Mary Kay Henry talked about the union's commitment to health reform and its efforts to create an army of health care voters. Wal-Mart's Linda Dillman spoke about efforts to apply the company's "Save Money, Live Better" motto to health care. She talked about Wal-Mart's work to provide insurance coverage to its associates, the company's $4 drug program, and its forays into providing electronic personal medical records to its employees and customers.
Reveille may be the bugle call that gets our military up in the morning; but all it takes is a few good state legislators to get us humming a tune about employer-provided health benefits in the wee hours of the morning. That was our song last Friday at 8:00 am Central Time, when we welcomed an impressive crowd at the National Conference of State Legislatures 2008 Legislative Summit in New Orleans. It is amazing how regular people will nod along to a health economics lecture even in New Orleans if you just set it to the right tune.
We explained how American firms' share of health care costs are contributing to their competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace. Like our paper on the same subject outlines, U.S. employers contribute more than twice as much as our top trading partners and are unable, in the short run, to shift costs onto workers or into prices. Accordingly, more employers are being forced to drop health coverage altogether and business support for comprehensive health reform is growing.
Kansas City, Missouri—hometown to winners of not one, but two seasons of Survivor, as well as the most recent season of American Idol—lost its bid on Sunday to land a $375 million Bombardier aircraft plant, which will instead be located closer to the Canadian company's headquarters in Montreal.
Why did the Paris of the Plains lose out to its Quebecois competitor? Globalization brings many variables into play, but Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) says it was health care that tipped the scale, according to the Kansas City Star's Jason Noble.
She's got a point. According to a recent policy paper by our New America colleagues Len Nichols and Sarah Axeen, U.S. manufacturing firms pay nearly three times as much per hour in health benefits as their Canadian competitors.
I am guilty of going to work when I'm sick. I admit to workaholic tendencies, but the real reason that I choose to cough my way through a day is because, as a working mother, most of my lost work days are due to my kids' illnesses and doctor appointments. Many of us hard-working, competitive Americans have our reasons for this practice of showing up to work sick. We load up on OTC medicine and suffer our way through a contagious illness, while sharing our germs with our not-so-grateful co-workers. When we get really sick, though, some of us don't have the luxury of staying home. It would mean unpaid leave or cutting into scant, precious vacation days.
This is troublesome for our already problematic health care system. When illness goes untreated, it can lead to more serious conditions that require higher-priced services and drug treatments. Increased health care costs ripple through the system:
Health care is the Kevin Bacon of economic maladies. Name a problem facing the U.S. economy and, without too much effort, you can find a way link to the wealth of nations back to the health of nations. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman zeroes in on this connection in his column today, discussing the close link between health care, jobs, and the economy. He argues:
Most public discussion of health care focuses on the problems of the uninsured and underinsured. But insurance premiums are also a major business expense: auto makers famously spend more on health care than they do on steel. One of the underemphasized keys to the Clinton boom, I’d argue, was the way the cost disease of health care went into remission between 1993 and 2000. ... But premiums surged again after 2000, imposing huge new burdens on business. It's a good bet that this played an important role in weak job creation.
Charles Kolb, president of the Committee for Economic Development, a business-led think tank here in D.C., took part in a New America Foundation panel discussion this spring about the economic burden that health care puts on our nation's businesses. We were particularly struck at the time by Kolb's perspective on just how seriously the health care system has declined, and how bold the solutions must now be. The CED understands bold; created in 1942, it helped draw up what eventually became the post-war Marshall plan. With Kolb's permission, we're sharing an edited version of his remarks that day. For more detail on the CED's health care proposals, see the long version here or the summary here ).
Six years ago, the CED looked at health care and concluded that the employer-sponsored system was sustainable, it was fixable. We recommended a number of things that the government could do, that the private sector could do, that individuals could do. We thought through all the little tweaks, how to take better advantage of the market power that employers had, how we could save the system. | <urn:uuid:86acb8d5-a5f6-4b21-86e6-0dfb19546369> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newamerica.net/blog/topics/employer-burden | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966235 | 1,898 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Posted by Uncategorized | Posted on 30-05-2012 | comments: 0| Posted in
The hospital of Croydon showed how the iPhone could be used in medicine. One of the doctors used its iPhone as a torch during a complicated miscarriage procedure. The reason for this emergency was the light – the doctor asked the nurse to make a torch light with the iPhone. To make the things even more complicated, the nurse was not familiar with the iPhone commands and the procedure was painful for the patient. The director of the hospital is currently investigating the case.
It is not the first time of iPhone use in medical practice. Even more, the University of Leeds issued iPhones to the students, copying a trend at medical schools in the United States. Other abilities of the iPhones include running blood tests and identifying the period of optimal fertility. | <urn:uuid:c9d5c4bf-c931-4460-861e-87d04435cfb1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cheapestinternationalcalls.com/blog/calls/the-iphone-as-a-medical-tool-2364 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964088 | 168 | 2.78125 | 3 |
Food-borne illness signs for seniorsFood safety is a vital part of staying well. Each year about 76 million people in our country become ill from eating contaminated foods. Thousands are hospitalized and about 5,000 die.
By: Mary Krueger, Douglas County Senior Coordinator, Alexandria Echo Press
Food safety is a vital part of staying well. Each year about 76 million people in our country become ill from eating contaminated foods. Thousands are hospitalized and about 5,000 die.
These illnesses come from eating foods that are contaminated with bacteria, viruses or parasites.
Older adults are at increased risk of contracting a food-borne illness. As we age, our bodies produce less stomach acid, making it harder to get rid of harmful bacteria that enter our digestive system.
Our digestion may slow down, allowing harmful bacteria to stay in our bodies longer. Changes in smell and taste can also keep us from knowing when food is spoiled.
An older person who gets a food-borne illness is likely to be sicker longer, and if hospitalized, is likely to have a longer hospital stay.
Why do food-borne illnesses seem more prevalent today? People are eating more meals outside of the home and consuming more food prepared by others. Much of our food is delivered over long distances. Also, harmful bacteria that are more resistant to drugs are finding their way onto foods.
Many food-borne illnesses are caused by bacteria like E. coli and salmonella. These can cause serious health problems and these illnesses can be dangerous.
If you get a food-borne illness, you might have upset stomach, abdominal pain, vomiting or diarrhea. Or, you could have flu-like symptoms with a fever, headache and body aches.
Many times people think their food-borne illness was caused by their last meal, but that may not be true. The time between eating the contaminated food and the onset of illness can vary widely.
Usually, food-borne bacteria take one to three days to cause illness. But you could become sick any time from 30 minutes to three weeks after eating some foods with dangerous bacteria.
If you think you have a food-borne illness you should:
• Contact your health care provider and seek treatment as necessary.
• Preserve the food in question. Wrap it securely, label it "Do Not Eat" and freeze it. It may be used to diagnose your illness and prevent others from getting sick.
• Save all packaging materials such as cans or cartons. Save any identical unopened products.
• Report your illness to the hotline at the Minnesota Department of Health at 1-877-foodill. They will inform your local county health department if you became ill from food you ate at a local restaurant or other eating establishment so they can investigate.
* * *
Feel free to contact Mary at (320) 762-3047 with any questions you have regarding senior citizen issues.
Reminder: Caregiver Support Group meets from 2 to 4 p.m. on Tuesday, August 14 at First Lutheran Church. All caregivers welcome. | <urn:uuid:8a4ab90a-a463-4b5a-b50d-924ebed4037d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.echopress.com/event/article/id/96842/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961075 | 625 | 3.328125 | 3 |
Diesel engines have played a significant role in the history of Mercedes-Benz. The company released its first diesel sedan in 1936 and the diesel 180 D sedan debuted in the United States in 1960. By 1981, nearly 80 percent of Mercedes-Benz customers opted for a diesel.
Since then, the availability of diesel-powered Mercedes-Benz models in the United States has waned, with some years seeing no diesels at all. Eric Linder, assistant product manager for the Mercedes-Benz S-Class models, attributed this decline to several factors. Public perceptions of the diesel began to shift, with many people concluding that the engines were noisy and dirty.
Linder added that with improved gasoline engines and cheap gasoline, diesel models began to fade from the spotlight, eventually being removed from the S-Class lineup in 1996.
But that's changed with the arrival of the S350 BlueTEC for 2012. As in the past, S-Class buyers can also choose a V-6 hybrid, V-8 and V-12 models, all powered by gasoline.
As a diesel-powered premium luxury sedan, the S350 pulls no punches. It's a genuine S-Class sedan, with the extremely roomy and comfortable passenger cabin that for years has made the S-Class a top choice among well-heeled buyers.
The ride is impressive. It’s smooth, steady, quiet and well controlled. I’ve said in the past that Mercedes-Benz automobiles turn asphalt to silk, and this S350 is no exception. It‘s among the best riding cars offered.
The centerpiece of the new S350, however, is the V-6 turbo-diesel engine. It displaces 3.0-liters and produces what many would consider a mediocre 240 horsepower. However, it also delivers an astounding 455 lb-ft of torque at only 1,600 rpm.
"It delivers more torque than a comparably sized gasoline engine ever could," Linder says.
It's torque that thrusts you ahead when you stab the accelerator pedal. That means impressive throttle response under all conditions and the ability to move this nearly 5,000-pound sedan from a stop to 60 miles per hour in only 7.2 seconds.
This cleanliness manifests itself in the absence of smoke, even on startup, a lack of exhaust odor and, in a week of hard use, not so much as a hint of oily residue around the exhaust pipes at the rear bumper.
This performance doesn’t comprise the environment, as the S350 is emissions compliant in all 50 states.
It achieves this through urea injection. The car carries seven gallons of this liquid, more than enough to take it well beyond normal service intervals, at which time it can be replenished. All S350 sedans also feature a seven-speed automatic transmission and 4Matic all-wheel drive.
Full throttle acceleration is accompanied by a soft, distant and distinctly diesel ticking sound that disappears completely in normal driving. It replaces the refined snarl that the gasoline engines in these cars produce when driven with a heavy foot on the accelerator.
What the gasoline versions cannot do is match this diesel’s fuel economy. "This is not only the most fuel-efficient S-Class available, it’s the most fuel efficient vehicle within its segment," Linder says. "Twenty-one miles per gallon in the city and 31 on the highway is definitely going to resonate among diesel customers."
The handling, which is excellent, should also resonate. The weight and size of this car are formidable, yet the S350 manages to handle with a surprising level of agility.
Arguing fuel economy as a selling point in this price class might contradict logic. However, what if you could have that fuel economy and 700-plus mile cruising range with no downside? And what if all of this came in an all-wheel drive model that was among the least costly of all the S-Class vehicles? You might conclude that the S350 makes real sense, and you would be right.
Mercedes-Benz S350 BlueTEC Diesel
Starts at: $92,550
Engine: 3.0-liter turbodiesel
455 lb-ft of torque
Next week: Volkswagen Beetle | <urn:uuid:d0fee7d4-b23f-4d40-8cd0-bd76604abca7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ctnow.com/topic/otr-pub-archive-autoreview-122811,0,1909884.column | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946974 | 875 | 1.625 | 2 |
Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin
by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: —Job 19:26
Let us not say, "I believe in God because he maintains me, because he gives me health, and because he nourishes me"; but "I believe in God because he has allowed me to taste of his goodness in preserving this body, which is but rottenness, so that I see him show himself to me as a Father in that I have being through the power of his Spirit. I believe in him alone because he calls me to heaven, and has not created me as an ox or ass to live here a little while, but has formed me after his own image, to the intent that I should hope for the inheritance of his kingdom and be partaker of the glory of his Son.
I believe that he daily allures me thither, so that I should not doubt but that when my body is laid in the grave, and there consumed to nothing, notwithstanding it shall be restored again at the last day; and in the meantime my soul shall be in safe and sure keeping, because when I am dead God will have it in his protection."
And when we are so well disposed, we may say with Job, "Well, now, I see my body must go to decay. Look, whatever freshness was in it, it diminishes day by day, and I need not go far to seek death. For I see no infirmity in my flesh which is so small that it is not a messenger of death. But yet for all that I shall see my God." If we could speak thus when we see that our strength diminishes and vanishes away little by little; then although it pleased God to smite us in such a way that, so to speak, we would rot above the ground, as Job did (for he says that his skin was worm-eaten and consumed, and he was as good as dead, and yet he protests that he will not cease looking unto his God), yet we should not cease to trust God after the example of Job.
This, then, is how the greatness of the afflictions that God sends us will not be to astonish us, provided that we are taught to recognize him as he is toward us; namely, to consider well to what end he has created us and maintains us in this world. —Sermons
John Calvin was the premier theologian of the Reformation, but also a pious and godly Christian pastor who endeavored throughout his life to point men and women to Christ. We are grateful to Reformation Heritage Books for permission to use John Calvin's Thine Is My Heart as our daily devotional for 2013 on the OPC Web site. You can currently obtain a printed copy of that book from Reformation Heritage Books.
Dr. Joel Beeke, who is editorial director of Reformation Heritage Books, has this to say:
"Calvin shows us the piety of a Reformed theologian who speaks from the heart. Having tasted the goodness and grace of God in Jesus Christ, he pursued piety by seeking to know and do God’s will every day. He communed with Christ, practicing repentance, self-denial, and cross-bearing. Moreover, his theology worked itself out in heart-felt, Christ-honoring piety. The selections of this devotional bear this out, and hopefully will be used by God to direct pious hearts in our own day."
These devotional readings from John Calvin were compiled by John H. Kromminga. Be sure to read his "Introduction" to John Calvin's Thine Is My Heart. | <urn:uuid:fcae102c-cb5c-46de-8cfa-c2af63ec999a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://opc.org/devotional.html?devotion_id=2986 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979552 | 782 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Sick in Space
It’s not just a problem for astronauts anymore.
- By Michael Klesius
- AirSpaceMag.com, March 09, 2009
Poor Gherman Titov, the second human in orbit. By the time the Soviets flew him in August 1961, Yuri Gagarin had grabbed the glory four months earlier. Unlike Gagarin, who had made just one orbit, Titov was subjected to 17, which took a little more than a day. That might have granted the kid bragging rights—he was 25 years old, and remains the youngest person ever in space. But after a few orbits, Titov suddenly grew nauseous, and then—horror of horrors for any military pilot turned cosmonaut—he threw up. It looked like a rookie problem, but Sergei Korolyov, the legendary engineer who headed the Soviet space effort, took it very seriously.
“Korolyov shut down the manned spaceflight program for a year,” says Chuck Oman, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They didn’t know what they were dealing with. At first they wondered if it was triggered by some central nervous system reaction to fluid shift in the body. Later, we found that wasn’t true. But when you go to orbit, you do change the rules. Humans are fundamentally flatlanders. Even though you’re not standing on the surface, the brain wants you to have one.”
For the better part of three decades, Oman has been working with NASA to understand the neurophysiology behind space adaptation syndrome, or space sickness—the malaise, disorientation, dizziness, and outright nausea that harass most astronauts during the first few days in orbit. As director of MIT’s Man Vehicle Laboratory, a group within the institute’s Center for Space Research, Oman has accumulated plenty of data that almost guarantees it: If you plan to go to space, get ready to feel crummy for a few days.
Oman’s work is worth a fresh look as orbital tourism companies like Space Adventures send increasing numbers of the super-rich up to the International Space Station—Virgin Galactic will soon send clients on suborbital rocketplane flights for $200,000 each, promising several minutes of weightlessness. Already, a company called Zero Gravity offers anyone who can part with $5,000 the adventure of 30-second floats inside a Boeing 727 during parabolic flights—repeated steep climbs alternating with steep drops. For some customers, after the 15th or so parabola, along with the sweet taste of weightlessness comes the bitter taste of something else. As zero-g comes to the masses, it pays to know the ground rules of space sickness. The two biggest are 1) consider taking anti-nausea drugs, and 2) keep your head still.
Alan Ladwig, a senior advisor in NASA’s Office of the Administrator, co-founded Zero Gravity. First of all, he hates the term “vomit comet.” “We’ve never used that phrase,” he says. “That’s something the journalists gravitate to. It sends the wrong signal.” He claims that the trick to enjoying a zero-g flight is to have a little protein in your stomach, a little fruit, and crackers. Visit your doctor first and talk about the right anti-nausea medication. And once the parabolas begin, have fun. Most of all, he says, lie down flat on your back each time the plane pulls out of a weightless phase. “It’s not the floating by itself that makes you nauseous,” he promises. “The problem occurs during the two-G pullout. And moving the head during pullout is a big no-no.” Future suborbital parabola fliers on rocketplanes will feel a higher, more sustained G-load during reentry, but will be strapped on their backs in reclining seats.
Space sickness didn’t afflict the Mercury and Gemini astronauts—if it did, they weren’t talking. All the early astronauts were hyper-secretive about perceived physical ailments that might give doctors reason to ground them. Also, researchers believe that the tight cockpits of those vehicles didn’t allow astronauts to float around enough to trigger sickness.
Apollo was a different story. The crew of Apollo 7, the first manned flight of the roomier three-seat capsule that allowed some free floating, reported having bad colds in space. But some now say that commander Wally Schirra, along with Donn Eisele and Walter Cunningham, all suffered something else. “Apollo 7, it was space sickness,” says NASA’s Millard Reschke, who studies the problem at the agency’s Life Sciences Research Lab at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “No doubt about it. The excuses just don’t hold up.” On the next flight, Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman was suddenly overcome with vomiting and diarrhea mere hours into the flight. Apollo 9’s Russell Schweickart endured days of misery from space sickness.
It may be a coincidence that these five men never flew again with the space program. But with moon landings about to happen, Apollo crews clammed up about the problem until years later when astronauts such as Apollo 11’s Michael Collins and Apollo 17’s Jack Schmitt admitted to feeling the butterflies of space sickness during their flights.
“Just because the Apollo guys didn’t report it doesn’t mean they didn’t feel it,” says former astronaut Owen Garriott. “They had a job to do and needed to press right ahead. But I do think the majority of the Apollo people felt it.”
Then came Skylab in 1973-74, when three crews of three astronauts each lived in Earth orbit aboard a modified third stage of a Saturn V rocket. About 20 feet by 30 feet, it was a gymnasium compared to anything that had preceded it. Garriott, who went up with the second group, remembers that even seasoned moonwalkers like his commander, Apollo 12’s Alan Bean, couldn’t hide their space sickness in the cavernous interior. His other crewmate Jack Lousma lost his lunch on day one. “Lousma was the worst of us, because his job was to be the first one into the big-volume dome of the orbital workshop.” Garriott claims his own adjustment took a few days. “We slowed down and tried not to work so hard. Tried not to move around so much.”
Oman claims that Skylab forced the issue. “Five out of nine got sick,” he says. “So NASA said, ‘Whoa, this is not some strange disease of Russian cosmonauts.’ ” Crew members on board Salyut, the Soviet space station, had been dealing with similar problems, he says. “Then space motion sickness came out of the closet in the first 50 shuttle missions.”
On Garriott’s next spaceflight, aboard space shuttle STS-9, which carried the large-volume Spacelab-1 in its cargo bay, he was first in after the vehicle reached orbit. He met the same fate as Lousma a decade earlier. “The adjustment was similar, except that I threw up, which I didn’t do on Skylab,” he says.
The simplest explanation for space sickness mirrors that of car sickness. It’s a sensory conflict in which the semicircular canals and otolith organs of the inner ear, which make up the vestibular system, tell you one thing—for example, that you’re moving—while your eyes, fixed on a book in the car or an instrument panel in the shuttle, tell you that you’re standing still.
A fundamental difference is that in a moving car, or even in the high performance T-38 supersonic jet that astronauts use to train, you’re still subject to Earth’s one-G pull. In orbit, you’re in continuous freefall, which just can’t be duplicated on Earth. People who can tolerate motion sickness on Earth sometimes suffer the most from space sickness. And the common pale face that precedes a bout of retching on Earth doesn’t happen in space because of the fluid shift upward.
There are few good predictors of who will suffer space sickness. But statistics show that between 70 percent and 90 percent feel it in some form on the shuttle, and about one in ten suffer severe symptoms including retching. Senator Jake Garn became the poster child of the puking shuttle flier on STS-51D in April, 1985, and astronauts now jokingly use the “Garn Scale” to rate their own severity.
Oman claims that vision plays a complex role in space sickness. “What seems to be happening in weightlessness is that when you put your feet toward the ceiling, something fundamentally changes. Your brain says, ‘Wait, that’s supposed to be the floor down there.’” Like the famous Necker Cube perception riddle, the orbiting brain goes through a series of visual illusions during its first days in orbit.
Medical doctor and two-time shuttle flier Bill Thornton, who got sick to his stomach on his first flight, STS-8, takes a scientific view of the process, calling it a “beautifully self-limiting adaptation” to an unusual environment. “Neuro-vestibular adaptation is an ancient evolutionary adaptation that conferred Darwinian survival advantages to our ancestors,” he assures, “especially to our arboreal ancestors. It’s a two-part process. The obvious component, miscalled sickness, protects the organism by more or less immobilization; while the second component, an individual adaptation, takes a day or so to reprogram components of the nervous system to allow for safe and effective activity in weightlessness.”
He admits that it tends to sneak up on you. “The first inclination you have is that you vomit your tonsils up in a couple heaves. I went on and on for about 36 hours. Then it was over, and I could do snap rolls and all the other tricks. So I had an invaluable firsthand experience.”
For some professional astronauts, the answer lies in taking antihistamines like promethizine (Phenergan), and scopalamine. But opinions are mixed about their risks. They cause drowsiness that some astronauts would rather avoid, even if it means gritting one’s teeth through a few days of space sickness. Many astronauts try to keep their heads as still as possible for the first 48 hours of a spaceflight, and definitely avoid the mirthful tumbling seen in countless film clips from orbit. Many shuttle commanders encourage their crews to remain upright with respect to each other and to any wall displays for the first few days of a flight.
Space tourism promoters may some day give similar advice to passengers bound for orbiting hotels. And if the bag has to be used, make it a good seal. | <urn:uuid:874dd43e-e95a-4d18-8a31-0dbff6d078ff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Sick-in-Space.html?c=y&story=fullstory | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954907 | 2,371 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Localization, or L10N, engineering is an important part of the professional localization process. Localization projects range from Product L10N to Software L10N, some need DTP work, some need coding, and some need printing. Localization engineers are specially trained to work with a variety of software tools, file types, and OS platforms to support the localization of their client's wide range of product portfolios.
"Experience and Knowledge is Invaluable."
Among the various tasks conducted by localization engineers:
- File prep and analysis (word count, TM leverages)
- Post File Processing
- Compilation and engineering (software builds, dialog box resizing)
- Cosmetic testing
- File conversions (clean/uncleaned files, preparation for DTP)
- Customization of TM tools
Localization engineers must be equipped with in-depth knowledge of different OS (Windows, Mac, Linux), software utilities, translation tools, development environments and multiple programming languages.
Localization Engineers excel at the following:
- Working knowledge of installation/configuration of multilingual OS and platforms
- Experience with a variety of development environments and programming languages such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Java, and Linux
- Intimate knowledge of internationalization (i18n), Unicode and multi-byte character issues in software development
- Detailed understanding of database systems, scripting languages, and software graphical interface development
- Experience with different installation programs such as InstallShield, WISE and InstallerMaker over different platforms
Being technical is an important differentiation between CSOFT and other localization companies who, in fact, only do translation.
Using our creative approach to problem solving, CSOFT L10N engineering capabilities help our clients shorten time-to-market and reduce overall project costs. They also help streamline localization workflow and greatly improve the consistency and quality of localization projects. | <urn:uuid:ccb10e47-d7a4-46e8-a74a-17ed32fadcc1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://medl10n.com/localization_l10n_engineering.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912767 | 381 | 1.914063 | 2 |
"The magnetic field or magnetic direction may be perceived as a dark or light spot which lies upon the normal visual field of the bird," Heyers said, "and which, of course, changes when the bird turns its head."
The study was published in a recent issue of the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.
More Navigational Tools
Scientists not involved with the study said it is impressive and well done, but cautioned that there are more pieces to the puzzle of how birds navigate on their long migrations.
"An animal that has to migrate over great distances needs to have both a compass and a map," said Cordula Mora, a biologist who recently completed her postdoctoral research at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Mora's work suggests that birds may use magnetic crystals in their beaks to sense the intensity of the magnetic field and thus glean information on their physical location. (Related news: "Magnetic Beaks Help Birds Navigate, Study Says" [November 24, 2004].)
"If you have a compass, you know where north, south, east, [and] west [are], but you don't know where you are, so you don't know where you should be going," she said.
Study author Heyers said "both [map and compass] systems may act in concert."
Robert Beason is a wildlife research biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Sandusky, Ohio, and an expert on bird navigation.
He noted that stars may also either fully or in part provide the birds with their visual bearing—not the magnetic field.
The next step is to figure out where all this information comes together in the bird brain, he noted.
"That's probably going to tell us where the navigation center for birds is," he said.
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SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES | <urn:uuid:91a0fa04-53ba-4aad-aae6-e3779b5a07a8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070927-magnetic-birds_2.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957225 | 417 | 3.765625 | 4 |
I was disappointed to learn that my home state of Tennessee is jumping on the “government must prevent obesity” bandwagon by instituting a new program called Eat Well, Play More Tennessee.
The title pretty much says it all: the state is going to tell us what to eat and encourage us to exercise more. Man, it’s inspiring to see government officials thinking outside the box.
The program’s home page states This plan is closely associated with the Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity Program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I’m guessing “closely associated” means the state program is funded by a federal grant. It may even part of the “stimulus” package or the health-care “reform” bill … hard to say, since nobody in Congress actually read either one.
If the funding didn’t come from the feds, the advice certainly does. One of the documents featured on the site is a list of anti-obesity strategies produced by the CDC. Here’s a paragraph from the Methods section:
The Measures Project Team completed a full review of 94 articles and seven seminal documents, resulting in the identification of 791 potential obesity prevention strategies. Similar and overlapping strategies were collapsed, resulting in a final total of 179 environmental or policy-level strategies for obesity prevention.
Well, that boosts my confidence already. If the CDC is promoting 179 separate anti-obesity strategies, there’s an outside chance one of them might work. The trouble with offering a simple solution (such as admitting that sugar and refined carbohydrates are fattening and ceasing to subsidize them) is that if it fails, you don’t have 178 back-up plans.
Another document featured on the site is the Surgeon General’s Vision For a Healthy and Fit Nation. This one is also full of bold new strategies, such as:
- Choose low-fat foods
- Eat more whole grains
- Become more physically active
The Surgeon General’s report opens by explaining that while obesity rates were low and stable during the 1960s and 1970s, they began to skyrocket over the next two decades. I can’t help but wonder if the committee members who produce these reports ever engage in conversations along the lines of:
“In closing, Mr. Chairman, the data demonstrates that obesity began to rise around 1980.”
“I see. And what can we do about it?”
“We recommend implementing programs to convince the public to consume less fat and more whole grains.”
“And this is a new strategy?”
“No. We put it in place around 1980.”
Naturally, the new state program calls for getting the schools involved. The recommendations include placing a nutrition counselor at every school and requiring teachers to take nutrition classes.
I can see how that will make a big difference. Look at the current situation: kids leave the classroom for the school cafeteria, where they’re served meals dictated by federal guidelines … teeny portions of protein with sides of mashed potatoes, noodles, rolls, peaches in syrup, and boxes of apple juice. Amazingly, those foods haven’t produced thinner kids.
After years of research, the state pinpointed the reason: the teachers don’t understand why kids need mashed potatoes, noodles, rolls, peaches in syrup, and boxes of apple juice. Educate the classroom teachers, and the federal guidelines enforced in the cafeterias will finally work.
Germany, perhaps not surprisingly, is considering a somewhat more punitive means of dealing with fat people: slap higher taxes on them:
Marco Wanderwitz, a conservative member of parliament for the German state of Saxony, said it is unfair and unsustainable for the taxpayer to carry the entire cost of treating obesity-related illnesses in the public health system.
“I think that it would be sensible if those who deliberately lead unhealthy lives would be held financially accountable for that,” Wanderwitz said, according to Reuters.
It’s nice to know the deep thoughts of MeMe Roth are finally gaining a following in Europe.
Others are suggesting even more extreme measures. The German teachers association recently called for school kids to be weighed each day, The Daily Telegraph said. The fat kids could then be reported to social services, who could send them to health clinics.
Given the country’s history, let’s hope sending the inferior people off to “clinics” strikes most Germans as a very bad idea.
The state of Michigan helped its citizens to become leaner and healthier this year, too. How? By encouraging them to give up meat for a day. The resolution is fascinating; I’ve never heard vegan propaganda translated into legalese before:
Whereas, A wholesome diet of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains promotes good health and reduces the risk of heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases, which take the lives of approximately 1.3 million Americans each year; and,
Whereas, The number of those who choose to live the lifestyle of a vegan or vegetarian has increased and so has the availability and selection of meat and dairy alternatives in mainstream grocery stores, restaurants, and catering operations; and,
Whereas, Reducing the consumption of meat or not eating meat at all can significantly decrease the exposure to infectious pathogens such as salmonella, E. coli, and campylobacter, which take the lives of several thousand Americans and sicken millions more each year; and,
Whereas, The benefits of a plant-based diet can consist of increased energy levels, lower food budget costs, and simplified food preparation and cleanup; and,
Whereas, It is encouraged that the residents of this state get into the habit of healthy living by consuming a diet that is rich with vegetables, fruit, and whole grains, and by staying active;
Now, Therefore, be it Resolved, That I, Jennifer M. Granholm, governor of the state of Michigan, do hereby proclaim March 20, 2010, Michigan Meatout Day in Michigan. In observance of this day, I encourage the residents of this state to choose not to eat meat.
I love it. It’s nearly as silly as the opening speech in Monty Python’s sketch The Royal Society For Putting Things On Top of Other Things.
Speaking of silly people across the pond, Scotland has decided it can cure obesity by ordering restaurants to serve smaller portions:
The SNP administration at Holyrood said it will ask chefs to reduce the calorific content of their meals, but warned legislation will follow if they fail to make “sufficient” progress.
The strategy argues an interventionist stance is required by the state because people will not sufficiently change their eating and exercise habits of their own free will.
Riiiiiight. But if you force the restaurants to serve smaller meals, then people will lose weight. I mean, it’s not as if they’ll go home and say, “Aaaacchhh! That damned little meal! Step aside, I’m fryin’ up a pan of chips.”
Shona Robison, Scottish public health minister, said: “No country in the world has successfully addressed obesity and we want Scotland to be the first.
Now that statement shows some amazing stupi– uh … confidence. No government in the world has successfully addressed obesity, but Shona Robinson has it all figured out. And here I thought the obvious conclusion is that government anti-obesity plans don’t work.
Or perhaps government programs need a more direct approach, like the one suggested by an official in Britain:
Doctors should stop mincing their words and tell the overweight they are fat, the public health minister has said. Anne Milton called on the NHS to ban terms such as “obese” because they do not have the same emotional impact.
The former nurse said larger people were less likely to bother to try to lose weight if they were told they were obese or overweight than if the doctor was blunt and said they were “fat.”
Mrs Milton told the BBC that it was important people took “personal responsibility” for their lifestyles. Speaking in a personal capacity, the public health minister said: ‘If I look in the mirror and think I am obese I think I am less worried than if I think I am fat.’
“How’s my health, doctor?”
“I’m sorry to break this to you, but … well, you’re fat.”
“What?! No way! I looked in the mirror this morning. I’m not fat; I’m just obese!”
“No, I’m sorry, but you’re fat. Really, really, really fat.”
“I’ll be damned. Now I feel personally responsible.”
By the way, the picture you see to the left is of Mrs. Milton. Someone needs to tell her she’s fat. She clearly hasn’t been informed. | <urn:uuid:a0409a3c-96ff-4597-83d4-c4052da41f3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/2010/09/23/government-plans-to-save-us-all/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955168 | 1,914 | 2.5625 | 3 |
EDITORIAL: Women in combat is a matter of fairness
Women, who make up about 15 percent of the armed forces, have been barred from about 17 percent of the positions.
Not because they had been proven unable to do the job or unwilling to the job, but simply because.
So the decision announced last week to allow qualified female service members to serve directly in combat positions was long overdue.
For one thing, it’s been obvious for some time that the modern battlefield doesn’t allow for the neat separation of combat and non-combat roles. That’s put women in harm’s way without official recognition of that depth of commitment and contribution.
For another, the principle that Americans who can do the work should be allowed to do the work has been widely embraced by our society for at least a generation. Extending that principle to the armed services is, to some extent, a simple matter of fairness. Our military ought to reflect our civilian values.
That said, the particulars will require a careful balancing act.
The business of the armed forces is deadly serious. Literally.
Forming the tip of the spear, combat soldiers are engaged in the business of killing the enemy.
In the process, soldiers risk the dismemberment and death of comrades and of themselves.
So it is that opening the door to women is a matter of fairness, but one that is constrained by the nature of that deadly serious occupation. Continued...
It is entirely appropriate, then, that combat positions will have gender-neutral standards of fitness. Every combat soldier must be able to carry her weight -- and more, as when a fallen comrade must be evacuated by hand from the battlefield while under fire.
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City Editor Jeremy Schiffres comments about the news of the day and other topics that he finds interesting.
Life Editor Ivan Lajara talks about living in the Hudson Valley, language, the Web, cats and even politics. But he shouldn't.
Sports editor Ron Rosner talks about the local and national sports scene. | <urn:uuid:be3aef4c-3527-4e21-a25d-3e85c55a0769> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dailyfreeman.com/articles/2013/01/29/opinion/doc5106c6ac53aed533285819.txt?viewmode=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922247 | 772 | 2.28125 | 2 |
Prime Minister Julia Gillard will retain religious rights law which legally allows gay discrimination in Australia. Reports said that she has assured religious groups that a new rights bill will keep current law that permits faith-based organisations to refuse employment to people they view as sinners, including gays and lesbians.
Australia's Parliament rejected in 2012 a same-sex marriage bill. Ms Gillard, during a question hour, explained her personal views on gay unions.
PinkNews reported that Australian Christian Lobby Managing Director Jim Wallace has met with the prime minister several times and has allegedly assured him that she has no intention to restrict freedom of religion in Australia.
Ms Gillard's office declined to comment on her discussion with stakeholders, apparently avoiding controversy over a hot issue. In 2012, Ms Gillard backed out of attending a Christian lobby conference after Mr Wallace suggested smoking was healthier than a gay lifestyle.
Religious organisations in Australia are among the country's large employers, including the Catholic Church which runs private schools. While they get government funding, their religious status allows them to reject applicants with sexual orientation or lifestyle that goes against their beliefs.
Expected to steer the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill in the Senate is Finance Minister Penny Wong, a Christian and a lesbian. She said the bill seeks to balance current legislation with the practice of religious exemption and the principle of non-discrimination.
The bill as well as current debate over same-sex marriage in other western countries had resulted in gay memes abounding in social media sites.
This meme seems to describe the current situation in Australia
while this one has a more liberal but skeptic view of marriages.
The perceived hypocritical view towards same-sex union is tackled in these three memes.
While this last meme sees gay marriage in terms of dollars and cents. | <urn:uuid:266fe983-4d0e-4d63-b9fb-8f83f9b25692> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/424491/20130116/australia-retain-gay-discrimination-law-memes-abound.htm | 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 | 0.967709 | 361 | 1.671875 | 2 |
(9 Feb '03)
9 Feb 2003,Mananthavady
Amma calls it Anandavady, the Blissful Garden. Not without reason. Mananthavady is a town among the hills of the southern tip of the Western Ghats. The ghats are known for their precious forests and beauty. Amma’s Brahmasthanam Temple, built atop one of the hills, is visible from a distance in all directions. The annual three-day program attracts huge crowds from nearby towns and villages. Here, Amma’s children are mainly economically disadvantaged but exceptionally rich at heart. Most of them are workers on tea- and coffee plantations, some of them have small holdings themselves. Living in proximity to nature probably has made them sweetly receptive to spiritual satsangs. I say this because though they are not exposed to spiritual disciplines like the urban people, the people of Mananthavady are exceptionally receptive to Amma’s satsangs.
In Her Anandavady, Amma, the Mother of Bliss, becomes the Mother of the Woods, Vanadevi as well. She is received with fanfare consisting of traditional as well as popular local festivity. In Her Anandavady Amma, as usual, never tires of receiving garlands as offerings of love. In addition to the garlands made of flowers commonly used all over the land—such as rose, jasmine, marigolds, hibiscus, basil leaves—Amma is offered garlands made of any flower that blooms on the slopes or in the valleys, flowers small and big, flowers of all possible shapes and hues and shades! In the jungle I would have passed by them, calling them flowers on the bushy fence. But people here are very artistic; they make colourful garlands out of scented leaves and wild flowers. Just as the bouquet made of different flowers is more beautiful than the one made of a single kind, these malas have a beauty of their own.
Worshippers of Devi offer malas made of fifty-four or one hundred and eight lemons. It is not unfamiliar to Amma’s children to see Her accepting such a mala just as She does a flower garland, unmindful of its weight. Here in Mananthavady, the farmers are fond of making malas out of their agricultural produce: malas of cardamom, of cloves, pepper, coffee seeds. Oh, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see malas of bananas, jackfruits or coconuts!
The silent valleys around here are a home for perennial ponds where white, pink and blue lotuses bloom. They make their way to adorn Amma’s peetham. The thin pure air on which, after sunset, settles fog, fills with the song of bulbuls and other singing birds sitting on treetops. So much of Nature and Her bounty around
Amma make Her verily the fairy—nay,the Devi of the woods. After the three-day festival, Amma and Her train of buses glided down the slopes into the bamboo groves in the plateau. In Her eight-week North Indian Tour, Amma will be covering all the major natural zones of the vast country. | <urn:uuid:2a6a3464-8dcd-4b7f-89e8-fed12796390b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.amritapuri.org/5003/anandavady.aum | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963487 | 680 | 1.765625 | 2 |
California State Senator to Introduce Autonomous-Vehicle Legislation
Google’s Golden State home gets closer making the company’s self-driving cars legal.
California is usually on the cutting-edge when it comes to everything from fashion (despite questionable sartorial contributions such as Ugg boots and flip-flops) to car culture. But the Golden State is following the lead of its neighbor Nevada in deciding whether to make self-driving cars legal on its roads, even though California-based Google has been leading the autonomous-vehicle charge.
State Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat, rolled into the capital, Sacramento, yesterday in a Google-modified Toyota Prius to announced plans to introduce a bill that will make self-driving vehicles legal on California roads and start creating safety rules. Padilla had Google officials in tow -- they probably wouldn’t just let him simply borrow the vehicle from their pool -- and, as in Nevada, the company lobbied for the bill.
Padilla is promoting the bill and Google’s self-driving technology as a way to decrease traffic accidents, saying that up to 99 percent are caused by human error. Google’s robo-cars use cameras, sensors and sophisticated software to steer clear of collisions -- and are never on the phone, applying makeup or angry at a spouse. “If we can utilize state-of-the-art technology to make cars and therefore our roads safer, I think we have an obligation to pursue that,” Padilla said.
The proposal in the California legislature also follows the lead of the Nevada law by allowing companies to test self-driving vehicles on public roads only after logging 10,000 miles on private tracks or other roads under certain conditions. Coincidentally, March 1 marked the first day that Nevada began allowing companies to apply for a permit to test autonomous vehicles openly on state roads. Florida, Hawaii and Oklahoma are also considering legislation that would allow self-driving cars to hit the highway.
Legal observers have noted that autonomous cars were never technically illegal in California. That’s why Google was able to extensively test its fleet of self-driving Prii on the state’s roads, although human drivers were always at the helm ready to take the wheel.
“We began our roughly 200,000 miles of testing our self-driving technology in California and it’s where we’ve covered the most ground,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. “It’s also our home state. We would like to see self-driving vehicles progress to the next stage here. We’re very fortunate to have found a supporter with a strong technical background in Sen. Padilla.”
And the time and money to pursue such a pet project – and friendly politicians.
[Source: San Francisco Chronicle]
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Have a story idea? Tip us off at email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:bf63c35d-bc8f-4aec-b486-78eb3640db15> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://editorial.autos.msn.com/blogs/autosblogpost.aspx?_p=db19c550-3ef0-4791-9b51-25b1a6174415&ref=bfv&post=6d71e687-2627-4ca6-97fd-900f10ebc07c | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957844 | 770 | 2.09375 | 2 |
During part of a rigorous seven-day Mt. Kilimanjaro trek in May 2011 for the Wounded Warrior Project, BYU associate athletic director Chad W. Lewis (BA ’97) carried the prosthetic leg of veteran Ben Lunak, who could not continue after his artificial limb began tearing and inflaming his flesh.
Former New England Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi had grabbed the leg, declaring that at least part of Lunak would reach the 19,300-foot pinnacle in Africa. When it became too heavy for Bruschi, he handed it off to Lewis.
“Reaching the summit was hard enough,” Lewis told an audience of BYU emeriti at their annual winter activity. “We began in a jungle, continued through a rain forest, traveled on the desert plains, and ended at the snow-covered Uhuru [Freedom] Peak. But the trip down was 100 times more difficult.” Eventually Lewis passed the leg on to another hiker.
The experience of carrying Lunak’s leg reminded Lewis of the Savior. “If we cast our burdens upon Him—no matter how difficult they are—He will carry them and walk with us. It was a profound moment when I really felt the love of my Savior.”
Lewis is accustomed to climbing metaphorical mountains. He began his BYU collegiate football years as a walk-on and his nine-year professional football career as an undrafted free agent. This time the mountain was the largest in Africa.
He agreed to embark on the arduous trek to call attention to the Wounded Warrior Project, a non-profit organization designed to help servicemen and servicewomen who have been seriously injured during military service. Jeff Fisher, former Tennessee Titans head coach and current St. Louis Rams head coach, joined Lewis and Bruschi to accompany four Wounded Warriors up the mountain.
“The adventure launched the Wounded Warrior ‘Believe in Heroes’ campaign for our true heroes,” Lewis said. The trip heightened his appreciation for the sacrifices made by members of the U.S. military—an appreciation he hoped to pass on to his emeriti audience. | <urn:uuid:53b21b36-1f45-4d35-800d-4b7bc3be6e2f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://magazine.byu.edu/g/?act=view&a=3022 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971078 | 444 | 1.59375 | 2 |
What to Do When Someone Dies
Whether you received a 2 a.m. phone call with news of an unexpected death or shared your loved one's final moments of a long illness, your initial reaction to the death was likely shock. It doesn't seem to matter how prepared we are - or aren't - a loved one's death often leaves us feeling numb and bewildered. If you're responsible for making the funeral arrangements or executing the will, shock and grief can be immobilizing. Even simple decisions can be overwhelming.
Making the first phone calls
What to do first depends on the circumstances of the death. When someone dies in a hospital or similar care facility, the staff will usually take care of some arrangements, such as contacting the funeral home you choose, and if necessary, arranging an autopsy. You will need to notify family, friends and clergy. It may be easier on you to make a few phone calls to other relatives or friends and ask each of them to make a phone call or two to specific people, so the burden of spreading the news isn't all on you. If you are alone, ask someone to keep you company while you make these calls and try to cope with the first hours after the death.
When someone dies at home or at work
If a person dies at home or at work, first call 911 or the emergency phone number in your area. According to Eva Shaw, author of "What to Do When a Loved One Dies," any death occurring without a physician or medical personnel in attendance must be reported to the police and an investigation held. After the coroner's examination, the body will either be transported to the morgue for autopsy or to the funeral home of your choice, depending on the circumstances of death.
If your loved one was under medical care, be sure to notify the doctor. If you don't know the doctor's name, look for prescription bottles or medical bills. If the person was under the care of a hospice program, call the hospice organization instead of 911.
Call the funeral director
Whatever the circumstances of death, one of your first calls should be to a licensed funeral director. We can help you:
- transport the body
- obtain a death certificate
- select a casket, urn and/or grave marker
- arrange the funeral, memorial and/or burial service
- prepare the obituary
- help you notify the deceased's employer, attorney, insurance company and banks
- offer grief support or direct you to other resources
Call the employer
If your loved one was working, you'll need to call his or her employer immediately. Ask about the deceased's benefits and any pay due, including vacation or sick time, disability income, etc. Ask if you or other dependents are still eligible for benefit coverage through the company. Ask whether there is a life insurance policy through the employer, who the beneficiary is and how to file a claim.
Call the life insurance company
Look through the deceased's paperwork for the life policy. Call the agent or the company and ask how to file a claim. Usually the beneficiary (or the beneficiary's guardian, if a minor) must complete the claim forms and related paperwork. You'll need to submit the death certificate and a claimant's statement to establish proof of claim. Remember to ask about payment options. You may have a choice between receiving a lump sum or the having the insurance company place the money in an interest-bearing account from which you can write checks.
Call Social Security and other organizations
Notify Social Security of the death. If your loved one was covered, the spouse or dependents may be eligible for certain payments or benefits. Also call any unions, professional or service organizations your loved one belonged to. He or she may have had life insurance or other benefits through these organizations.
Gather important papers
Of course the first thing you may be looking for when someone dies is the will or trust. But remember to gather other important papers, such as deeds, business agreements, tax returns, bank accounts, earnings statements, birth and marriage certificates, military discharge papers, Social Security Number, vehicle registration, loan payment books, bills, and any other important papers pertaining to your loved one's affairs. You'll need these to file a final tax return and settle the estate; you may want to consult an accountant.
Executing the will
If you were named the executor of your loved one's will, you've got more work to do. First, you'll need to file a probate case with the court. Although an attorney isn't required in most states, you'll probably want to hire one who is experienced in probate. You may choose to hire the lawyer who prepared the will, but that isn't necessary.
Depending on the specifics of the estate, probate can be complicated and lengthy. As executor, you'll be responsible for carrying out your loved one's wishes according to the will, paying creditors and balancing the estate. There's no standard amount of time a probate lasts, but some states are initiating laws to expedite the process.
Dying intestate - without a will
If someone dies without a will - dying intestate - the court will appoint an administrator. If you are appointed administrator, your responsibilities will be similar to those of an executor: distributing assets, paying creditors and balancing the estate.
Accessing bank accounts
If you have a joint account with the deceased you may be able to conduct business as usual, depending upon how the account was opened. Otherwise, normally only the will's executor or administrator can access the account after providing the required paperwork to the bank. Call or visit the bank to find out what is required.
Wrapping up your loved one's affairs can be tedious and stressful. Find guidance you can trust to help you work out the details, such as a funeral director, accountant, attorney, grief counselor and/or clergy to help you manage the legal, financial and emotional issues a death can bring.
- "The Mourning Handbook: The Most Comprehensive Resource Offering Both Practical and Compassionate Advice on Coping with All Aspects of Death and Dying" by Helen Fitzgerald
- "I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye: Surviving, Coping and Healing after the Sudden Death of a Loved One" by Brook Noel and Pamela D. Blair
- "How to Go On Living When Someone You Love Dies" by Therese A. Rando, Ph.D.
- "What to Do When a Loved One Dies: a practical and compassionate guide to dealing with death on life's terms" by Eva Shaw (Dickens Press, 1994).
- "Step by Step: Your Guide to Making Practical Decisions When a Loved One Dies" by Ellen Shaw, (Quality Life Resources, 2001).
- AARP, www.aarp.org | <urn:uuid:036975ac-a443-4bc4-b679-c8d475d9bb01> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.funeralplan.com/samhoustonmemorialfuneralhome/fpplan2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943392 | 1,409 | 2.203125 | 2 |
An Epitaph on S [alathiel] P [avy], a child|
of Q [ueen] El [izabeth's] Chapel
by Ben Jonson
Weep with me, all you that read|
This little story ;
And know, for whom a tear you shed
Death's self is sorry.
'Twas a child that so did thrive
In grace and feature,
As heaven and nature seemed to strive
Which owned the creature.
Years he numbered scarce thirteen
When fates turned cruel,
Yet three filled zodiacs had he been
The stage's jewel ;
And did act, what now we moan,
Old men so duly,
As, sooth, the Parcæ thought him one,
He played so truly.
So by error, to his fate
They all consented ;
But viewing him since, alas too late,
They have repented,
And have sought, to give new birth,
In baths to steep him ;
But being so much too good for earth,
Heaven vows to keep him.
Statue of a boy playing a flute.
Vatican Museums. ©1999 A. Jokinen.
Poetry of the English Renaissance 1509-1660.
J. William Hebel and Hoyt H. Hudson, eds.
New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1941. 499.
||to Works of Ben Jonson
Copyright © 1996-1999 Anniina Jokinen. All Rights Reserved. Violators will be prosecuted.
Anniina Jokinen on September 4, 1999. | <urn:uuid:7d5e7013-e0d1-4ba8-90a0-add7c2dcb43f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/jonson/salathiel.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.909784 | 344 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
Note 44 at Mt 6:31: The way we take or receive anxious thoughts is by speaking them. Doubtful thoughts will come, but it is not sin until we entertain them (see note 17 at Mt 5:28). According to this verse, speaking forth these thoughts is one way of entertaining them. Therefore, don't speak forth these negative thoughts (compare with Pr 6:2, 13:3, 18:20-21; and Mt 12:36-37). | <urn:uuid:b9bdd3b6-7a0f-4952-8813-aa2cf7dffc7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.awmi.net/bible/mat_06_31 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9252 | 129 | 1.78125 | 2 |
George Siemens (2008) suggests that distance education is growing in acceptance, fueled primarily by increased communication technology, a broader, global audience, and increased collaborative interaction between individuals. Siemens, most renowned for his theory of Connectivism, is approaching this topic from a very optimistic standpoint and while I generally agree with his assertion, I think we have a long way to go before distance education and traditional education are perceived as equal. Still, his point is well taken and if we deconstruct his reasoning, we begin to understand not only what is fueling the growth of distance education, but what we can expect to see evolve in the next few years. Let's look closely at one of the factors Siemens cites as contributing to acceptance.
Siemens (2008) suggests that the growing sophistication of communication technologies is expanding individual's level of comfort with distance education. Skype, instant messaging services, text messaging services, social networking applications, and video conferencing software are all examples of this type of technology and the list of available applications is growing exponentially day after day. The evolution of these technologies is really quite astounding. Email ten years ago, for example, was very limited, while the recently mothballed Google Wave at least demonstrated that what we think of today as email has evolved considerably. Similarly, discussion threads were "all the rage" in the 1990s but seem rather obsolete when compared to Wikis, blogs, and microblogs. Yet, is the sophistication or complexity of the technology truly what explains the growth and evolution of Internet usage and Distance Education? Or is it something specific about the type of sophistication that appears to be emerging?
Stephen Downes, one of my absolute favorite people in the world, suggests that the most transformative and successful communication technologies are those that allow people to express their individuality, creativity, and autonomy. The key word here is "express" and it is why advances in communication technology are having such an impact on the acceptance of distance education. Prior to applications like Skype, communication was very limited, both by the technology itself and people's understanding of how to manipulate it. So, the complexity of newer technologies in and of itself is not the source necessarily of growing use and acceptance; it’s the level and richness of the communication they allow and their ability to allow greater and deeper expression. So-called web 2.0 technologies are emerging specifically around this theme. Applications like Nozbe, Prezi, Digg, and Delicious integrate the social aspects into function, resulting in more collaborative, evocative opportunities for people to intertwine form and function to create new and innovative representations. In fact, there’s even a name for doing so…it’s called a mash-up and it’s perhaps the most purely creative digital genre on the web today.
Clearly, technologies are emerging that reduce the geographic distance between people and they are having an impact on the acceptance of distance education. But, as David Hopkins points out, physical distance is perhaps the least important component in education. Hopkins is more concerned with cognitive distance, social distance, and generational distance and he suggests that distance education has yet to address those issues adequately. I think it’s important to note that this is one area where distance education and traditional education may be equivalent. I’m not convinced that traditional education ever crossed the cognitive, social, or generational distance effectively on a large scale. As evidence I point to the large number of lecture-driven courses still active today. At any rate, I think it’s fair to say that distance education will only be able to stand on its own two feet when we begin to understand that distance in not purely a measure of physical space.
There is an interesting, yet obvious relationship between technological advancement and usage. While we could attempt to predict what the next innovative technology might be, it's really driven by usage, which is in turn driven by the need to express oneself. Thus, it's hard to predict what might be next. At the very least, we can say with some confidence that more advanced methods of expression are likely at the heart of these advances, particularly in communication technologies. Distance Education is no different. As we "play" in our sandboxes, innovators are paying attention to what we are doing and listening to what we wish we could do, and the next generation of applications they develop cycle through the process.
Siemens, G. (2008) The future of distance education, Laureate Education Incorporated. | <urn:uuid:e148f3be-d5fb-4be3-bb29-f0afdd570ada> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sighborgmusings.blogspot.com/2010/09/is-acceptance-of-distance-education.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96496 | 909 | 2.328125 | 2 |
With an ageing population and an increase in ‘lifestyle’ conditions, demand for healthcare has never been greater. What are the biggest health challenges and how can medical technology help to address them? On Target reports.
Last month, On Target
provided an overview of medical technology in Europe, outlining its most developed regions and the emerging markets where steady growth is being predicted. In a global environment plagued by fiscal turbulence, our article told a remarkably positive story: the medtech industry is in pretty good health.
According to analysts, the European medtech sector has been growing steadily and consistently for a number of years. With the medical device market in Western Europe forecast to grow by 40% inside the next five years and rapid acceleration predicted in Central and Eastern Europe, the prospects for the wider industry appear strong.
But what is driving this anticipated growth? This month, On Target
explores the health challenges facing the global community and looks at the therapeutic areas where medical technology really makes a difference.
Dial M for medtech
Consensus supports the recent claims by management consultants McKinsey that the industry is growing at a rate of 5–6% each year. John Wilkinson, former Director General of the ABHI and now Chief Executive of Europe’s trade association for medtech companies, Eucomed, believes the latest data is an accurate reflection of progress. “My instincts are that the level of growth has been pretty consistent over the last few years,” he told On Target
. “Of course, it’s very sector-specific: some mature sectors are growing more slowly than that, while some of the newer technologies are growing at a much more dynamic rate. So that headline figure covers a multitude of individual stories.”
Growth is, of course, directly linked to demand; and with an ageing population requiring greater healthcare provision and an increase in ‘lifestyle-related diseases’, demand is not going to drop any time soon. These societal challenges are reflected in the high-growth areas acknowledged by the industry. “Those markets showing the most rapid growth line up with the key healthcare challenges associated with ageing and ‘metabolic syndrome’ – which is basically obesity,” said John Wilkinson. “These are the key drivers of change in healthcare. Orthopaedic intervention for hip and knee problems is a key driver; and, increasingly, so is spinal intervention – due to both ageing and overweight in the population. The metabolic syndrome associated with a sedentary population is driving two further areas: diabetes care – it’s predicted that 7% of the population will be diabetic by 2020 – and cardiology.”
These headline conditions feature prominently in analysis, both retrospective and forward-looking, of medtech industry performance. Data from Credit Suisse First Boston, based on estimated revenues in 2004, show that alongside diagnostics, orthopaedic and cardiovascular therapies make the biggest contributions to the global medical technology industry. Back then, the medtech sector had an estimated value of $215 billion, with some of the most significant contributions to that figure being diagnostics ($25 billion), cardiovascular ($17 billion) and orthopaedics ($16 billion).
In the years since 2004, these common global healthcare challenges have remained – and diagnostics, cardiovascular devices and orthopaedic implants have continued to set the pace. In addition, developments in neurodevices and advanced technologies designed to bring healthcare closer to patients’ homes are also stimulating growth. This is particularly relevant in Europe, and is driving opportunities for medical device companies.
“There is going to be increasing growth in areas targeted at managing patients in their homes. Some of this is advanced technology – but a lot of it is fundamental technologies for fighting chronic conditions, adapted for the home and the community,” said John Wilkinson.
The usual suspects
These new technological advances relate primarily to the delivery of healthcare, and are driven by governmental objectives to move that delivery away from hospitals and into the community. However, the major clinical challenges for medical science have remained strikingly consistent. It’s worth looking in more detail at the three biggest therapy areas in the medtech sector to see how they align with today’s societal challenges.
The global market for in vitro diagnostics was valued in excess of $38 billion in 2007, and has been forecast to grow by 6.7% year on year until 2012. Growth is being propelled not only by the emergence of new technologies and increasing patient awareness, but also by an increase in the prevalence of several chronic and infectious diseases. Molecular diagnostics and point-of-care tests are also fuelling growth. Molecular diagnostics is the fastest-growing segment of the IVD market, and has been projected to enjoy compound annual growth (CAG) of 14% until 2010 from a base value of $2.6 billion in 2005. Likewise, point of care tests, which can be used at the patient’s bedside, in doctors’ surgeries and at home, now account for around a third of the global IVD market. This segment was valued at $12 billion in 2005, and analysts have predicted a CAG of 7.8% for it by 2010.
The pace of technological change in the IVD market is certainly enabling earlier and more accurate diagnoses of disease, improving clinical decisions and assisting more effective monitoring of treatment. However, as in the device market, the adoption of new IVD technology is being forced to overcome reimbursement and regulatory obstacles that can potentially slow progress and adversely affect health outcomes.
The impact of orthopaedic problems on the health of the global population, and thus on the global health economy, is huge. According to the Bone and Joint Decade (www.boneandjointdecade.org
), bone and joint diseases affect hundreds of millions of people over the world and are the leading cause of pain and disability. They account for half of all chronic conditions in people over the age of 50 in developed countries, a figure which is set to double by 2020. In addition, 10–15 million people (many of them young) are injured or disabled each year through road accidents. With the number of musculo-skeletal diseases set to rise sharply in the next decade, the impact on health economies around the globe will be significant. Currently, a fifth of all visits to outpatient clinics worldwide are for musculo-skeletal conditions.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that the orthopaedic sector is a major market for the medtech industry. In 2005, worldwide sales of orthopaedic products reached $25.9 billion. By 2010, analysts predict that the sector will top $44 billion in global revenues. The orthopaedic product sector is divided into a variety of segments: reconstructive devices and joint replacements, spinal implants and instrumentation, fracture repair and orthobiologics. In recent years, the spinal sector has proved the most dynamic, with growth in the early 2000s of almost 30%. While this has slowed since, it remains a growth area. Reconstructive and joint replacement devices have also slowed – and while they still lead the way in orthopaedic sales, knee and hip replacements no longer command premium prices. The small bone market has emerged in recent years as a new growth area for joint replacement technologies.
In 2007, the European market for orthopaedic devices was valued at around $3 billion. Leading players in the market include Smith & Nephew, DePuy (J&J), Stryker, Zimmer, Biomet and Synthes.
The global cost of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is vast. In the US alone, heart disease and stroke are estimated to have cost $448.5 billion in 2008 (according to the American Heart Association and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute). Likewise, CVD is the main cause of death in the European Union, killing over 2 million people each year and costing the EU economy over €192 billion annually. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO):
• More people die worldwide each year from CVD than from any other cause (see table opposite).
• An estimated 17.5 million people died from CVD in 2005, representing 30% of all global deaths. Of these deaths, an estimated 7.6 million were due to coronary heart disease and 5.7 million were due to stroke.
• In 2015, almost 20 million people will die from CVD – mainly from heart disease and stroke, which are projected to remain the leading causes of death.
The global market for cardiovascular devices is tipped for strong growth in the next five years. This is, of course, in keeping with the demands of an ageing population and a sustained rise in obesity. The latter has not only helped to cement CVD as the leading global killer, but has also led to diabetes becoming almost a global epidemic. WHO predicts that within the next ten years, diabetes deaths will increase worldwide by more than 50%.
The cardiovascular device market is expected to reach $40.46 billion by 2011 in North America alone. One of the most significant innovations in this market has been the development of the drug-eluting stent, a market-leading device in angioplasty procedures. The European drug-eluting stent market has been forecast to reach $4.5 billion by 2009, up from $1.6 billion in 2001 (source: Eucomed). Other cardiovascular solutions provided by the medtech industry include cardiac rhythm management, heart valves, cardiac surgery systems, minimally-invasive image-guided technologies, interventional neurovascular technologies and heart assist devices.
The leading players in the cardiovascular device market include Cordis (J&J), Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Guidant, St Jude Medical, Abbot, Sorin, Conor Medsystems and Biotronik.
Paying the price
Clearly, the medical technology industry has a well-deserved reputation for providing innovative solutions to health challenges across the world. However, in an era where the escalating population is placing increased pressure on global health economies, the speed of innovation may be thwarted by the age-old question: who pays the price?
Health economics, as well as the current market economics created by the liquidity crisis, will play a major role in the evolution of medtech. “Cost pressures may force the way the industry goes, but there’s plenty of scope for the industry to contribute in terms of productivity and better patient outcomes,” said John Wilkinson. “There is a huge amount of innovation going on in Europe. The medtech industry relies on clinicians, scientists and engineers – they are the creative engine of the industry. The industry channels that innovation into products that can be used in the clinical environment. We see no decline in the innovation potential in Europe, but we do see some short-term clouds on the horizon in terms of who is funding that innovation.”
The precise impact of the current financial crisis on the medtech sector is difficult to predict, but there will be an impact. In all probability, this will have a greater effect on early-stage companies looking for funding than on established players in the market. For the medtech industry as a whole, John Wilkinson feels, the opportunities will still be out there:
“I think the opportunity for industry is its increasing ability to radically restructure the way we do healthcare. There are industrial parallels for this. The business of delivering healthcare is overwhelmingly people-driven, and some of these innovations allow you to change the sites and the human resource demands of treating patients. Minimally-invasive surgery is clearly a major driver for reducing hospital stays by facilitating day-case surgery. Telemedicine enables patients to be monitored and managed in their homes rather than in a high-cost environment.
“So really the main opportunity for the medtech industry, and a message that the industry often struggles to get across, is the fact that we can profoundly change healthcare delivery and what it costs. If you draw the trend lines for demand for doctors and nurses and so on, you can see that we are going to need to use technology as a key enabler – otherwise, we’re going to run out of people.”Next month, On Target will take a closer look at regulatory issues affecting the medtech sector and explore HTAs in Europe. | <urn:uuid:ec08a373-674f-41b1-b0bf-6230ba8684d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pharmafield.co.uk/be/post/2008/12/02/In-safe-hands-where-medtech-makes-a-difference.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946876 | 2,537 | 2.234375 | 2 |
There’s no way you can have grown up anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard, anytime post-war, and not be familiar with the accomplishments of G. Grier Beam, even if you’re already asking, “Who’s that?” The company he founded in 1932 was Carolina Freight Carriers, whose red, black and white colors flew proudly on eastern roads for years.
It’s very atypical to find any museum devoted to a single trucking firm or individual, but the C. Grier Beam Trucking Museum fulfills that duty admirably. Among the trucks on display are a brace of Macks in Carolina livery, including a B-series conventional tractor and an H-series “cherry picker” cabover. The Beam museum is also a memorial for past Carolina employees. It’s based in Cherryville, North Carolina, in Gaston County, about 30 miles west of Charlotte, and open Thursday to Saturday. Call 704-435-3072 or visit www.beamtruckmuseum.com.
2 Comments - Leave a Reply | <urn:uuid:dd512797-23a4-4bb8-933b-3902355d30a0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2010/11/10/carolina-we-hear-you-calling/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918938 | 234 | 1.9375 | 2 |
Tips for Avoiding BPA in Canned Food
It may seem simple, but trying to avoid the BPA in canned foods can be a challenge.
That's why we put together some quick tips for choosing foods without this harmful chemical.
- Some companies have already started using BPA-free alternatives in their canned beans, although Eden Foods is the only company that includes "BPA-free" on the label. Unfortunately, most companies aren't disclosing what they're using instead of BPA and we don't know which replacements are safe.
- Some companies are selling frozen cooked beans, so check the freezer section.
- If you're looking for a cheaper alternative, try soaking dry beans overnight and cooking them yourself. You'll get affordable, BPA-free beans for the next day's recipe. You can even make a large batch and freeze them for future heat-and-eat convenience. Just don't reheat them in plastic containers, which can leach BPA or other plastic chemicals.
- The best BPA-free alternative to canned fruit is simply replacing it with dried or fresh fruit. An added bonus is that many canned fruits contain added sugar so cutting the BPA might also cut the calories.
Ravioli, Pasta with Meatballs and Other Canned Meals
- These all-in-one meals have some of the highest levels of BPA of any canned foods, possibly because their high fat and sodium content encourages leaching of the chemical. That means ridding your pantry of these foods offers great BPA-free bang for your buck. If you crave convenience or can't cook, try replacing canned with frozen meals. Just make sure to pop the meal out of the plastic (the tray too, not just the film cover) before throwing it into the microwave!
- Going out to eat can be a challenge because you don't know if the meal you ordered contains canned food or not. Your server, however, should have this information, so don’t be afraid to ask! Generally speaking, many restaurants use canned foods so it might be tough to completely avoid BPA in your restaurant meal.
- Many soups are available in Tetra Pak containers, which look like oversized juice boxes (you might recognize them from the soy milk section of the store). Tetra Paks are BPA-free, made from cardboard lined with aluminum foil and with a layer of PET (plastic code #1). However, some cities don't recycle Tetra Paks—check with your city’s waste program and urge your city to recycle them if it doesn't already.
- In need of chicken, beef or vegetable broth? Many broths also come in Tetra Pak containers, or you can use bouillon cubes and water to create the same broth flavor in recipes. If you enjoy cooking, you can also make your own broth and freeze extra in glass jars for later use.
- Cracking open a can of veggies is definitely convenient, but vegetables have some of the highest levels of BPA among canned foods, according to product tests. For heat-and-serve convenience, buy frozen vegetables and steam in the microwave in a glass or ceramic bowl covered with a plate (ditch the steam-in plastic bag).
- Canned tomatoes are a pantry staple, but you can get them without the can: some grocers now stock tomatoes in Tetra Paks or glass. If your favorite store doesn't carry them, ask.
- Of course, fresh vegetables are always the best option. Check out what's local and seasonal in your area—they're likely the least expensive, freshest and tastiest produce selections around. | <urn:uuid:4b38b767-1aba-41ee-9f90-4a8c7a9da7fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://breastcancerfund.org/reduce-your-risk/tips/avoid-bpa.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949179 | 754 | 2.265625 | 2 |
Of the Way how in Particular they Afflict Men with Other Like Infirmities. But who can reckon the number of infirmities which they have inflicted upon men, such as blindness, the sharpest pains, and contortions of the body? Yet we shall set down a few examples which we have seen with our eyes, or have [...]
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Of the Method by which they can Inflict Every Sort of Infirmity, generally Ills of the Graver Kind. But there is no bodily infirmity, not even leprosy or epilepsy, which cannot be caused by witches, with God’s permission. And this is proved by the fact that no sort of infirmity is excepted by the Doctors. [...]
Of the Method by which Devils through the Operations of Witches sometimes actually possess men. It has been shown in the previous chapter how devils can enter the heads and other parts of the body of men, and can move the inner mental images from place to place. But someone may doubt whether they are [...]
How Devils may enter the Human Body and the Head without doing any Hurt, when they cause such Metamorphosis by Means of Prestidigitation. Concerning the method of causing these illusory transmutations it may further be asked: whether the devils are then inside the bodies and heads of those who are deceived, and whether the latter [...]
Of the Manner whereby they Change Men into the Shapes of Beasts. But that witches, by the power of devils, change men into the shapes of beasts (for this is their chief manner of transmutation), although it has been sufficiently proved in the First Part of the work, Question 10, Whether witches can do such [...]
How, as it were, they Deprive Man of his Virile Member. We have already shown that they can take away the male organ, not indeed by actually despoiling the human body of it, in the manner which we have already declared. And of this we shall instance a few examples. In the town of Ratisbon [...]
How Witches Impede and Prevent the Power of Procreation. Concerning the method by which they obstruct the procreant function both in men and animals, and in both sexes, the reader my consult that which has been written already on the question, Whether devils can through witches turn the minds of men to love or hatred. [...]
Witches commonly perform their Spells through the Sacraments of the Church. And how they Impair the Powers of Generation, and how they may Cause other Ills to happen to God’s Creatures of all kinds. But herein we except the Question of the Influence of the Stars. But now there are several things to be noted [...]
Here follows the Way whereby Witches copulate with those Devils known as Incubi. As to the method in which witches copulate with Incubus devils, six points are to be noted. First, as to the devil and the body which he assumes, of what element it is formed. Second, as to the act, whether it is [...]
How they are Transported from Place to Place. And now we must consider their ceremonies and in what manner they proceed in their operations, first in respect of their actions towards themselves and in their own persons. And among their chief operations are being bodily transported from place to place, and to practise carnal connexion [...]
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- Portia: Thank you for exposing this truth of 2013. Witc... | <urn:uuid:1a0e81b2-322c-49b8-ab2a-422310e89a0c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/category/mainbody/page/6/?wpmp_switcher=desktop | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946123 | 966 | 1.617188 | 2 |
The homeless population is getting bigger, and not enough is being done to help those without homes in central Arkansas. That`s the word from the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C. Officials say homelessness has increased about 25% in most cities in the last two years. They say agencies in Little Rock are trying, but there`s still a lot of work to be done. "Shelters need to be open 24 hours a day, there needs to be a larger day center. Police need to quit harassing homeless people living here along the park," said Michael Stoops, the coalition`s coordinator. Stoops says the causes of homelessness include a lack of affordable housing and decent pay. | <urn:uuid:eca7996a-4092-4c1b-907b-a62726965524> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://arkansasmatters.com/fulltext?nxd_id=43040 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953236 | 143 | 2.09375 | 2 |
We can barely keep up.
One report tells us things are getting better. The next tells us that they are getting worse.
Last week, for example, we thought we might finally be seeing the sell-off we’ve been waiting for. But yesterday, the Dow rose. Gold rose. And oil rose. Gold’s back over $1,500…and oil is back over $100.
As for the economy, same story. We got back-to-back updates on the employment situation, for example. No sooner had we absorbed this news on Thursday:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The number of Americans filing for jobless aid rose to an eight-month high last week and productivity growth slowed in the first quarter, clouding the outlook for an economy that is struggling to gain speed.
While the surprise jump in initial claims for unemployment benefits was blamed on factors ranging from spring break layoffs to the introduction of an emergency benefits program, economists said it corroborated reports this week indicating a loss of momentum in job creation.
Other reports this week showed weaker employment growth in the manufacturing and services sectors in April and a step back in private hiring, suggesting Friday’s closely watched data could prove weaker than economists have been expecting.
But come Friday, the news was entirely different.
The report in The Financial Times told us the “stock market was boosted by [a] good jobs report.”
According to Friday’s news, employment had gone up!
A similar flip-flop came to us in the housing market – but in the other direction. Last week, there was a story that told us that sales had been surprisingly strong…hinting that the housing market had finally “bottomed out.”
But yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the bottom had already given way:
Home Market Takes a TumbleTurnaround More Distant After 3% Drop, Steepest Quarterly Decline Since 2008
Home values posted the largest decline in the first quarter since late 2008, prompting many economists to push back their estimates of when the housing market will hit a bottom.
Home values fell 3% in the first quarter from the previous quarter and 1.1% in March from the previous month, pushed down by an abundance of foreclosed homes on the market, according to data to be released Monday by real-estate website Zillow.com. Prices have now fallen for 57 consecutive months, according to Zillow.
What’s the real story?
The real story is that we’re in a Great Correction. But it is one that is having a hard time expressing itself. Every time it opens its mouth, the feds come along with duct tape.
The Great Correction wants to tell the truth – that there’s too much debt in the system; that most of today’s ‘growth’ is phony, and that bad debt needs to be erased. The feds want to shut it up…they want to lend more money…and pretend the problem will go away.
As a result, the ‘news’ we get is garbled…unclear. We have to listen hard to figure out what it really means.
Here’s one of the stories that has gotten jumbled up and mis-reported. The rich have gotten richer, but why? The dumbbells blame ‘capitalism’ and ask the government to ‘do something.’
The real culprit is the government itself. Here’s one report that got it right:
How the Fed made the rich richer
The ‘QE2’ project was supposed to ease borrowing and get consumers to spend again. Instead, it has benefited only a few while raising most people’s cost of living.
There’s a good reason for this: As inflation surges at the store and the gas pump, the economy is stalling. And the heart of the problem could very well be the Federal Reserve’s $600 billion ‘QE2’ money-printing initiative, which was implemented last November to great fanfare on Wall Street and is set to end in June.
While the program has helped push up the cost of living for all of us – sending inflation into the red zone and damaging consumer confidence – evidence suggests its benefits have accrued only to the top tier of the net-worth ladder.
Yes, the stock market has posted impressive gains since the idea of QE2 surfaced, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index ($INX) up nearly 31% from its low last August. And that has pushed up household net worth by $2 trillion. The hope has been that this will translate into new spending and drive the economy forward.
But stock ownership is concentrated among the wealthy: On average, just 12% of households worth $100,000 or less own stocks and mutual fund shares outside their retirement plans – a group that comprises 74% of the total population. While many more own shares through 401ks and IRAs, they’re not in a position to easily tap that wealth for current spending.
At the same time, QE2 has pushed up borrowing costs, pressing down the prices of homes – a much more widely held asset. The Case-Shiller Home Price Index started falling last summer as the idea of QE2 was floated, and it hasn’t stopped since. The broad 20-city index now sits below 2009 levels.
[Alan] Meltzer believes the Fed is making the same mistakes it made in the 1970s, focusing too much on unemployment while ignoring the inflation threat. The Fed dismisses that threat as transitory and says inflation expectations remain under control.
This is “simply wrong” according to Meltzer, since inflationary pressures reflect real, lasting shifts in the supply/demand balance as countries like China grow and those like Saudi Arabia struggle to feed their growing appetite for resources. And while unemployment is a problem, “it’s not a monetary problem.”
Bill Bonnerfor The Daily Reckoning
Since founding Agora Inc. in 1979, Bill Bonner has found success and garnered camaraderie in numerous communities and industries. A man of many talents, his entrepreneurial savvy, unique writings, philanthropic undertakings, and preservationist activities have all been recognized and awarded by some of America's most respected authorities. Along with Addison Wiggin, his friend and colleague, Bill has written two New York Times best-selling books, Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt. Both works have been critically acclaimed internationally. With political journalist Lila Rajiva, he wrote his third New York Times best-selling book, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, which offers concrete advice on how to avoid the public spectacle of modern finance. Since 1999, Bill has been a daily contributor and the driving force behind The Daily Reckoning. Dice Have No Memory: Big Bets & Bad Economics from Paris to the Pampas, the newest book from Bill Bonner, is the definitive compendium of Bill's daily reckonings from more than a decade: 1999-2010.
Bill, I was so gratified to stumble upon your article. However,
“What’s the real story?
The real story is that we’re in a Great Correction. But it is one that is having a hard time expressing itself. Every time it opens its mouth, the feds come along with duct tape.”
You’ve stated the problem, but by no means have you told the story! I’m hopeful that you will follow up this piece with further evidence of the feds role in crafting the message and running the fog machine that is creating the murk.
I was floored last week to hear the spin on unemployment figures being universally propagated by major media outlets, from CNN to NPR. The .2% RISE in unemployment, from 8.8% to 9.0%, was attributed to disenchanted job seekers seeing a ‘light’ in the economy and returning to their job search.
This is an abject lie. There is no mechanism to measure the ‘re-entry’ of unemployed who have not been actively searching for work. First, unemployed workers who are no longer receiving unemployment benefits are not counted in the unemployment rate calculation. They drop off the radar entirely once they exhaust all benefit eligibility. How, then, are these people being counted upon their ‘re-entry’ into the mass of American humanity currently seeking employment? There is no mechanism to measure their numbers nor monitor their job search activities.
The assertion that the rise in unemployment can be attributed to this segment of jobless workers is patently false. However, in listening to ABC, NBC, CNN, “The News Hour” on PBS, and “All Things Considered” on NPR, this was articulated across the board as the ameliorating factor in rationalizing that the RISE in U.S. unemployment is actually a good thing.
Come on, Bill; you started it! Now finish it! Or at least keep going with it. This story needs to be told. It is unfolding before us. It’s in our FACES.
Glad to see I am not the only one having a hard time fathoming why the Nasdaq is at a decade high while housing hits new lows.
Your position on great correction conforms to that of other authors I encountered, which makes me wonder whether this consencus in pulic opinion signifies the beginning of a new way of thinking. I just want to say how much I enjoy this information. I like this one Bill.
Yeah I look over that before about him. I’m not exactly sure where I check it but it was an forum it might have been the same article you look over. I remember reading somewhere that he was terrified he would kill himself. He was especially terrorize of buses as he feared he would jump in front of one.
The quack policy that was good for stock owners in North America turned out even better for those in Japan.
From under which fetid igneous formation did these IRS slugs slither?
How the “Maker Movement” Will Launch the Best of Times in a Tale of Two Americas
Even the sickest dogs on The Street are reaping the benefits of this rally
In places like Mongolia or Myanmar, for example, you find today’s Dakota Territory. | <urn:uuid:08aecfd7-430f-4fd9-af16-d638fc56296b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dailyreckoning.com/from-employment-to-housing-reality-in-a-great-correction/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961271 | 2,169 | 1.695313 | 2 |
By Catherine Wagley
By Catherine Wagley
By Wendy Gilmartin
By Jennifer Swann
By Claire de Dobay Rifelj
By L.A. Weekly critics
By Catherine Wagley
By Zachary Pincus-Roth
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Larkin, a reclusive and fiercely unfashionable British poet whose work resonates deeply with readers, was referred to only a few times. The most frequently cited poets were W.B. Yeats and Auden. Two of Yeats’ poems were ubiquitous: ”The Second Coming“ (1921) a vision of horror that summed up much of the 20th century and already has a grip on this one, and ”Easter 1916“ (”All changed, changed utterly:A terrible beauty is born“). In the meantime, Auden‘s ”September 1, 1939,“ which was written in New York on the eve of World War II, popped up all over the Internet like an electronic letter in a bottle. Despite being more than 60 years old, the poem almost seemed to have been composed for the occasion, and its most famous line, ”We must love one another or die,“ became famous all over again.
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.
Other Auden poems made the rounds too. Most pertinent, perhaps, was a sinister little lyric from 1938, ”Gare du Midi,“ about a man who gets off a train ”clutching a little case“ and ”walks out briskly to infect a cityWhose terrible future may have just arrived.“ In retrospect, the poem reads like a prophecy of germ warfare, and may have been intended as such. Significantly, the person quoting it (in the Washington Post), was former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen.
It was inevitable that poetry would be bandied about after a tragedy of this size, if only because journalists and politicians need something solemn and pithy to cite. Expressing something important about life in a small number of extremely memorable words is, after all, the poet’s art. But by the time I heard a sentence written by Stephen Spender emerge (uncredited) from the mouth of Governor George Pataki of New York, I knew something noteworthy was going on. Why Spender, a now largely forgotten British writer whose heyday was in the 1930s? Why poets from England and Ireland rather than America? After all, Americans wrote some of the greatest poetry of the last century.
One possible answer lies in the extreme aestheticism of much modern American verse. As Auden‘s literary executor, Edward Mendelson, once told me, ”No one was ever made uncomfortable about their moral life after reading Wallace Stevens, but you can feel very uncomfortable after reading Auden.“ Then there’s the fact that 20th-century Americans, poets included, had the luxury of viewing history from a distance, or of entering it as saviors. National tragedy hasn‘t been our daily bread. Vietnam and the social upheavals of the 1960s temporarily dragged history into our living rooms, but since the 1980s its absence has been close to total. We fight a war, and one soldier breaks a leg: That’s about the extent of our casualty list. Before long, we start forgetting where or why the war was fought. It‘s no wonder most of our poets haven’t been preoccupied with history: There‘s been so little to go around. As a result, they’ve been free to cultivate the gardens inside their own heads. Many strange and beautiful plants have resulted, but grand statements about the world have been scarce.
Yet grand statements are what you want in a poem when terrorists have just eviscerated the World Trade Center along with thousands of its occupants. You don‘t want impressionistic daubs and creative-writing prettiness; you need a point of view. As Edward Rothstein wrote in The New York Times, ”This destruction seems to cry out for a transcendent ethical perspective.“ The literati would normally be uncomfortable with such an uncompromising sentiment, but for a moment they weren’t so sure. What will survive of us is love. We must love one another or die -- what are those if not transcendent ethical perspectives?
Admittedly, they are also somewhat vague. But what‘s striking about many of the lines people have been quoting is their precision, their attempt to nail down a specific universal truth. ”I and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return,“ Auden wrote. You don’t come across lines like that anymore in poems. For one thing, we don‘t believe in evil -- unless it’s our own, in which case we believe in it in spades -- and we‘ve abandoned the idea of ”the public“ in favor of multiple communities with special needs. Even the word ”schoolchildren,“ used as a blanket term, is enough to get the professionally sensitive tut-tutting. ”Are we talking about underprivileged schoolchildren? Disabled schoolchildren? From single-parent households?“ Etc. If few contemporary poets now bother to say something that feels universally true, this is one reason why: They’re afraid of being slowly tortured to death by a nationwide cadre of nitpickers.
Find everything you're looking for in your city
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Check out the hottest list of places and things to do around your city | <urn:uuid:5b82443c-d58b-4223-886c-d7d87781123f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.laweekly.com/2001-10-11/art-books/poetry-among-the-ruins/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945959 | 1,303 | 1.835938 | 2 |
The 13th Century was a turning point in making of arms and armors of the Middle Ages. Typically, armors dating prior to the 13th century were mainly composed of mail armor, or maille, made to counter the impact of the uniform sword blades of the early medieval period. By the mid-13th century however, the armies of Feudal Europe witnessed not only an increase in platted armor but consequently a change in blade geometry. This is an interesting example of the transitional arming swords used during the outset of the 13th century. Crowned with a “cocked-hat” pommel, originally found in Scandinavia, the sword hilt was generally mounted on a type X or type XII blade.
The “cocked-hat” pommel, classified by Petersen as Type Y, was used through the 11th and 12th centuries. By the 13th century the “coked-hat” pommel remained in use, but became more massive. Numerous examples are found throughout Europe. During his examinations of various swords of the middle ages, Oakeshott noted identical swords in various sources; from a crucifixion scene in a 13th century manuscript from Goslar, a sword found in Hungary with an identical pommel, another identical sword from Brunau, An example found in a German manuscript and a final example at the end of the 13th century on the grave-slab of Ulrich von Regensburg in Zurich.
1060 High Carbon Steel, Tempered to a Rockwell of 53
Fittings : Mild Steel
Blade Thickness: 1.34 mm
Total Length: 34"
Blade Length : 27"
Weight: 2 lbs 6 oz.
Please contact us for shipping rates to ship overseas. | <urn:uuid:18c42025-8e65-4aff-81e5-4ec01f55829d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://darksword-armory.com/products-page/medieval-swords/mid-13th-c-sword-1314/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947425 | 363 | 3.6875 | 4 |
Due to global economy downturn, those who seek job in US might not feel welcome. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Says that unemployment rate has increased to 8.1per cent according to their survey. So the immigration policies have become tight for the job seekers in US.
In 2010, H1B visa’s fee has been raised by passing bill for temporary workers from foreign countries. And also for L1 visa holders, employees in international companies.
“You start with the general issues of the visa situation and the very high unemployment rate, and you add the fact that there used to be many more entry-level jobs at financial institutions and big manufacturing companies. That has shut down. You’re not seeing job growth.
“It’s not as easy to find positions, and as a foreigner or immigrant, you are not at the front of the queue, so it’s going to be tougher for you.”
So Immigration restrictions remain a hurdle for the foreign job seekers and creation of a global, flexible workforce is considered as a priority in most of the business. As a result, companies are controlling expense associated with expatriate postings by changing the assignment structure and shortening their duration. Expatriate packages cost is very high and most of them involve costs associated with relocation, housing, incidentals and transport. According to Human resource expert local hire is less expensive than appointing an expatriate to a given job.
The traditional expatriate assignments last between one and five years but many companies have started short term training or project-based assignment which exists between three and twelve months. So that employees can get the opportunity to spend time at multinational’s headquarters learning and being indoctrinated in the corporate culture.
The highly valued skills according to Ms.Fitzgerlad, an international career coach who works with expatriates, are depending on the nature of role, variance analysis, and experience in financial statements, annual and strategic planning and forecasting.
To be successful in today’s world, all of us should think in a broader way in this global economy.
As of today there are so many options that are open for those who wish to work temporarily in the United States on a H1B extension. There are many work categories that include intra-company transfer visa (L-1 visa), B-1 visa, H-2B visa, H-3 visa, O-1 visa, O-2 visa, P-3 visa, and more. Apart from the above mentioned visas(temporary) you also have the option of a H1 B specialty occupation visa, that is issued by the US Consulate/Embassy that would allow you work temporarily in the US. The issuance of the H1 B extension visa is associated with the employer. This implies that you would require a sponsoring employer in order to apply for the visa.
Ideally the H1 B visa is ideally suited for:
- Professional who possess high degree of specialized knowledge like consultants, journalists, analysts related to research.
- Professional nurses who have entered the US for supervising nursing operations.
- Renowned fashion models.
- Employers who are required to bring in qualified professional for jobs that entail specialized skills.
Receiving an extension of stay on the H1 visa:
Initially the H1B extension was issued for a period of 3 years. It is now possible to extend the visa by another 3 years. A person with an H1B extension is permitted to extend beyond 6 years under special circumstances. Per the 21st Century Act of 2000, a H1 B visa holder can file for an incremental one-year extension annually after the completion of six years on H1B status. This visa can be extended beyond 6 years only if:
- You are a beneficiary of an employment based immigrant petition (I-140) or an application for Adjustment of Status.
- Your labor certification application is pending for more than 365 days.
Until a final decision is made on the H1 B extension of the non-immigrant’s green card, the applicants belonging to the above mentioned scenario can get an extension for 1 year at time.
For the visa status to be extended in increments of 3 years you
- must possess an employment based green card petition filed on your behalf in an either EB1, EB2 or EB3 categories.
- you are not eligible to file an Adjustment of Status application for the only reason because you are from a country for which the priority date is not current. This is usually the case with applicants who are from India or China.
The following documents are required to be submitted to the US State Department for the purpose of renewal/extension of your H1B work visa.
- A valid passport for the applicant and each of the family members.
- An original of the form I-94 that was issued to the applicant by the USCIS.
- USCIS Form I-797 which would include the information on the applicant’s present employer.
- The employer’s letter of support containing details of the applicant’s nature of work, position.
- A fully typed non-immigrant visa application form, OF-156 added with one official passport-size photograph for each applicant, regardless of the age.
- A non-refundable visa fee payable to the U.S. Department of State.
- A self-addressed postage-paid envelope for return of the documents.
Any foreign national who seeks to enter the United States must obtain a visa. The United States visas are classified into Immigrant and Non-immigrant visas. The immigrant visas are used by people who wish to travel to live permanently in US and non-immigrant visas are used by people who travel to US on a temporary basis for business or pleasure.
People who wish to enter United States for employment purpose must obtain a US working visa in order to be eligible to work in the United States. United States offers working visas such as H1B and H2B visas . The H1B working visa falls under the non-immigrant visa category. This visa allows a foreign national to be sponsored by a US Company for a period of six years and may lead to sponsor for Green Card. This H1B visa is mainly designed to be used for people who come under the Specialty Occupations category.
People who seek to enter United States using the H1B visa must be offered a job in the United States and must be sponsored by the employer of that company/organization. Also it is the duty of the US sponsor or the employer to prove that the position requires a skilled person from a specialty occupation and the intended employee has the required skills. The Specialty Occupations require a high degree of specialized knowledge (usually this requirement can be met by having a 3 year degree or 3 years’ equivalent post-graduate experience), such as mathematics, architecture, engineering, and other occupations
List of documents needed for H1B visa
There are certain eligibility requirements to be met by both the US employer and the applicant when applying for the H1B visa. The U.S. employer must agree to pay the H-1B employee at least the prevailing wage earned by similarly employed workers in the area of employment and must make other attestations as required by the Department of Labor. The applicant must hold a bachelor’s degree, possess specialized skill, and must speak and read English.
The applicant must ensure he/she provides the required supporting documents to be eligible for H1B visa. Below listed is the basic documents that the applicant must provide.
- A letter from the Current Employer
- Offer letter form the company in United States
- Resume of the applicant
- Sample company projects documents and some documents describing what the company does
- Approval Notice (form I 797) of the original petition
- Employment Verification letter
- Bank Statements
- Degree Certificates
After the application for H1B visa has been submitted by the US employer, USCIS will review the application for completeness with inclusion of the supporting documents. If USCIS finds the application is incomplete or if any required document is not submitted, the application might be rejected. On approval of the application, USCIS will send an approval notice to the US employer. If the petition visa is approved, an Approval Notice will be sent. Using the Approval Notice, the applicant may obtain the H1B visa from the US Consulate. If the application is denied, USCIS will notify applicant in writing the reason for rejection.
Every foreign national who wishes to enter United States must obtain a visa. The United States visas are classified into Immigrant and Non-immigrant visas. Immigrant visas are used by people who wish to travel to live permanently in US. Non-immigrant visas are issued for people who wish to travel to US on a temporary basis for business or pleasure.
People who seek to enter United States based on employment must obtain a working visa in order to be eligible to work in the United States. There are many working visas available and one such visa is H1B visa. The H1B visa is a non-immigrant visa. This visa allows a foreign national to be sponsored by a US Company for a period of six years and may lead to sponsor for Green Card.
The H1B visa allows business professionals to work in the United States for a specific amount of time. The H1 visa is allowed to US employers to sponsor foreign employees to work in their concern or institution when a US Citizen or a permanent resident is not available for that occupation.
In order to be eligible for the H1 visa, both the US employer and the foreign employee must satisfy the eligibility requirements.
- The United States job offer must be in a Specialty Occupation. Specialty Occupations require a high degree of specialized knowledge (usually this requirement can be met by having a 3 year degree or 3 years’ equivalent post-graduate experience) .such as mathematics, architecture, engineering, and other occupations.
- During the time of job offer, no U.S. citizen or permanent resident must be available for the job.
- The petition for H1 visa must be submitted by the US company and not by the employee.
- The U.S. employer must agree to pay the H-1B employee at least the prevailing wage earned by similarly employed workers in the area of employment and must make other attestations as required by the Department of Labor.
In addition to the above mentioned requirements the foreign employee must,
- have a bachelor’s degree. If the applicant has a foreign degree, then that degree must be determined to be equivalent to that of a U.S. bachelor’s degree. If applicants do not hold a Bachelor’s degree, they may claim to be Graduate Equivalent if only they posses 12 years or more work experience in the same occupation.
- possess specialized skill, and
- must speak and read English
Once the application for H1 visa has been submitted to USCIS by the US employer, it will be reviewed for completeness. The supporting documents will be checked along with the application. If all the requirements are met, USCIS will send an approval notice to the US employer. If the petition for H1 visa is approved, an Approval Notice will be sent . Using the Approval Notice, the applicant may obtain the H1 visa from the US Consulate. If the application is denied, the USCIS will notify in writing the reason for rejection. | <urn:uuid:a0a64073-8e4f-4004-96db-451b056d87dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://immigrationissues.wordpress.com/tag/h1b-visa/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944348 | 2,370 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Chapter 3: The Headphone
Once you have yourself a good quality source and some high quality music, you can start to look into headphone upgrade.
First, set a budget. As audiophiles' headphones go, they can be very expensive. You want to make sure you are getting a headphone that well matches your source. You don't want something too expensive but you won't want to cut your budget too low either. For the current earphones' (earbud and IEM) market, $50 to $100 will give you a good start, $100 to $200 will give you a very good selection. Anything beyond $200 is targeted at audiophiles (= mad people that will do anything for sound quality). If you are in a tight budget, there are still some good option at the sub$50 market, but you will have to be extra hardworking to find them. Most of them are hidden pearl that you can only find in forum discussion, not big review site.
Second, make sure you know where/how the headphone will be used. As portable rig goes, you don't want earbud when you are in library, nor will you want IEM when you need to be in constant communication. Find out whether you can stand earbud or IEM before you purchased. There is no point to buy a headphone when you can't even used it more than 5 minutes.
Third, look for the best sound quality headphone that fit your taste. Reviews often only tell what the reviewer believes to have good sound quality. What most don't tell is that each reviewer has a unique taste of music, and most will not match yours. You want to be sure that you are getting something that match your taste, even when it is not the best sounding you can afford (as you might not enjoy it).
Chapter 4: The Headphone Amp
I have written an article ('To amp, or not to amp') a while back to put some points into the craziness in chasing amp, do read it. People often read too much into how a little amping can put them in the quick path to audio heaven, well that is simply not true. Amp is really for more advanced user who know what they are looking for to complete their setup. If you can barely understand the reason for amping, the meaning of LOD, line-level signal, or whether your current setup needs amping or not, you should NOT even consider buying an amp. The point is, there are easier way to get better SQ then getting an amp. Amping is for user who understand the limitation of their setup and willing to go the extra miles to squeeze out the last few % in their system.
Headphone amp is just an element for fine tuning a portable rig, not a magic cure for sound quality.
Chapter 5: The Other Factors
I guess the first 'other' factors that comes into mind is cable. If amping is a relatively small element for fine tuning, cable will be the one you should ignore most of the time. I am not saying cable has no effect on sound, but at the level of portable rig, a few inches of cable, may it be silver or gold, really is nothing compare to the amount of copper in the wire and PCB circuit. It will be like placing racing-quality spark plug into a 30yrs-old car and hope it can compete in WRC racing, that is just too much of a wishful thinking.
One of another factor will be the eartips, or perhaps how to achieve an optimum seal. Different eartips (with different materials) can change the sound just enough to make a difference. So the basic idea is, don't stick to just the stock eartips, try as many aftermarket eartips as you can find.
As my closing comment, I want to point out that a portable setup is the rig you want to carry around. Thus it must be a solid solution that is practical to use. You will be foolish to assume the best sounding system will be the most practical - it is often not. Getting the best out of what you can and willing to carry is what tuning / upgrade is all about. Identifying the weakest link and finding a way to solve the most important issue should always be your first priority when it comes to determine the path of upgrading. Don't just buy into the belief that you can get a magic cure that will fix everything, cause there is none of such thing! | <urn:uuid:56be8b94-9279-4182-ab4c-725eba904390> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.inearmatters.net/2009/02/which-way-up-part-2.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966422 | 918 | 1.53125 | 2 |
The Daily Star
---- — Step Back in Time features news items from The Daily Star 25 and 50 years ago.
25 years ago
Nov. 9, 1987
During his career, Oneonta surgeon Dr. Byron Sheesley has practiced medicine in the Gaza Strip under war-time conditions, and dealt with patients in Kenya who sold their medicine because they didn’t understand what it did.
He now plans to retire on Dec. 31 after 31 years of medical practice.
Sheesley’s interest in medical missionary work dates back to his early years as a surgeon. After graduating from medical school at the University of Buffalo, and serving a three-year residency, the Ohio-native worked for two years at a mission hospital in Puerto Rico.
“There’s a tremendous amount of satisfaction in doing these things for people who will never be able to repay you,” he said.
Sheesley, a slight, soft-spoken man, became interested in missionary work because of his faith in Christianity. It was through the church that he learned of the need, he said.
In 1958, he left Puerto Rico for a position at the Community Hospital in Stamford where he worked both in surgery and in general medicine. He was appointed to the staff of Fox Hospital in 1964 as a general surgeon.
Once in Oneonta he formed a partnership with Dr. Virgil Polley, who was also interested in medical missionary work. Oneonta Surgical Associates has since grown to six surgeons.
Sheesley said one of the purposes of the partnership was that it would allow each doctor to serve in a missionary hospital two months out of the year.
50 years ago
Nov. 9, 1962
An historic first in Oneonta came about this week with the issuance of uniforms to postal window clerks for the first time.
Now the smiling man at the window who dispenses stamps, envelopes, money orders and the like will greet his customers in a colorful jacket of Pekin Blue … a maroon bow or four-in-hand tie (optional) and a sparkling white broadcloth shirt.
The new uniform, just made official by the postal department, is for window clerks only and only for those window clerks who work at least four hours regularly per day.
Other clerks, even though they may work more than 20 hours a week, officials said, cannot at this date wear the uniforms which are furnished by the postal department.
However, in the near future, such regulations are expected to be liberalized and the day may soon be at hand when every clerk is tastefully attired in blue, maroon and white.
Comments recorded by clerks in Oneonta wearing the new garb were all happily favorable. Cries of “Hey! That looks nice …” and “Say, you look pretty sharp there, boy” were common according to post office spokesmen. | <urn:uuid:a91d5571-4dea-4ddf-9cd5-27e9dd568cf2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thedailystar.com/stepbackintime/x121544016/Step-Back-in-Time-Nov-9-2012/print | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977281 | 596 | 1.875 | 2 |
If your mind and body have gone into hibernation this winter, it doesn't take too much effort to get healthy and active again.
From having your vitamin D levels checked, to being aware of 'grazing' habits, to finding a physical activity you enjoy – experts from Jean Hailes for Women's Health have come up with some winter survival tips to keep you healthy during the colder months.
"For a lot of people, winter can be a time of cold, dark, rainy days, of illness, and of lowered mood. There are, however, some strategies to help reduce these effects of winter," says Professor Jane Fisher, Jean Hailes director of research.
"For example, look after yourself with healthy meals such as warming soups and hearty casseroles packed with vitamin-rich vegetables and iron-boosting meat.
"If you are not able to get out in the winter sunshine, perhaps a vitamin D supplement might be worthwhile in the colder months. Vitamin D is important for maintaining bone health, as well as reducing the likelihood of symptoms such as lowered mood and fatigue when vitamin D levels are too low."
Take the opportunity during winter to catch up on any routine screening tests, too, such as mammograms or Pap smears.
Jean Hailes endocrinologist, Dr Sonia Davison, recommends finding a form of exercise that you enjoy during winter. Exercise has been shown to improve mood by increasing 'feel good' chemicals – endorphins – in the body.
"Even though it's cold and dark, exercise will help you look and feel good. Find something fun such as dancing, zumba or walking the dog and mix it up so you don't get bored. Get a friend involved as this will help you stay committed," says Dr Davison.
Avoiding too much comfort food is just as important as avoiding too much time on the couch. Winter is the time when it is easy to fall into the trap of indulging in heavy, warming, calorie-rich foods that often have a nostalgic appeal – such as lasagne, fried foods, pies and chocolate treats. Grazing is another winter pitfall, says Jean Hailes dietitian Terrill Bruere.
"If you are curling up in front of the TV and are looking for comfort and warmth, try a cup of tea or chai with a couple of plain biscuits," she says.
"Want the taste of chocolate? Look for a low-fat hot chocolate mix or have a small piece of dark chocolate. The main thing is not to graze without being aware of what you are eating.
"Think seasonal, too. Mandarins, oranges and lemons are lovely at this time of year and full of vitamin C. Root veggies like beetroot, parsnip and pumpkin are in season and make great soup ingredients or simply roast them with a dash of oil."
If you like a warm dessert to take away the winter chill, try stewed fruits or crumbles with low fat custard or yoghurt. But don't eat dessert straight after dinner when you aren't really hungry - wait until suppertime or afternoon tea the next day.
"Monitor your weight every now and then and if it is creeping up keep a diary of what you are eating and why for a week," says Bruere.
"Then fine tune your food intake to prevent the kilo creep." | <urn:uuid:a351b6de-1530-41c6-95c1-33ec3e9d1197> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.getnetworking.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4747:top-tips-to-get-you-through-winter&catid=35:women&Itemid=73 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964312 | 698 | 2.90625 | 3 |
Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1916.
Tarkington was a widely read and prolific multiple Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and dramatist.
Here Tarkington satirizes first love.
"Every man and woman over fifty ought to read Seventeen. It is not only a skillful analysis of adolescent love, it is, with all its side-splitting mirth, a tragedy. No mature person who reads this novel will ever seriously regret his lost youth or wish he were young again...." -- William Lyon Phelps, The Advance of the English Novel | <urn:uuid:087ae132-a0bc-40d4-8114-079a33742904> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.booksinmyphone.com/?author=Booth%20Tarkington&src=jach01 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951787 | 115 | 1.75 | 2 |
JURIST Special Guest Columnist Jonathan Hafetz, of Seton Hall Law School says that the failure to close Guantanamo Bay is an unwelcome step in justifying arbitrary detention and torture, and wonders how far indefinite detention and military commissions will sweep....
wo days after his inauguration, President Obama announced that he would close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year. Obama's pledge, along with his accompanying executive orders banning torture and secret detention, heralded a return to the rule of law.
More than two years later, Obama's plan to close Guantanamo is in shambles. While Obama has repatriated 67 Guantanamo prisoners, 172 remain. Political opposition and legal hurdles now complicate further resettlement efforts. Although the Obama administration clings to his goal of shutting the prison, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has acknowledged the prospects for closure are very, very low," and the Pentagon is pressing ahead with new military commissions at the base. Last week, the administration formally abandoned its plan to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) and four other alleged 9/11 plotters in federal court, stating that they would be prosecuted in military commissions (as the Bush administration had originally planned).
The irony is that the United States is much further from closing Guantanamo now than it was after Obama's post-inaugural pledge.
Congress deserves much of the blame. On top of previous legislation obstructing detainee resettlement, Congress has now barred the use of military funds to bring detainees to trial in the United States. This measure not only ensured the demise of the administration's plan to prosecute KSM in federal court. It also signaled the degree to which a vital tool in fighting terrorism--criminal trials--could be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. As Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged in announcing the KSM-reversal, both America's security and values are best served by federal prosecutions of suspected terrorists.
Obama, however, bears responsibility as well. The administration did not lay the necessary political groundwork for the federal prosecution of KSM and his co-defendants, failing, for example, to enlist the key powerbrokers in New York, where the trial was to have taken place.
More generally, the president never capitalized on his post-election momentum to operationalize his promise to close Guantanamo. Instead, he created a multi-agency task force to conduct a year-long study of detainee cases. Without effective leadership from the White House, a fierce backlash filled the political vacuum. Before long, the tide had turned, and what had once been a political challenge became a political impossibility.
The Obama administration's handling of Chinese Uighur detainees is emblematic of this larger failure. In 2008, a federal judge ordered the release of seventeen Uighur detainees after the government conceded that they presented no threat to the U.S. Because the Uighurs could not be returned to China (where, as dissidents, they faced imprisonment and possible torture), the only remedy was release in the United States, at least until another home could be found.
Administration lawyers developed a plan to settle several Uighurs in northern Virginia. Resettlement would have helped demonstrate to the public that Guantanamo detainees were not all "the worst of the worst," as Bush administration officials had falsely branded them. More importantly, it would have helped persuade other countries to accept more detainees by showing America was doing its fair share to shut down the prison. As Jane Mayer has detailed in the New Yorker, Obama killed the plan after word leaked and Republicans declared their opposition to bringing any detainees to the U.S.
Obama's failure to close Guantanamo though is more than a matter of political missteps. It is also a consequence of his acceptance of the larger detention system that Guantanamo embodies.
In his May 2009 speech at the National Archives, Obama accepted several key premises of the Guantanamo system even as he repeated his pledge to close the prison itself. To be sure, the president expressed a preference for prosecuting suspected terrorists in the regular court system. But he also accepted that some detainees could be held indefinitely without trial while others could be charged in military commissions, a second-class justice system that lacks the constitutional safeguards and legitimacy of the federal courts. Obama's recent executive order creating a system of periodic review for prisoners slated for indefinite detention institutionalizes this policy.
Obama, in short, sought only to reform Guantanamo not to end it. Thus, rather than scrapping military commissions, the president backed legislation that propped up the commissions by making some improvements.
The result is not simply "Guantanamo lite," but something more corrosive. The failure to close Guantanamo has helped justify the policies of arbitrary detention and torture that spurred its creation in the first place. Further, it has vindicated the politics of fear. "If Guantanamo is so difficult to close," Americans may wonder, "perhaps it should remain open."
Guantanamo was once seen as morally and legally unacceptable, and closure commanded strong bipartisan support. But today Guantanamo appears a necessary evil. Better that Obama had never promised to close Guantanamo than to promise and to fail.
The question no longer is "Will Guantanamo close?" (It won't, at least not anytime in the foreseeable future). Rather, it is what form Guantanamo will take, and how broadly its core features of indefinite detention and military commissions will sweep.
Jonathan Hafetz is a professor at Seton Hall Law School. He has litigated leading post-9/11 detainee cases and is the author of a new book, "Habeas Corpus after 9/11: Confronting America's New Global Detention System" (NYU Press).
Suggested Citation Jonathan Hafetz, Failing to Close Guantanamo, JURIST - Forum, Apr. 14, 2011, http://jurist.org/forum/2011/04/failing-to-close-guantanamo.php | <urn:uuid:5d4b1c4a-3910-489a-b710-bf1b29f6e893> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jurist.org/forum/2011/04/failing-to-close-guantanamo.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966337 | 1,191 | 2.046875 | 2 |
Technology Will Set Health Reform Free
The big story back then was of electronic health records, or EHRs, which would transform care by giving doctors data on their patients. I naively assumed this would benefit mainstream tech companies, like Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) , which had the necessary technology. They assumed as much, too.
We were wrong. Both those companies exited the market with their financial tails between their legs.
The 2009 Recovery Act included $19.2 billion in stimulus for EHRs, and politically-connected CEOs like Glen Tullman of Allscripts (MDRX) assumed they would win the money by selling software as a service, or SaaS, requiring less upfront cost to doctors and clinics, along with faster upgrades done centrally.
The argument made sense, but Tullman, too, was wrong. Since December, he has also been out as CEO, as Forbes reported. Shares in Allscripts now sell for little more than they did when health reform was first proposed.
Instead the gains have gone to incumbent medical technology firms like Cerner (CERN) , which has quadrupled in value under this president, and McKesson (MCK) , which has more than doubled while adding a handsome dividend. The new Allscripts CEO is a former Cerner executive.
More importantly, medical care inflation still outstrips that in the general economy, according to MetricMash. Overall prices from October 2009 through October 2012 were up 7%, medical costs were up 10.5%.
Khosla confronted doctors directly in September, as Wired reported, saying "healthcare is like witchcraft and just based on tradition," rather than driven by data. He said 80% of what doctors do could be done better by computers. | <urn:uuid:cfc777b1-ad22-4195-aa36-ea99257d37b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://business-news.thestreet.com/alamogordo-news/story/technology-will-set-health-reform-free/11843456 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988122 | 364 | 1.679688 | 2 |
In the 1990s I wrote a series of articles and columns that appeared in my friend Bob Bryant's excellent magazine, Recumbent Cyclist News. There have always been some recumbent enthusiasts who believe that recumbents should and ultimately will be the dominant form of bicycle. While I don't think that will ever be the case, that "what if?" discussion was the seed of this story.
by Kent Peterson
When you work for the world's top selling bicycle magazine, dealing with wackos is just part of the job. Usually Bob is the guy stuck talking to the nut-cases but this week he'd taken the RCN jet to Bermuda with the models for the annual "Women of Recumbency" photo shoot. It was up to me, Nicole and Billy the intern to get the current issue out the door. Nicole was off getting vital office supplies while Billy and I were wrestling with a tricky issue of layout, so we didn't notice the stranger until he cleared his throat.
"Billy you pinhead!" I said, "you've got this picture of the carbon Bachetta backwards. Look, the drive train is supposed to be on the right side!"
"Gee boss," Billy sniveled, "you sure are cranky before you've had your coffee. I hope Nicole gets back with those lattes soon."
Billy and I turned and noticed the stranger for the first time. His face looked normal enough, but his clothing was unusual. His shirt and shorts seemed to be made of some kind of thin stretchy material that clung tightly to his skin. The shirt was garishly colored and it had pockets in the back while his black shorts appeared to have some kind of diaper-like pad built into the seat. Frankly, the total look of the outfit was ridiculous but over the years I've learned that it really is best not to judge a book by its cover. I managed to keep a straight face and shot Billy a look that made it clear to him that he'd best do the same.
"May I help you?" I asked.
"Yes, yes I think you can. Dr. Bryant, I presume?"
"No," I replied, "Dr. Bob is out of town. I'm Mr. Peterson and this is my associate Billy. What can we do for you?"
"Actually," the stranger began, "it's not so much what you can do for me, it's what I can do for you. You see, I've got a bicycle design I think you'll find very interesting..."
"Hold it right there Mr., uh-mm what did you say your name was?"
"Oh, where are my manners?" The stranger fussed. "The name's Backer. D.F. Backer."
"Well, Mr. Backer, no offense but we're kind of busy here. Maybe you could call back next week and make an appointment." This was pretty much the standard brush-off we've developed over the years. It seems like every George, Tim or Gardner thinks he's the next great bicycle designer and sooner or later they all come to let us in on the ground floor of their magnificent idea. And they pretty much all expect Bob to fork over some cash to help turn a silly impractical sketch into an even more improbable reality and they never believe us when we tell them that it just doesn't work that way.
But Mr. Backer wasn't so easily dismissed. "But I've come such a long way. Just give me five minutes."
"Well," I wavered...
"Great!" Backer beamed. "Come outside and I'll show you my bike!"
I looked over at Billy and shrugged my shoulders. "OK Backer," I grumbled, "you've got five minutes." Billy and I followed the man with the silly clothes out to the RCN parking lot.
I have to give Backer points for originality; his bike was like nothing I'd ever seen before. The bike had two large wheels and an absurdly short wheelbase. Instead of having a boom out front, the crank was located a few centimeters in front of the rear wheel. The frame stretched upward for no apparent reason and I didn't see anything that even remotely resembled a seat. A small wedge of plastic topped a metal tube protruding from the top of the frame, but I couldn't conceive of anyone voluntarily perching on that tiny platform. The front of the machine sprouted a wildly curving collection of metal tubes that looked like the remains of a particularly messy accident involving the trombone section of an unfortunate marching band. I could only assume that this was the steering mechanism of the unusual contraption that Backer insisted on calling a bicycle.
Billy and I stared slack-jawed at the machine and it took me about thirty seconds before I could even formulate my first question: "How the heck do you ride that?"
"It's easy!" Backer exclaimed as he threw a leg over the machine and began riding it in wide circles in the parking lot. Despite the machine's bizarre configuration, Backer rode it with apparent ease and the wide grin never left his face as he answered the questions that now tumbled from my lips.
"Isn't it uncomfortable?"
"Not really." Backer explained. "My weight is supported not only by the saddle, but also by my hands and feet. It might feel strange at first, but once you get used to it, it's fine."
I wasn't convinced. "I don't think I'll ever be comfortable having a wedge of plastic shoved up my butt." I scowled but Backer only laughed.
"Don't knock it until you've tried it. Actually, I believe this kind of bike will appeal to the folks who like to 'Think Different.' I'm going to market them here under the brand name 'WedgeE'."
"But it doesn't have any suspension," I countered. "It's got to have a really harsh ride on rough roads."
"That's not really a problem," Backer replied as he drove the machine straight for a set of speed bumps. Just before he hit the bumps he stopped turning the cranks, bent his elbows and lifted his butt off the saddle. The bike bucked as it hit the bumps but Backer hovered an inch or so above the saddle with that annoying grin still plastered on his face.
"Whoa, that was cool!" Billy exclaimed. Even I have to admit to being somewhat impressed.
I wasn't completely sold on this device, however. "Look here Backer, I'll grant that your machine has some interesting features, but you've got to admit that it's an aerodynamic disaster."
"Well," Backer said "I really can't argue with you on that point. But it's not as bad as you think. If I grab the bars up here and stretch my back out flat, I cut through the wind better." At this point Backer grabbed the part of the handlebars that looked like the slide section of a trombone. Even though he was still grinning, he really didn't look comfortable.
"Come on Backer, you don't expect me to believe people will ride around all stretched out like that!"
"Actually," Backer replied, "I know they will. I've seen hundreds of riders on bikes just like this one..."
"OK, OK." I'd had enough. "Look here Backer, I've given you your five minutes and I'll even grant you that your machine has some interesting features but you don't expect me to believe that there are other bikes like this out there. If there were bikes like this anywhere in the world, I think I would have heard of them by now."
"Oh no, " Backer said, "you wouldn't have heard of these because they don't exist in your world... yet. You see, I'm really not from around here."
I was pretty sure by now that Backer was an escaped mental patient, but that didn't explain where he'd gotten his strange contraption. While I was pondering this, he continued rambling on. "No doubt you're familiar with the quantum worlds hypothesis?"
"Yeah," I grunted. "SciFi stuff. It's the theory that different events actually spawn of different realities. So there's actually some world out there in some dimension where Hitler won World War Two. Stuff like that, right?"
"Exactly!" Backer beamed. "But trust me, that Hitler world isn't very conducive to the interests of an inter-dimensional entrepreneur such as myself. However I've found a very interesting opportunity between your world and a place called Earth. Your worlds are so very close, they really only differ in a few bits of technology."
"And you come from this place, Earth?"
"Oh heavens no!" Backer laughed. "Their world is even more primitive than yours. Neither of you have invented the mechanisms of inter-dimensional travel yet. I'm merely a businessman. I make my living by exploiting economic opportunities I perceive existing between similar worlds."
"But couldn't you make a lot more money selling this inter-dimensional technology to these various worlds?" Of course I wasn't buying any of this for a second but even though Backer was an obvious wacko, he was at least an interesting wacko.
"Where I come from they have pretty strict rules against that. Simple one-for-one technology swaps between parallel worlds are easy but you wouldn't believe the paperwork involved in trying to get anything really complicated through to you people."
"But doesn't the fact of your telling me all this violate some kind of Prime Directive?"
Backer laughed again. "Oh really, you must watch too much TV! Prime Directive, that's rich. It's more like a really complicated tax-code. We can tweak around the edges but it's really quite hard to change the world in any significant way."
"Tell me about it!" Billy injected sarcastically.
I shot Billy another one of my "put-a-sock-in-it" looks and then said to Backer, "OK, so your scheme is that you'll make money selling these, uh-mm what did you call them..."
"WedgeEs" Backer and Billy both said simultaneously.
"Yes, WedgeEs. You think you'll make money selling them here?"
"Yes, I do," said Backer earnestly.
"Well, I've got to tell you Backer, I don't see it. It's a fundamentally flawed design and around here superior products win out. Billy can tell you a lot about that. Billy, why don't you tell Mr. Backer about how you dropped out of college and tried to make a computer system to compete with what Jobs and Wozniak were doing?"
"Ah Boss..." Billy begin whining but now it Backers turn to look dumbfounded.
He looked closely at Billy and muttered quietly "well I'll be damned..." His bewildered look quickly turned to one of resolve. "Mr Gates," he said, addressing Billy formally, "would you like to go into the WedgeE business?"
"What would it pay?" Billy queried cautiously while I added "Look here Backer, you can't just waltz in here and start hiring away the RCN staff!"
"I'll double whatever Dr. Bob is paying you for starters," Backer said briskly. Billy and I both looked at him like he was crazy but I could tell Billy was intrigued.
"I'll want to see some money up front and I want my lawyers to work up the contracts," Billy spoke quietly, with an intense
resolve I'd never seen in him before.
Backer laughed. "Of course," he said, "I'd expect nothing less."
I, on the other hand, didn't know what the heck was going on, much less what to expect. I didn't even know if Billy really had a lawyer.
Backer and Billy exchanged business cards and then Backer rolled away on his crazy contraption.
When Nicole came back with the lattes, Billy told both of us he'd decided to quit the magazine.
"I'm going to miss you," he said pointedly to Nicole.
I got the impression he wasn't going to miss me at all.
"C'mon, Billy," I cajoled, "you've got to at least help us get this issue done."
"You and Nic can get it done, I've got a business to build."
And with that he walked out the door.
I recounted the story of D.F. Backer and the strange bicycle to Nicole.
"Wow," she said, "do you think he'll really be successful selling those things?"
"Not in this world, Miss Kidman. Not in this world." | <urn:uuid:120bad34-bfb8-48fb-b524-a37190102fcc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kentsbike.blogspot.com/2007/03/wedgee.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985864 | 2,678 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Texas: State to Cover City STD Tracking
July 17, 2009
A Department of State Health Services official confirmed on July 10 that Texas will pay to continue the work of two STD prevention specialists whose jobs had been targeted for elimination by Lubbock city staff. While the two positions themselves may still be cut, the work of the STD investigators will be picked up by four health staffers already working in 35 counties regionally. "It's an increase in our workload," said Bob Martinez, communicable-diseases manager for DSHS Region 1, adding, "If the city doesn't do it, we will." If Lubbock City Council decides to stop supporting the Health Department's STD clinic, the state will pay for that as well, Martinez said. It will not, however, pay for two administrators and two health educators who work with school children and the community. The local health department faces the loss of $946,000 under the budget proposed by City Manager Lee Ann Dumbauld.
07.11.2009; Sarah Nightingale
This article was provided by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is a part of the publication CDC HIV/Hepatitis/STD/TB Prevention News Update. Visit the CDC's website to find out more about their activities, publications and services. | <urn:uuid:80caa44b-9f22-44af-9852-ebf8770bb6e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thebody.com/content/art52766.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960224 | 268 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro has unveiled his latest creation, and it's a far cry from the ultra-lifelike robot clones he has produced in the past. Meet Telenoid R1, designed to be a "minimalistic human." Or a nightmare baby. Take your pick.
Telenoid is a child-sized telepresence robot through which users can interact with others from a distance. Created in collaboration with Osaka University and Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Telenoid is a tool for investigating "the essential elements for representing and transferring humanlike presence," according to Ishiguro and his team.
As seen in the video below, Telenoid users can interact with people at a distance through a laptop. The control system tracks the user's face and head motion and captures his or her voice. The motions and voice are relayed to Telenoid, which expresses them while interacting.
The most striking feature of the robot is its design, which packs a high creep factor. It's meant to appear neither male nor female, young nor old. It has an abbreviated torso and arms, but can wiggle around to a limited extent while on its stand.
Compared with Ishiguro's Geminoid F and Geminoid telepresence robots, Telenoid has far fewer actuators--only nine DC actuators instead of dozens of pneumatic actuators--meaning it will cost much less to manufacture.
Osaka software firm Eager plans to start distributing Telenoid later this year. A research version will be priced around $35,000 and a commercial version about $8,000, according to IEEE Spectrum. … Read more | <urn:uuid:359a1857-3228-47ab-a524-b1ddf8ebb1d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.cnet.com/8300-5_3-0.html?keyword=Geminoid | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950173 | 345 | 2.5 | 2 |