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It is a warning Quebec anglos have been hearing for the past 40 years – the French language is in danger, Quebec’s identity is threatened.
That perceived threat has led to the creation of Quebec’s language charter and four decades of amendments and protests as language activists mobilized against what they have perennially described as the sea of English that surround them.
But a survey published this weekend suggests that once you stick your toe in that sea, so to speak, the waves aren’t anywhere near as frightening as you thought they’d be.
The poll, conducted for the Association of Canadian Studies, finds that the more time francophones spend with their anglophone neighbours, the less they worry about losing their first language.
That result seems to contradict the idea that francophones living in urban areas like Montreal are concerned about the increasing use of English in their midst.
Among the respondents who had frequent contact with anglophones, about 37 per cent said they were somewhat or very concerned about losing their French. As contact with English decreased, however, the number rose until it reached 60 per cent among francophones with who “never” encounter English speakers in their daily lives.
Is it possible that more you get to know anglophones, and their television shows, the less scary they become?
We asked the question to Jack Jedwab, director of the Association for Canadian Studies. | <urn:uuid:19897b8b-5223-4cda-b489-4d68916c5c74> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.montrealgazette.com/2012/12/10/english-a-threat-to-quebec-it-seems-ya-rien-la/?postpost=v2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978846 | 294 | 2.34375 | 2 |
Vermont Law School is one of only two universities in the country that continue to bar military recruiters from its campus because the U.S. armed forces will not hire openly gay recruits . . . a violation of the school's non-discrimination policy. Following a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that found schools must allow recruiters on campus or, if they decide not to out of protest, lose all federal funding, most colleges and universities relented, noting that a freeze on federal money would cripple many of their academic endeavors.
But Vermont, along with William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, continues to deny recruiters access to students, refusing to back down from its policy of only allowing employers who include sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies to visit the campus.
As the Times reports, that has meant a significant cut in dollars received from the government.
As a result, the school is denied some federal research money — $300,000 to $500,000 a year by one outside analyst’s estimate.
“Every once in a while an issue comes to a community and, despite a cost, it comes to the conclusion that it has to stand up for its principles,” said Jeff Shields, president and dean of the law school. “It has to do with speaking truth to power, and it’s one of those roles that those of us lucky enough to be trained as lawyers hopefully take from time to time.”
And the Pentagon is not backing down.
“If the Department of Defense finds a school is doing this, it notifies other federal agencies and funding gets cut off,” said Lt. Col. Les Melnyk, a department spokesman.
The result is a loss in important educational funding for schools, and, because of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," a loss of significant talent to the armed forces.
The military should have access to the best and brightest students on campuses across the country, but Congress should understand that the "best and brightest" includes LGBT students, too. They should not be denied the opportunity of a military career, if they choose one, simply because they are lesbian or gay. And colleges should not be denied important federal funding because they stand on principle that non-discrimination is a 'must.'
The easiest way to solve the entire dilemma is for Congress to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The military, then, will be in compliance with non-discrimination policies, and universities like Vermont Law School won't have to risk a half-million dollars in funding because they want to do the right thing. | <urn:uuid:e7902b62-16d8-4e73-89c3-4ec54bb2236f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.pflag.org/2008/06/price-of-principles.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96546 | 536 | 1.796875 | 2 |
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The Archaeology and History of the Native Georgia Tribes (Native Peoples, Cultures, and Places of the Southeastern United States)
The story of Georgia s Indians from elephant hunts to the European invasion.
Spanning 12,000 years, this scientifically accurate and very readable book guides readers through the prehistoric and historic archaeological evidence left by Georgia s native peoples. It is the only comprehensive, up-to-date, and text-based overview of its kind in print. Drawing on an extensive body of archaeological and historical data, White traces Native American cultural development and accomplishment over the millennia preceding the establishment of Georgia as a colony and state. Each chapter opens with a vivid fictional vignette transporting the reader to a past culture and setting the scene for the narrative that follows. From hunting giant buffalo and elephants to attempts in the 1700s and 1800s to maintain tribal integrity in the face of European and Euro-American violence and threats, White takes the reader on an archaeologically based tour of the land that today is Georgia.
Evidence from selected archaeological sites and projects is woven into the narrative, and insets supplement the main text to highlight informative passages from archaeological reports and historical documents. A generous number of photographs, maps, and illustrations aid the reader in identifying artifacts and testify to the artistic abilities of these indigenous peoples of Georgia.
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regarding ISBN / ISBN-10 / ISBN10, ISBN-13 / ISBN13, EAN / EAN-13, and Amazon | <urn:uuid:5a937af7-efc2-4ffb-9837-475a7d82ed0e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alldiscountbooks.net/_9780813025766_i_.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.909361 | 738 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Many Year Six classes put on a performance at the end of the year to mark the end of their time at their primary school. Although the end of the academic year is still a few months away, here are details of a new musical for those teachers who want to plan ahead!
‘Fame Idle is the story of three kids who are confused why everyone around them seem obsessed by celebrity culture and they are not. It’s a musical comedy with a moral message… “Fame ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.” It has a modern score and a witty script that follows Bobby, P.J. and Smudge as they discover what friendship means when faced with a chance of fame – but at what cost?’
Here is a video which highlights some photos and audio from the production:
Many schools have already put on their own performances of the musical and received extremely positive feedback. To find out more for yourself, visit www.fame-idle.co.uk. | <urn:uuid:9ee8a8dc-3544-49ad-9cb0-47f555890418> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.teachingnews.co.uk/2010/03/fame-idle-year-6-production/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969591 | 212 | 1.59375 | 2 |
jfs can be used for booting if and only if its grub were written in the MBR, but the same jfs grub may not work if written into the first boot sector. However if the grub were into ext2, ext3 and reiserfs it should boot with both the options.
But if the linux os is of a binary installer system such as deb or rpm, then it shouldn't matter as booting via the command configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst would bring back the menu screen the same way as a chainloader +1 would do.
Earlier in my old i586 machine I had used a jfs based linuxmint-grub to boot other operating systems (opensuse, opengeu, pclinuxos-gnome, granular), but return back from other linux's grub graphical menu to the linuxmint-grub (jfs) graphical menu via the command configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst.
Although I was familiar with the jfs boot in the MBR as a good option, I realized its inability to boot via the first boot sector's chainloader +1 only recently while trying a similar way out in my new i686 machine having sabayon, ubuntu and mandriva. | <urn:uuid:e0defae1-f556-48b6-a971-aa88f8a40d76> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forum.sabayon.org/viewtopic.php?p=122521 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939731 | 269 | 1.789063 | 2 |
The Knoxville branch of the Marine Corps League spent part of Saturday honoring a veteran who is their namesake.
The Lt. Alexander Bonnyman Detachment held its annual ceremony at Bonnyman's family plot in Highland Cemetery in Knoxville. November 22nd marks the 69th anniversary of his death.
Bonnyman was raised in Knoxville. He enlisted during World War II at the age of 33 when he didn't have to. He left a wife and two kids behind.
He saved hundreds of his fellow marines through his actions during one battle in the Pacific on the island of Tarawa.
"Everything this man did was noteworthy. He's the epitome of honor, courage, and commitment," said David Cate of the Bonnyman Detachment.
In November 1943 on the final day of the fight, Japanese troops inside a bomb proof bunker launched a fierce attack against the exposed marines.
Lt. Bonnyman voluntarily crawled to the entrance of the bunker. He placed explosives that killed many of the enemy and pushing the rest out. He lost his life after he helped the U.S. advance and prevented anymore casualties during the fight.
His body remains on the island, but his family memorial is where these marines pay tribute to a man who earned the nation's highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor.
The Bonnyman Detachment includes the Young Marines to teach them Bonnyman's story.
"We need to remember our local heroes. We need to pay tribute to them. We need to tell our kids hey here is an ordinary man who did extraordinary things," said Young Marines Director Virgil Young. | <urn:uuid:f6ba2264-8a83-463d-ab96-4481b15bba8c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wbir.com/rss/article/242190/2/Marine-group-honors-local-WWII-hero | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977366 | 335 | 1.75 | 2 |
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This conference on the anniversary of the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plants, a conference will be held to look at the retaliation and attacks on nuclear plant whistleblowers. Also US sailors and military personnel in Japan were contaminated by the radioactive explosions and now they are fighting for compensation and their healthcare. An injured sailor from the U.S.S. Reagan will speak as well as her lawyer who is representing these military personnel. There will also be music and a screening of "The Mothers Of Fukushima".
The children of Fukushima are still being contaminated despite the fact that the Japanese government, TEPCO and the US government is telling the people that they can overcome radiation and that Fukushima can be "decontaminated" so that they can move back despite the continued radiation and contamination even in the rain. | <urn:uuid:5ff0fc09-4746-459b-86d1-3325e8dcf15a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/03/06/18733201.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956608 | 189 | 1.898438 | 2 |
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Join Glenn Beck and all your KPRC favorites at the Third Annual TALKRADIO 950 Birthday Bash presented by Thunderbolt Transmissions! It's Thurs., March 18, at City Streets, 5078 Richmond just west of Post Oak!! We'll have live music on the Houston Siding Stage, a special celebrity edition of Reverse Trivia and a free buffet. If you can't be there, check out the live webcam provided courtesy of Shaw's Jewelry. Doors open at 1 p.m., and you must be 21 or older to get in. Sponsored by Exclusive Furniture.
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||Building The Perfect Beds
In most of Texas, it is essential that we build beds to plant things like landscape shrubs and vegetable gardens. That's because in most of the state, our soil simply stinks. It's got too much Clay, or Gumbo, or Sand or Caliche. Whatever the case, it's not the best soil to plant anything in without amending it.
Which is why garden-advice gurus such as myself are always hammering home the point about "building raised beds." Unfortunately everyone seems to want to build a raised bed in the existing soil. STOP THAT! Building a raised bed really does mean building a bed on top of whatever you have that stinks.
So, here are some simple steps to remember when building a raised bed. Again, this is almost always needed for landscapes, vegetable gardens and flower beds. These techniques are never recommended for Tree Planting.
Let's start with the soil: The best soil simply put is Rose Soil. Rose Soil is normally a perfect blend of Clay-soil, sand and well-composted humus material. They sell it by the bag and by the bulk at many soil yards. If they don't have a Rose Soil, then ask for a blend that may be called a Garden Mix, or Landscaper's Mix. This too, is usually a perfect blend of the aforementioned elements -- Soil-Sand-Humus. A raised bed needs to be at least 8-10 inches above the existing soil profile. But it can be mixed for a few inches with the existing profile. But that also means if you blend the Rose Soil with the existing soil, you still need to add 6-8 inches of nothing but the mix on top of that which has been blended with the existing soil. Again, the goal is to achieve a raised bed.
Then it's important to lock it in. You can do that any number of ways, but don't just build the beds and forget to lock it in. I am a personal proponent of Landscape Stone, as seen in the picture at left, to "lock-in" these beds. You can also use landscape timbers or pre-cast bricks akin to cinder blocks. You can use the "edging material," you know, the 4-6 inch green metal strips? But, unless you're desperate please avoid the edging. Not only does it look "20-years-ago" but they also always come loose and they always rust.
As for landscape stone, there are many kinds and many colors, and I really don't care which color you choose, just make sure to contrast the color of the brick or paint on the house. Never, ever try to match the color. Landscape stone is also known as Moss Rock and it can also be found in Limestone.
Up against a house and near the foundation, it's never a good thing to make a raised bed right up over the weep holes of the foundation. It is a good idea to lay a few inches of bull rock or river rock up next to the foundation. And then you can start your raised bed out from the edge of that protective barrier. This serves many useful purposes. First, it keeps you from covering the weep holes. Second, it helps you keep a "walking" area on the back of the landscape bed for cultural-care purposes.
Plus, a raised bed doesn't have to be 10 inches throughout. It is important for it to be at its highest "raised" depth towards the center, where you plant on planting the shrubs. Raised beds can taper down both towards the front and back to as little at 4 inches if need be.
However, if you build a raised bed, and a tapered one at that, and don't lock it in as discussed earlier, you will eventually see it erode away over a period of time.
More specifically, for vegetable gardens (picture at top of page), a raised bed can start with the Soil-Sand-Humus combo discussed earlier, but should also be amended even further with organic matter like well-composted cow manure or cotton burr compost. I say the perfect blend for a raised veggie garden is the two parts Rose Soil, blended with one part organic compost. Or seen another way, 1/3 of your soil needs to be really good compost.
Then there is the basic and true Flower Bed. Again the bed should be raised, but probably no more than 4-6 inches. However, do not apply this rule to the base of trees. If you follow my advice, you should never try to plant things around the base of trees, especially flowers. The only exception to this is that ground covers, which are mostly permanent, can be planted around the based or in the mulch rings of tress. A raised "flower bed should be all on it's own.
Lastly, no matter what bed your building, cover it up with a nice thick layer of mulch. What kind of mulch is up to you, but let me say this about "building raised beds" - If you ever want to continue to build upon that bed by naturally adding organic matter over time, you must stick with the shredded mulches: Shredded Hard Wood, Shredded Pine Bark or Shredded Texas Red Cedar. As they tend to decompose while they are doing good things like blocking weeds and conserving moisture, they tend to naturally build back the soil profiles.
Until next issue, here's to
Great Gardening from the GardenLine, heard
exclusively weekend mornings from 8 to noon
on Talkradio 950 KPRC.
Powered by KPRCRADIO.com | <urn:uuid:fcdbb0e0-4082-4649-94ca-f559b8003881> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kprcradio.com/pages/listenernewsletter/GardenTalk_03-11-04.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94866 | 1,470 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Just after finishing his new movie about the aftermath of the massacre at the Munich Olympics, Steven Spielberg talked with TIME movie critic Richard Schickel, who collaborated with him on the TV documentary Shooting War, about his reasons for taking on Munich, his anger at the International Olympic Committee and his modest plan for improving Arab-Israeli relations.
TIME: WOULD IT BE FAIR TO SAY THAT THIS MOVIE IS, IN THE END, ABOUT THE HUMAN COST OF A QUAGMIRE? Yes. And also for me this movie is a prayer for peace. I always kept thinking about that as I was making it. Somewhere inside all this intransigence there has to be a prayer for peace. Because the biggest enemy is not the Palestinians or the Israelis. The biggest enemy in the region is intransigence. Do you know Amos Oz's books? There's a wonderful quote we found, that sort of makes sense to me: "In the lives of individuals, and of peoples, too, the worst conflicts are often those that break out between those who are persecuted." They see in each other's faces a reflection of some larger oppressor. That may well be the case with the 100-year conflict between Arabs and Jews.
DO YOU THINK THIS FILM WILL DO ANY GOOD? I've never, ever made a movie where I said I'm making this picture because the message can do some good for the world--even when I made Schindler's List. I was terrified that it was going to do the opposite of good. I thought perhaps it might bring shame to the memory of those who didn't survive the Holocaust--and even worse to those who did. I made the picture out of just pure wanting to get that story told. I thought it was important that at least my kids someday could see what happened, just to hear that story being told. I feel the same way about Munich. I don't think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today.
BUT IT'S CERTAINLY WORTH A TRY. Everything's worth a try. I didn't make this movie to make money, and I don't know if I've made a commercial movie at all. But I certainly feel that if filmmakers have the courage to talk about these issues--whether they're fictional representations of real events or are pure fiction or pure documentaries--as long as we're willing to talk about the real tough, hard subjects unsparingly, I think it's a good thing to get out in the ether. It's not a bad thing. And there's a project I'm initiating next February that I think might also do some good.
WHAT'S THAT? What I'm doing is buying 250 video cameras and players and dividing them up, giving 125 of them to Palestinian children, 125 to Israeli kids, so they can make movies about their own lives--not dramas, just little documentaries about who they are and what they believe in, who their parents are, where they go to school, what they had to eat, what movies they watch, what CDs they listen to--and then exchange the videos. That's the kind of thing that can be effective, I think, in simply making people understand that there aren't that many differences that divide Israelis from Palestinians--not as human beings, anyway. | <urn:uuid:734c7417-7fe7-4d8d-bedc-42b4c82ec2e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1137684,00.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979928 | 686 | 1.59375 | 2 |
|2nd Governor of Oklahoma|
January 9, 1911 – January 11, 1915
|Lieutenant||John A. Greer|
|Preceded by||Charles N. Haskell|
|Succeeded by||Robert L. Williams|
July 8, 1863|
|Died||January 16, 1933
Lee Cruce (July 8, 1863 – January 16, 1933) was the second Governor of Oklahoma. Running against Charles N. Haskell in 1907 in the Democratic primaries, Lee would not receive the party's nomination for Oklahoma's first Governor. However, Cruce would later take Haskell's seat once he left office as the second Governor of Oklahoma.
Early life and move to Oklahoma
Lee Cruce was born in the city of Marion in Crittenden County, Kentucky on July 8, 1863. He attended Marion Academy, and subsequently attended Vanderbilt University, receiving a law degree from the latter. Though he passed the Kentucky bar exam in 1887, he did not practice law until he joined his brother’s law firm at Ardmore in Indian Territory in 1891. After ten years of practicing law, Cruce entered the financial world as the first cashier of the Ardmore National Bank, of which he later served as the bank’s president. In 1901, Cruce was elected an alderman in the local government of Ardmore. Through his combined positions of power in the Ardmore National Bank and the movement towards statehood in late 1906, Cruce submitted his name on the Democratic primary for Governor of the newly created state of Oklahoma. The powerful, and popular Charles N. Haskell defeated Cruce for the nomination.
Governor of Oklahoma
Before Governor Haskell's term ended in 1911, Lee once again sought the Democratic nomination for governor. This time Cruce was successful. Defeating his Republican opponent, Cruce stepped in to fill Haskell's vacated office and was inaugurated as the second Governor of Oklahoma on January 9, 1911.
Despite the fact that Haskell and Cruce were both Democrats, that is where the similarities end. Whereas Haskell exercised extensive executive control over the Oklahoma Legislature (mainly through his force of personality), Cruce lost much of the executive power Haskell established. As Governor, Cruce continually struggled for power against the Legislature throughout his term. Despite his lacking Haskell's control, Cruce still managed to complete many projects he initiated. Cruce’s first major success came in the realm of automotives. With the increase in automobiles, the Legislature acted upon Cruce’s commendation and established the Oklahoma Department of Highways in 1911. Roads were improved with funds generated from an annual one-dollar license fee.
Next on the Governor's agenda was to construction of the Oklahoma State Capitol in the State's capitol, which Haskell officially moved from Guthrie to Oklahoma City in 1910. Under the supervision of Cruce, the Legislature established the three member State Capitol Commission in 1913. This commission was charged with purchasing land for the Oklahoma’s new State Capitol Building. After purchasing the desired property in downtown Oklahoma City, on July 20, 1914, groundbreaking began. Then on November 16, 1915 (Oklahoma's 8th birthday) the cornerstone was laid in Masonic fashion and construction began.
Believing the State needed to take on a greater moral role, Cruce supported enforcement of blue laws. Through specific legislation, Cruce and the Legislature closed businesses on Sundays, and declared prize fighting, gambling, bootlegging and horseracing illegal. This, combined with Haskell's prohibition plan, proved too much for the State to handle. The Legislature did not possess the funds needed to finance the operations and only ended up shifting funds around from one law enforcement agency to another. Cruce, on numerous occasions, in his role as Commander-in-Chief, called out the state militia to enforce his laws. The most famous of these events occurred when Cruce declared martial law in Tulsa to prevent a horserace from taking place. The race was brought to a halt as shots were fired over the heads of the jockeys.
Much like his desires for a greater morality of the state, Cruce was an avid abolitionist when it came to the use of capital punishment throughout the state. Pioneering the movement to abolish capital punishment, Cruce commuted twenty-two death sentences to life imprisonment and only one execution took place during his administration. Despite this, he did little to prevent lynchings of non-white people, explaining to the NAACP;
There is a race prejudice that exists between the white and Negro races wherever the Negroes are found in large numbers ... Just this week the announcement comes as a shock to the people of Oklahoma that the Secretary of the Interior ... has appointed a Negro from Kansas to come to Oklahoma and take charge of the supervision of the Indian schools of this State. There is no race of people on earth that has more antipathy for the Negro race than the Indian race, and yet these people, numbering many of the best citizens of this State and nation, are to be humbled and their prejudices and passions are to be increased by having this outrage imposed upon them ... If your organization would interest itself to the extent of seeing that such outrages as this are not perpetrated against our people, there would be fewer lynchings in the South than at this time ...
Congressional reapportionments nearly resulted in the downfall of Cruce's administration. In 1912, Cruce vetoed a bill to reapportion the state into eight congressional districts designed to minimize Republican voting strength. This veto as well as the Governor's attempts to abolish some public institutions for economic reasons, led the legislature to investigate the executive branch. As a result, the State Auditor, State Insurance Commissioner, and State Printer were impeached. Cruce himself escaped impeachment in the Oklahoma House of Representatives by a single vote, similar to U.S. President Andrew Johnson. (Johnson was impeached, but was acquitted in the Senate by a single vote.)
By the end of his term in 1915, the voters were, for the most part, ready for a change. Looking for a new Governor, the voters looked to Governor Haskell's friend and then Chief Justice of Oklahoma Robert L. Williams. Elected in 1914 following the end of his only term on the Court, Williams became the third Governor of Oklahoma.
Late life and legacy
After Cruce left office, he would continue his career as a lawyer and banker through Oklahoma. In 1930, Cruce was defeated in the primary for the United States Senate losing out to Thomas Gore, one of Oklahoma’s first Senators. Cruce died January 16, 1933, in Los Angeles. He is buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in adoptive hometown of Ardmore.
State of the State speeches
Charles N. Haskell
|Governor of Oklahoma
Robert L. Williams | <urn:uuid:ccb308cc-b7af-40f9-aeb2-e0f50698c4a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Cruce | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970329 | 1,398 | 2.5 | 2 |
Thank God It's Backward Compatible
Read More: TVTechnology: ATSC Approves DTV Non-Real-Time Delivery SystemThe Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) has approved the adoption of an enhancement to the current broadcast digital video transmission system which will allow broadcasters to transmit file-based content on a non-real-time (NRT) basis. The new standard, designated A/103, is backwardly compatible with the present U.S. digital broadcast standard and supports both fixed and mobile television services.
NRT delivery capability was lacking in the original implementation of digital television broadcasting, and its implementation is expected to be a boon to viewers who aren’t able or who don’t wish to view some of a broadcaster’s program offerings on a real-time basis.
“Television broadcasting remains the most efficient means to move popular content to a very large audience because broadcasting is an infinitely scalable one-to-many technology,” said Mark Richer, ATSC president. [The] ATSC’s new NRT standard gives broadcasters the capability to deliver all types of file-based content to consumers. Using broadcast television, programmers will be able to send content that a viewer may watch at their convenience.”
Okay, they say that this will actually let there be 3DTV using ATSC 2.0. Not that anyone really cares about 3DtV!!! I'm for anything that will mean that I will be able to continue to get free TV in the future. And, no need for a new converter box program (or me needing to spring for a new converter box) is a great bonus. | <urn:uuid:22fcab79-e7b8-49a0-ab63-87263112ae88> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dtvusaforum.com/dtv-hdtv-chat/47113-new-atsc-standard-allows-non-real-time-delivery.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92381 | 345 | 1.546875 | 2 |
|Chronological and political information|
Validus was a Hapan Sith Lord and a member of the First Sith Trinite. The only Hapan to serve Darth Abeonis and the Sith Order of Decreto before Hapes conquest, Validus was treated as an outsider, a traitor and infidel by her fellow Hapans, resulting in her falling further into the darkness.
In the year 63 ABY, following the Battle of Thyferra, she was chosen by Darth Abeonis to become part of the First Sith Trinite; and by 121 ABY had become a member of the Sith Council. She was later killed in the Massacre of the Sith Council; the first casualty of the Successors War.
|First Sith Trinite| | <urn:uuid:b39c766e-51c6-4ebc-aa62-c5a7e27aa37a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://misc.thefullwiki.org/Darth_Validus | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955704 | 153 | 1.976563 | 2 |
A manor for the poor
Lundegård manor house is visible from the road from Tommerup to Brobyværk. It dates back to the early 1500s, and in the early 1600s, the manor belonged to King Christian IV's mother-in-law, Ellen Marsvin. In 1702 it was acquired by Peder Smidt, who bequeathed…
A bailiff's son with a social conscience
Lundegård was sold in 1702 to Peter Smidt, a bailiff's son. This was a sign of the times of the Danish period of absolute monarchy which saw the emergence of a new breed of landed gentry. Many of the new estate owners had a reputation for tyranny among their tenant farmers. How Peter Smidt treated his copyholders, is not known, but he had a strong social conscience, in that he bequeathed his estate to a foundation, with the proceeds to be distributed among the paupers of Funen. The feudal system of the estate itself remained unchanged. It comprised almost the entire parish, and the unpaid labour performed for the estate by the landless peasants continued for many years. Not until much later did the peasants gain the right to own their own land. This meant that Lundegård's copyholders paid rent and laboured for the good of the poor.
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Contribute with links | <urn:uuid:86594125-2f85-4e1a-a7c1-f27f15161a94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kulturarv.dk/1001fortaellinger/en_GB/lundegaard | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969543 | 321 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Although Nigeria has been a driving force in establishing peace and security in the region through its role in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), it has struggled with multiple internal conflicts that jeopardize its own security. Given the current crisis in Mali, ECOWAS, with international support, must work closely with Nigerian and Malian leaders to find a role for the regional hegemon. Any plan of action must take into account Nigeria’s prominent status without jeopardizing its domestic or regional stability. This will be in both Nigeria and ECOWAS’s interests.
Within Africa, Nigeria is dominant. The nation is Africa’s most populous country, the continent’s largest producer of oil, and its second highest troop contributing country for UN peacekeeping missions worldwide. Nigeria has been an economic and political leader in the regional organization ECOWAS, which is headquartered in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. Now, as West Africa and the world face the region’s most pressing and volatile security situation in Mali, Nigeria must carefully balance its own tense internal security challenges with its leadership role within ECOWAS and the region.
Instability reigns in the north of Nigeria, where, since 2009, the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram has been waging a brutal and incessant campaign against government and civilian targets, particularly Christian sites. The group claims to be fighting to transform Nigeria into an Islamic state governed by Sharia law. Paradoxically, it is other grievances, such as extreme poverty, high corruption, and inequality with the more developed south, that allow the group’s extreme ideology and tactics to resonate with the local population.
Boko Haram’s current wave of weekly attacks in Northern Nigeria has instilled perpetual fear in the day-to-day lives of both Christians and Muslims. An August 2011 attack on the UN headquarters building in Abuja showed increased technical skill and an international dimension, not to mention its precedent as the first attack outside the north, illustrating the deepening intra-state conflict Nigeria finds itself in.
Though Boko Haram has not committed any attacks outside of Nigeria, regional and international security actors are worried about the group’s potential to destabilize West Africa’s most powerful country and expand within the region. The United States recently has expressed concern about Boko Haram’s risk to U.S. national security and pledged support to the Nigerian government to help combat the terrorist group. In June 2012, General Carter Ham, Commander of U.S. Africom, suggested that security experts’ worst fears of Boko Haram coordination with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Al Shabaab are becoming a reality. On her recent African tour, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responded by offering support to the Nigerian security forces to combat Boko Haram.
Although instability in Nigeria clearly poses a concern for the international community, controlling the security situation in Mali following the March 2012 coup has become a priority. In the past six months, Mali’s vast north has become an ungoverned region, hosting a range of non-state armed groups with complex allegiances that the weak post-coup government has failed to control. Islamic extremist groups like Ansar Dine or the Mouvement pour l’unicité et le jihad en Afrique de l’Ouest (MUJAO) are threatening local security through a strict application of Sharia Law, which is causing a mass displacement of Malians and a humanitarian crisis. Moreover, the lack of state control has enabled Al Qaeda’s local affiliate, AQIM, to establish itself in Northern Mali. Mali’s neighbors are worried about how Al Qaeda’s proliferation could destabilize the region, and the international community fears even greater consequences beyond West Africa.
ECOWAS’ proposed force of 3,300 troops presents one potential military solution to combat the armed groups controlling Northern Mali. On September 24, 2012 the Government of Mali and ECOWAS agreed to the planned ECOWAS support force, and Mali has now requested UN Security Council Authorization for such an intervention. The Security Council is seeking a more detailed plan from ECOWAS, providing an opportunity for regional and international leaders to think not only how and when the force should operate, but also who will comprise it.
Nigeria is the strategic and financial leader of ECOWAS and will likely be the backbone for the ECOWAS force in Mali. Nevertheless, Nigeria’s forces have struggled to control an Islamic extremist group within its own country, so they will probably be unable to promote stability any better in a significantly more challenging, unknown environment. Additionally, Nigerian participation in a Mali intervention could trigger retaliation from Boko Haram or attacks by Malian jihadist groups on Nigeria. A Nigerian-driven ECOWAS force could also provide greater rationale for Boko Haram and AQIM to link up and internationalize. That disastrous outcome would worsen the crisis in Mali further.
Still, despite these precautions, an ECOWAS force without a significant participation from its regional superpower may not be financially or logistically possible. These dilemmas highlight the challenges of forming a high capacity, neutral, and well-financed regional force in an area where many countries face their own internal conflicts. Because of its importance in the region and the world, Nigeria’s internal security is crucial to the overall stability in West Africa. A regional force to bring peace to Mali must not compromise Nigeria’s ability to solve its own violent extremism threat.
An earlier version of this article featured a photograph of soldiers that were from Niger, not from Nigeria. The Forum regrets the error. This photograph portrays Nigerian soldiers on a peacekeeping mission in Darfur. | <urn:uuid:1e5dc109-1eb0-4d82-97ba-3b7839e1e2f0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fletcherforum.org/2012/10/01/shorey/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92968 | 1,167 | 2.109375 | 2 |
Last week, when I wrote about the new versions of the three leading Web browsers, I briefly discussed how each of them now has a feature that blocks websites and advertisers from tracking users' movements online.
After my column ran, the reaction from readers was, "Tell us more."
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to handle that request. Each of the three major browser makers has put in place its own distinct anti-tracking system. None of them is turned on by default; in fact, they can be quite complex to activate.
The tracking tools are used by advertisers and marketing research companies to get a better understanding of their users, who are otherwise generally anonymous, and to target advertisements to individual consumers based on their online activities. Online marketers argue that tracking helps them deliver ads that are relevant and helps support many of the services such as email or news that are offered for free to Web surfers. Privacy advocates have persuasively countered that online tracking is far more extensive than most consumers realize or have knowingly consented to.
Firefox browser maker Mozilla is focusing its anti-tracking efforts on promoting a new "header" field. Headers are the information that browsers transmit to sites when users request Web
Mozilla's idea is to include in that header information a field that would inform websites of users' tracking preferences. The system would work like a kind of beacon, alerting websites and advertisers that users don't want to be tracked.
Mozilla's Do Not Track system has the potential to be a powerful tool for Web surfers.
Unfortunately, the system has a big problem: few websites are presently set up to recognize or respond to Mozilla's Do Not Track header. That means that for now, even if Firefox users turn on the Do Not Track feature, they almost certainly will continue to have their movements monitored by marketers. And because tracking is typically invisible to end users, they'd have little way of knowing that.
Firefox users can supplement this system by installing an add-on program called AdBlock Plus and then subscribing to a list of known advertisers and networks. As it sounds, this program blocks most Web ads from appearing when users download pages, but it has the side benefit of preventing tracking.
Unfortunately, AdBlock Plus is a blunt tool. It blocks most ads -- including ones you may want to see -- but by default, it doesn't block all tracking, because it targets advertisers, not other firms that track users.
Microsoft's anti-tracking solution is very similar to what's available for Firefox, except that it doesn't require users to download a separate program. When users turn on "tracking protection" in Internet Explorer, the browser will send out the same Do Not Track header that Mozilla is promoting.
Additionally, Internet Explorer allows users to subscribe to lists of advertisers and Web companies whose tracking they want to block. They can even subscribe to some of the same lists used by AdBlock Plus.
But Microsoft added on an extra layer of protection to Internet Explorer. The browser allows users to automatically create anti-tracking lists. Internet Explorer can monitor who is providing content such as ads or videos on the Web pages users visit. The browser assumes that if a third party is delivering content to more than a few websites, that third party is probably tracking Web users. Once a user sees content from that provider on a certain number of sites, Internet Explorer will start blocking that provider.
Unfortunately, like AdBlock Plus, these automatic lists are blunt tools that may end up blocking content that users actually want to see.
Google (GOOG) is taking a different tack with Chrome. Many Web advertisers already allow consumers to opt out of being tracked and receiving so-called targeted advertisements. To do so, consumers have to visit particular websites that have been set up by the advertisers or industry groups. When consumers click on ad networks that they want to opt out of, the sites save cookies -- or small files -- to the users' browsers.
Unfortunately, those cookies can be easily deleted.
Google's solution is a small, optional add-on program for Chrome called "Keep My Opt-Outs." The program prevents users from accidentally deleting their anti-tracking preferences when they delete their cookies.
"Keep My Opt-Outs" is more effective than the Do Not Track header, because the anti-tracking preferences it protects are already supported by many of the major advertising networks.
But "Keep My Opt-Outs" isn't built into Chrome and Google doesn't advertise it within the browser, so consumers have to know that it's available and take the extra step to install it. And if they want to opt out of tracking, they have to take another step and find the sites that allow them to set their preferences. In other words, Google's anti-tracking system isn't one-click easy.
The good news is that if you're concerned about having your online movements monitored, you can do something about it. But blocking such tracking is not as easy or as comprehensive as it ought to be.
Contact Troy Wolverton at 408-920-5021 or firstname.lastname@example.org Follow him at www.mercurynews.com/troy-wolverton or Twitter.com/troywolv.
Turning off tracking
The new versions of the three Web browsers allow users to block advertisers and websites from tracking their movements online. Here's how to turn on their anti-tracking features.
Mozilla Firefox 4.0
1. Click on the "Firefox" button (Tools menu in Windows XP if Menu Bar is open) in the upper-left corner of the browser window.
2. Click on "options" (or "preferences" on a Mac). This will bring up the options dialogue box.
3. Click on the "advanced" button.
4. In the "Browsing" area on the "advanced" section, click on the box next to "Tell Web sites I do not want to be tracked."
Note: This turns on a "Do Not Track" header, which few websites currently recognize. For added protection against tracking, users can install AdBlock Plus, an add-on program that blocks ads and prevents tracking by many Web operators. To do so:
1. Click on the Firefox button (or "Tools" in the menu bar on a Mac).
2. Click on "Add-ons."
3. Click on the "Get Add-ons" tab.
4. Click in the search box on that Web page, type "adblock plus" and hit enter
5. Click on the "install" button next to AdBlock Plus. You'll then be prompted to restart your browser.
6. After that, you should return to the Add-ons Web page. Click on the "Extensions" tab. This should give you a list of add-ons you've installed.
7. Find the AdBlock Plus extension and click the "Options" (or "Preferences" on a Mac) button underneath it. It should show that you are subscribed to a subscription list. By default, this list is likely to be EasyList or Fanboy's List.
8. Open up a new tab. Go to https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/ This will take you to EasyList, a site that puts together lists of Web advertisers and trackers. (If you have Fanboy's list, go to http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/.)
9. Under "EasyPrivacy," click on the link to "Add EasyPrivacy to AdBlock Plus." This will bring up the "Add AdBlock Plus filter subscription" dialogue box. (On the Fanboy page, you'll want to click on the link to "Add Fanboy Tracking list to Firefox"; you may be prompted to add the Fanboy AdBlock list first.) This will bring up the "Add subscription" dialogue box.
10. Click on "Add subscription."
Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.0
1. Click on the settings button in the upper-right corner of the browser window (it looks like a gear).
2. Click on or mouse over "Safety." This will bring up a submenu.
3. Click on "Tracking Protection." This will bring up the "Manage Add-ons" dialogue box.
4. Make sure "Tracking Protection" is selected under the list of "Add-on Types." Then click on "Your Personalized List."
5. Click the "Enable" button in the lower-right hand corner of the dialogue box.
Note: This does something similar to turning on the "Do Not Track" feature in Firefox, although Internet Explorer will also start automatically creating a list of blocked operators by monitoring the third-party content served up by the sites you visit. Rather than waiting to generate a list, users can simply subscribe to a pre-existing one. To subscribe to one such list:
1. Open up a new browser window.
2. Go to https://easylist.adblockplus.org/en/
3. Scroll down to the box that says "EasyPrivacy Tracking Protection List"
4. Click on the link to "Add EasyPrivacy Tracking Protection list to Internet Explorer 9." This will bring up the "Tracking Protection" dialogue box.
5. Click on "Add List."
Google Chrome 10
1. Open up a new browser window.
2. Go to https://chrome.google.com/webstore. This will take you to the Chrome Web store.
3. In the "Search the store" box, enter "keep my opt outs"
4. Click on the icon for Google's Keep My Opt Outs extension. This will take you to the Keep My Opt Outs page in the Chrome store.
5. Click the "Install" button on the right side of the page. Wait until Chrome confirms that it has installed the extension.
6. In the "Description" box on that page, click on the link to http://www.aboutads.info/choices/.
7. The page that loads will tell you what ad networks you may already have opted out of.
8. After the site finishes analyzing your browser settings, click on the "All Participating Companies" tab. From here you can select individual networks and tracking companies you can opt out of. Or you can click on "Select All Shown" to choose all of them at once.
9. Click on the "Submit your choices" button.
Note: AdBlock Plus is also available for Chrome and represents an alternative to the Keep My Opt Outs method. Chrome users can search for and install AdBlock Plus from the Chrome Web store.
Source: Mercury News research | <urn:uuid:a65401f5-cc88-4a11-b5e5-aeb290d17fa7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_17796776?nclick_check=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901482 | 2,223 | 1.96875 | 2 |
Books that make literacy fun!
Do you remember the excitement of rushing home to read a book that you hoped would never end?
We're Big Brother Mouse, a Lao-based, Lao-owned project. We started in 2006, publishing "books that make literacy fun!" Now we're also publishing books that provide older readers with access to the information, ideas, and pleasure people in many countries take for granted.
Until now, few books were published in the Lao Language. Many people in Lao villages never saw a book. Big Brother Mouse is already changing that, but we still have far to go.
Big Brother Mouse is based in Luang Prabang, Laos; we also have a shop in Vientiane and our books are sold in a growing number of other places. Please come visit if you're in Laos. If you're not, you can learn more from this website, and we hope you'll want to help.
Left: Children in a rural Lao village at a book party sponsored by Big Brother Mouse. These 3-hour events in rural schools are one way that we make literacy fun! Come see what happens at a book party. | <urn:uuid:27d49f1f-f2c9-4511-a819-2ddd6290999a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bigbrothermouse.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974332 | 241 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Court Clears Yahoo in Nazi Case
PARIS -- In what might end a three-year legal fight, a Paris court Tuesday threw out accusations by French human rights activists who said Yahoo should be held legally responsible for auctions that were once held on its website of Nazi paraphernalia.
The court ruled that Yahoo and its former chief executive, Tim Koogle, never sought to "justify war crimes and crimes against humanity" as they were accused of doing by human rights activists, including Holocaust survivors and their families.
The case was initiated in 2000, when France's Union of Jewish Students and the International Anti-Racism and Anti-Semitism League sued Yahoo for allowing Nazi collectibles, including flags emblazoned with swastikas, to be sold on its auction pages.
The case led to a landmark ruling in France, with a court ordering Yahoo to block Internet surfers in France from auctions selling Nazi memorabilia. French law bars the display or sale of racist material.
Yahoo eventually banned Nazi material as it began charging users to make auction listings, saying it did not want to profit from such material.
The company insisted the decision had nothing to do with the proceedings in France, but it continued to oppose the French case. The company even asked a federal judge in California to affirm that U.S. companies could not be regulated by countries that have more restrictive laws on freedom of expression. The judge agreed.
Still angry at Yahoo's attitude, French Holocaust survivors and their families launched a second attack and were joined by a group called the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between People. The parties sued for one symbolic euro.
But the Paris court said Tuesday that "justifying war crimes" means "glorifying, praising or at least presenting the crimes in question favorably." Yahoo and its auction pages did not fit that description, the court said.
Neither of the groups that filed complaints against Yahoo returned calls seeking comment about the decision. It was not immediately clear if they planned to appeal. | <urn:uuid:855efd6b-0a30-43aa-9466-edf8a01920c6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2003/02/57633 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974145 | 409 | 1.664063 | 2 |
The dynamic, of necessity, has been forever altered.
"I'm also issuing a new goal for America," Obama said Tuesday night, and before he could even complete the sentence, he had to know that there were plenty of people who would automatically reject whatever words would follow and would not be shy about it.
Self-doubt is a characteristic that a modern president of either party must banish as he speaks. If he were to dwell on the fact that every single syllable he utters is being dissected in real time, it would be understandable if he were unable to make it through a paragraph.
"We know what needs to be done," Obama said, but that word -- "we" -- is itself open to daily dispute. A president's voice may be, symbolically, the loudest in the republic, but it is one voice among hundreds of millions, most of them with the technological power to talk right back. Democracy, at warp speed.
That endless and instantaneous conversation -- and it is only going to grow more constant in the decades to come -- is the contemporary reality to which each president must now adjust, the fresh fact of civic life. It is, in a fundamental way, the new state of the union.
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Join us at Facebook/CNNOpinion. | <urn:uuid:bc87de9e-f8e7-40c3-be5f-ef110526f4ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kcra.com/news/national/Greene-Democracy-talks-back-on-SOTU/-/11797450/18525038/-/item/1/-/6w2grpz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98239 | 274 | 1.757813 | 2 |
For the first time, scientists have peered to the edge of a colossal black hole and measured the point of no return for matter.
"Once objects fall through the event horizon, they're lost forever," Shep Doeleman, assistant director of the MIT Haystack Observatory and research associate at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, said in a statement Thursday. "It's an exit door from our universe. You walk through that door, you’re not coming back."
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Although the event horizon is an imaginary line that's impossible to observe, astronomers have imaged the region around a giant black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. That's allowed them to measured, for the first time, the closest stable orbit in which matter can circle the black hole. The findings were reported in this week's issue of the journal Science.
The supermassive black hole in question lies at the center of the galaxy M87, which is about 50 million light-years from our own Milky Way. This behemoth black hole contains the mass of 6 billion suns.
Using a new observatory called the Event Horizon Telescope, which links up radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California, astronomers measured that the innermost possible orbit for matter around the black hole is roughly 5.5 times the size of the black hole's event horizon.
This innermost orbit is about five times the size of the solar system, or 750 times the distance from Earth to the sun, Doeleman told Space.com. The distance between Earth and the sun is nearly 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).
The observations allowed the researchers to confirm that this swirling mass around the black hole is the source of the powerful jets of light seen radiating from the galaxy. Many galaxies throughout the universe spot similar jets, thought to be produced by matter falling into their central black holes. Until now, no telescope has had the resolution power to verify the idea.
The Event Horizon Telescope is a new project that aims to link as many as 50 radio dishes around the world to work in concert to image the distant universe. Already, the observatory can see celestial objects with 2,000 times more detail than the Hubble Space Telescope.
- Black Hole Quiz: Test Your Knowledge of Nature's Weirdest Creations
- 4 Million Sun-Sized Black Hole - How Would It Form? | Video
- The Strangest Black Holes in the Universe
© 2013 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com. | <urn:uuid:0150be4d-87e4-42b2-98ce-1a2d803aeade> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbcnews.com/id/49199688/ns/technology_and_science-space/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907424 | 622 | 3.234375 | 3 |
A high school student arrested today for allegedly launching the worldwide computer virus known as LovSan or Blaster is a loner who drives too fast, neighbours said.
Bill McKittrick called 18-year-old Jeffrey Lee Parson "a computer genius", but not a criminal.
"He's smart on the computer, but I cannot believe he was doing any hacking," McKittrick said.
Another neighbour, Curtis Mackey, said Parson has few friends and drives too fast in their neighbourhood.
"He's just got one kid he hangs with typically," he said. "He speeds up our street and it really ticks me off."
Court papers said FBI and Secret Service agents searched his home on August 19 and seized seven computers, which are still being analysed.
In an interview with FBI Special Agent Eric Smithmier, Parson, known online as teekid, admitted modifying the original Blaster infection and creating a version known by a variety of different names, including Blaster.B., court papers said.
Different versions of the virus-like worm, alternately called LovSan or Blaster, snarled corporate networks.
Symantec Corp, a leading antivirus vendor, said the worm and its variants infected more than 500,000 computers worldwide. Experts consider it one of the worst outbreaks this year.
All the Blaster virus variants took advantage of a flaw in Microsoft Corp's flagship Windows software.
Parson operated the t33kid.com website, according to internet registration records. The site appeared today not to have any content on it but previously contained software code for at least one virus and a listing of the most-damaging viruses circulating on the internet.
The FBI said in court documents that at least 7,000 computers were infected by Parson's software.
Parson told investigators he built into his version of the Blaster worm a method for reconnecting to victim computers later, according to court papers. Infected computers automatically registered themselves with Parson's website so he could keep track of them.
Parson nearly always wears baggy jeans with T-shirts and sports constantly changing hair cuts and colours, neighbours said. Last time Mackey saw him, he had long, blond hair and spikes on the top.
He never saw Parson with a computer and was surprised he had developed a computer virus.
"I didn't think he had the smarts for it myself," he said, adding, "The profile kind of fits. He kind of liked to be alone a lot."
As Parson awaited his first court appearance today, a red curtain was drawn across a window at the family's home and no one answered the door.
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Copyright © 2003. The Sydney Morning Herald.
|advertise | contact us| | <urn:uuid:ddf644f1-5810-4761-b718-774652fed008> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/30/1062194745044.html?from=storyrhs | 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 | 0.973148 | 589 | 1.984375 | 2 |
A star in the constellation Canis Major.
(AF-55: dp. 7,050; 1. 459'2"; b. 63'; dr. 28'; s. 16 k.; cpl. 292; a. 12 3"; cl. Alstede; T. R2-S-BV1)
The refrigerated cargo ship Matchless was laid down for the War Shipping Administration under a Maritime Commission contract (MC hull 1202) on 23 August 1944 at Oakland, Calif., by the Moore Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co.; launched on 14 October 1944; sponsored by Mrs. Harry E. Kennedy; and was delivered to the United States Lines under a bare boat charter on 23 March 1945. That firm operated the ship in the Pacific during the final months of the war and during the first four years following Japan's capitulation. On 11 August 1949, the ship was returned to the Maritime Commission at Mobile, Ala., and she was laid up in the National Defense Reserve Fleet berthing area at Bay Minette, Ala.
In November 1950, the Navy selected Matchless for reactivation as it was expanding the Fleet to meet its greatly increased responsibilities resulting from United Nations decision to oppose communist aggression in Korea. The vessel was towed to Camden, N.J., where she was overhauled and converted to a store ship by the New York Shipbuilding Corp. During this work, she received the best and most modern equipment to enable her to carry out her primary mission, underway replenishment. Renamed Aludra on 16 January 1951, the ship was placed in commission by the Navy on 19 June 1952, Comdr. Ralph H. Moureau in command.
Assigned to Service Squadron 3, Service Force, Pacific Fleet Aludra arrived at Sasebo, Japan, on 28 October 1952 and took up the tasks of supporting Task Force (TF) 77 in strikes along the east coast of Korea and TF 72 in patrols in the East China Sea and off Formosa. Ending her first deployment to the western Pacific, she returned to San Francisco on 4 May 1953.
Thereafter, for more than 16 years, she alternated operations on the west coast of the United States with tours in the Far East resupplying ships serving in the Orient. Among the highlights of her service was her participation in Operation "Passage to Freedom," the evacuation of thousands of Vietnamese refugees from communist-controlled areas of Vietnam after that country had been partitioned in 1954. During the early years of her career, she was considered to be a pioneer in the development of improved and faster methods of fleet replenishment. To help her achieve this end, she received many alterations and tried out a great deal of experimental logistical equipment. The ship again visited Vietnamese waters in March 1965 and, for a bit over three and one-half years thereafter, devoted most of her efforts to supporting American warships fighting aggression there. She left that war-torn country for the last time on 19 April 1969 and headed—via Sasebo, Japan—for home.
Aludra arrived at Oakland on 11 May and, a month later, began preparations for inactivation. Decommissioned on 12 September 1969, she was returned to the Maritime Administration and berthed with the National Defense Reserve Fleet at Suisun Bay, California. She was withdrawn from the reserve fleet on 19 January 1977 for stripping by the Navy prior to sale. She was sold in November of 1977.
Aludra received one battle star for Korean service and eight engagement stars for her operations in Vietnam. | <urn:uuid:d5857034-4031-42f6-9d27-77093d6358e4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/a7/aludra-ii.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972257 | 722 | 2.0625 | 2 |
October 30, 2012 > Educating to end censorship
Educating to end censorship
Submitted By National Coalition Against Censorship, Photo by courtesy of Rev. Jeremy Nickel
Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist (UU) Congregation and the Kids' Right to Read Project (KRRP) are hosting a reading of two books banned by the Fremont School Board. The eight part series will be led by Washington High School English teacher Teri Hu whose attempts to include the modern literary classics in the Senior A.P. curriculum have been censored. The class will meet monthly, Wednesdays at 7 p.m. The first meeting was held October 24; the next scheduled meeting is Wednesday, November 14. Meetings will continue on the second Wednesday of every month, concluding in May.
Despite statements in support of the books by Mission Peak UU, KRRP and others, the Fremont School Board moved once again in 2012 to censor the Advanced Placement English curriculum at Washington High School. The works in question, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Tony Kushner's Angels in America, are highly acclaimed works by lauded and respected authors. Both works are taught frequently in college preparatory courses-Angels in America has appeared on the national AP exam in the past.
"When I read about this issue last summer, I was shocked that this could be happening in Fremont. I have since learned that Fremont's School Board is the only school in the entire United States to have banned Angels in America. Bastard Out of Carolina has only been banned one other time. As a community that cherishes the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and the inherent worth and dignity of all people, I knew our congregation had to find a way to support teacher Teri Hu, and work against this terrible and antiquated decision," said Rev. Jeremy D. Nickel of Mission Peak UU Congregation.
The class seeks to educate the community about the true value of these two transformative twentieth century works whose value goes beyond their use in an exam; these are literary texts that inform readers about the human experience and broaden their horizons. Books will be available for purchase at the class and available to students of the Fremont school system for free.
"Often with book challenges, a book is quietly removed and the discussion ends there. In this case, Mission Peak UU has taken the initiative to open an educational, productive dialogue about what these texts have to offer," said Acacia O'Connor, Coordinator of Kids' Right to Read. "Banning these books from being used in the classroom denies students the right to explore these important texts in a safe and supportive educational environment."
"I truly believe that once Fremont residents have a chance to read these books and engage with them in a thought-provoking, structured setting, they will immediately understand the power and educational value of these books," said Teri Hu. "And my hope is that by introducing these books to the larger community we can make sure the Board understands that Fremont parents want their kids to read these books, and that the classroom is exactly the kind of place where they should be encountering the complicated ideas and emotions they generate."
See for yourself on Wednesday, November 14!
Banned Books series
Wednesday, Nov 14
Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation
2950 Washington Blvd., Fremont
Second Wednesday: November through May | <urn:uuid:46620e4c-060b-4e77-9536-2ce3166fa719> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tricityvoice.com/articlefiledisplay.php?issue=2012-10-30&file=BannedBooks+554TSP+++TCV.txt | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963447 | 690 | 1.953125 | 2 |
Under development since 1995, the military's goal is to install microprocessors incorporating gigaflops computer capability into "smart particles" the size of a single molecule.
Invisible except under the magnification of powerful microscopes, these nano-size radio-controlled chips are now being made out of mono-atomic gold particles. Networked together on the ground or assembling in the air, thousands of sensors will link into a single supercomputer no larger than a grain of sand.
Brought to you by the same military-corporate-banking complex that runs America's permanent wars, Raytheon Corp is already profiting from new weather warfare technologies. The world's fourth largest military weapons maker bought E-Systems in 1995, just one year after that military contractor bought APTI, holder of Bernard Eastlund's HAARP patents.
Raytheon also owns General Dynamics, the world's leading manufacturer of military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.
Raytheon also reports the weather for NOAA through its Advanced Weather Information Processing System. According to researcher Brendan Bombaci of Durango, Colorado, these Raytheon computers are directy linked with their UAV weather modification drones. Bombaci reports that NOAA paid Raytheon more than $300 million for this "currently active, 10-year project."
She goes on to describe the Joint Environmental Toolkit used by the U.S. Air Force in its Weather Weapons System. Just the thing for planet tinkerers.
For public consumption, nano-weather control jargon has been sanitized. "Microelectric Mechanical Sensors" (MMS) and "Global Environmental Mechanical Sensors" sound passively benign. But these ultra-tiny autonomous aerial vehicles are neither M&Ms nor gems. [Space.com Oct 31/05]
According to a U.S. military flier called Military Progress, "The green light has been given" to disperse swarms of wirelessly-networked nano-bots into the troposphere by remotely-controlled UAV drones for "global warming mitigation."
U.S. Army Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, as well as U.S. Air Force drones "are slated to deploy various payloads for weather warfare," Military Progress asserts. This dual mission - to slow global warming and use weather as a weapon - seems somewhat contradictory.
FIGHTING FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
U.S. Military Inc. is already in the climate change business big time. The single biggest burner of petroleum on this planet, its high-flying aircraft routinely rend Earth's protective radiation shielding with nitrous oxide emissions, while depositing megatons of additional carbon, sulfur and water particles directly into the stratosphere - where they will do three-times more damage than CO2 alone.
Go figure. A single F-15 burns around 1,580 gallons an hour. An Apache gunship gets about one-half mile to the gallon. The 1,838 Abrams tanks in Iraq achieve five gallons to the mile, while firing dusty radioactive shells that will continue destroying human DNA until our sun goes supernova.
A single non-nuclear carrier steaming in support burns 5,600 gallons of bunker fuel in an hour - or two million gallons of bunker oil every 14 days. Every four days, each carrier at sea takes on another half- million gallons of fuel to supply its jets.
The U.S. Air Force consumed nearly half of the Department of Defense's entire fuel supply in 2006, burning 2.6 billion gallons of jet fuel aloft.
While flying two to five-hour chemtrails missions to reflect incoming sunlight and slow global warming, a single KC-10 tanker will burn 2,050 gallons of highly toxic jet fuel every hour. The larger and older KC-135 Stratotanker carries 31,275 gallons of chemtrails and burns 2,650 gallons of fuel per hour.
The EPA says that each gallon of gasoline produces 19.4 pounds of CO2. Each gallon of diesel produces 22.2 pounds of CO2.
Total it up and routine operations by a military bigger than all other world militaries combined puts more than 48 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. Nearly half that total could be eliminated by ending the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. [TomDispatch.com June 16/07; huffingtonpost.com Oct 29/07]
Meanwhile, the 60 year quest for weather warfare continues. Though a drone cannot carry a heavy payload, more sub-microscopic weather modification particles can be crammed into a UAV Predator than all the chemtrail slurry packed into a tanker the size of a DC-10. T
According to the air force's own weather modification study, Owning The Weather 2025, clouds of these extremely teeny machines will be dropped into hurricanes and other weather systems to blend with storms and report real time weather data to each other and a larger sensor network.
Then these smart particles will be used to increase or decrease the storm's size and intensity - and "steer" it to "specific targets".
The air force report boasted that nano-chemtrails "will be able to adjust their size to optimal dimensions for a given seeding situation and make adjustments throughout the process." Instead of being sprayed into the air at the mercy of the winds aloft, as is the fate of normal chemtrails, nano versions will be able to "enhance their dispersal" by "adjusting their atmospheric buoyancy" and "communicating with each other" as they steer themselves in a single coordinated flock within their own artificial cloud.
Nano-chemtrails will even "change their temperature and polarity to improve their seeding effects," the air force noted. [Daily Texan July 30/07]
Rutgers University scientist J. Storrs Hall held out the military's hope that these new nano weather-warrior bots: "Interconnected, atmospherically buoyant, and having navigation capability in three dimensions - clouds of microscopic computer particles communicating with each other and with a control system, could provide tremendous capability." | <urn:uuid:c31539e5-014a-44f7-8f0b-5a60eaa20269> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fourwinds10.net/siterun_data/environment/humans/chemtrails/news.php?q=1321292737 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913668 | 1,245 | 2.453125 | 2 |
By Olivia Lennox
Bradley Jardis and Tommy Mozingo showed up at the Plymouth State University campus as promised, but were unarmed. In the days leading up to the event, the story got more complex.
Bradley Jardis, a New Hampshire activist, is planning a courageous act of civil disobedience at Plymouth State University on Friday, 9-Dec-2011. He has done meticulous research to show that a ban on guns and knives on campus is not only unconstitutional, but also violates the New Hampshire statutes.
New Hampshire activist Bradley Jardis is planning an act of civil disobedience at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire. The event is planned for 9am on Friday, 9-Dec, and is a protest of the University's ban on weapons on campus. Jardis issued a press release that states the appropriate New Hampshire law, and shows how Plymouth State University officials blatantly violated New Hampshire State statues with their ban on weapons.
Jardis is planning an event on the campus on Friday, 9-Dec-2012, where he and a friend will be carrying rifles on campus in violation of the rule and talking to students about the law and how their school is breaking it.
According to MegMcLain.com: | <urn:uuid:d34afacd-e26e-45d1-b59d-d755c1c4b237> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cdevolution.org/taxonomy/term/2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947193 | 255 | 1.914063 | 2 |
Program at nation's major ports tests ways to secure containers
'Nobody has found a replacement for a caveman with a big club who stays up all night by the fire. You still need that.'
'The port of seattle's Mick Shultz
Brand X Pictures
While Seattle sleeps, port officials in Puget Sound are on their second cup of double-jolt espresso, working to keep cargo safe in the nation's third-largest center for containerized imports and exports.
Homeland security officials agree that one of the weakest links in the transportation system is container shipments. Security gaps could leave the more than 7 million cargo containers that arrive in the United States each year vulnerable to being used illegally to transport drugs, people or weapons.
In an attempt to close this gap, last year the Homeland Security Department earmarked $58 million for Operation Safe Commerce, a pilot program to prompt research and development of technology to ensure the security of containers through the supply chain.
Three port areas, the nation's largest container load centers, were chosen for the project. The three Operation Safe Commerce ports'Seattle and Tacoma, Wash.; Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif.; and the Port Authority of New York-New Jersey'handle about 70 percent of the nation's containerized cargo.
Operation Safe Commerce isn't so much about the physical security of the ports, said Mick Shultz, spokesman for the Port of Seattle. It's about finding a way to protect the cargo while it's in transit.
'That's where the real ballgame is,' Shultz said. 'You can put a thousand soldiers around a marine terminal, but they can't help you if there is something deadly in the cargo,' he said. 'If you want to secure the economy, secure the supply chain.'Physical security needed
A wide range of information technologies will be tested in the nine projects that constitute the Washington portion of Operation Safe Commerce, Shultz said. 'But nobody yet has found a replacement for a caveman with a big club who stays up all night by the fire,' he said. 'You still need that.' Cargo security still involves a carefully monitored chain of physical processes, some controlled by punch card procedures.
The Puget Sound ports in Washington received $27.9 million for the pilot projects, said Jim Serrill, director of seaport security for the Port of Seattle. Some of the technologies being tested include intrusion detection, container sealing and Global Positioning System products, Serrill said.
Each of the nine projects has five or six workers on a team, said Barry Wilkins, director of global supply chain security practice for Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations of Parsippany, N.J., which is the project manager for the Puget Sound ports.
A team typically includes a shipper, an ocean carrier, a manufacturer, a terminal at the port of origin and a systems integrator, typically a major defense contractor, Wilkins said. These include Science Applications Internation Corp.; System Planning Corp. of Arlington, Va.; Maersk of Copenhagen, Denmark; BV Solutions Group Inc. of Overland Park, Kan.; Unisys Corp.; Innovative Logistics Techniques Inc. of McLean, Va.; and the Tioga Group of Philadelphia.
As the project unfolds, Operation Safe Commerce is revealing the importance of developing a fairly complex underlying infrastructure and communication system, Wilkins said.
For example, intrusion detection devices to detect light, radiation, and biological and chemical elements are usually put inside containers, Wilkins said. Electronic seals or other devices that can communicate with these detectors are usually on the outside of the containers.
Data from these devices is transmitted to a supply chain event management system. Workers respond to any anomalies reported through the system according to protocols that port officials have established, Wilkins said. 'If the alarm goes off, somebody has to do something about it.'Federal involvement
The supply chain event management system also has to communicate with the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection Bureau, Wilkins said. 'This system will be the glue that will put this all together,' he said.
Shultz said the projects should be completed by the end of August, and port officials are expected to submit a report to the Transportation Security Administration by the end of October.
The overriding goal of Operation Safe Commerce is to establish and determine best practices, policies and procedures for safe shipping that use technology, said Mike Wasem, communications manager of the Port of Tacoma. Another goal is to develop practices that can be adopted as the basis for an international standard for safe containerized shipping.
'Because shipping involves foreign trade partners, we can't tell them unilaterally 'This is how it's going to be,' ' he said.
Once in place, the standards will not only enhance security, but will increase the efficient flow of trade. 'It could mean better prices for Wal-Mart shoppers as well as safer cargo,' Wasem said.
Every day, thousands of boxes move across the Pacific. Operation Safe Commerce will examine 'every vulnerability, every step from the carpet weaver in Bangladesh to the warehouse in Chicago,' he said. Every point along the way is being prodded, poked and tested.
The amount of containerized shipping to and from the Pacific coast is expected to double within 12 years, Wasem said.GCN staff writer Mary Mosquera contributed to this story. | <urn:uuid:0584cb83-1a7f-4196-8ba0-84e6b4eb92c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gcn.com/Articles/2004/06/15/Program-at-nations-major-ports-tests-ways-to-secure-containers.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93671 | 1,096 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Fig. 3. Feedback loop in beach visitors.
Even if water quality improved and the recreational appeal of the beach greatly increased, this would not necessarily result in a greater number of beach users because the beach would already be close to its recreational carrying capacity, especially during the summer months. (Recreational carrying capacity is defined as the number of beach visitors that are physically able to occupy the beach, limited by behavioral norms such as the distance at which the visitors are prepared to sit from each other [De Ruyck et al. 1997]). Conversely, if the recreational appeal decreased due to adverse water quality conditions, the number of visitors would not necessarily decrease significantly. People prefer less crowded beaches; therefore, as the number of visitors decreases due to poor water quality conditions, other people would likely visit because the beach would become less crowded. There is a possible feedback from water quality of the beaches to increased visitors to the local bars and restaurants (indicated by a dotted line), but we did not include this in our model due to a lack of available data. | <urn:uuid:2d93e24b-1881-4a86-8bd3-8993cbafd150> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol16/iss4/art28/figure3.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970846 | 212 | 2.875 | 3 |
.- Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who died in 1991 and was excommunicated for ordaining four bishops in 1988 without the Pope’s permission, did indeed sign every document of Vatican II—the same documents he would later harshly criticize, according to a recent article in the Italian magazine Panorama.
The article entitled, “In the Secret Heart of the Vatican,” written by Ignazio Ingrao, states that among the documents kept at the Vatican Secret Archives “are those of the Second Vatican Council, which unmasked an historic falsehood spread by the traditionalists,” led today by schismatic Bishop Bernard Fellay, who several months ago rejected a proposal by the Holy See to return to full communion with the Catholic Church.
“Marcel Lefebvre, the archbishop who contested the conciliar reforms and was excommunicated for having ordained four bishops without the Pope’s permission, in reality signed the documents of Vatican II with his own hand, beginning with the constitution Gaudium et Spes, which he later would harshly criticize,” Ingrao wrote in his article.
“The signature of Lefebvre appears at the bottom of the Council documents,” said historian Piero Doria of the Vatican Secret Archives, who helped Ingrao in the research.
In exclusive statements to CNA, Ingrao explained that this was “the first time a photographer and journalist were allowed to photograph and describe” the vast area “where letters relative to the two thousand year history of the Church are conserved.”
Ingrao also told CNA, “In reality, historians and experts already knew that Lefebvre had signed the Council documents. But many people were not aware of this, and traditionalist propaganda spread the belief that Lefebvre had always opposed the documents. The original copies of the Vatican II documents show the contrary and for many this has come as a surprise.” | <urn:uuid:37c56f16-75e1-4d7a-bd28-97261288576c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/archbishop_lefebvre_signed_every_one_of_vatican_iis_documents/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975032 | 411 | 2.0625 | 2 |
by Ingrid Seger-Woznicki
I read with great interest the article written by Ruthe Friedner Matisky (February 2003 issue) and felt compelled to share my thoughts. The particular paragraph that stood out for me was:
Let’s talk about that stimulating environment. In Utopia a parent wouldn’t have to give this a thought. I’ve pictured Utopia for years – it’s an intentional community where the adults are all involved in meaningful pursuits and there are no housekeeping burdens because it’s all shared equally and there is always someone available to take care of the smaller children while the older children are able to pick and choose which adults to join in their meaningful work. There is never a deadline that prevents the adults from being anything but patient and charming with their children and there are no stupid television programs or mindless computer games to distract the children from the joy of real community. The environment in Utopia just naturally gives the kids much food for thought to stimulate their brain cells. The kids don’t have to be shuttled around to experience nature or to encounter people making music or playing chess or doing karate because its all around them.
The concept of a Utopian education makes me wonder how I am moulding my own son, because I can not at any point in time forget that I live in a Western, suburban, contemporary society where individuals life-continuums do not necessarily cross but bounce off each other. Utopia for me includes having a tribe/commune/extended family support – living in an interdependent culture. This lack of an interdependent culture is noticeable when I observe the play tactics of children in playgrounds; it amazes me how often children play as separate entities, irrespective of the number of children that happen to be at the playground at the same time. The exception is that if the child has a friend with them, then naturally these ‘friends’ play together and collectively they are their own little “island”, excluding other children from entering their world. This seems to hold true for all ages, even my own.
This means that if I want to make things happen for me, and for my child. If I want to pursue a “pure” form of education, the natural format, the one where my child will blossom true to his nature, I have to create this environment of interdependence, and in creating it, in manipulating it, I keep wondering how much I am merely creating a situation where my son will not fit in to his own culture. For there are many things that my own culture expects from me that I do not enjoy, that I in fact dislike but am forced to do, perform or contribute because this is what makes me a good citizen, a valuable member of society, and this is the basis of a form of stability in my own society, enabling all of us to live as peaceably together as much as possible. Take for instance, the company that my husband and I run. It is successful and allows me to be at home with my son. I keep the books for our business, I complete the BAS statements, I am a qualified Accountant – I also dislike very much doing that side of the business. In fact, the reality is, all I really want to do is to have the luxury of busying my mind with parenting issues, my various hobbies, my natural interests and to balance this with being a wife and woman. Having said that, I am finding that I have NO balance and because I do not live in Utopia, my role as a mother is all-consuming, and because I have chosen to home-school and try to provide the sort of natural upbringing that I see in my mind’s eye, I am finding that reality clashes with my visions and my own personal needs and growth as a person.
Every now and then, I feel resentful towards my own culture. It feels as though there is an army of negative vibes externally, beyond my control, forcing me towards conforming, by guiding my child to mainstream schooling, letting him experience the culture in which he will inevitably live, work and make friends. I fear these subliminal vibes and I also fear that I am moulding my child in such a way as to alienate him from his own culture, and yet the alternative does not make me feel comfortable because I know the alternative is soul destroying, and so I conclude (when I am feeling rational) that my role as a mother is to facilitate the moulding process and help him to see reality and to accept it without taking it personally and yet still feel at ease with being his own individual, embracing his own values, his own uniqueness.
Nevertheless, I also feel, as does Ruthe, “I think I’m starting to understand why not everybody does this”. Today at 36, I feel predominantly a mother and with it I wear the various hats: nurturer, home educator, nurse, comforter, psychologist, facilitator, etc., and sometimes I forget who I am as a person, an individual. I lose myself in my own role as mother, and the mental pictures that I have built as to what it means to be a mother. This all-consuming role as a mother means that I feel as though I am constantly juggling everybody’s needs, including my own, and I know this is because I do not live in Utopia, Other times, I feel as though I am a selfish person, incapable of giving to the biologically natural extent that I was meant to. Then there are times when I feel that I am a product of my own culture, my own upbringing and thus when it comes down to it I think that maybe I am subconsciously sabotaging my own visions in response to my dysfunctional instincts. Finally, there are times when I am too tired to feel guilty or inadequate and I give myself a pat on the back, just for trying, for trying to see things clearly. But my moods swing wildly, depending on various factors, namely my energy levels, my focused mind, and my ability to extend myself to the task at hand.
I do not live in a truly interdependent culture and as a result, I feel strongly, deep within the silence of my own heart that I am really not meeting anyone’s needs and all I am doing, in pragmatic terms, is living in a dream world where I just keep juggling until one day one of those balls in mid air will fall and reveal me to be “not enough”. And to top it off, because I do not live in Utopia, an interdependent culture, and because I am in many ways an “island” living against the grain of my own Western, suburban, contemporary culture, I am not totally convinced of the value for our family of unschooling or natural learning. It is not that I do not think it works; on the contrary, it feels instinctively correct, BUT I do not live in a culture which respects natural learning.
So, for instance, my child demonstrates no interest in the sciences, but has a natural knowledge about animals and has an intrinsic knowledge about how to ‘doctor’ them (which is a skill that my grandmother possessed, and yet she had very little formal education). Does this mean that my son can aim at practising professionally as a veterinary surgeon? Will he be able to open up his own clinic? I also wonder whether I am conveying to him that he does not have any responsibility towards unpleasant tasks. I often ponder whether I am giving him a twisted message about our reality because inevitably he will have to cross the various bridges and study the diverse subjects at a university or college, regardless of his feelings, thoughts or beliefs about these subjects. His feelings and thoughts about the process of institutionalised learning, the structural makeup, the various exams, etc., will also be unimportant if he wants to pursue, for instance, the veterinary profession. Do I agree with the education system? No, but to be frank, neither do I disagree. I do not have a simple and satisfactory answer whereby I feel completely satisfied with any one road, any one educational process where its goal is to educate a mass group of individuals at one and the same time.
Additionally, living in a non-interdependent culture means that often things just do not happen smoothly. At times my son does not want to contribute to or participate in the world that I live in, he does not want to clean up after himself, he does not ‘feel’ instinctively the point of team work, of learning from one’s elders, from those who have something special and unique to share. Thus much of my energy seems to be spent on trying to convey, persuade, cajole, him into seeing the point of teamwork and team effort, and to appreciate the gifts in other individuals. I find this tiring. Then there are days when he wants to be a fully participating team member, but these desires depend on his mood, his frame of mind, and not because he sees it as a normal way of life, the way that life should be. This is often followed by days when I think that I expect far too much from my son, BUT my own contrary view is that I have seen other cultures (outside of the Western culture) in action where children the same age as my child instinctively understand the point of the team process and these children intuitively appreciate the gifts in others. So, my heart either swells with annoyance or pride towards my own child. This, I know, would not happen in Utopia and I am forced to try to communicate clearly to my son my boundaries, the way I view being respected and appreciated and it instinctively feels absurd. Accordingly, I realize all of this is part and parcel of my son’s education. In Utopia, I would not need to communicate so clearly such matters because there would not be a need, the interdependent culture, the forces within the culture, the implicit cultural expectations, would communicate it for me.
I often hear, “Mama play with me”, and I know that within the framework of play, there is learning, there is much opportunity to explore his natural world and even go beyond it. Yet, this forces me often to be child-centred and what I am endeavouring to teach, or at least to convey subtly, is that our house, our family culture is relationship-centred; no one of us is alone important, but we are all important. For me, this is what being a family is about, what being interdependent is about. If I am successful at communicating this remarkable message, I somehow have persuaded myself to think that everything else should fall into place.
So, back to natural learning – in its Western suburban contemporary format, it requires me to be child-centred where my antennae are constantly on the alert. I personally find this incredibly draining and very intense. It does not feel natural to have such tightly wound attention centred around my child’s natural interests. The culture that I live in prevents this naturally occurring, my time seems consumed by reality, and by adult duties and for that reason alone I am veering towards structured learning, and simply being aware for the time being of my child’s interests and pacing myself accordingly in natural education.
Having said all that, this inevitably leads me to ask myself why I am home-schooling. My reasons are mainly due to the fact that I do not believe that there is an average child, an average person, and I believe that as individuals we learn various subjects not in a linear fashion, but more haphazardly, gaining knowledge spasmodically, our thought processes moving to and fro in a sort of chaotic “filing system” until our brain makes concepts, ideas, connections fit together. Consequently, the individual may seem ‘slow’ in some subjects and ‘advanced’ in others at a certain point in time. Thus, comparing individuals, calculating and manufacturing averages gives erroneous conclusions not only about the individual but also about the genuine comprehension of the subject matter at hand. My goal, therefore, is to see the academic individual in my child. This includes giving him the autonomy to feel at ease with his unique educational pace and to help him to view education as a continuous, life-long journey that one never quite masters nor stops enjoying. Hence, what one does not fully understand today is merely a wonderful opportunity, a satisfying challenge for tomorrow.
I also feel strongly that the education system as it stands today feeds anti-social behaviour, as the typical school environment, although meant to be stimulating, is boring intellectually and often an insult to intelligence, essentially because it tries to shape groups of individuals to conform to a standard that is impractical. Instead of fostering the individual, it spurns individuality. Prior to deciding to home-school, I looked at alternative schools of various kinds, and I noticed that despite their best intentions and philosophies, children felt a pull to conform, to blend in. One school even boasted how many of its students became successful naturopaths. I support alternative medicine wholeheartedly, but it felt uncanny and strange to hear that this particular school influenced so many individuals towards a singular path. This is the reality, however, and I do not feel I can evade cultural and unwelcome influences, the natural peer pressures that dominate all individuals to a lesser or greater degree. These cultural influences have a domino effect on the social skills displayed by the child or group of children, which can be observed by how they treat the individual: the culture either embraces unity or division, resulting in any one child being left out, teased, bullied, rejected or on the other hand compassionately treated, included, respected. Even if I lived within a truly interdependent culture, that arrangement would still promote a unique culture and thus a pull of certain values, expectations, tacit messages as to how to behave, how to fit in, and I also feel this is right and good. Otherwise, how else are we to find our fit in society?
For this reason, I feel in my repertoire of educational duties the necessity to develop in my son social skills that our family culture both admires and practises, enabling him to sift through the array of sub-family cultures/values, and find his social fit with mental adroitness and confidence and yet still be able to walk his own distinctive path.
When I am absolutely honest with myself, my core reason for home-schooling is that I want to manage the influences on my son, I want him to adopt our family culture, our family values and beliefs, our visions, and have a solid foundation, with strong and deep roots, before being thrown into the big wide Western contemporary world where there are so many diverse sub-cultures, values, beliefs and visions. I want him to be able to grow as an individual without having to sift out information when he does not possess the maturity to do so. I feel a deep need to protect him from being bombarded by the soup- mixture of cultures, beliefs and assortments of values which I strongly feel is the soul-destroying factor in our society, our school system, and our community. Large communities of people need to share a culture which embraces similar values and beliefs in order to stand firm, to connect emotionally and mentally, or to my mind they lose their own foundation, their roots and the individuals lose their sense of self. Some would declare that I do not trust my son’s sensibilities, or common sense. My reply to that is that I try very hard not to burden my son with too many responsibilities prematurely. I believe as humans we were meant to move away from our base, our home in micro-steps Hence, a baby’s only responsibility is to clearly communicate its needs. A toddler’s responsibility is to communicate his or her growing sense of individuality. A child’s responsibility is to progressively seek independence. It is my view that children and young adults are forced to make life decisions and enter the big arena prematurely and are given minimum skills or guidance, and are given an ineffectual foundation, with shallow roots. This leaves these same individuals with a weak base to work from, and ultimately leaves them vulnerable. I want my son to have a foundation and roots. I want him to feel intuitively strong. I want him to feel his strength from deep within himself, and thus be able to make life decisions based on self-awareness, and self-knowledge.
I honestly believe I can educate my own child as well as, if not better than any school system, in such a way that he will be able to make life choices that fit our Western contemporary societal expectations, and I feel that he will be emotionally and mentally prepared with a solid basis and thus become a stronger individual, and better equipped to face life challenges, and thus a functional human with the social skills to understand how to live being true to himself and at the same time be able to juggle his various roles in life with more aplomb than I ever will. If I achieve this for my son, I will consider myself a successful home-schooler, a successful mother and ultimately somewhere in that complex role I will feel complete as a woman and wife. For, after all, to parent is to be able to pro-create for the sake of posterity and in that is another conclusion; as a parent I was meant to be an educator and the most influential person in my child’s life, so that I nurture, guide, facilitate, protect and ultimately mould the human that grew within me, binding us indefinitely, ensuring that within OUR family the life-continuums cross most emphatically, giving solidarity to my family, its roots now and for the future.
The words a father speaks to his children in the privacy of the home are not overheard at the time, but as in whispering galleries, they will be clearly heard at the end and by posterity.
~Jean Paul Richter~
Ingrid Seger-Woznicki is a ‘Domestic manager’. Before her child was born she taught as a Lecturer in Business Ethics and Accounting at University. She lives in Mitcham, Victoria, Australia, with her husband, infant and child. She is home-schooling her child and is finding that home-schooling, like the human spirit, is a life-long education for all, and ever-changing. | <urn:uuid:082c4d69-9eac-40ed-a517-bfeffb0f491a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.home-ed.vic.edu.au/2003/02/06/unschooling-is-my-job-or-is-it/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972712 | 3,801 | 1.890625 | 2 |
[Evilsigntist] combined an old cornet with an old PS2 guitar hero controller to produce the Trumpet Hero. The fragile looking conglomeration really brings a smile to our faces. Just make sure the instrument has already seen the end of its days before drilling holes to mount the various parts.
In the image above you can see that the three valve buttons have been painted to correspond to frets on the original guitar controller. The orange and blue frets are positioned for the left hand to operate. There seems to be a couple of different version because there is a diagram showing a mute in the bell that can be twisted for whammy bar input, but that’s not shown here. Strumming is accomplished by blowing through the mouthpiece, but as you can see in the video after the break, no buzzing is necessary.
Using actual instruments as game inputs is a lot of fun. We always think back to the flute and drum set controllers for Rock Band. | <urn:uuid:381ec1af-0c4a-42c0-be9b-3b35f9954129> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hackaday.com/2012/03/29/trumpet-hero/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=39eb77acf0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955079 | 200 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Titanic Framed Photograph with Coal Fragment - Signed by Last Survivor Millvina Dean
SKU ID #431064
To Order by Phone Call 1-800-933-6249
- Additional Details
- Ages: 8 and up
- Dimensions: 13" L x 16" W x 1" H
- Weight: 3 lbs
Among the survivors of the Titanic sinking was nine week old Millvina Dean, her mother and brother; they would survive on Lifeboat 10. The three surviving members of the Dean family went on to live long healthy lives; Dean's mother passed away at age 96, her brother passed at age 80, and Millvina, who was last living survivor of the Titanic, passed away on May 31, 2009 at the age of 97. This photograph of the famous Titanic ship is personally signed by Millvina.
This photograph is framed with a piece of coal that was recovered by the RMS Titanic during the 1994 Titanic Research and Recovery Expedition. This is the only item from the actual Titanic wreckage that can be sold to the general public.
Limited Edition of 1912, the year of the tragedy. Certificate of Authenticity included. | <urn:uuid:4cdbbe36-4a96-48b8-9a54-2900bbc95b72> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://shop.history.com/detail.php?p=431064&v=history_collectibles&pagemax=all&mobile_browser=on | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947079 | 242 | 1.554688 | 2 |
In 1963, LeRoi Jones, a twenty-eight-year-old poet from Newark, New Jersey, sat down and wrote a play. Titled “Dutchman,” Jones’s one-act work was more or less finished twenty-four hours after its inception. In his 1984 autobiography, the author (who, in 1967, prompted by Malcolm X’s assassination two years earlier, abandoned his “slave name” to become Amiri Baraka, or Blessed Prince) wrote, “I can see now that the dramatic form began to interest me because I wanted to go ‘beyond’ poetry. I wanted some kind of action literature.” The “action literature” that he created would likely have made the great Thespis yelp. In “Dutchman,” he not only picked up some of the themes that Strindberg had explored in “Miss Julie,” his hallucinatory 1888 examination of class and gender, but added that other great taboo: race.
Reading Baraka’s script today is like watching an expert butcher at his bloody chopping block. One hears a terrible kind of music as the playwright slices through his characters’ flesh, bones, and cartilage. Lula and Clay, the white woman and the black man who are the play’s protagonists, screech and wail at each other in ghastly speeches, which recall the bruising hooks and repetitions that Baraka’s contemporary Ornette Coleman laid down on his 1961 disk, “Free Jazz.” Take, for instance, Lula’s characterization of Clay, shortly after they meet:
You look like you been trying to grow a beard. That’s exactly what you look like. You look like you live in New Jersey with your parents and are trying to grow a beard. That’s what. You look like you’ve been reading Chinese poetry and drinking lukewarm sugarless tea. (Laughs, uncrossing and recrossing her legs) You look like death eating a soda cracker.
Her analysis of Clay’s pretensions is actually solicited by Clay: half-jokingly, he asks her to describe him as she sees him. (We are also meant to understand that Baraka was indicting his own bohemianism here.) Clay is complicit in his sparring partner’s disgust. Would she express her contempt so gleefully if it weren’t obvious to her—she is an animal who can instantly sniff out fear—that her whiteness and femininity matter more to Clay than his own “lukewarm” manhood?
These are some of the thoughts that cross one’s mind at the beginning of Bill Duke’s thrilling revival of the show, at the Cherry Lane, where it first opened on March 24, 1964, and created a sensation. The play is still a sensation. Upon entering the small theatre, the audience immediately feels as if it were in a “No Exit” situation. Projected across two panels blocking the stage are images from the New York subway system. The houselights flash and then darken like the lights of a subway car. A tall elderly black conductor (Paul Benjamin) enters the theatre and walks down the aisle with a Bojangles-like strut and shuffle. Pushing the two panels aside and disappearing from view, he leaves us in a subway car with Clay (Dulé Hill), a handsome black man in a dark suit who sits reading a book. (The appropriately skeletal and realistic set is by Troy Hourie. Drew Levy and Tony Smolenski’s sound design—we hear trains screeching and steel wheels rumbling in tunnels throughout the play—contributes to the eerie atmosphere.) Clay’s train pulls into a station. On the platform just outside, a thirtyish white woman (the phenomenal Jennifer Mudge) walks by, spies Clay, and smiles knowingly. She enters the car slowly, casually, her hips and breasts moving to and fro in her light summer dress. Her long gold-streaked brown hair is a tangle of Medusa curls.
Clay pretends not to notice Lula as she bends over, rummages through her satchel, and pulls out an apple. But pretty soon there is no way for him to avoid looking at this urban Eve. Nor can Lula resist the desire that she assumes she inspires. Sitting a little too close to Clay, she exchanges a few pleasantries before the dance of death begins.
LULA: Weren’t you staring at me through the window?
CLAY (wheeling around and very much stiffened): What?
LULA: Weren’t you staring at me through the window? At the last stop?
CLAY: Staring at you? What do you mean?
LULA: Don’t you know what staring means?
CLAY: I saw you through the window . . . if that’s what it means. I don’t know if I was staring. Seems to me you were staring through the window at me.
LULA: I was. But only after I’d turned around and saw you staring through that window down in the vicinity of my ass and legs.
Clay’s stiffening in response to Lula’s accusations indicates the level of fear that this country’s historically murderous response to miscegenation can provoke in a black man. (Eldridge Cleaver described the soul-lacerating effects of that history four years later, in his memoir, “Soul on Ice”: “The white man forbade me to have the white woman on pain of death. . . . Men die for freedom but black men die for white women, who are the symbol of freedom. . . . Until the day I can have a white woman in my bed . . . I will still be a slave.”) Lula can claim her desire, but Clay cannot acknowledge his. Lula has whiteness—which is to say, power—on her side. “I lie a lot,” she tells Clay offhandedly. “It helps me control the world.” What Clay has, and must protect, is his relative invisibility. One gets the sense that all he wants is to get by. | <urn:uuid:7aaae206-dd91-4f9a-966b-575731603033> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2007/02/05/070205crth_theatre_als | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966177 | 1,338 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Posted by Henry on August 06, 2003
In Reply to: A FINE LINE. posted by Marcus on August 06, 2003
: Need to find the origin of this saying. I have looked in every ref book with no luck, it's used constantly but has no ref?
From the archives;
Hi, I'm new here. Can you tell the meaning of "walk a fine line"? I encountered this in a newspaper this morning, and I couldn't find it in the dictionary. Thanks.
It means to steer a risky and difficult course between two policies... to be so near the edge of one that you risk falling into another less desirable one. All of which is a pretty unclear definition, so maybe an example might help.
"With his current policy approach towards Iraq, President Bush walks a fine line between the interests of national security and those of warmongering."
The metaphor's from tightrope walking, I'd guess.
A fine line is a very thin thread, silk or cotton perhaps. | <urn:uuid:0ac101d0-715d-42e2-be17-aa482ba87530> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/23/messages/146.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981577 | 209 | 2.6875 | 3 |
National Day of Prayer Participants Call for Wisdom and Unity
The 61st annual National Day of Prayer saw participants focus on emphasizing their belief that the United States of America is a nation founded under God, and pray that President Barack Obama and other political leaders would use wisdom in their roles.
Shirley Dobson, chair of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, led the celebrations in Washington, D.C. Her husband, James Dobson, an evangelical Christian author and founder of Focus on the Family (FOTF), was absent from celebrations for the first time in over 20 years due to illness.
Dobson said during her remarks that the tradition of prayer is a "legacy handed down from our founding fathers." The United States is a faithful, praying nation, she added, pointing to results of a recent Pew study that said 96 percent of Americans believe in God, and that over 60 percent pray.
Over a dozen speakers, mostly evangelical Christians, religious leaders, as well as members of the judiciary, service members and diplomats, prayed for the unity of the nation in light of its economic challanges and for the government -- with special emphasis given to the office of the president -- to be able to make wise decisions.
No representative of the White House was present to pray for President Obama, as it was pointed out, but several church leaders filled in, notably Bishop Harry Jackson of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Md., who emphasized that one should pray for the executive branch "without wrath and doubting."
"Every day I get a little angry about what's going on in America" but God says people should not get angry, Jackson said, in one of several references to national unity. Lord Jesus is the "king" of America, he added. But the country's leaders are making the decisions for the entire nation, and it is a Christian's duty to pray for them and their wisdom, he suggested.
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"We have to pray not only for the president himself and the values he projects," but also the entire administration, Jackson added.
"We're in a nation that has Christianity as primary religion," but a value system that is not a general value system, he added, referring to the differences between Americans on issues like marriage and abortion. Jackson, like a few other speakers, suggested that although there are ideological differences in the nation, it is important to make it clear that the United States is a Christian nation that must aim for unity in Jesus Christ and in Christian values.
"I pray that we see continued unity in this Congress," said Vonette Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ at the University of California Los Angeles, who prayed for members of Congress to be what "God wants them to be" and for congressmen to be "able to argue back and forth without anger" and to be able to find answers to the economic problems and unity to be able to find solutions to those problems.
Travis Ryan, a singer and worship leader from California's Saddleback Church, led participants during the event's worship period.
The 2012 observance of the National Day of Prayer, led under the prayer theme from Psalm 33:12, "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord," saw an estimated 40,000 official prayer events in all 50 states with more than 300 in Texas alone.
Other notable speakers who offered prayers for "unity under God" included Bobby Little, executive director of Christian Embassy in Washington, D.C.; Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a popular spiritual leader and political commentator; H.E. Sheila Siwela, permanent representative of the Republic of Zambia to the United States; Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (R - AL); Judge Reggie Walton, U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia; Glenn Sheppard, president of International Prayer Ministries; Rep. Randy Forbes (R - VA); and Dr. David Jeremiah, senior pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church, Calif.
READ: THE CHRISTIAN POST LIVE BLOG OF THE WASHINGTON D.C. NATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER OBSERVANCE | <urn:uuid:cd1b6ff7-c218-42fb-b0ee-6a47981832da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://m.christianpost.com/news/national-day-of-prayer-participants-call-for-wisdom-and-unity-74311/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95956 | 844 | 2.0625 | 2 |
As the Boring Billion closes, things really happen. Geochemical evidence shows that we begin losing sulfidic waters about 800 million years ago. At the same time, paleontology tells us that eukaryotes are diversifying and expanding over large areas of the ocean. Molecular evidence suggests that animals start to differentiate around then.
There are now major fluctuations in the carbon cycle never before seen. We have multiple glaciations, of which at least two seem to have pretty much covered the world. And we have oxygen rise, so that we come to have a world much more like the world that we know. The 300 million years after the end of the Boring Billion are probably the most eventful 300 million years in our planet’s history.
So you would say that calling it the Boring Billion sells this period short?
Very much so. One reason is that understanding the interval’s stability may be more of a challenge than understanding the change we see both before and after. And we know it wasn’t that evolution stopped. In fact, there’s reason to believe that all of the properties of cell biology that made complex life possible in the next geologic era were put in place here: cytoskeletons that allow eukaryotic cells to change shape, and cell polarity that allows cells to send a molecular message to one side of the cell but not the other, and to interact with nearby cells. The molecular circuitry and cross talk that allow complex organisms like us to exist today all took root in the so-called Boring Billion.
You recently showed that the oceans had an abundance of
sulfide and a dearth of oxygen during a later period as well, around 500 million years ago. Evolution slowed down then, too. Is this a regular pattern?
Yes, but it is less and less frequent. If you look at the last 65 million years, in the so-called Cenozoic era, I don’t think there are any examples of globally widespread subsurface oxygen depletion. In the previous era, the Mesozoic, from 65 to 250 million years ago, there were six or seven such oceanic anoxic events. They were short, sharp shocks. Going back even farther, in the Proterozoic, these kinds of environments were everywhere. Over the course of time, it goes from being ubiquitous to repetitive to rare to absent—more evidence that we live at an unusual time in the history of Earth.
You are a member of the Mars Rover science team. What parallels do you see between the geologic history of Earth and Mars?
We can apply what we’ve learned about studying ancient rocks on Earth to Mars. NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers have enabled us to examine 3.5- to 4-billion-year-old sedimentary rocks on Mars, in much the same way that we study ancient strata on Earth. We’ve learned that liquid water was present on the Martian surface during this interval, but also that its chemical makeup and short duration would have challenged any known life-forms. Mars was wetter very early in its history, but the probability that it was ever a blue planet like the Earth is, I think, remote. The more we learn about Mars, the more it seems to me a planet that’s very different from Earth.
So you don’t think we’ll find signs of life on Mars?
It’s not impossible, but I wouldn’t bet large sums of money on it. | <urn:uuid:7337a472-db55-4db5-8c4d-07a74e8a858c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://discovermagazine.com/2011/evolution/23-what-happened-earth-boring-billion-years | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962476 | 732 | 3.828125 | 4 |
The United States maintains several hundred embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions around the world, many of them located in extremely dangerous places and vulnerable to attack. On September 11th of this year the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya was victimized by just such an attack. It started at 10:00pm local time in Benghazi (4:00pm in Washington D.C.) and left four Americans dead including the U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Oddly, one of the first statements made about the attacks came that same evening (despite a pledge not to campaign on the anniversary of 9/11) from Mitt Romney. Romney was, needless to say, critical of President Obama’s response to the developing crisis, though the President himself would make no statement regarding Benghazi until the following morning.
On the surface, this may not seem like such a big deal. Politicians running for office will leap at any opportunity to criticize or embarrass their opponents. But there is something extraordinarily cynical about Romney’s effort to discredit the President. Romney’s hasty “foreign policy” remarks, formulated before anyone really knew what had happened, came from a man with virtually no foreign policy experience at all, unless spending time in France as a Mormon Missionary as a way of avoiding service in the Vietnam War, a war championed by Romney, counts as foreign-service. In Romney world such things are possible. In fact, Romney’s own campaign cited those draft-exempted years (the only religious exemption recognized by the U.S. government) and the fact that he traveled a lot on business as exactly that – talk about a thin resume! And if that was not bad enough, we heard even more about Romney’s foreign policy strategy in his now infamous, secretly recorded “47%” remarks.
On that tape we hear Romney discussing President Carter’s failed Iranian hostage mission, and how much political hay was made of that. Romney reassures his donors that “if something of that nature presents itself, I will work to find a way to take advantage of the opportunity.” In other words, I will exploit any opportunity to politicize any overseas event that might cast a shadow over President Obama’s considerable foreign policy success. Lacking any credentials or meaningful experience myself, I will hop up to the nearest microphone, at the earliest and even uninformed moment and demonstrate to the world my foreign policy chops. And that is exactly what Mitt Romney did shortly before midnight on September 11th.
In typical American political and media-frenzied style Romney has actually gained traction on the issue. How is it though that this singular, small, albeit tragic event has become the primary focus of our debates and discussion when the much broader, relevant and positive resolution of the Libyan Revolution is virtually ignored? Wasn’t it genuine foreign policy skill that enabled President Obama to work with NATO and regional powers on the sensitive matter of deposing an Arab dictator? Wasn’t it his maturity, deftness and experience that enabled America to contribute to the fight for Libyan freedom in a measured fashion with relatively little cost to our Treasury and no cost in American lives? Doesn’t all of that matter much more than a nuanced evaluation of the crisis response, and the words that were or were not spoken regarding the sneak attack in Benghazi? Or is it just too irresistible for us to play the “gotcha” game, indulge the picking of minor but irritating political scabs, and forget almost entirely and meaningfully about all that is truly important about our politics and our politicians.
In coping with the real-world crisis in Libya, President Obama was revealed for what his is – a steady and competent leader capable of recognizing and defending American interests while also doing the right thing (unless the continued control of Libya by the dictator Muammar Gaddafi is considered the “right” thing, and some on the Right who care not a whit about other people’s freedom might feel exactly that way). In jumping up to that mic and jumping ahead of the Benghazi incident, Mitt Romney was also revealed for what he is – an opportunist, desperate to be President, or as Woody Allen might put it, a haircut definitely posing as a man.” | <urn:uuid:a3028a63-ce52-4d3f-b35a-790c72743b82> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://highlandpark-ca.patch.com/groups/robert-defulgentiiss-blog/p/bp--romney-the-foreign-affairs-poser-ebce9e0c | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969701 | 871 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Known officially since 1949 as the town of Boykin, the community of Gee's Bend is situated in Wilcox County in the west Alabama Black Belt. Today, approximately 750 people, mostly descendants of enslaved African Americans, live in the community on the banks of the Alabama River. Although beset by the same poverty and economic underdevelopment that characterize other sections of western Alabama, Gee's Bend has demonstrated a persistent cultural wealth in the vibrant folk art of its quilt makers, whose work has gained national attention and critical acclaim.
Early inhabitants of Alabama tended to create communities along the many waterways of the state, so Gee's Bend is not unique as a river community. Joseph Gee, a large landowner from Halifax County in North Carolina, settled in 1816 in a bend of the Alabama River across from the future town of Camden and southwest of the site where Selma would be founded three years later. He brought 18 enslaved blacks with him and established a cotton plantation. When he died, he left 47 slaves and his estate to two of his nephews, Sterling and Charles Gee. In 1845 the Gee brothers sold the plantation to a relative, Mark H. Pettway. The Pettway family name remains prominent in Wilcox County. After emancipation, freed blacks who stayed on at the plantation worked as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The Pettway family held the land until 1895, when they sold it to Adrian Sebastian Van de Graaff, an attorney from Tuscaloosa who operated the plantation as an absentee landowner.
The 1930s was a period of significant change in Gee's Bend. A local merchant who had extended credit to the residents of the Bend died, and his family demanded immediate payment of all debts owed to him. Families watched as all their food, animals, tools and seed were taken from them. Members of the community might have perished but for rations distributed by the Red Cross and a decision by the Van de Graaff family to waive rents. In 1937 the Van de Graaff family sold their land to the federal government, and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) established Gee's Bend Farms Inc., a pilot project of a cooperative-based program designed to sustain the inhabitants. The government built houses, subdivided the property, and sold tracts of land to the local families, for the first time giving the African American population control of the land they worked. During this period, the community also became the subject of several FSA-sponsored photographers, including Marion Post Wolcott and Arthur Rothstein.
In the later years of the Depression, the advent of widespread use of mechanization in agriculture brought additional hardships to small farmers and caused the first major exodus from Gee's Bend. Many residents, however, stayed on their land because it belonged to them. In 1949 a U.S. post office was established in Gee's Bend, and the federal government imposed the name Boykin on the community, against the wishes of most of the residents. Then in 1962, a dam was constructed on the Alabama River, flooding thousands of acres of the most fertile land in the Gee's Bend community. During the civil rights era, Wilcox County officials terminated ferry service across the Alabama River, necessitating a two-hour drive to Camden, the county seat. At the time, not a single black person was registered to vote in Wilcox County, and the cessation of ferry service was one of many attempts to keep it that way.
Since the 1960s, Gee's Bend has gained significant national attention from the quilts produced by women in the community, as well as those produced by the Freedom Quilting Bee in neighboring Alberta. Photographer John Reese and writer/storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham visited Gee's Bend in 1980-81 as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities project to document the community. In the late 1990s, a folk-art collector from Atlanta, Georgia, after seeing a photograph made by Roland Freeman of a quilt draped over a woodpile, went to the area and bought hundreds of quilts. The pieces have been heralded as brilliant pieces of modern art. A collection of quilts from Gee's Bend was shown at the Houston Museum of Art before traveling to the Whitney Museum in New York City, where it again received high acclaim. The exhibit also proved to be controversial, however, and initiated serious academic discussions on the definition of art.
The descendants of slaves and sharecroppers still populate Gee's Bend today, but the lack of jobs and infrastructure has burdened the community with the same crippling poverty found across much of the Black Belt.
According to the 2010 Census, the population of the Boykin community was 275. Of that total, 95.3 percent identified themselves as African American, 4.0 percent as white, and 0.7 percent as Hispanic. Median household income in 1999 was $24,250, and per capita income was $6,048.
The workforce in present-day Boykin is divided among the following occupational categories:
· Manufacturing (35.9 percent)
· Educational services, and health care and social assistance (38.0 percent)
· Finance, insurance, and real estate, rental, and leasing (26.1 percent)
There are no schools in the Boykin Community. Education is overseen by the Wilcox County Public Schools.
County Road 29 runs east-west through Boykin. There is a ferry service between Boykin and the city of Camden on the south side of the Alabama River.
Events and Places of Interest
Roland Cooper State Park lies across the Alabama River to the southeast of the community.
Jackson, Harvey H., III. Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.
Keurten, Bruce, and John DiJulio. From Fields of Promise. VHS. Auburn, Ala.: Auburn Television, 1993.
Maharidge, Dale, and Michael Williamson. And Their Children after Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.
Windham, Kathryn Tucker. Twice Blessed. Montgomery, Ala.: Black Belt, 1996.
Published March 9, 2007
Last updated February 28, 2013 | <urn:uuid:1e416276-d178-4c33-866a-ba2dc9c59a3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1094 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960934 | 1,309 | 3.078125 | 3 |
May 28, 2009 (01:05 PM EDT)
Intel Tools Driving Multi-Core Chip Development
Read the Original Article at InformationWeek
Intel this week said it has combined its parallel programming design tool, Composer, with an Inspector tool and an Amplifier tool to produce Intel Parallel Studio for C and C++ programmers.
Intel Parallel Studio is intended to work with Microsoft Visual Studio for development of Windows applications intended to run on servers with multicore CPUs. Four-core CPUs are currently in production, with six and eight core lines expected before the end of the year from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
With Intel Parallel Studio, Windows application programmers will be able to generate applications that run in parallel segments, or different processes running simultaneously, on Intel multicore chips. Each core is capable of processing two threads in Intel's latest Xeon 5500 chips, so a two-way, quad-core server (eight cores total) could process 16 threads or 16 separate parts of a single program concurrently, if it's been designed for parallel processing.
Such techniques promise to bring about a large increase in speed of execution, said James Reinders, director of the software developer products business at Intel.
"Applications are only just starting to appear that are optimized to make best use of these [multicore] systems," he said in an announcement yesterday of Parallel Studio's availability.
Parallel Composer provides C and C++ compilers, code libraries, and an extension to the Visual Studio debugger to allow it to debug parallelized applications. Composer also provides an Intel API, OpenMP, through which a program may connect to the parallel processing capabilities built into Intel chips.
Parallel Inspector provides analysis of newly written code, checking for threading and memory errors. It uses dynamic instrumentation so code may be reviewed and tested as its written, without test builds or complete system recompiles being run. The inspections are done inside Visual Studio's development environment.
Parallel Amplifier is an intuitive performance analyzer -- it doesn't need to know the details of the chip architecture. It can identify bottlenecks in threaded Windows applications and allow further tuning of the application.
Continuing to use tools "designed for single-core processor systems will not yield good results," Reinders warned.
Intel is one of the vendors working with the U.S. Air Force to convert an Air Force Space Command Project from a mainframe to a Xeon processor environment. Other vendors involved in the project include Rogue Wave and Mitre, a federally funded research center.
The Intel parallel processing toolset was announced at Intel's Swindon, United Kingdom, development lab Wednesday. It's available through Intel resellers listed on Intel's site. Parallel Studio is priced at $799. Each tool is available as a standalone product for $399. | <urn:uuid:fc8b42a6-21f4-43c9-906e-ae7c45308087> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.techweb.com/news/217700703/intel-tools-driving-multi-core-chip-development.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.918322 | 571 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Cutaneous Kaposi's Sarcoma Tumor
Here's a taste of what TheBody.com has to offer on this topic:
Get the Facts
Ask the Experts
The Robert James Frascino AIDS FoundationHello English Lad,Can you contract KS by kissing? No, not if your immune system is healthy.The KS story is a bit complicated. I'll reprint some additional information below. Basically, in order to acquire KS, a cofactor is required. That... Read more »
Harvard Medical SchoolThe skin lesions appear most often on the lower extremities, face (especially the nose), mouth, and genitalia, but they can also appear in many other places. The lesions are often oblong, but can appear in many other shapes. The lesions can appear... Read more »
Connect With Others
Posted by Anonymous, 2 RepliesAnyone out there who has KS or has knowledge about it?
I need to communicate with you if you are that person. Please respond-I would be so very grateful. Thanks.
Read more »
Posted by anxious66, 2 Repliesi have read that kaposi sarcoma can present itself at any stage of HIV infection, this is IF i was infected which everyone i'v spoken to is convinced i havent.
risk was unprotected oral msm me giving for about a minute, no ejaculation, possibly... Read more »
Posted by Sprite1, 1 ReplyHow quickly does Kaposi's Sarcoma manifest? In addition to what I believe are new moles, I also have a couple of flat red spots on my shoulder now. Read more »
Guides for People With HIV | <urn:uuid:a2d6425d-00d6-491a-95e0-edc08a0df718> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thebody.com/h/cutaneous-kaposis-sarcoma-tumor.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954811 | 342 | 1.625 | 2 |
A child with measles has been taken to hospital and five other cases of the virus have been confirmed after infected passengers arrived in Auckland on a flight from Brisbane two weeks ago.
More than 100 further cases are being investigated by the Auckland Regional Public Health Service.
The service was told last week of four infected passengers on Emirates Flight EK434, which arrived in Auckland at 5.30pm on January 11.
Medical Officer of Health Dr Richard Hoskins said now two further cases of the highly contagious virus had been confirmed and others were likely.
All the confirmed cases had come from a large family group flying together on the flight from Brisbane.
"All of the confirmed cases are young people aged 5 through to 16 years old, and one of those was hospitalised because it was so severe.
"They have almost certainly caught measles on the plane from the infectious cases. Measles is very easily transmitted from one person to another through the air, for example, while walking past the passengers with measles, or while waiting in the airport gate lounge."
Due to measles' highly contagious nature, he said, anyone who had been in contact with the infected people might now be infected themselves.
The Public Health Service is trying to contact anyone who has come into contact with the people who have the confirmed cases of measles.
"It is extremely contagious. If you even breathe in the air of someone who has it and exhales near you, you could catch it," Dr Hoskins said.
Once diagnosed the decision would be made on what the treatment options were, including possible isolation.
Dr Hoskins said measles was very serious and 30 per cent of people who caught it developed complications.
The only way to be immune was to keep up to date with immunisations or to have had measles before, he said.
He said if anyone caught the disease from the flight they would have already started showing the symptoms of high fever, a runny nose, red eyes, a cough, spots in the mouth or a rash.
Anyone with those symptoms should see their doctor or call Healthline on 0800 611 116 as soon as possible.By Amelia Wade Email Amelia | <urn:uuid:7e60ad9f-d235-4f1d-9d31-a8d676beea9e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10702283 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987369 | 438 | 1.625 | 2 |
But the atheist’s statement was not simply about the Nobel-winning poet. Had I retorted with the information that I have a wonderful relationship with my tarot card reader, with whom I have sessions every three months or so, or that I know the house placement and sign of Mars in my horoscope and that I have had entire conversations complaining about that placement and sign, or that I am a lapsed atheist who has strayed back into belief and my belief is actually very important to me, his sadness would have spread to all of humanity and our silly, superstitious ways....And yet the atheists keep on, telling us that we don’t have to believe in God. It maybe never occurred to them that perhaps we want to....Informing neo-Druids of their falsified lineage is probably not going to do much to sway them, anymore than an advertisement on a bus proclaiming, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” — like the recent campaign that ran on London buses — is not going to do much to sway me. I’ll still be reading my Maud Gonne. In a time of great grief, having lost her son at the age of 1, right around the time Parnell died, she decided to use her will to fight against the current sad circumstances in her life. She began to research how she might reincarnate her dead son back onto the earthly plane. After a night of ritualistic sex on his grave (Yeats reports in his Memoirs, disapprovingly), a daughter was born nine months later. Maud was convinced that Iseult, as she named her daughter, contained the soul of her lost son. Those needs — for solace, for change, for order, for a little magic and irrationality — are not met with the ideals of the Enlightenment, and pretending those needs don’t even exist is not the way to win converts.
Would it surprise you if I said that I have no problem with people falling short of a rigorous standard of perfect rationality? For example, I pretty much agree with what Alan Watts said here:
Indeed, an exponent of the I Ching might give us quite a tough argument about the relative merits of our ways for making important decisions. We feel that we decide rationally because we base our decisions on collecting relevant data about the matter in hand. We do not depend on such irrelevant trifles as the chance tossing of a coin, or the patterns of tea leaves or cracks in a shell. Yet he might ask whether we really know what information is relevant, since our plans are constantly upset by utterly unforeseen incidents. He might ask how we know when we have collected enough information upon which to decide. If we were rigorously "scientific" in collecting information for our decisions, it would take us so long to collect the data that the time for action would have passed long before the work had been completed. So how do we know when we have enough? Does the information itself tell us that it is enough? On the contrary, we go through the motions of gathering the necessary information in a rational way, and then, because of a hunch, or just because we are tired of thinking, or because the time has come to decide, we act. He would ask whether this is not depending just as much on "irrelevant trifles" as if we had been casting the yarrow stalks.In other words, the "rigorously scientific" method of predicting the future can be applied only in special cases - where prompt action is not urgent, where the factors involved are largely mechanical, or in circumstances so restricted as to be trivial. By far the greater part of our important decisions depend on "hunch" - in other words, upon the "peripheral vision" of the mind. Thus the reliability of our decisions rests ultimately upon our ability to "feel" the situation, upon the degree to which this "peripheral vision" has been developed.Every exponent of the I Ching knows this. He knows that the book itself does not contain an exact science, but rather a useful tool which will work for him if he has a good "intuition", or if, as he would say, he is "in the Tao". Thus one does not consult the oracle without proper preparation, without going quietly and meticulously through the prescribed rituals in order to bring the mind into that calm state where the intuition is felt to act more effectively.
I think it may have been John Gray who used the metaphor of conscious awareness being like a penlight being used to scan a darkened warehouse full of information. Point taken. There should always be consideration granted to the "peripheral vision of the mind". There may be something to your intuition whether or not you have a coherent articulation of it. Much of what grabs our attention or motivates our action never rises to the level of being officially noticed or labeled. But this strawman atheism that says we're not allowed to enjoy music, art, literature, love or a feeling of the sublime in nature without being able to reduce it to its constituent atoms and define it in terms of chemical reactions is a little tiring. Who actually claims this? Would someone please point out the one brainy, obnoxious, newly-minted teenage atheist who delights in taking an empirical hammer to everyone's metaphysical fine china so we can all join together in solidarity and go kick the supercilious shit out of him and be done with it already?
You know, I don't think any of my offline friends are atheists. Most are what I call spiritual-not-religious. Some are into alternative healing and therapies, some are buffet-style spiritual dabblers, and some are what I think of as quantum mystics. Most of them have subtly imputed arrogance to me if they haven't outright accused me of it. I'm fairly sure they think my worldview is bleak, sad, empty, or lacking in joy, imagination and creativity. If anyone ought to be complaining about slings and arrows, you'd think it would be people like me.
But I love 'em all the same. I don't take our differences there any more seriously than I would if they were fans of different fútbol teams. It's something fun to argue about, but once the contest is over, there are more important things in life, and more significant contexts in which our beliefs may manifest themselves besides that of an official statement of dogma and principles. Why is my confidence unruffled by being the odd one out? Why am I not so defensive and thin-skinned about what they think of my lack of metaphysical beliefs?
I'm starting to wonder if it's because I have a sharper distinction drawn between objective truth and aesthetic truth. Objective truth about the world is pretty bleak and disheartening. You have to lead a sheltered life or a willfully blinkered one to avoid facing up to the unimaginable suffering that has always permeated it; the countless lives of people just like you, with just as much a feeling of importance and a desire to live, who died suddenly, terribly and anonymously without having fulfilled anything like what we think of as purpose. Aesthetic truth - at least in the sense that I define it - ameliorates that to a large degree, allows us to get on with our lives as if they matter. The optimistic prospects for Liverpool Football Club next season, the writings of my favorite authors, the new music on the horizon, the love of my girlfriend; they all give my life meaning in a way that couldn't necessarily be justified to anyone skeptical of them. None of them offset the fact that my ultimate destination is a crematorium, but they sure make the journey there a lot more pleasant. You either get it or you don't. It doesn't diminish my profound enjoyment of Nietzsche's writing if a friend thinks he's too bombastic, shrill and offensive. Why should it diminish their woo-woo beliefs if I point out that, strictly speaking, your personality is not conditioned by the position of stars in the sky at the time of your birth, that the nurse in the delivery room exerts more of a gravitational pull on you than the distant planets, and that paying careful attention to the specific details and circumstances of your individual life might perhaps serve you better than scrutinizing playing cards associated with a grab-bag of vague generalizations about human nature?
At the heart of it, most of us don't think much of ignorance, willful delusion or cowardice in others and certainly don't want to be thought of as possessing any of those traits ourselves. The problem seems to be, it's hard to claim honest belief in most religions or spiritual beliefs without harboring at least one of them. It would be one thing if people were clear on the fact that they're only using tarot cards, say, as a convenient means of enabling lateral thinking, but if they haven't clearly distinguished between "the way the world is" and "the way I feel and act within it", the hurt feelings are probably going to continue. | <urn:uuid:212651e4-850f-4887-9d21-7cacb5870701> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://theonetrueblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/fortune-tellers-make-killing-nowadays.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970112 | 1,855 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Problem no. 8: Drug-resistant infections
Cubist Pharmaceuticals is building a killer arsenal to fight today's ultra-resistant infections.
SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) -- The background: Bacterial infections that were once easily treated with antibiotics like penicillin have gained frightening resistance during the past few decades - despite the mistaken assurance by the U.S. surgeon general in 1969 that "the war on infectious disease has been won."
The war has started all over again, and right now the bugs are winning. In 1974 just 2 percent of the most common form of staph infections found in hospitals were resistant to the common antibiotic methicillin; today more than 60 percent are impervious to it. This year nearly 2 million Americans will get bacterial infections while in a hospital; 90,000 of them will die.
The solution: The key to battling these new bugs is developing new classes of antibiotics. But they're not coming from Big Pharma: Just 13 antibiotics have reached the market since 1998, after drug companies began scaling back antibiotics in favor of blockbuster drugs for everything from depression to high cholesterol.
And of the new antibiotics, only one - Cubicin, from Massachusetts-based biotech Cubist Pharmaceuticals - has been a true winner. Cubicin hit the market in 2003 as a treatment for serious skin infections caused by bacteria that invade during surgery. In 2006 it was approved for bloodstream infections from drug-resistant staph contracted through catheters, surgeries, or IV drug use.
The payoff: Cubist, which went public in 1996, has brought in more than $320 million in Cubicin sales so far, making it the most successful new intravenous antibiotic ever. Its third-quarter sales hit $50 million, a 65 percent jump from 2005, and annual revenue is expected to reach $200 million by 2008. But only now is it paying off. "We spent $490 million to get Cubicin into the market," says CEO Mike Bonney. "And in the third quarter, we turned our first profit quarter since the company was founded."
Bonney already has two new anti-infective uses for Cubicin in clinical trials (see correction below). Other earlier-stage drugs target lung infection and an increasingly life-threatening form of hospital-acquired diarrhea. Because of its smaller size (409 employees), Bonney says, the company can earn a tidy profit on drugs that bring in $200 million to $300 million a year, although he anticipates a much bigger market with each.
The opportunity: Current estimates place the annual cost of treating drug-resistant infections at more than $10 billion. As ultra-resistant strains continue to rise, so will demand - both for treatments and for new ways of preventing the spread of bacteria before it takes root in a person's body. A handful of biotechs, including Basilea, Oscient, and Paratek, are already chasing new classes of antibiotics but have yet to get federal approval for their top prospects.
The rules of the game apply as much to startups as to Big Pharma: It takes five to eight years to discover a drug candidate and another five to eight years to get a green light from the FDA. "Cubist scientists anticipated the drug-resistant staph infections we are seeing explode today," Bonney says. "You need to be incredibly prescient in this field and understand what is going to be the problem 10 to 16 years out. And you need patient investors."
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Cubist Pharmaceuticals has two new drugs awaiting FDA approval. As the story now states, Cubist has two new uses for its existing drug, Cubicin, in clincial trials.To send a letter to the editor about this story, click here. | <urn:uuid:bb114fa5-1550-4ffc-a0a4-f2615b304145> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/24/magazines/business2/Prob8_DrugResistantInfections.biz2/index.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954944 | 776 | 1.828125 | 2 |
DJ Kid Koala performs "Hanky Panky" in the KPCC studio on Wednesday, Oct. 31. He will perform at the Echoplex on Thursday as part of his 12 Bit Blues Vinyl Vaudeville Tour.
Musician Eric San — better known as DJ Kid Koala — is one of the most influential and well known-members of the scratch DJ scene. San has composed songs with the band The Gorillaz, performed with Jack Johnson, and has performed at Preservation Hall in New Orleans, typically a more traditional venue.
San talks with us about his brand new album “12 Bit Blues” which is a combination of old jazz songs, original music and beats all mixed live.
First can you explain a little about the technique of the scratch DJ?
“If I had to break it down to its most simple form, all scratching is a combination of rubbing the sound back and forth, and cutting the sound on and off with the volume lever essentially. With that combination of things you can create many different rhythms and pitches that is what I have been practicing for the past 20 years. Anyone can do it, the first scratch you learn is the baby scratch. The volume is up and you just rub the record back and forth.”
Are your turntables different than just a normal at home turntable?
“Yes, these are professional directive turntables. They don’t have the belt underneath them they have a very strong magnet and motor so that even if you are scratching and putting a lot of weight on the record you are not slowing down the platter. If someone was trying to do this at home with their normal turn tables it would sound different... but my first maybe year and a half of practicing was off flexi records.”
Where did the scratch DJ scene really come from?
“Grand Wizard Theodore is credited as the originator of the scratch in the 70s, so then he was practicing this back spinning technique so he had his headphones on one ear like we do right now. The story was his mom was calling him for dinner and he didn’t want to lose is place, so he just kept rubbing the record back and forth to keep his place and while he was hearing this he was listening to his mom in one ear and the sound in the other ear. The next show he did he integrated that sound, the crowd went wild, and that was that.”
One of the older songs you have done people will probably recognize, “Moon River,” what made you decide to do that song?
“My mother has always been my number-one fan, but her comprehension of what I do technically or musically soars over her head. At one point a few years ago, all the kids have moved away she said, 'It's your father and my 30th wedding anniversary and we wanna bring the family all together.' So I booked a show, just so someone would fly me to Hawaii, knowing that the whole family would be there. I knew she would be at that show, so I said I’m gonna do something special for her, so I picked “Moon River” because it was her favorite song.”
How do you deal with people who say the song is fine as it, and ask why does this have to happen?
“It doesn’t. I think in terms of my personal education on an instrument it’s sort of the challenge of seeing if I can find a way to play turn tables and in that case finding a way to bend tones and notes on records to follow a chord cycle or to emote something.”
What is special about the limited edition CD cases for your new album “12 Bit Blues?”
“The first round of the album is packaged with a science kit. A cardboard gramophone that you can fold up, you fold up the ampliphone and the base, and it comes with a little four-inch flexi record, all you need to do is get a pin or a needle and use that as the stylus and you basically have a little cardboard gramophone.”
You kick off your tour tonight, what can people expect?
Well the '12 Bit Blues,' the equipment is vintage, a lot of it older than me, I felt that to do the live show instead of going with the high tech light show that would soar over people's head I wanted to think of an old school way to present this, oldest technology I can think of, which was dancing girls and puppets. A kind of vaudeville show, a variety show that sort of I can play some of this music but there is a lot of spectacle around it.”
You can see Eric San, DJ Kid Koala, tonight at the first show of his album tour. The concert is at the Echoplex in Echo Park. | <urn:uuid:927ca436-7e01-4628-8b34-c91e62c96c5c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2012/11/01/29123/kid-koala-12-bit-blues-music-scratch-DJ/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980377 | 1,018 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Final Version of Core Standards Assuages Some Concerns
Expectations of students in math and English outlined in document
The final set of common academic standards was released last week, capping months of closed-door work to write them and months more to revise them with feedback from state education officials, teachers’ unions, and other education interest groups.
The project is an attempt to address the uneven patchwork of standards that results in differing expectations among schools, districts, and states and leaves many students unprepared for work or college.
Organizers of the Common Core State Standards Initiative announced the final documents at a press event at a Georgia high school on June 2. A high-profile list of guests, including governors and education commissioners, spoke in support of the standards.
Calling the standards “second to none in the world,” Steven L. Paine, the schools superintendent in West Virginia, told the crowd that the standards will help state education chiefs “collectively provide” an education worthy of all students.
The final document outlines what experts decided are the knowledge and skills students should have in mathematics and English/language arts. Convened last year by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the writing and feedback panels included university scholars, state curriculum specialists, and teachers; the education group Achieve; testing organizations such as the College Board and act Inc.; and curriculum-design companies such as America’s Choice.
Drafts evolved as they were circulated among state departments of education, teachers’ unions, and subject-matter groups, and then revised. The panels’ work still was criticized in some quarters, however, for affording too little chance for general public input, or for producing expectations that were too rigorous or not rigorous enough.
The first official public draft, released in March, drew more than 10,000 comments on a website set up by the NGA and the CCSSO. The final document incorporates that feedback, officials said, as well as final rounds of input from states and specialized groups.
William McCallum, one of the lead writers of the math standards, said the writers tried to make the final version more usable, with better guidance for teachers, and a clearer structure. They also tried to make the math standards more “assessible,” or easier to test, and they smoothed out the grade-to-grade progressions, moving some concepts to earlier or later grades, he added.
The writers also created a better progression toward Algebra 1 in grades 5 through 7, according to Mr. McCallum, a professor of mathematics at the University of Arizona. States that want to require students to take Algebra 1 in 8th grade can do so “with confidence they will be prepared,” he said.
The final version of the English/language arts standards places more emphasis on reading and writing of technical materials, such as government documents, said Sue Pimentel, a lead writer for that subject. That team of writers also added world literature in grades 9 and 10, and made it easier to determine the complexity of texts, said Ms. Pimentel, the co-founder of StandardsWork, a Washington-based consulting group.
Changes were also made to reflect the concerns of the early-childhood community, so the standards now note the importance of play as a method of learning and of educating the whole child, and early-grades expectations better reflect variations among young children in skills development, she said.
Away From Washington
The choice of location for the event and the list of attendees carried political messages that the organizers of the common-standards initiative hoped to send as states decide whether to adopt them.
Peachtree Ridge High School in Suwanee, Ga., is 600 miles from Washington, a fact aimed at critics who see the common-standards movement as a federal intrusion into state education decisions. That perception was fueled by rhetorical and monetary support from the federal government. President Barack Obama backs the idea, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top grant competition, financed with economic-stimulus money, favors states that adopt the standards.
In addition, key groups that spearheaded the initiative are all based in Washington. Those groups have repeatedly pointed out, though, that the common-standards work began after numerous state requests for such a project, and that the document has been shaped by the states’ review and feedback.
The list of speakers at the event—state schools chiefs, governors of both major parties, leaders of parent and civil rights groups, a corporate executive, an urban superintendent, and top officials of the two national teachers’ unions—conveyed a message of widespread buy-in, from the grassroots to the upper echelons.
The standards are an example of “people pulling together” regardless of political party and geography “to do what’s in our national interest,” Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware, a Democrat, said via video conference.
“We governors believe education is the rightful responsibility of our states,” Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, a Republican, said from the podium.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Lily Eskelsen, the vice president of the National Education Association, were also on hand to endorse the standards. Ms. Weingarten pointed out the role that teachers had in shaping the standards and called the AFT an “unabashed supporter.”But the standards, while “extraordinarily important,” are only one piece of the puzzle, Ms. Weingarten said, adding that the real work begins with implementation.
Leah Luke, Wisconsin’s 2010 teacher of the year, praised the standards as a potent teaching tool. They are strong because “they model the best classroom practice of the end in mind,’ ” she said as the standards-writers smiled and nodded. “There is a logical progression of skills from the endpoint backwards down to kindergarten,” she said.
Ms. Luke, an 18-year veteran who has taught both English and Spanish, said she was also excited that the language skills are no longer the province of English teachers alone, but are to be shared with teachers of science, social studies, and other subjects.
Urban superintendents also voiced their support.
Andrés Alonso, the chief executive officer of the Baltimore school system, spoke on behalf of the 55 urban superintendents who signed a statement of support through the Council of the Great City Schools. The city superintendents, he said, think the work is “not simply about access [to quality], it’s not simply about equity, ... it’s fundamentally about excellence. Excellence has been denied too long to too many of our students.”
The four major math societies, including the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, issued a statement in support of the standards. In an interview, W. Gary Martin, a professor of mathematics education at Auburn University who reviewed the standards on behalf of the NCTM, called it “notable” that the standards had evolved to the point that all four groups could endorse them. In particular, they had been concerned about reasoning and mathematical thinking, but he said they saw substantial improvement in that area.
Still, acceptance of the standards is not universal. R. James Milgram, one of a handful of the 29 member core-standards validation committee who refused to sign off on the document, said the math standards still don’t measure up to those in California, Minnesota, Massachusetts or Indiana.
“What they are is far better than the vast majority of standards in this country, but they do not match up well with international expectations, and they are not quite as good as the best of the state standards,” Mr. Milgram, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Stanford University, said in a phone interview.
Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia signed pledges of support to help develop the common-core initiative, but that did not bind them to embrace the resulting document. Kentucky, Hawaii, Maryland, and West Virginia adopted the standards tentatively, based on earlier drafts.
Two more states, North Carolina and Wisconsin, adopted them in final form. Now that the document is final—and with Race to the Top requiring state action by Aug. 2—dozens more states will face adoption decisions in the next couple of months.
Vol. 29, Issue 33, Pages 18-19
Access selected articles, e-newsletters and more! | <urn:uuid:c386bac4-14fa-4057-b6f5-f51c1f3e6204> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/09/33common-2.h29.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955924 | 1,778 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Seed Certification & Plant Protection Centre
| Main | Services | Programme | Staff | Organogram | News & Events |
The mandate of SCPPC is to ensure plant protection, seed quality and the management and conservation of Plant Genetic Resources in Sri Lanka. In fulfilling this mandate the activities of the center are planned with the objective of ensuring high good quality of locally produced and imported seeds and planting materials to specified expected standards, evaluating, characterizing and conserving plant genetic resources, conducting seed technology research to produce and maintain good quality of seeds and planting materials, conducting National Plant Protection activities and ensuring the strict implementation of the Plant Protection and Pesticide Acts. In addition the center also provides training for the production of high quality seeds and planting materials
In order to achieve these objectives the responsibilities are entrusted to seven units which function under the administration of this center.
Seed Certification and Plant Protection Centre (SCPPC) of the department of Agriculture was formed in 1990 with the multi disciplinary mandate to provide a wide array of services to achieve growth excellence in Agriculture.
The centre encompasses seven units under its administration, namely
The major functions and the responsibility of the SCPPC and its major units are
Seed Certification Service.
The activities of the SCS is focused towards promoting development of the seed industry by assuring the quality of locally produced and imported seeds and planting material locally produced and imported seeds and planting materials available to the farmers. Distineness, Uniformity and Stability (DUS) testing for candidate varieties for release and post control testing of local and imported seeds are important activities of SCS. Its activities are implemented via 28 regional units including 4 seed testing laboratories and 4 post control farm field.
Plant Protection Service.
It is entrusted with the responsibility of promoting pest control method in Agriculture crops that are not only environmentally sound but also economically viable and acceptable to the farmer. These broad objectives are expected to be reached trough development and implementation of integrated pest management strategies. Control of pest and disease outbreaks, seed fumigation and management of some noxious aquatic weeds and other invasive species in agricultural habitat are also mandatory functions assigned on PPS.
Plant Genetic Resource centre.
Efforts are made by PGRC to conserve plant genetic resources of the country, and to promote their use for the benefit of present and future generations. To achieve this centre explores, collects, introduces, conservers, evaluates and documents the genetic diversity of food crops and their related species.
Office of registrar of pesticide
The main function of this office is the enforcement of the control of pesticide act No. 33 of 1980; its amendments and regulations. The act provides provision to control import packing labeling storage formulation transport sale and use of pesticides trough registration of individual products. The office r of the registrar of pesticides has the national responsibility to ensure that only the high quality pesticides those are least hazardous to human health and environment enter the market in Sri Lanka.
National plant quarantine service.
The main responsibility of the NPQS katunayake is to facilitate the imports and exports of plants and plant products for the development of agriculture and related industries in the country. Issuing of phytosanitory certificates, inspection and treatment of imports and exports of plants and plant products. Dissemination of knowledge on all aspects of plant quarantine via training and awareness programmes for interested groups are the main activities of the NPQS.
Plant Quarantine Unit, Air port.
Plant Quarantine Unit, Sea port.
Plant Quarantine Unit, Gannoruwa.
The SCPPC provides several significant services required to sustain agricultural productivity such as quality control of seeds, plant protection, control of pesticides, plant genetic resources conservation and plant quarantine. In order to ensure a safe and viable agriculture industry and preserving its prosperity in the future, regulatory aspects of agricultural activities have received due recognition in the programmes of the SCPPC. This is primarily achieved through legislation pertaining to plant protection control of pesticides and seed certification.
The Plant Protection Act No. 35 of 1999 in Sri Lanka make provision against the introduction and spread of any organism harmful to or destruction of plants and for the sanitation of plants in Sri Lanka. The Plant Quarantine Service fulfils the Quarantine and Phytosantary requirements of imported and exported agriculture commodities such as plants and plant products and seeds with the expansion of free market economy, influx of agricultural commodities has increased by leaps and bounds. Facilitation of International movement of pest free plants and plants products play a vital role in the development of agriculture and related industries in the country, which in turn enhances the national economy.
The control of pesticides Act. No. 33 of 1980, which regulates the import, storage, transport, marketing and use of pesticide helps minimize hazard on public health and the environment by their wide usage in agriculture. In addition, with a view to reduce the use of pesticides, the concept of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) was actively promoted and is now considered a great success in rice cultivation.
Moreover, as a signatory to the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) and Sanitary and Phytosantary Agreement of World Trade Organization (SPS/WTO), Sri Lanka is obliged to ensure the successful implementation of the terms of these agreements. In this context, Seed Certification & Plant Protection Center (SCPPC) serves as the National Plant Protection Organization (NPPO) of Sri Lanka to comply with the conditions in these agreements.
Functions of SCPPC
© 2006 Department of Agriculture, Sri Lanka (DOASL), All rights reserved-Developed in association with ICTA. | <urn:uuid:ecb3aa4a-f964-4d14-95f5-3e5415698235> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.agridept.gov.lk/index.php/ta/institutes/290 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919135 | 1,138 | 2.390625 | 2 |
In a large basin, combine 100 parts water with 1 part glacier-formed rock dust. Mix over millions of years and allow to settle until human kind inhabits South Island, New Zealand. This simple recipe has created a beauty so rare and a landscape so striking it deflates your lungs within moments of arriving at its shores.
Lake Tekapo is an idyllic alpine spot at the foot of Mt. John, on the South Island of New Zealand. The color of the lake's water truly sets it apart from other lakes. It's a beautiful turquoise blue created by rock flour from surrounding glaciers. The glaciers in the headwaters of Lake Tekapo grind rock into a fine dust on their journey down towards the lake. This rock flour is suspended in the water and causes the magnificent turquoise.
The amazing color of the lake set against the backdrop of snow-capped peaks and wild flowers makes Lake Tekapo extraordinarily dramatic and a must see on a trip to New Zealand. | <urn:uuid:9b5e8185-bd11-43dd-b62a-44b9b7d9dc57> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lake-tekapo-south-island-new-zealand | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932095 | 202 | 2.15625 | 2 |
What You Need to Bring
- Bring the completed patient questionnaire packet with you to your appointment.
- Any medications that you are currently taking. No medications are given or supplied by the Sleep Center.
- Pack a small bag with personal items to comfortably prepare for sleep and that you will need in the morning. (Personal toiletries, book, snack and a change of clothes, especially if you need to shower and go directly to work.)
- It is important to bring something comfortable to sleep in. Pajamas, nightgown, sleeping shorts and a t-shirt are suitable. You do not want anything that will make you hot and sweaty.
Guidelines for Your Visit
- No acrylic fingernails or polish on your fingernails.
- Shower and shave the day of your study. Your hair will need to be free of excessive sprays, gels and creams.
- Do not use lotions or creams on your body or face.
- Do not forget your reading glasses to be able to complete paperwork.
- Try to get a good night’s sleep the night before.
- No naps the day of your sleep study.
- Do not consume any caffeine after noon the day of your study.
What to Expect
Once you arrive at the Sleep Solutions Center, you will be shown to your private bedroom. Each room is equipped to monitor and record your breathing, heart rate, oxygen levels and brain wave activity during sleep.
A camera is used to observe your sleep throughout the night and provides useful diagnostic information. An intercom is on at all times to allow you to speak to the technologist in an adjacent monitoring room. | <urn:uuid:17bf2a04-9db5-4aa4-acb6-174e4a281d16> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lexmed.com/medical-services/sleep-solutions/your-visit.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901213 | 345 | 1.625 | 2 |
Creating a Haven for Hummingbirds
Use feeders and flowers to attract these avian pollinators to your garden
ON A HUMID MORNING IN OCTOBER, a bird bander named Rusty Trump reaches into a pull-string trap and lifts out a calliope hummingbird. This species, which summers in western mountain meadows and forests, normally migrates to Mexico in the fall. But this young male has been captured in a backyard in Augusta, Georgia.
Two other eastward migrating calliopes spent last Thanksgiving in a park on the northern tip of Manhattan. Green-breasted mangos—a tropical species of hummer—have been spotted at feeders in North Carolina and Texas. In central Colorado, master bander Brenda Wiard is trapping significantly greater numbers of black-chinned hummingbirds just outside of their normal range. And Anna's hummingbirds are showing up as far north as British Columbia.
What is going on in the world of hummingbirds? Some biologists believe global warming may be a factor, but no one knows exactly why these changes are occurring. Many hummingbird experts do agree, however, that there's never been a better time to try to entice one or more of the 21 species of hummers that range in this country into your backyard. Besides the possibility of helping provide information to researchers, you can also help these pioneering birds survive with feeders and flowers.
Start this fall by hanging a feeder. "They don't stop hummingbirds from migrating," says Bob Sargent, a master bander who maintains 55 feeders on his ten acres just north of Birmingham, Alabama. "Hummingbirds are programmed to move south when the days get shorter," he adds, "not when the food supply begins to dwindle." According to Sargent, a fall feeder will even help lingering hummers put on extra fat, which fuels them during their migration.
To prepare sugar water for a feeder, mix one part sugar to four parts boiling water. Never use honey or artificial sweetener. Both can cause a fungal infection in the birds. And Sargent says that the use of red dye is completely unnecessary and may be harmful to the hummers. You can, however, make extra sugar water and store the excess in the refrigerator for as long as two weeks.
Change the feeders sugar water frequently, even if no birds are visiting the site. The "nectar" can spoil quickly, sending a hummer away no matter how hungry it is. Replace the solution every five to seven days during the cooler months, and as often as every two days when summer temperatures remain above 90 degrees F. Rinse the feeder thoroughly—without soap—before refilling. Clean it once a month with a very mild, diluted bleach solution.
Another thing you can do to attract hummingbirds—indeed, perhaps the most important—is to add flowering plants to your yard. Sargent, who along with his wife Martha runs the nonprofit Hummer/Bird Study Group, points out that hummingbird habitat is being lost to development all across the United States and Canada. Backyard gardeners can help replace some of this disappearing habitat by creating hummingbird gardens.
When you begin to choose plants, think about when they will bloom. One of the keys to luring hummers to your yard, and keeping them coming, is to set out annuals and perennials with different blooming periods. By doing so, you'll be certain that there will be a steady supply of flowers in your yard from early spring until well into the fall. In warmer climates, some plants that bloom during the winter months will provide the birds with a year-round source of nectar.
You should also consider the color and shape of the flowers. Almost anything red and tubular is a favorite, according to Wiard. Pink and orange are also desirable, followed in descending order of preference by purple, blue and yellow blossoms. As a rule, the hummingbirds choose flowers that contain a lot of nectar and just a little fragrance.
Some excellent plants are native honeysuckles such as red honeysuckle and twinberry; most varieties of sages or salvia; many types of columbine including crimson, Canadian and western; and perennial penstemons such as scarlet bugler or firebird. Other good bets are bee balm or wild bergamot, cardinal flower, trumpet creeper, ocotillo, lupines, scarlet monkey flower and fire pink. Check with a local native plant society or your local nursery to determine which of these native plants will grow best in your part of the country. Natives require a lot less care compared to nonnative plants, and the birds generally evolved with them as well. What's more, native plants thrive without having to rely on pesticides and other potentially dangerous chemicals.
"Insecticides can be very harmful to hummingbirds," says Allen Chartier, a hummingbird researcher who bands the birds in Michigan and Ontario. "Most people think they feed exclusively on nectar, but this is not true. Hummingbirds feed their young almost entirely on small insects and only a little nectar." Also, the adults need regular doses of protein from mosquitoes, spiders, thrips, gnats and other arthropods to round out their diet. Some hummer aficionados even go so far as to hang an overripe melon or banana near one of their feeders to attract extra insects.
A constant source of water will complete your hummingbird haven. If you have a birdbath, place a couple of flat rocks in it to give the tiny birds an opportunity to bathe. Or add a drip fountain attachment, available at most garden centers. Running water seems to be a magnet to hummers—they will even fly through the spray of a sprinkler.
Once hummingbirds discover your garden, they apparently will remember it from year to year. Sometimes they even reappear on the same day. Bob Sargent has caught the same migrating rubythroat at the same feeder on the same day for four years in a row. "Hummingbirds seem to have a beautiful clock that runs," he explains, "putting them exactly where they're supposed to be on exactly the right day." With a little work on your part and a little luck, that spot could even be your backyard. | <urn:uuid:2045cd61-5586-48f9-9fa0-471e28832624> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/National-Wildlife/Gardening/Archives/2002/Creating-a-Haven-for-Hummingbirds.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944601 | 1,307 | 3.34375 | 3 |
India: Seminar on "Empowering Citizens to Combat Corruption"
December 9, 2010 - December 9, 2010
On the occasion of the International Anti-Corruption Day, the Central Vigilance Commission, India in association with the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) and UNODC is organising a seminar on the theme "Empowering Citizens to Combat Corruption" on 9th December 2010 at Vigyan Bhavan, New Delhi. The seminar aims to bring together stakeholders from the Government, private sector, civil society, academic institutions and the media to deliberate on proactive strategies to address corruption in all spheres of life.
The Seminar will commence with the inaugural session, which will also the include the launch of a CVC Portal 'VIGEYE', aimed at empowering citizens to actively participate in addressing corrupt practices in the delivery of public services and execution of public funded projects. It will be followed by three panel discussions and a summing up session on the following sub-themes:
- Engagement of Civil Society in addressing Corruption
- Addressing Corruption from the Supply Side
- Modernizing the Vigilance Framework
The seminar programme schedule is as below. Entry to the seminar is by invitation. | <urn:uuid:47ae3146-ffd0-488e-9aaf-6b8879b13e86> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.unodc.org/southasia/en/events/seminar-on-empowering-citizens-to-combat-corruption.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911053 | 248 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Apr 19, 2012
CSB Report on Fatal Welding Explosion at DuPont Buffalo Facility Finds Company Overlooked Hazards; Recommendation Calls on Company to Monitor Flammable Vapor Inside Storage Tanks During Hot Work
Buffalo, NY, April 19, 2012 — In a draft report released today at a news conference in Buffalo, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) determined that an explosion that killed one and injured another contract welder on November 9, 2010, was caused by the ignition of flammable vinyl fluoride inside a large process tank, a hazard which had been overlooked by DuPont engineers.
The CSB found that that sparks or heat from the welding, which took place on top of the tank, most likely ignited the vapor. The CSB said a primary cause of the blast was the failure of the company to require that the interior of storage tanks – on which hot work is to be performed – be monitored for flammable vapor. A proposed recommendation urges DuPont to require monitoring the inside of storage before performing any hot work, which is defined as welding, cutting, grinding, or other spark-producing activities.
The Board will vote on the report and its recommendations at a CSB public meeting tonight at 6 pm at the Embassy Suites located at 200 Delaware Avenue in Buffalo. A CSB 11-minute safety video, entitled “Hot Work: Hidden Hazards,” utilizing computer animation to depict the sequence of events leading to the tragedy, will be released at www.CSB.gov, subsequent to the board vote on the report.
Noting the CSB issued a safety bulletin on the dangers of hot work in March 2010, CSB Chairperson Rafael Moure-Eraso said, “I find it tragic that we continue to see lives lost from hot work accidents, which occur all too frequently despite long-known procedures that can prevent them. Facility managers have an obligation to assure the absence of a flammable atmosphere in areas where hot work is to take place. Explosion hazards can be eliminated by testing inside tanks as well as in the areas around them.”
The accident occurred at the DuPont chemical plant in Tonawanda, a suburb of Buffalo, which employs approximately 600 workers. The facility produces polymers and surface materials for countertops, sold under the trade names Tedlar® and Corian®. The process for making Tedlar involves transferring polyvinyl fluoride (PVF) slurry from a reactor through a flash tank and then into storage tanks. The tanks were also inter-connected by an overflow line. The CSB found the company erroneously had determined that any vinyl fluoride vapor that might enter the tanks would remain below flammable limits.
Days before the incident the process had been shut down for tank maintenance due to corrosion on tank agitator supports. The fill lines were locked out for safety. Tanks 2 and 3 were repaired and the process restarted, but work on tank 1 was delayed because the necessary parts were not available. Finally, a contract welder and foreman were engaged to repair the agitator support atop tank 1. Although tank 1 remained locked out from the main process, the overflow line remained open which connected tank 1 to tanks 2 and 3. The CSB determined that flammable vinyl fluoride flowed through the overflow line into tank 1 and accumulated to explosive concentrations. Investigators found that while a facility hot work permit was issued for the task, the DuPont personnel who signed it were not sufficiently knowledgeable about the Tedlar chemical process.
Although DuPont personnel monitored the atmosphere above the tank prior to authorizing hot work, no monitoring was done inside the tank to see if any flammable vapor existed there. The CSB investigation found the hot work ignited the vapor as a result of the increased temperature of the metal tank, sparks falling into the tank, or vapor wafting from the tank into the hot work area.
The explosion blew most of the top off the tank, leaving it and the agitator assembly hanging over the edge. The welder died instantly from blunt force trauma, and the foreman received first-degree burns and minor injuries.
CSB Team Lead Johnnie Banks said, “Our investigation found that DuPont’s process hazard analysis incorrectly assumed that vinyl fluoride in the Tedlar process could not reach flammable levels in the slurry tanks. And, critically, DuPont personnel did not properly isolate and lock out tank 1 from tanks 2 and 3 prior to authorizing the hot work. The flammable vapor was able to pass through the overflow line into the tank the welder was working on, unknown to him or to the operators who signed off the hot work permit.”
The CSB also determined that DuPont should have included the three storage tanks as part of the Tedlar process covered by OSHA Process Safety Management rules. Yet on the day of the accident, a compressor failure led to higher concentrations of vinyl fluoride vapor in the polyvinyl fluoride slurry. Furthermore, a U-shaped seal loop on the flash tank overflow line had a “fishmouth” split in the pipe that could emit vinyl fluoride vapor. Engineers concluded further operation with the broken seal loop presented no hazards, but the CSB determined the pipe split provided a potential pathway for flammable VF gas to enter the tanks.
The Board will consider and vote on several proposed recommendations to DuPont. These include enforcing safety procedures for hot work permits and ensuring explosion hazards associated with hot work activity are recognized and mitigated; revising corporate procedures to require all process piping and vent piping be positively isolated before authorizing any hot work, and to require air monitoring for flammable vapor inside tanks and other containers where hot work is to be performed.
The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating serious chemical accidents. The agency's board members are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. CSB investigations look into all aspects of chemical accidents, including physical causes such as equipment failure as well as inadequacies in regulations, industry standards, and safety management systems.
The Board does not issue citations or fines but does make safety recommendations to plants, industry organizations, labor groups, and regulatory agencies such as OSHA and EPA. Visit our website, www.csb.gov.
For more information, contact CSB Communications Manager Hillary Cohen, cell 202-441-2980 or Sandy Gilmour, cell 202-251.5496. | <urn:uuid:dee72222-9bf4-423d-9829-a3f1f95edeb9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.csb.gov/csb-report-on-fatal-welding-explosion-at-dupont-buffalo-facility-finds-company-overlooked-hazards-recommendation-calls-on-company-to-monitor-flammable-vapor-inside-storage-tanks-during-hot-work/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962044 | 1,320 | 1.804688 | 2 |
A New Perspective.
Commentaries by Mark Haworth-Booth. Preface by Lawrence Durrell.
Thames & Hudson,
176 pp., 144 duotone illustrations, 9¾x12".
Few photographers have spanned the genres from photojournalism to true artistic endeavor as completely as Bill Brandt. Yet Brandt’s journalism was never strictly reportage; all his work reflected a clear artistic purpose. His qualities as an artist were never better expressed than in his series of nudes, photographed in the studio and on location over a period of thirty-five years. He published that work in two justly famous books: Perspective of Nudes (1961) and Bill Brandt Nudes (1980). Now the oeuvre has been brought together in a single volume in Brandt Nudes: A New Perspective, previously published only in a limited edition.
This book reflects Brandt’s original selection and organization of the images. Each of the sections is introduced with a succinct and revealing essay on the work by Mark Haworth-Booth. | <urn:uuid:6924b74e-a4d0-45d7-8400-a0165cb56974> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=NT311 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955433 | 221 | 1.640625 | 2 |
There are not many people who have creds in the departments of both humanitarian and war efforts.
Eric Greitens spent his twenties in refugee camps in Bolivia and Rwanda. And then he joined the Navy SEALS. He currently runs an organization called The Mission Continues and he recently wrote a book called “The Heart and the Fist”. This past week in an interview on the Diane Rheme show he said,
“To be a real warrior means that you develop your strength in order to be of service to others.”
This struck a deep chord with me. If I am honest with myself I have to be mindful of the violence that bubbles in me when I experience or observe injustice. My first instinct is not to pass around a big hug. It’s to punch someone in the face (or worse). On the one hand I can temper this response as a byproduct of anger and find a more accurate response. But there is something so natural about the instinct to stand up and fight. What do you do with that? Is violence and fighting just when it is defense of the oppressed and vulnerable?
When asked how he felt about pacifism he said,
I actually have tremendous admiration for people like Gandhi, for example, who are absolute pacifists. I think the key, though, to be a really strong pacifist, it actually still means not that you avoid conflict, but that you’re willing to actually put yourself in a place where you’re going to use peaceful means in the middle of conflict. And I have tremendous, tremendous respect and admiration for people like Gandhi, for other people who have taken that kind of peaceful approach.
I think one of the things I find is that they actually have that same set of [warrior] courage because they’re actually willing not just to talk about being pacifists, but they’re actually willing to go to the front lines themselves and to use those peaceful means.
And this made me cringe. Because when I feel my violence rise up in response to injustice, it is so easy to say that I am not going to do anything, I am going to step aside and avoid my anger in the name of compassion. But silence and softness is not the way of compassion. It is the way of fear.
Compassion is the way of the warrior.
What do you do with a practice that teaches both Ahisma (non-violence) and Virabhadrasana (warrior pose)? How do you embody the warrior and practice non-violence?
These questions haunt me. What do you think? | <urn:uuid:eb3542c8-a4c2-4bef-aa55-2d2e852f8386> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://yogamodern.com/categories/recent-posts/the-way-of-the-warrior/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96384 | 536 | 2.140625 | 2 |
- Historic Sites
Appomattox County Historical Museum
This museum covers the history of Appomattox County, but is not concerned with the Civil War surrender.
A former county jail built in 1895 building now houses exhibits pertaining to regional history, including a one-room school, a doctor's office, and jail cell. While the Civil War connection dominates this small town, the museum is proof that Appomattox was much more than a surrender. | <urn:uuid:8aff0e8a-208f-44af-9f48-c5344306a98e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.americanheritage.com/content/appomattox-county-historical-museum?nid=20532 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952375 | 93 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Point: Innovation tournaments can be run either competitively or collaboratively, with each approach yielding better results for different purposes.
In his second book, Best Practices are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition, (named the 2011 best book on innovation by CEORead) innovation speaker Stephen Shapiro offers 40 tips on how to innovate efficiently. His tip #11, for example, tackles the topic of innovation competitions and tournaments. The tip focuses on what role, if any, collaboration should play in these bounty-driven events.
Innovation tournaments can be run either competitively or collaboratively, Shapiro says. In a competitive tournament, such as ones run by Cisco and LG Electronics, no participant can see rivals’ submissions. In a collaborative tournament, such as GE’s Eco-Imagination challenges, anyone can see a submission and comment on or vote on the entry. The Netflix Prize and X Prize use a hybrid version, running the tournaments as competitions for prizes but allowing for collaboration within each submission.
Which approach generates the best solutions? Collaborative tournaments work best in areas where problems require “cumulative knowledge” or “building on best practices,” Shapiro says, citing research by Kevin Boudreau and Karim Kakhani in the Sloan Management Review. The collaborative approach lets players build on to each other ideas and create more refined ideas based on feedback from other participants.
Competition, in contrast, is most effective when the problem requires broad experimentation with an emphasis on truly new ideas rather than refined ideas The competitive aspect means that many different ideas are pursued simultaneously.
Whereas collaboration enjoys the benefits of players influencing each other, competition enjoys the benefits of players being independent of each other, thereby avoiding problems like group think, which might artificially narrow the ideas along the basis of the first idea suggested. In some cases, a hybrid approach will use competition in phase one of the tournament to gather a lot of ideas and then use collaboration during a second phase to flesh out and refine the most promising ideas.
- Hold an innovation tournament to access the innovative energies of suppliers, customers, and smart people from around the world.
- Use a collaborative tournament if you need ideas that are cumulatively built and more carefully refined by the players.
- Use a competitive tournament if you want a wider range of “left-field” ideas and plan to do your own refinement or hold a two-stage contest in which the second stage refines the ideas of the first.
Author of more than 450 company case studies and contributor to 28 books, Andrea Meyer writes & ghostwrites about innovation, IT and strategy for clients like MIT, Harvard Business School, McKinsey & Co., and Forrester Research. Follow her at www.workingknowledge.com/blog and twitter.com/AndreaMeyer. | <urn:uuid:0e08680d-0080-4b93-8fc7-85e713ffd73c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2012/02/11/collaboration-in-innovation-competitions/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924347 | 580 | 1.84375 | 2 |
You are browsing the archive for Landslides Mudslides.
23 April 2013
A round up post of some new landslide videos and other resources
12 March 2013
A small rockslide on a Cornish slope has been captured in action in a high quality video
12 February 2013
The full video of the Mount Dixon rock avalanche from Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park in New Zealand
The full video of the rock avalanche on Mount Dixon in Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park is now available. It is astounding!
6 February 2013
The makers of the film Chasing Ice recorded an extraordinary collapse event on the Ilulissat Glacier in Western Greenland. This video is now available on Youtube
29 January 2013
In the last few weeks there has been an unusual amount of landslide activity worldwide. This is just a few of the more interesting events, there are many more that I’ll try to cover in the next few days. Thanks to everyone who has pointed them out to e, and apologies if I have not acknowledged your contribution or covered your story yet. Please do keep them coming! 1. The …
28 January 2013
. At the time of the rock avalanche on Mount Dixon in Aoraki Mount Cook in New Zealand last week it was reported that at least one of the occupants of the Plateau Hut caught the video in action. This has proven to be the case – 3 News NZ has obtained the footage from the climber – Neil Wiltshire – and has a nice report that features it. At …
9 January 2013
A very interesting earthflow video from Austria
24 December 2012
Four interesting new landslide videos, two from the USA, one from China and one from the UK
19 December 2012
Unbelievable – a video of a landslide striking and derailing a freight train in Everett, near Seattle, USA
On Monday a landslide derailed a freight train Everett, near Seattle in Washington State, USA. The landslide was caught on a remarkable video
10 December 2012
A remarkable video of a full-scale debris flow experiment in South Korea. | <urn:uuid:fa1bdb3b-7a8e-4f75-9483-9cfb5f6c5f92> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/category/landslide-video/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956137 | 428 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Soon enough, visitors to the Grand Canyon will be able to get an early look at what awaits them, courtesy of Google Maps.
Google published a blog post today highlighting the maps team's current trip to Arizona, which marks the first time the company is using its "Trekker" camera system.
The Trekker, unveiled at a press event in June, is a wearable backpack with a camera system poking out of it. The camera enables the team to capture 360-degree images of its surroundings, thanks to more than a dozen 5-megapixel lenses and a battery that lasts all day. It is controlled by an Android smartphone.
"The narrow ridges and steep, exposed trails of the Grand Canyon provide the perfect terrain for our newest camera system," the company said.
Google is spending the week at the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, including the Bright Angel and South Kaibab trails, among others. Eventually the panoramas will be available on Google Maps for all to see. | <urn:uuid:548450ce-2875-4660-9dd4-e20bfdc09f2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57539264-93/google-brings-street-view-to-the-grand-canyon/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946066 | 204 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Wonderful and thought provoking introduction to a key component of what I refer to as the Aiki Principles of Aikido.
The Japanese words of "nintai" and "gaman" include "patience" in their list of definitions, which also includes "perseverence, endurance, forbearance and self control". Yet, for us Westerners, our actual experiences with these concepts have far greater meaning, and thus, the crux of our challenge in dealing with them.
In your admirable work with people, troubled by the state of being impatient and out of balance, you have ample opportunities to apply your understanding of Aiki principles to positive results.
I learned some time ago, that most people tend to listen to a favorite radio station in common, WIIFM. What's In It For Me, lets us appreciate that people will always have their own wants and needs as being paramount. Perhaps we can work on expanding the definition of "value" in their choices, by demonstrating how the use of Aiki Principles can result in having more "in it for them".
Patience is kinda like waiting for something positive or good to happen. Tolerance, perhaps, is more like waiting for something negative to stop or go away. By themselves, little can be reasonably expected. Together, with a practiced plan of action, and a rejuvenated will to actually take charge of each situation, one can achieve success, similar to the tangible benefits and earned confidence we obtain when we train diligently on and off the mat.
Patience, then, may simply be a matter of remaining still, preparing for the right moment to act. It can be the state of being ready to be pre-emptive or even pro-active in dealing with potential problems, especially before they can prove to be dangerous.
I look forward to even more insight into how to read the motives, and the self image and self awareness issues encountered by us all. | <urn:uuid:4f155cc0-5566-404d-ab8e-7ae9a5739600> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aikiweb.com/forums/showpost.php?p=241258&postcount=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960492 | 394 | 2.09375 | 2 |
On 27 April India commissioned the first of a new batch of Talwar -class frigates. The INS Teg was built by the Russian shipyard Yantar at Kaliningrad; she is a modified version of the three older Russian-built Talwar -class frigates that joined the Indian fleet during 2003–04. While the first three frigates of the class carry Klub-N antiship missiles, the Batch II units, which include the Teg as well as the yet-to-commission sisters Tarkash and Trikand , are designed to carry Brahmos antiship missiles, which reportedly have a secondary land-attack capability. All members of the 4,000-ton, 125-meter Talwar class can trace their hull design and propulsion system to the 1960s-vintage Krivak-class frigates. The current ships, however, have an entirely new superstructure, shaped to reduce radar returns and sometimes described as providing partial stealth capabilities. The acquisition of three additional units of the class is currently under consideration by the Indian Navy. | <urn:uuid:048f22b3-affa-4900-8c48-bc33272cde1b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usni.org/print/24846 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972545 | 218 | 1.859375 | 2 |
Halloween is definitely in the air-everywhere you look there are costumes, candy, and decorations on display. But as Christians, should we celebrate this holiday with questionable spiritual origins? A great history of Halloween can be found here.
Obviously the whole “worshiping Celtic deities” and “blurring the worlds between the living and the dead” things don’t really fit into the Christian faith. But I think if we examine our intentions, I don’t believe Halloween is off-limits for Christians.
There is nothing wrong with wearing costumes, carving jack-o-lanterns, and eating candy with friends. I think those can just be seen as modern-day, fun fall traditions, not reminders of a Celtic festival of Samhain, simply because these acts no longer have any historical or religious meaning. They are American traditions, just like cooking out on the fourth of July or eating those candy hearts on Valentine’s Day. (I don’t care what anyone says, they are fantastic.)
Christians’ enjoyment of Halloween, however, should be tempered by an idea put forth by Paul in I Corinthians 8. Here he discusses not wanting to cause brothers weaker in the faith to stumble in regard to eating meat sacrificed to idols. As a Christian, Paul knows the religious implications of eating this meat are meaningless, since the sacrifices themselves were meaningless to these fake Gods. But Paul says: “Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.”
I don’t think this means if a fellow Christian is offended by your celebration of Halloween, you should stop. But I do think it means to respect his or her views, to not talk about it around them if they don’t want to hear it, and to be open to questioning about why you think it is OK. Don’t argue with them and try to change their minds.
My personal belief is, Halloween is a fun day that is taken way too seriously by religious people. I don’t believe God is offended if people celebrated this modern-day candy fest. But we need to be sensitive to those who don’t share those beliefs. It’s all a part of loving and serving others and encouraging them on their own spiritual journey. | <urn:uuid:f9a09cf7-09df-42d5-827a-44235403c0ee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.teensite.net/tagged/christian | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966107 | 492 | 1.601563 | 2 |
ECO Canada awards four Canadian students annually with $2,500 towards their first-year tuition in an environment-related program at any Canadian post-secondary institution. An environment-related program can include, but is not limited to, engineering, sciences, social sciences, and mathematics.
Scholarships are awarded to individuals who have shown leadership in her or his community in the areas of environmental protection, resource management, or environmental sustainability.…
Added by ECO Canada on April 19, 2011 at 11:30am — No Comments
Last year Eco-conscious high school students from across Canada were challenged to submit a video outlining an environmental issue in their community. In June 2010, four schools were awarded funds to help implement eco-friendly initiatives and green their school.
The second annual ECO Action! Video Contest is now open to students from grades 9-12 and will be awarding $2,000 to the winning teams. This national contest is designed to get students thinking about…Continue
June 11, 2010 - The environment took centre stage for many Canadian high school students over the month of May as they worked collaboratively with educators to document an environmental issue close to home and propose solutions for a greener community.…Continue
Added by ECO Canada on July 12, 2010 at 5:02pm — No Comments | <urn:uuid:c9332c3f-ff93-43a2-86e3-fcdfbe6f892a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.teensforplanetearth.org/profiles/blog/list?tag=school | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974136 | 264 | 2.140625 | 2 |
National Test Scores Fall Again
A new report on test scores designed to measure educational progress shows that the nation’s students lost ground between 1992 and 1994. Scores in reading and writing fell, while scores in math and science stayed about the same.
The test scores were made available in October in a progress report on student performance issued by the U.S. Department of Education as part of a long-term trend analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. NAEP tests in math, science, and reading have been given to students aged 9, 13, and 17 every two years since the early 1970s. Writing tests have been given every two years for the last ten years.
Although the 1994 NAEP study was scheduled for release in November 1996, a summary report was issued a month early in response to Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole’s charges that the scores were being “held hostage” until after the election.
Whether the scores were in fact being “held hostage” is not clear. But upon their release they suffered in comparison to earlier scores. Reading scores for two out of the three age groups fell between 1992 and 1994. Writing scores for all three age groups also fell. Current writing scores for grades 8 and 11 are lower than the average scores achieved when the tests were first administered.
The results in math and science, while not as bad, are still not encouraging. Average scores for both math and science stayed about the same from 1992 to 1994 for all three age groups. Current science scores for the 17-year-olds are significantly lower than they were in 1969, when the science test was first administered. However, current math scores for 9- and 13-year-olds are significantly higher than they were in 1973, when the math test was first given.
The NAEP report also provides details of the progress made towards closing performance gaps between racial groups. Again, the scores show few gains. The gap between the scores of blacks and whites for reading and science actually widened since the late 1980s for all age groups. Since 1986, the gap between the math scores of 13-year-old blacks and whites also widened, as did the gap between 9-year-old and 13-year-old whites and Hispanics. The gap between science and reading scores for 17-year-old whites and Hispanics also widened since 1990.
As for progress on closing gender gaps, the report shows that reading and writing scores for girls are consistently higher than those for boys. Although boys generally score better than girls in science and math, the gap between 17-year-old boys and girls has narrowed since 1973.
NAEP is a congressionally mandated project of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) at the U.S. Department of Education. The NCES contracts with qualified testing organizations to produce and administer the evaluations. The NAEP 1994 Trends in Academic Progress was prepared by principal researchers Jay R. Campbell, Clyde M. Reese, Christine O’Sullivan, and John A. Dossey of Educational Testing Service. Their full report was issued by the U.S. Department of Education on November 26, 1996.
George A. Clowes is managing editor of School Reform News. His email address is firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:f20b8068-b16a-4131-9118-c09785526bdf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/1997/01/01/national-test-scores-fall-again | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979618 | 673 | 2.828125 | 3 |
The teacher stopped the presentation and asked for a volunteer from the class. A young lady was the first to raise her hand and was brought to the front of the room.
“I want you to stand against this wall and reach your hands up as high as they can go.” said the teacher.
The young lady went up on the tips of her toes and reached her hands high up the wall, touching a spot with her finger tips.
“That’s as high as you can go?”
When she answered affirmatively again, he stood up on a chair and put a piece of tape on the wall where the tips of her fingers had reached.
Then he took out a $100 bill and told her, “I will give you $100 if you can reach higher than that piece of tape.”
The young lady went back to the wall, got on her tip toes, reached her arms up and then somehow stretched her fingertips about an inch past the tape.
“Now hold on,” said the presenter. “You told me the first time you had reached as high as you possible could!”
“I thought I did!” she said.
We all laughed as the young lady collected her money and sat down.
I have thought a lot about the lesson of that demonstration over the years and how it applies to us individually, and organizations collectively. From time to time we are all stretched to our limits. But are they our actual limits or just our perceived limits? We can all probably think of some times in our life when we had given everything we had but then were forced to dig deeper to give a little more effort.
I think that the most common mistake we make as humans is that we underestimate ourselves every day. We avoid certain ambitions or opportunities because we think we don’t have the time, energy, or ability to accomplish them. We forget that we are able to stretch. We all have a little more ability than we initially believe. Often times, we just need the right motivation, like a $100 bill, to bring out that extra effort from us.
Someone once said that if you ran as hard as you could until you absolutely couldn’t go anymore and then looked up into the face of a hungry lion, you would suddenly find a little more energy to run away.
In sports, it has been shown that athletes will give up mentally about 20% sooner than their body would have to give up physically. We tell ourselves we are too tired to go on long before our body actually becomes too tired to go on.
In life, we determine a task is too hard or impossible long before we have really tapped into our full abilities. This is the root of failure. Determining our full ability based on a flawed misconception of what we think is our limit.
Winners are not just the people who are vastly superior. They are the people who will give just a little bit more than the common person. One more phone call, one more mile, one more push or effort. When the voice in their head says, “You’re done.” they still go a little further. And it is in that extra effort where all of the growth happens. The real victories and successes happen after the point where you first thought, “I should give up.” Because when you stretch to accomplish something great, you never return to your original size. You grow. Mentally, physically, emotionally. And the next time you have a big task to accomplish, your reach will already be a little farther.
Action Items to “Successify”
#1 – Stretch Your Vision. Take a look at the ultimate vision you have for your life. Your career, income, hobbies, accomplishments, relationships, etc. What would you have to accomplish so that on your death bed you could say you lived a successful life? If you have already accomplished everything or feel like you could do it in the next few years, try setting a bigger goal. It will inspire you to stretch yourself further.
#2 – Exceed Expectations. Look at your current situation and determine the biggest task, project, or obstacle that you are dealing with. Think of ways that you could not only accomplish it, but exceed anybody’s expectations of what the task requires. Figure out how most people would finish it, and then do it better.
#3 – Ignore the voice. When you are in the middle of something really hard, that voice will come and try to tell you to stop. Learn to ignore the voice and push on. You have so much more in you than what your think you have. You must convince yourself of this. The only way to do that is to try it. Once you exceed your reach a couple of times, that voice will learn to be quiet.
I wish you success as you learn to stretch yourself to your full potential. Success waits for you on the other side of your limits.
If you enjoyed this post or know someone who could use it, please “Like” it below or share it with your friends. If you would like to receive our monthly e-mail full of positive quotes and ideas, CLICK HERE to subscribe.
Suggested posts you might like: | <urn:uuid:42f5486f-f2ca-49f0-8a39-b3982fbe00ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://successify.net/category/attitude/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978509 | 1,090 | 2.09375 | 2 |
- Posted January 27th, 2009 at 8.52am in Ongoing Priorities.
With countless news stories, papers, editorials and experts giving their view of why Congress should or shouldn’t enact the Pelosi-Reid-Obama Debt Plan, we thought it would be helpful to give you a short index of why spending does not equal stimulus.
HIGH COST TO AMERICAN TAXPAYERS
- After Congress appropriates the FY’09 omnibus bill, they may have spent over $1.4 Trillion in less than one month!
The current “stimulus bill” will be the LARGEST SPENDING BILL EVER enacted by Congress, making the New Deal look small, accounting for inflation.
- The “Stimulus” Bills Your Family – $825 Billion is equivalent to borrowing $10,520 from EVERY FAMILY IN AMERICA. This money has to be paid back.
- If all families were asked to equally shoulder the burden of $825 Billon, this debt would be equivalent to what they roughly spend on food, clothing, and health care in an entire year.
- If Government Spending solved recessions, we would never have recessions.
BAD IDEAS – “THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE”
The hidden liberal policy agenda inside the ‘stimulus bill’…
- Over $142 Billion in Federal education funds: Nearly double the total outlays for the Dept. of Education in 2007 – making good on Reid-Pelosi-Obama education promises to the NEA.
- $87 Billion Medicaid bailout: Medicaid is funded by a formula that matches state spending levels with federal dollars. If we keep bailing states out, they will have every incentive to continue irresponsible spending. Fiscally responsible taxpayers in Indiana are now paying for fiscally irresponsible bureaucrats in Illinois.
- Expanded Medicaid coverage and SCHIP: Reid-Pelosi-Obama are enacting a nationalized health care policy with no debate. The government will soon be responsible for more health care spending than the private sector, i.e. socialized medicine.
- Green Jobs?: The myth of ‘green jobs’ merely means replacing one job lost, with a new job that fits the left’s agenda. It is a zero sum game. More than doubling spending, the stimulus also has over $35 billion for the Dept. of Energy. DOE’s current budget is $23.8 billion.
- Family Planning and birth control for children, immigrants and the wealthy, which could also be used as a backdoor to allow federal funding of abortions. How is this stimulus? **UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi agrees this is not stimulus and has removed it from the bill proving these measures are allergic to sunshine.**
- Redistribution: Refundable Tax Credits for people who don’t pay taxes.
- Pork Spending: Digital TV Coupons ($650 Million), Gov’t Cars ($600 Million), Nat’l Endowment for the Arts ($50 Million), Repairs to National Mall ($200 Million, including $21m for sod).
- No Jobs: While they have not been able to support these claims, Pelosi/Obama promise between 3 & 4 million jobs, yet House Tax Committee staff can’t estimate even ONE job will be created.
- Ineffective: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 52% of the spending in the ‘stimulus bill’ can even be spent by the end of FY’10. Well short of the 75% benchmark set by President Obama.
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” – FDR’s Treasury Sec. Henry Morgenthau Jr., architect of the New Deal.
BETTER IDEAS AND RESULTS
- Make the 2001 and 2003 Tax Cuts permanent, instead of raising taxes in 2011; Reduce Marginal Tax Rates for Individuals and Businesses by 10% creating new jobs. Adopting just this one proposal would create between 500,000 and 1 million jobs in one year.
- Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax & reduce the Death Tax to 15% ($5 mil. individual exclusion) Enact long-term reforms and budgets for entitlement spending., putting long-term obligations from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, front and center in the budget process.
- Assess and enforce long term spending rules in Congress. Get us out of debt!
- Go to Heritage.org for more ideas and ways to avoid giving Americans a debt they didn’t create. | <urn:uuid:a1d6f4a9-fad9-4bfd-9943-25a78122194d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://normanhooben.blogspot.com/2009/02/dumbing-down-of-america-are-we-there.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914221 | 958 | 1.929688 | 2 |
Energy conservation is the practice of decreasing the quantity of energy used while achieving a similar outcome.
Energy efficiency is using less energy to provide the same level of energy service.
In the context of transportation, fuel efficiency commonly refers to the energy efficiency of a particular vehicle model, where its total output (range, or "mileage" in the US) is given as a ratio of range units per a unit amount of input fuel.
Geothermal power is energy generated by heat stored beneath the Earth's surface.
Green building is the practice of increasing the efficiency of buildings and their use of energy, water, and materials.
A green roof is a roof of a building that is partially or completely covered with vegetation and soil, or a growing medium, planted over a waterproofing membrane.
Hybrid Electric Vehicle
A hybrid electric vehicle is a vehicle which combines a conventional propulsion system with an on-board rechargeable energy storage system to achieve better fuel economy than a conventional vehicle.
Passive solar buildings aim to maintain interior thermal comfort throughout the sun's daily and annual cycles whilst reducing the requirement for active heating and cooling systems.
Photovoltaics, or PV for short, is a solar power technology that uses solar cells or solar photovoltaic arrays to convert light from the sun directly into electricity.
Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle
A plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) is a hybrid vehicle with batteries that can be recharged by connecting a plug to an electrical power source. | <urn:uuid:a729bea6-b6cd-4e7e-b985-9cc187532ecf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.engine21.com/solutions?q=net&sr=11 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910525 | 306 | 3.625 | 4 |
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Valley Public Radio Staff
Government & Politics
Mon July 30, 2012
California Bill Would Allow More Than Two Parents Per Child
The California law that says a judge can recognize only two legal parents per child would change under a bill working its way through the legislature. The bill’s author says not every family today looks like “Ozzie and Harriet’s.”
Democratic Senator Mark Leno of San Francisco says he wrote the bill to recognize non-traditional families…where there might be biological non-custodial fathers or surrogate mothers. The bill rises from the case of a child who had two legal mothers.
When one was sent to prison and the other hospitalized, the biological father was not allowed to act as legal guardian. But opponents argue Leno’s bill complicates issues of parental law and could spark litigation. Diane Wasznicky is the President of the Association of Certified Family Law Specialists.
”It’s going to cause confusion, it will probably create conflict and it’s only going to lead to problems.”
Leno says the legislation would apply only in family court when required to protect the best interests of the child. The bill has passed the Senate and is now in the Assembly. | <urn:uuid:2b3cb8bb-17ba-437b-8344-646ebabf2857> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kvpr.org/post/california-bill-would-allow-more-two-parents-child | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951108 | 265 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Posted by SK (188.8.131.52) on June 10, 2003 at 15:10:56:
Yesterday I finally finish to adjust springs.
It took about 5 hours.
But I could not rotate a single rotation.
But I am sure my spring adjustment is almost perfect in my 80 cm diameter wheel.
The last one to be checked is the wheel inside design.
I think the number of parts is variable.
But the design could be more complicated.
I am using the simplest one now.
But the simplest one is not so simple.
Today I decide to apply patent of my now building design.
I did not finish yet, but will not take too long to finish.
I will say about the speed(RPM).
I think it is not related to size.
Do you know the frequency of elastic material?
As I know the frequency is related to "k" and "m" k is coefficient of elastic material, and "m" is mass.
This wheel is moving by the weights and springs, so the RPM is also related to that variables.
I have already promissed to here everyone to open my design.
Who is the contact person to discuss about OPENING.
Because I have many things to explain by my bad english.
Please help me how to open my design here.
Post a Followup | <urn:uuid:71241414-5cf5-4a0b-bcdb-d8a555069970> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.besslerwheel.com/wwwboard/messages2/2059.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953342 | 286 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Housing coming for homeless veterans
By Scott Appleton - Staff Writer
Jewett City - posted Tue., Feb. 1, 2011
JEWETT CITY - Around 200 veterans in eastern Connecticut are now homeless. Some people think if a veteran is homeless, there must be an unsavory reason. But several years ago, a group of veterans in Jewett City recognized a new kind of homeless veteran: young men and women. They join the service to pay for college, but when they return home, they find their jobs have been filled by someone else. Some of them do not have family to put them up and help them readjust to civilian life, so they end up on the street.
William Czmyr is a veteran who decided to do something about this. It all started seven years ago, when he initiated the “Home at Last” campaign to seek funds for building homes for homeless veterans.
The LaFlamme-Kusek American Legion Post #15 is now in the process of converting its existing building in Jewett City into 18 permanent supportive housing units to create a regional facility for homeless veterans in eastern Connecticut. It is a huge, old brick building down the hill from the library. Next to the Post is another very old building, its walls and roof disintegrating.
The funding has come together, and in the next 12 months, the old brick building will be renovated and transformed into a beautiful home for the homeless veterans, Czmyr said.
The building was built in 1870 and the parking lot behind it is going to be destroyed to allow for the expansion of the building. The disintegrating structure next door will be demolished, as well as another building beside it, to make way for a new parking lot. The idea is to create a home of which the veteran residents can be proud. Services will be available to them, such as transportation to counseling and work. The building sits below the bridge going into Lisbon. As such, it will be the first building many people will see upon entering Jewett City, and the last they see upon leaving.
Currently, most veterans without homes end up in transitional housing. In those situations, they typically are allowed around two years residency, and such residency can be terminated if it is deemed that the veteran is not following specified patterns of behavioral change.
The American Legion home is the first of its kind, offering permanent, unconditional housing to men and women who have fought for their country. Each apartment will be approximately 600 square feet, including a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living space. Everything will be handicapped-accessible, with an elevator and connector to feed both buildings. The home will also have a geothermal heating system.
Czmyr has been this project’s cornerstone. He speaks of it with passion and conviction. “These veterans do not deserve to be on the streets. It is a shameful blight on our great nation when the people who served to protect us now walk about without hope or help,” he said. Czmyr is hopeful that this building will serve as the beginning of a trend. He wants to see homes like it built across the country, manned by veterans who want to help these homeless ex-service members. He is excited by the prospect of veterans working in the homes, because he knows that veterans can relate, and they are the only people who truly can, to what these new veterans are going through.
Today, however, there are many obstacles to overcome before this dream can be realized. While the town of Griswold has fully endorsed and backed the building of this home, the town of Rocky Hill has blocked another one.
To learn more about this project, visit the website www.al-veteranshousing.org. | <urn:uuid:d19739c9-33f5-42b7-bb8e-cb722e7bb58a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.remindernews.com/article/2011/02/01/housing-coming-for-homeless-veterans | 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 | 0.967434 | 771 | 1.59375 | 2 |
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Are consumers buying your green claims? Probably not.
New research from Cone Communications reveals that purchase decisions are becoming more and more influenced by a company's social and green claims, but woe betide those who don't uphold those claims.
Late last year, research from Cone Communications found that the vast majority (94%) of consumers would swap their usual brand for another that supported a local cause, assuming the price and quality were comparable.
The trend is on the rise - 62% claimed to have purchased a product that supports a cause during 2011, up from 49% the year before. In fact, Cone Communications say this purchase behavior is at an all time high since they began monitoring 18 years ago.
"Over the years, consumers have been increasingly expecting companies to support social causes," said Craig Bida, executive vice president of cause branding and non-profit marketing. "Now we're seeing Americans demand companies address issues by speaking with their wallets."
New research from Cone Communications reveals that, as well as social causes, American consumers remains concerned about the environmental impact of the products they buy.
In addition, many are skeptical about whether companies really are addressing all of their environmental impacts and only 44% trust companies' claims of being green.
Misleading consumers is dangerous. Over three-quarters of those surveyed by Cone said they would boycott a product or brand if they were misled, according to the 2012 Cone Green Gap Trend Tracker.
Consumers expect companies to address their environmental impact throughout a product's lifecycle from manufacturing, use and disposal. However, it is the "end-of-life" messaging that is most influential; 42% say they are most influenced by the environmental impact of a product's disposal.
"The emphasis on disposal is not surprising considering it's an area in which consumers feel they have a responsibility and have control over what they do with products after use," said Jonathan Yohannan, Cone Communications' executive vice president of corporate responsibility.
"However, what most consumers don't know is that for many product categories, disposal may represent the least significant aspect of a product's impact. There's an opportunity for companies to reframe the discussion and educate consumers about what they're doing to reduce a product's impacts across the supply chain."
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Small business success starts with a solid email foundation. If you're a small business with limited resources, you need an... | <urn:uuid:33be0352-3517-4579-bcb7-31bece78c4cd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bizreport.com/2012/04/are-consumers-buying-your-green-claims-probably-not.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944725 | 753 | 2.28125 | 2 |
Building Neighborhood Leaders. Strengthening Our City. Neighborhood Leadership Academy
The Department of Community and Human Development's Neighborhood Services Division will host the Neighborhood Leadership Academy Graduation for 38 participants on March 21, 2007.
The goal of the Neighborhood Leadership Academy's 16 week course is to provide residents with information and knowledge so they may have equitable input on issues and policies affecting City Government. This program shapes the confidence of citizens who want to be knowledgeable of how city services and policy decisions operate and to also promote their individual purpose within civic and community affairs.
To provide residents with a working knowledge of City Government and the essential skill sets to become effective neighborhood advocates and community leaders.
|Newsletter produced by the City Communications & Public Affairs Office.
If you would like to subscribe to receive the Community Newsletter,
send an email to firstname.lastname@example.org, with your name and email address. | <urn:uuid:5c487e04-58ce-4cd5-8d33-d1c1dc621625> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.elpasotexas.gov/community/_archive/022607/quality9.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946147 | 184 | 1.640625 | 2 |
The poor dont have to pay. They qualify under the extended medicade clause of the law
I am not talking about the poor. I am talking about people who are temporarily unemployed or younger people who would not be considered poor under the law, but don't have the extra to pay for insurance.
This is a tax on low income people. People who don't qualify for medicade or food stamps because they make to much. These are the people I think about, because I was there, my sister and a friend are there. I chose at the time to not have insurance because it was an expense I didn't need. Now I would be taxed, another expense I would not have been able to afford.
It's great that there is a waver available.
But from this it looks like ANYONE making over 16K is going to be expected to buy insurance or pay the tax.
We need FREE healthcare. This law is a smokescreen.
I am working class. I have to use 80/20 insurance to afford my apartment. If I use something like Kaiser, I cannot pay the rent. I am not the only person in this situation.
If America is to get to th next level, we need FREE insurance like what they probably do in our native lands. If I am wrong on this, my African brothers and sisters can correct me.
I don't know how they do it in the different African countries, but in European countries people are taxed at 30-40% of their income to pay for the free healthcare. **** I don't know how the people afford that. | <urn:uuid:651b0745-c59b-4faa-87bb-4c151cbc3939> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://destee.com/index.php?threads/supreme-court-upholds-obamacare-individual-mandate-as-a-tax.72430/page-3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981754 | 326 | 1.851563 | 2 |
Many people put off saving for retirement because they don’t realize how many investment opportunities are available. Yet starting young gives you more time to grow your savings through investments such as Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and 401K savings plans, mutual funds, Certificates of Deposit (CDs) and even purchasing real estate.
When to start saving
Your approach toward saving for retirement will change at different points in your life. Young adults can afford to take chances with investments that have higher risk because they have time to wait out the inevitable dips in the market. As you get older, your investment strategy will move toward lower risks with a goal of maintaining the nest egg you have accumulated.
How much to save
Whether you use online retirement planning calculators or enlist the help of a financial advisor, you must begin by considering some
important questions: What is your life expectancy? What kind of lifestyle do you want during retirement? Will you travel, buy a boat or have other large expenses? Be generous in your financial goals to avoid outliving your savings after you have retired.
Mutual funds vs. IRA or 401K plans
For new investors, terms like mutual funds, IRA and 401K can be confusing. There is an important distinction among these terms. Mutual funds are a type of investment package. They are made up of a combination of stocks and bonds designed to meet a specific goal (level of risk vs. yield). On the other hand, IRA and 401K plans are types of accounts. They can be used to invest in mutual funds, stocks, bonds, CDs and other options.
Employer-based retirement plans
Many employers offer retirement savings options, such as 401K plans or pension programs. Enrollment is often a simple process and in some cases employers will match the contributions you make to your retirement saving plan. If you leave the company, you can cash out or roll the money from your 401K into a plan at your new job or into a personal IRA.
Personal saving plans
Regardless of employment, you can opt to open an IRA through your bank. IRAs provide tax advantages in addition to retirement savings. The type of IRA you choose (Roth or traditional) and the level of risk for your investment will depend on your personal needs.
For no-risk savings, older adults often opt to put money into CDs for a set length of time. CDs either pay a fixed or variable rate of interest and are FDIC insured. Real estate is another way to invest in the future. Retirees who have built equity in a family home often downsize later in life.
Young adults may not be thinking about retirement yet, but it’s never too soon to start saving for the future. Remember, the earlier you begin saving, the longer you will have time for your money to grow. | <urn:uuid:c7c7867a-4700-4311-b326-bd0b4ade6168> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.imakenews.com/eletra/mod_print_view.cfm?this_id=2409226&u=bredemannchevy&show_issue_date=F&issue_id=000588213&lid=b11&uid=0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951494 | 576 | 2.28125 | 2 |
Exhibit celebrates Youth Art Month
Published: Sunday, February 24, 2013 at 3:15 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, February 22, 2013 at 5:15 p.m.
March is National Youth Art Month, and the Chapman Cultural Center will celebrate with an exhibit of artwork from public and independent schools throughout Spartanburg County.
The exhibit will be in the Student Galleries in the Moseley Building and will be on display March 4-April 14. It is open and free from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday and 1-5 p.m. Sundays. Each year, one of Spartanburg's seven school districts takes the lead in planning the exhibit. This year's lead district is Spartanburg County School District 6, which will host a reception from 4:30-6 p.m. March 19 at the Chapman Cultural Center.
More than 280 pieces of art are displayed by the art teachers in every public school in the county, as well as several independent schools and the S.C. School for the Deaf and the Blind. Drawings and paintings, as well as 3-dimensional works are included and showcase the talents of children throughout the county.
Youth Art Month began in 1961 as an annual observance each March to emphasize the value of art and art education for all children, and to encourage public support for quality school art programs. It provides a forum for acknowledging skills that are not possible in other subjects. Art education develops self-esteem, appreciation of the work of others, self-expression, cooperation with others and critical-thinking skills. All of these skills are vital to the success of our future leaders — our children.
For more information about this exhibit or other educational programs of the Chapman Cultural Center, contact Ava Hughes at email@example.com or 864-278-9693.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged. | <urn:uuid:e5311c2c-9770-40e4-af6f-d1cf5453416c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.goupstate.com/article/20130224/ENT/130229851/1097/news01?Title=Exhibit-celebrates-Youth-Art-Month | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957227 | 422 | 2.203125 | 2 |
Gieves & Hawkes presents an evening with Mr. Henry Worsley No1 Savile Row.
2011 marks the centenary year of two of the most celebrated polar journeys in the history of exploration – those of Captain Scott and Roald Amundsen in their race to be the first to reach the South Pole. The outcome is well documented; Amundsen arrived first claiming the South Pole for Norway beating Captain Scott who arrived three weeks later, 17 January 1912. All five members of Scott’s party perished during their return journey.
In honour of that great event and this tragic sacrifice, six serving soldiers from the British Army retraced both the Scott and Amundsen routes in two teams of three – an event never undertaken since the original in 1911/12. Gieves & Hawkes were proud to have been asked to sponsor this historic journey as after all No1 Savile Row was the original home of the National Geographical Society who appropriately provided Captain Scott with expedition maps and territories information.
Back in Oct we presented Mr. Henry Worsley who lead the expedition, with a special Gieves & Hawkes union jack flag so that when they reached their finale mark at the Pole they could mark their truly memorable and inspirational achievement with the iconic flag.
Last night Mr. Worsley returned to our Savile Row store not only to share with us tales from this incredible journey but also to remind us why he and his team wanted to take part in this extraordinary venture.
All money raised from this expedition will be donated to The Royal British Legion to aid their £25m project to build four Personnel Recovery Centers to rehabilitate wounded servicemen and women through sport and adventurous training.
For further information or to donate please visit www.scottamundsenrace.org | <urn:uuid:a101111f-1665-49c6-9999-2749bf4ad2c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://discover.gievesandhawkes.com/news/an-evening-in-scotts-footsteps | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950758 | 363 | 1.671875 | 2 |
In Bolivia, Butch Cassidy (now calling himself James Blackthorne) pines for one last sight of home, an adventure that aligns him with a young robber and makes the duo a target for gangs and lawmen alike.
Harry Collings returns home to his farm after drifting with his friend, Arch. His wife, who had given up on him, reluctantly allows him to stay, and soon believes that all will be well ... See full summary »
The year is 1845, the earliest days of the Oregon Trail, and a wagon team of three families has hired the mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains. Claiming to know a short cut, Meek leads the group on an unmarked path across the high plain desert, only to become lost in the dry rock and sage. Over the coming days, the emigrants must face the scourges of hunger, thirst and their own lack of faith in each other's instincts for survival. When a Native American wanderer crosses their path, the emigrants are torn between their trust in a guide who has proven himself unreliable and a man who has always been seen as the natural enemy. Written by
Early in the film, three women are walking across the baked desert following the wagons, presumably to the west. The guide may be off course but nobody would mistake east for west. Yet the womens' shadows are to their left as they walk, and since the sun would always be in the southern sky in Oregon, they could only be walking east. A basic detail that a director should not miss. See more »
'Who knows what's over that hill? Could be water, could be an army of heathens blood or water' the words of Stephen Meek, a hardened pioneer of the Western front, whose name is more than a slight contradiction of character. The year is 1845 and Meek is the guide for members of three families who have left the settlements on the thriving Eastern Seaboard of America and are now undertaking the last leg of their long journey, through Oregon desert. Although they are at the brink of their destination the uncertainty of their route, the need for food and water, and more than anything the threat of Indigenous tribes is deeply felt.
Kelly Reichardt has been an intriguing presence on the independent scene for several years now. While sparse and potentially esoteric, her previous films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy felt very unique, rich in atmosphere and subtext. This one, shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio this is clearly not about gorgeous panoramic Western vistas, but an arid environment and sense of isolation, constriction and fear that the characters can't escape. The cinematography is enveloping every image and sound has clarity of intent and authenticity that's impressive, but not mechanical, there's a level of artistry here that's seamless.
Reichardt has done a remarkable job. The way in which we first encounter this group has an almost voyeuristic dimension. We observe them bringing their belongings across the river, cages and basket across, a woman pregnant. The classic wagon vehicle. We see the necessity they feel to wade through and continue on their journey no matter what. Reichardt's not interested in fulfilling the conventions of the genre or even screen writing at large nothing is indicated, nothing is too obvious and the decisions she makes in terms structure and thematic elements are felt on a subliminal level, right up until the final shot. By defying expectations of the genre and her film becomes all the more engrossing.
This is quite a simple story about people with simple customs and practical needs driven by a need to fulfill their 'Manifest Destiny' the inherent right they feel to colonize this new land. Setting off on the journey, Meek himself tries to enforce his high status, telling the youngsters cautionary tales of bears and brutes and emitting a seemingly affable macho persona. For the rest of the group, there is a sense of communal obligation and not too much time for soul-searching or camaraderie. Reichardt does not draw attention to anything - whether it be the name actors she has playing these very pared down roles or the multitude of themes and messages running beneath the surface.
Among the eclectic ensemble of actors in the film is Michelle Williams, Reichardt's muse previously on Wendy and Lucy who continues to go from strength to strength in proving her versatility and conviction as an actress. Here she plays Emily Tethero a young mother on this trek, and eventual moral compass for the audience. She's invisible in the role - in the best sense; there is no big announcement or introductory close-up of her arrival on screen as 'Two-Time Academy Award®-nominee Michelle Williams', now playing dress-up in the desert the blatant heroine of the piece. No, Reichardt is smart and knows how to treat the audience with intelligence, she does not indicate anything. However, as the narrative unfolds, Emily's increasing speculation over their route, her concerns about water and private ideas of gender roles makes her an adversary for Meek.
These tensions come to a head however when they encounter a Native American Indian. From the moment this happens Williams' character immediately decides to take very practical action to the threat. But soon enough this Cherokee man becomes a possession for the group, an entity they fear so intensely yet cannot let go of they interrogate him to find out the route, to know of any more like him who may attempt to destroy. The fear of the Other is palpable and the ultimate intent of the film is revealed.
However, Emily Tethero is the one who listens to him she hears him praying despite not understanding his words, she also repairs his shoe. She begins to become more lenient with him, despite her upbringing and societal beliefs. As the group's situation begins to become more desperate - these various gestures and allowances enrage Meek with a turbulent dynamic beginning to form and some consequence and yet it never descends into hysterics.
If the job of the artist is to deepen the mystery - then Kelly Reichardt has succeeded. By the end of this film there are no clear answers. There is no sense of the world being set to rights by this story, the film does not presume that what it is has to say about race relations (still relevant in 2011 and beyond) is closing the book on the topic, not for the characters, nor the audience. The film is not about these people's ultimate destination because the sense of closure and satisfaction felt at the end of most movies is an illusion - an entertaining one, which we can suspend our disbelief to enjoy, but an illusion nonetheless. Here that kind of compromise is not necessary, and to witness this on screen is like a window into the past.
69 of 110 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful to you? | <urn:uuid:6062be6b-f867-4853-934b-b65a42705162> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1518812/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9619 | 1,407 | 1.546875 | 2 |
More than 500 million years ago, single-celled organisms on the Earth's surface began forming multicellular clusters that ultimately became plants and animals. Just how that happened is a question that has eluded evolutionary biologists.
But scientists in the University of Minnesota's College of Biological Sciences have replicated that key step in the laboratory using natural selection and common brewer's yeast, which are single-celled organisms. The yeast "evolved" into multicellular clusters that work together cooperatively, reproduce and adapt to their environment – in essence, precursors to life on Earth as it is today.
Their achievement is published in the January 16 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It all started about two years ago with a casual comment over coffee that bridging the famous multi-cellularity gap would be "just about the coolest thing we could do," recall postdoctoral researcher Will Ratcliff and associate professor Michael Travisano, both from the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior.
So they decided to give it a try. Then came the big surprise. It wasn't actually that difficult. Using yeast cells, culture media and a centrifuge, it only took them one experiment conducted over about 60 days, says Travisano, who is senior author on the PNAS paper.
"I don't think anyone had ever tried it before," says lead author Ratcliff. "There aren't many scientists doing experimental evolution, and they're trying to answer questions about evolution, not recreate it."
Despite their modesty, the achievement has earned praise and admiration from evolutionary biologists around the world.
"To understand why the world is full of plants and animals, including humans, we need to know how one-celled organisms made the switch to living as a group, as multicelled organisms," said Sam Scheiner, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Environmental Biology. "This study is the first to experimentally observe that transition, providing a look at an event that took place hundreds of millions of years ago."
Funding for the research was obtained in February 2011, with coauthors R. Ford Denison and Mark Borrello, adjunct and associate professors, respectively, in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior.
Ratcliff and Travisano gave the scientific community a glimpse of their discovery at a conference last summer and have subsequently been invited to talk about it at other meetings. The PNAS article represents the first time full details about the research have been disclosed. "The article provides us with the first opportunity to show the breadth of evolutionary change that we've observed," Travisano says.
In essence, here's how the experiments worked. The two chose brewer's yeast or Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a species of yeast used since ancient times to make bread and beer, because it is abundant in nature and grows easily. They added it to a nutrient-rich culture media and allowed the cells to grow for a day in test tubes. Then they used a centrifuge to stratify the contents by weight. As the mixture settled, cell clusters landed on the bottom of the tubes faster because they are heavier. They removed the clusters, transferred them to fresh media, and grew them up again. Sixty cycles later, the clusters – now hundreds of cells – looked roughly like spherical snowflakes.
Analysis showed that the clusters were not just groups of random cells that adhered to each other, but related cells that remained attached following cell division. That was significant because it meant they were genetically similar, which promotes cooperation. When the clusters reached a critical size, some cells essentially committed suicide (apoptosis) to allow offspring to separate. The offspring reproduced only after they attained the size of their parents.
"A cluster alone isn't multiellular," Ratcliff said. "But when cells in a cluster cooperate, make sacrifices for the common good, and adapt to change, that's an evolutionary transition to multicellularity."
In order for multicellular organisms to form, most cells need to sacrifice their ability to reproduce, an altruistic action that favors the whole but not the individual, Ratcliff said. For example, all cells in the human body are essentially a support system that allows sperm and eggs to pass DNA along to the next generation. Thus, multicellularity is by its nature extremely cooperative. "Some of the best competitors in nature are those that engage in cooperation, and our experiment bears that out," said Travisano.
Evolutionary biologists have estimated that multicellularity evolved independently in about 25 groups. Travisano and Ratcliff wonder why it didn't evolve more often in nature, since it's not that difficult to recreate it in a lab. Considering that trillions of one-celled organisms lived on the Earth for millions of years, it seems as if it should have, Ratcliff said.
Maybe that's a question they will answer in the future, using the fossil record for thousands of generations of their multicellular clusters, which is stored in a freezer in Travisano's lab. Since the frozen samples contain multiple lines that independently became multicellular, they can compare them to learn if similar or different mechanisms and genes were responsible in each case, Travisano said.
The research duo's next steps will be to look at the role of multicellularity in cancer, aging and other critical areas of biology.
"Our multicellular yeast are a valuable resource for investigating a wide variety of medically and biologically important topics," Travisano said. "Cancer was recently described as a fossil from the origin of multicellularity, which can be directly investigated with the yeast system. Similarly the origins of aging, development, and the evolution of complex morphologies are open to direct experimental investigation that would otherwise be difficult or impossible."
University of Minnesota: http://www.umn.edu
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail. | <urn:uuid:61918456-fcfe-4fea-aca7-1dc2b15cb423> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.labspaces.net/116784/Biologists_replicate_key_evolutionary_step | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965978 | 1,268 | 3.71875 | 4 |
June 15, 2006
To those of you who speak Beghilos, the practice of constrained writing using a calculator may come as no surprise – and I do recall it being mentioned during the recent E-Fest 2006 at Brown. To some, though, this concept could seem odd. Calculators can be art objects, yes, but tools for digital writing?
The major project in this category seems to be Amos Latteier’s Calculator Haikus, exhibited in 2000. (Note his use of the 6 for the lowercase “g” as opposed to the 9 for the capital “G” seen in the photo here.) From these texts, it seems that the calculator is predisposed to describe things like sludge underfoot and accidentally discharged petroleum.
While some settle for being 1337, others will choose to be ELIGIBLE (upside down). Here’s a calculator word list and some puzzles if you want to join the Beghilos ranks and OOZE GLOSSES as a LOGOS BOSS. | <urn:uuid:b88f6853-c970-4f63-ae2a-ea25cbe44523> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://grandtextauto.org/2006/06/15/numbers-flip-out/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951931 | 218 | 2.0625 | 2 |
Like all the sports Group Trout fishing is a great exciting activity sport. It is a fresh-water sport where you can relax along with playing with your fishing nets and rods. It is usually carried out on the river-shores and ice-covered mountain rivers. Wild and high elevatedriversand lakes at the cold areas are ideal for group Trout fishing. It is indeed a fun and challenging sport. In order to have a high percentage of success Group Trout Fishing, the people should be clever in choosing the fishing flies they will use. There have actually plenty of choices to select from and this can give you a strain most expressly if are still learners. The fishermen should be sure about using the same cast is not as effective when used again when fishing in the same location. Trout can adapt and you can't fool them the second time around. This makes group Trout fishing more challenging. So it is important to get to know the fish and where it lives. By means of studying what kind of insect it eats would also be a great help. In this way, you can limit your scope of options to what type of lure you should use and you will have more chance of inviting the trout to bite.
When going for Group Trout Fishing in river or stream situations, Make sure to avoid wearing clothing with plain white or loud colors as it may distract the fishes. This is because wearing such bright colors like orange or white will make you stick out like a sore thumb against the background making it easy for the fish to spot you in daytime. So, it would be wise to wear drab colors such as grey or brown in order to blend in with the surroundings as far as possible. This will make it harder for the trout to identify you and increase your chances of getting more bites from flies.
Group Trout fishing usually calls for light weight fishing gear and bait unless you intend to go fishing in the huge Great Lakes visiting where you will definitely require much heavier gear. In most cases though, a 5 foot light weight fishing rod joined with light reel spooled with four will go better. Talking about the hook, 10 hooks should do successfully and as for the trap, smaller lures are recommended as well. If you want to use spinners or spoons, it's important to use those that are no heavier than one ounce and if your choice of bait is minnow-type plugs, then you should ensure they don't exceed 4 inches in length.For a better group trout fishing, a conventional angling method, artificial flies are tied using materials including feather and fur onto a hook to imitate naturally occurring food to catch more fishes. | <urn:uuid:26152f44-d9bc-48be-b275-5cec7de0f5fa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mintarticles.com/read/olympic-games-articles/unusual-sport-of-group-trout-fishing,74167/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958331 | 528 | 1.523438 | 2 |
We are fortunate to live in a well-informed and enlightened age, where guidance on how to conduct a healthy lifestyle is accessible to all social groups and demographics. This has resulted in an increasing demand for organic food, drink and produce. So much so that the industry earned $26.7 billion in revenue during 2010. Showing an increase of 7.7% on the figures recorded in 2009, organic food has continued to grow in popularity despite being more expensive due to its smaller scale production and the labor-intensive processes involved. With consumers wanting to achieve value for money, is it possible to eat both healthily and frugally in 2012?
Citizens in the U.S. have certainly reduced the amount that they spend on food over the course of the last five decades, thanks largely to improved agricultural productivity and the wider range of choices that have been made available to them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans spent a total of 15.3% of their household budgets on food and beverage costs in 2011, as opposed to 40% in 1949. This decrease also has much to do with the improved knowledge of the modern day consumer, which ensures that consumers know where to go in order to source the very best value for their money.
This is vital in sourcing affordable organic food, and it is important to carefully select both your supplier and the types of food that you purchase. In terms of the former, local markets and farms offer the most competitive prices, primarily because you can make a purchase almost directly from the source and avoid the high mark-up costs of grocery stores. In terms of selecting your food, it is crucial that your produce is in season and easily accessible. This allows you to minimize any potential shipping costs while also negating the issue of high demand and limited availability.
Buying in Bulk
Bulk buying may well be an established money saving practice for retailers, but it can also be adopted to benefit the modern day consumer. This is especially true when it comes to buying organic food, which is now available in an increasing range of specialist and mass market wholesale stores. Produce such as soy, almond milk and shelf-stable rice can be sourced in large cases, and there are a number of organic spreads and sauces that do not expire quickly and can therefore be stored for significant periods of time.
This practice also allows you to purchase seasonal goods in bulk, and subsequently freeze any excess produce during the off-season to get the most value out of your investment. A successful bulk-buying strategy is dependent on your ability to plan frugally and purchase core staple produce so that you have a supply of multi-purpose ingredients that can be used in a range of different meals and dishes. The exact savings that you can make through buying in bulk varies from state to state in the U.S., but it is certainly a great way to reduce the cost of purchasing organic foods.
Know Your Costs
As with any money-saving effort, sourcing affordable organic produce relies heavily on your ability to learn the market and compare rival costs. Comparing price is a crucial part of this, especially with an increasing number of grocery stores now introducing their own range of organic produce to compete with specialist brands. You must be patient and develop a knowledge of each brand and the value that they offer in exchange for your money.
There are other items of knowledge that will stand you in good stead when purchasing organic food, especially if you aim to secure your produce in bulk. For example, it is critical that you understand the cost per unit (CPU) of the products that you buy in addition to their fixed retail price. The CPU is calculated by dividing an item's cost price by a specific quantity or unit weight. This enables you to calculate your budget in cents rather than dollars, and also develop a far greater understanding of where you can make savings on organic food.
The Bottom Line
As consumers are employing a wider range of effective money-saving techniques, the demand for organic food and beverages is continuing to rise. By developing an understanding of the market and the suppliers who trade within it, it is possible to minimize your costs and enjoy the benefits of organic food without breaking the bank.
More From Investopedia | <urn:uuid:73184f17-9ea4-45a3-8344-15effdd991a7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/eat-healthy-food-save-money-200839447.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960259 | 854 | 2.125 | 2 |
Air Products’ global leading liquefied natural gas (LNG) technology and equipment will be floating on an LNG production platform 180 kilometers off the coast of Malaysia and producing 1.2 million tons per year of LNG when the PETRONAS Floating LNG Project 1 (PFLNG 1) comes onstream in late 2015.
Air Products announced the signing of an equipment and process license agreement with PETRONAS Floating LNG 1 Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Petroliam Nasional Berhad, the national oil and gas company of Malaysia.
“This project will showcase not only our proprietary and leading LNG technology and equipment, but also Air Products’ worldwide manufacturing capabilities, as portions of the equipment will be fabricated and assembled in the United States and Asia,” said Bill Kennington, major account manager‒LNG with Air Products. “This floating LNG (FLNG) project is very important for Malaysia by unlocking and enabling economic development and commercialization of significant gas reserves from locations where the resource was essentially stranded.”
PFLNG 1, to be located off the coast of Bintulu, Sarawak, Malaysia, will use Air Products’ AP-NTM LNG Process and Equipment. This proprietary equipment includes coil wound heat exchangers to be built in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, United States (U.S.); compressor-expanders to be assembled in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania, U.S.; and economizer cold boxes to be built in Tanjung Langsat, Malaysia. The proprietary equipment will be shipped from these three Air Products manufacturing facilities for assembly into modules and then installed on the PFLNG 1 vessel.
The AP-NTM LNG process is the most efficient of all nitrogen recycle LNG processes in the industry, and is ideally suited for small scale FLNG applications. This is the initial use of the AP-NTM LNG Process and Equipment, but its development builds on the successful implementation of the nitrogen recycle section of Air Products’ AP-X® LNG Process and Equipment, which has been operating reliably for over three years in Qatar. The AP-NTM LNG process and equipment can be configured in an all-nitrogen recycle process for a single train at a nominal one million tons per annum, or it can be boosted in capacity with the addition of pre-cooling.
Air Products has a long relationship with PETRONAS, supplying LNG technology and equipment to their land-based Bintulu, Malaysia LNG facility for multiple LNG trains, with the first train becoming operational in 1983. “We are extremely proud that PETRONAS selected Air Products’ technology for its first FLNG project. PETRONAS is a major player in LNG industry development worldwide, and we look forward to supporting them in making this FLNG project a great success,” said Jim Solomon, director‒LNG with Air Products.
This will be the second FLNG project using Air Products’ LNG technology and equipment that has been contractually awarded and joins a separate project slated for the Browse Basin off the northwest coast of Western Australia. | <urn:uuid:e371f1fe-1d9e-45e1-9c26-e6f1fc280133> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=2642&mn=1562&pt=msg&mid=11933220 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922891 | 650 | 1.648438 | 2 |
We've reviewed in an earlier article Daniel Kahnemann's Prospect Theory, his latest book quot;Thinking Fast and Slowquot; and some of the key findings of Behavioural Finance and we'll be discussing a number of the implications for investors in a subsequent piece...
However, in this article, we'd like to dwell in one interesting discussion in Chapter 21 of the book - quot;Intuition vs Formulasquot;. This discusses in some detail the efficacy and value of checklists amp; algorithms in addressing some of the predictable flaws in human decision-making -users of Stockopedia PRO will already know that these kinds of tools are a key part of our feature set.
The Efficacy of Checklists
Kahnemann writes that a key source of inspiration for his work was the book, Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence by Paul Meehl. Meehl was an American psychologist who studied the successes and failures of predictions in many different settings in the 1940s. He found overwhelming evidence that predictions based on mechanical (formal, algorithmic) methods of data combination outperformed clinical (e.g., subjective, informal, quot;in the headquot;) methods based on expert judgement.
A famous example confirming Meehl’s conclusion is the “Apgar score,” invented by the anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar in 1953 to guide the treatment of newborn babies. The Apgar score is a simple formula based on five vital signs that can be measured quickly: Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity,Respiration. It does better than the average doctor in deciding whether the baby needs immediate help. It is now used everywhere and saves the lives of thousands of babies.
Another amusing example of the power of statistical prediction is the Dawes formula for the durability of marriage. This formula apparently does better than the average marriage counselor in predicting whether a marriage will last. The formula is:
“frequency of love-making minus frequency of quarrels.”
Similarly, as Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business Review points out, Princeton economist Orley Ashenfleter predicts Bordeaux wine quality using a simple model he developed that takes into accountwinter and harvest rainfall and growing season temperature. Although wine critic Robert Parker has called Ashenfleter's approach “so absurd as to be laughablequot;, Ian Ayres notes in his great book Supercrunchers that Ashenfelter was right and Parker wrong about the ’86 vintage. Interestingly, McAfee also references a2000 paper whichsurveyed 136 studies in which human judgment was compared to algorithmic prediction. Only eight of the studies found that people were significantly better predictors of the task at hand.
Why algorithms beat judgement
In quot;Thinking Fast amp; Slowquot;, Kahnemann goes on to discuss the reason why experts appear to be inferior to algorithms. The main suggestion is that experts try to be clever, think outside the box, and consider complex combinations of features in making their predictions. Complexity may work in the odd case, but more often than not it just reduces validity. Kahnemann observes:
quot;Simple combinations of features are better... Several studies have shown that human decision makers are inferior to a prediction formula even when they are given the score suggested by the formula! They feel that they can overrule the formula because they have additional information about the case, but they are wrong more often than not. According to Meehl, there are few circumstances under which it is a good idea to substitute judgment for a formulaquot;.
How applicable is this to investing?
That all leads to thoughts about the finance/investing domain. Just how applicable is this particular conclusion to the finance/investing domain? Are there reasons to think that investing is different to, say, medicine or psychology in terms of the effectiveness of expert judgment?
The forecasting record of analysts would suggest otherwise - but that may be a cheap shot given that analysts suffer from a well-documented conflicts of interest where - as is often the case - they act as investment bankers to the companies their analysts cover.
James Montier's excellent piece - An Ode to Quant - discusses this question in some detail and clearly takes the view that investing is unlikely to be different, although he notes some significant obstacles that exist for widespread acceptance of this view, i.e.
Firstly, the fear of technological unemployment. This is obviously an example of a self serving bias. If, say, 18 out of every 20 analysts and fund managers could be replaced by a computer, the results are unlikely to be welcomed by the industry at large. Secondly, the industry has a large dose of inertia contained within it. It is pretty inconceivable for a large fund management house to turn around and say they are scrapping most of the processes they had used for the last 20 years, in order to implement a quant model instead.
Of course, this is not to say that judgement has no place in investing at all. Changing market circumstances may invalidate a particular algorithmic strategy. Furthermore, without some degree of intuition, it would presumably not be possible to decide which set of parameters - given a potential infinite choice - to factor into a checklist in the first place.
Nevertheless, in the investing domain then, like many others, it seems that the implication of Meehl's research have still not yet been fully accepted. Algorithmic/quant investing is seen as cold, clinical and brittle - and regarded with some degree of scepticism, while the quot;informed viewquot; of an expert analyst is much more comforting. But it remains to be seen how long this view will be sustained, should evidence continue to mount of better returns from the former approach.
What are your thoughts?
- Painting By Numbers: An Ode To Quant
- Intuition and the Quantitative Value Investor
- Harvard Business Review: The Future of Decision-Making
Read more posts on Stockopedia » | <urn:uuid:4b7e08bf-a174-4ac0-8ae4-7b213b07acd0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessinsider.com/when-do-statistics-and-algorithms-trump-investing-judgement-2012-1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952725 | 1,241 | 2.3125 | 2 |
Over the hills and halls of Mount Vernon
I heard voices that cried,
"No taxation without representation!"
And the Tories who lied.
In the monuments and museums and houses
I saw people who dreamed
In the battlefields of blood and of anger
I saw the British get creamed
I saw brave men who died
And children who cried
I heard calls for freedom to vote
I heard lofty appeals
And men with ideals
I read words that the wisest men wrote
Yet it baffles me now
To understand how
These men died for America and why
It's a nation of thugs
And homewrecking drugs
And poor homeless children who cry
Our forefathers tried
But instead they died
If you look closely, I think you'll find:
A nation of crime
And a nation of death
Was not quite what they had in mind.
This piece has been published in Teen Ink’s monthly print magazine. | <urn:uuid:b291a5d9-642a-4aaf-9302-fb85c8647e98> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://teenink.com/poetry/all/article/14531/American-Revolution/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946372 | 202 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Jobs, jobs, jobs. It’s the topic on the forefront of everyone’s minds and is the issue likely defining the upcoming presidential election. Too many workers are toiling in jobs that don’t pay enough to support their families, and too many can’t find work at all. As middle-class jobs become more scarce, and newly created jobs lack the wages and benefits of long-term employment, we’re headed toward even greater income inequality. Read more »
Fed up with the relentless attacks on workers from state legislators, Michiganders have launched a new campaign to protect collective bargaining rights. The Protect Our Jobs campaign has already begun collecting signatures to put a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would ensure workers’ rights to form unions and bargain together for fair pay and better working conditions.
There’s no doubt that this initiative would be good for workers, but it’s also crucial for the state’s economic recovery. With the ability to bargain collectively, workers can regain their grasp on the middle class and pump much-needed consumer spending into the economy.
Earlier this month, Los Angeles workers got some long-awaited good news: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Board of Directors unanimously approved a project labor agreement (PLA) for upcoming projects that will create an estimated 270,000 good, family-supporting jobs over the next 30 years. What’s even better? Forty percent of work hours will go to disadvantaged communities, and at least half of those hours will go to apprentices—meaning a career path for workers who might otherwise be stuck in dead-end, low-wage jobs. Read more »
The issue of whether childcare workers should be able to form unions has generated considerable debate in recent years. Those who support the rights of these workers to form unions and bargain collectively emphasize the low pay and difficult environments childcare providers often face. Unions help to stabilize conditions, improve job satisfaction, and raise wages to appropriate levels—all of which are vital to providing the best possible care for children.
Unfortunately, very little is known about the tangible differences unions make in the lives of childcare providers. But a new study from the Economic Opportunity Institute (EOI) helps to shed light on the value unions provide to an often-neglected and voiceless group of workers. Read more »
Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its annual report on union membership rates in the United States. In stark contrast to the decline in union membership we’ve seen in recent years, union membership levels held relatively steady at 11.8 percent in 2011.
Though cash-strapped state and local governments cut jobs, the percentage of public sector workers in unions increased from 36.2 percent to 37.0 percent. Job loss in the public sector was offset by gains in the private sector, where union membership stayed at 6.9 percent with an increase of 110,000 union members. The construction industry, which experienced one of the greatest drops in unionization in 2010, saw 73,000 union members added in 2011—the largest net gain for any industry. Read more »
It’s a new year. And for many of us, that means new resolutions. People trudge to the gym, start doing the dishes right after dinner, or tackle their messy closets. But what about companies? Shouldn’t they be resolving to do a little self improvement too? In the case of Amazon.com, the answer is painfully clear. Read more »
In September, an investigative report revealed that Amazon.com’s Breinigsville, PA, warehouse has been operating like a sweatshop – with employees working on their hands and knees at a frantic pace, enduring the pain because they’re afraid of losing their jobs. Amazon had even forced employees to work in temperatures so high that the company kept ambulances parked outside to carry sick workers out on stretchers.
After thousands of outraged customers wrote to Amazon’s CEO demanding that the retailer set things right, Amazon is now planning to install air conditioners in its warehouses. Unfortunately, the company hasn’t bothered to address other problems that are just as serious. Read more » | <urn:uuid:b7f5dd36-a3f7-44a6-8b08-3c018a6a1cc0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://americanrightsatwork.org/blog/tag/good-jobs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951897 | 865 | 1.882813 | 2 |
Monday, January 28, 2008
Pictured above are two versions of my latest Illustration 3 assignment. The top one is obviously the finish and the bottom one is the line version. The assignment was to create a composition based on an anthropomorphic or familiar entity that we felt best described some aspect of ourselves. I chose the fox, for its quietness and thoughtfulness and also because I simply find them to be beautiful and fascinating creatures.
I started with the concept of me carving a fox out of wood with a knife (like old school status yo) and the shavings would cascade down and form a fox like spirit at my feet. However after much deliberation I opted for this close view, much more intimate, my teacher felt.
I drew the initial drawing on bristol board smooth press and inked it with some black ink and a nib pen. I scanned the drawing into Photoshop along with a background that I physically painted with acrylic paint. I then had to seperate the line work from the white background and I changed it to a dark rusty brown color instead of the original black. I thought it would give it a much richer look and be much more interesting.
I pieced the two together and colored the drawing in Corel Painter using the oil pastels. I had originally wanted to use digital watercolor but found the process for making it look right too time constraining. Overall I am very happy with the outcome and I love the clean lines I was able to create with the pen and ink. Thoughts? | <urn:uuid:fd1e0354-c54c-458d-ae59-f193dd7621d5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kevinwadaart.blogspot.com/2008/01/pictured-above-are-two-versions-of-my.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970668 | 309 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Saturday, October 22, 2011
I thought I would take a break from the usual to share some things about our home. This summer my wife and I bought our first house! It's a quirky modern house halfway into the woods, a short walk to the college. We both loved it immediately. It has these great big floor-to-ceiling windows that look out at birch trees and fields beyond. But we were also intrigued by the house's slightly mysterious history. The previous owner was the eccentric widow of the chair of the art department. When we first saw the place it was full of art -- African masks and statues, Japanese paintings, Eames and Noguchi furniture, crazy optic wallpaper, etc. I remember saying to each other that it looked like the home of some crazy 1970s art teacher lady. We were sold!
Friends of the previous owners told us the house was a prefab built by grad students from either Harvard or MIT. We did a little research but couldn't find anything. Then last week a friend found a photo on a blog of a house that looked exactly like ours. A few clicks of the mouse later and we discovered that our house is a Techbuilt prefab designed by an architect named Carl Koch. Apparently Techbuilts were among the most popular of early prefabs on the east coast in the 50s and 60s. Koch's idea was to cut costs by building homes out of exchangeable 4 X 8 panels factory made and shipped to the building site, where they could be erected in a few days. The panels could be arranged in a number of configurations, but all Techbuilt houses have the same pitched roofs, exposed beams, split-level construction, large overhangs, etc. There's actually another house just down the street from us that we suspect is another Techbuilt.
Koch was an interesting figure from what we can gather. We checked out one of his books, At Home With Tomorrow, where he makes some slightly ponderous claims about what women want in life and in houses. Some of these photos are from that book, or from promo materials for Techbuilt. I love the one of the wall being assembled below. It looks just like our house! Koch seems to have been a shrewd marketer as well as an architect. The way many east coasters found out about Techbuilt was through a 1954 Ford Foundation-sponsored TV program called "Excursion," which did a lengthy feature on Techbuilt narrated by Burgess Meredith. I would love to see that show.
Anyway here are some views of our house, taken in August before we moved in. I can post more if anybody's interested. Photos of my records? | <urn:uuid:e657ce62-51bf-468e-8f1c-3ce169d1248f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://toysandtechniques.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/techbuilt.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987911 | 544 | 1.59375 | 2 |
January 30, 2007 > Keeping our children safe, strong and free
Keeping our children safe, strong and free
By Reshma Yunus
CAPA (The Child Abuse Prevention Agency) celebrated its 15 year anniversary of incorporation on November 13, 2006. During its fifteen years, the organization has served over 140,000 children and school districts in both the TriValley and TriCity areas. The organization's mission is to empower children with the knowledge that they have the right to be safe and free from abuse. Debbie Anderson, co-Founder of CAPA, says, "The purpose of this program is to teach our children to be safeguard against such events as kidnapping, physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
Author Robert Fulghum asserted that "All I needed to know, I learned in kindergarten". CAPA staff believes that some things need to be taught even earlier - in pre-school. CAPA has an age appropriate program for preschoolers to second grade with loveable puppets, Green Puppet, Yellow Puppet and Red Puppet, who teach preschoolers crucial personal safety lessons. Lessons for preschoolers focus on how to deal with tickling, bullying and opening doors safely. Green Puppet is the "heart" touch, or the loving touch. Yellow Puppet represents the "question mark" touch and Red Puppet is the "No Touch." Children are encouraged to trust their own feelings to distinguish between these kinds of touches.
Most importantly, the puppets teach Children learn to say "NO" in an assertive manner. Rose Grof, Program Coordinator who has been with CAPA since inception, says, "Predators were asked, what would have stopped you from doing this (abusing) to a child, had they just answered simply the word 'No." After preschool, the program incorporates a "stranger danger" component and help children to be safe from potentially harmful people.
The four and five year old children are also educated on what to do if they get an unwanted touch from someone they know. "Children are very self-centered," Grof says, "Often they believe that they are the cause of a 'bad touch'." This seems to be the case especially when a child is acquainted with the predator. "We educate them that it is not their fault and that there are trustworthy adults that they can turn to when needed."
CAPA also had programs for children from third to the sixth grade which do not use puppets. For older children, Grof says, CAPA's programs utilize facilitators who incorporate role-plays and brainstorming activities. CAPA staff and the students dialogue and brainstorm about issues of phone and internet safety. Of special concern in today's virtual world, Grof says, is exploitation of young vulnerable children by predators on the internet.
The program teaches children how not to give away information about themselves to strangers, including the internet. Children are taught basics of keep their identity and location private so as not to be susceptible to predators. These include tips such as not giving out their school colors or logo and not to release phone numbers or addresses to strangers. The program for older children also includes self defense. Staff and students discuss how to be strong and free but with freedom, come rules and laws.
A main segment of the program includes CAPA staff asking students, "Who keeps you safe?" Staff and students brainstorm who that may be; answers range from a parent, to a trusted aunt or uncle or school teacher or family friend. Grof says that the staff will not leave a student "high and dry" without knowing there is someone that child can turn to for support. In addition, staff will try to connect the child to a person of trust.
Grof adds that it is necessary to repeat the CAPA program at each grade level, at least once year, to reinforce the lessons. "We rarely learn things without adequate reinforcement, but we make sure that the time and format are age appropriate so children don't get bored or impatient." The program for younger children lasts only 35 minutes and includes time for questions. Programs for older children takes about an hour and a half, leaving time for questions from students.
At the end of each program, CAPA gives teachers a packet with follow-up activities such as games and word puzzles to reinforce the lessons. They also give out little stickers with color picture of three puppets which were purchased with a grant and also in the past have given out pencils to older children which were reminders to be "safe, strong and free."
Recently the organization has been challenged with financial issues as grant funding and school budgets have been cut. Larry Anderson, current President and Chair of the CAPA Board, says CAPA needs to raise about $30,000 a year in grant funds and so far has only raised $15,000 as fees charged to schools don't cover all costs. Grof adds, "Our program is really very affordable, we charge only $115 per class for a package of nine or more classes. This includes a meeting with parents and teachers. This works out to under $6.00 per child in a classroom of 20 students. Imagine, less than $6.00 to help keep our children safe!"
For more information and to donate to CAPA, you can call 510-657-CAPA or write to them at Child Abuse Prevention Agency, P.O. Box 6019, Fremont, CA 9439. | <urn:uuid:f5dc4387-0916-4f92-a9b7-468b0a345030> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tricityvoice.com/articlefiledisplay.php?issue=2007-01-30&file=CAPA.txt | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969718 | 1,099 | 2.65625 | 3 |
We have national holidays in this week. Yesterday is Respect-for-the-Aged Day. (敬老の日) We recognized yesterday there are a lot of old people in Japan.
There are some reasons that prolong our life. However I think that the biggest reason is medical treatment progress and we can live longer. In Japan 60 years old is very important age. When people get 60 years old, we celebrate the longevity as Kanreki. (還暦). But now 60 year old in Japan is very young and seventy or eighty years old is not unusual. These people are very powerful and have a lot of energy.
We need respect old people who work hard after the war and contribute to our modern society.
There is some cerebration year for longevity in Japan.
60 year old for Kanreki (還暦)
70 years old for Koki (古希)
77 years old for Kiju (喜寿)
88 years old for Beiju (米寿)
90 years old for Sotsuju (卒寿) | <urn:uuid:ddbad7d2-a111-4fbe-a94d-5bae6306bfee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ilovejapancul.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html | 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 | 0.93053 | 241 | 1.78125 | 2 |
About 20 percent of Latino adults have a postsecondary degree compared with more than 35 percent of all adults in the United States, but attainment varies by state. And new research out today shows just where the most strides are being made.
Excelencia in Education, a Washington-based national nonprofit organization that promotes Latino student success in higher education,released separate fact sheets for each state with data on Latino college completion. They include state-level data on the Latino population, representation in K-12, educational attainment of adults, equity gaps in degree attainment, and best practices for improving Latino college completion.
"This new research makes it clear that states can't hope for a better future for all their citizens if they don't succeed in leveraging the talents of their Latino residents," said Dennis Jones, president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a private nonprofit that works to improve strategic decisionmaking in higher education, in a press statement. "By showing state leaders how they compare with other states and to national goals, the information presented will help them be more strategic in the decisions they must make to close the attainment gap."
Among the highlights in the new research:
Latinos are a younger minority group than others in the U.S. with a median age of 27 compared with 40 for white, non-Hispanics. In Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota, the median age for Latinos was 22 in 2010.
Nationally, Latino youths make up 22 percent of the K-12 public school population and 15 percent of the U.S. population overall. States with the highest Latino public school population: New Mexico (60 percent), California, (50 percent), Texas (50 percent), Arizona (41 percent), and Nevada (38 percent).
Latinos are not graduating at the same rates from college as other groups. Nationally, the gap in degree attainment between Latino and their white, non-Hispanic peers for first-time, full-time students was about 14 percent. The biggest gaps are in Connecticut (19 percent), Delaware (15 percent), Illinois (15 percent), Iowa (18 percent), and Washington state(16 percent).
Latino College Completion in 50 States is a project of Excelencia's national initiative, Ensuring America's Future by Increasing Latino College Completion, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, the Ford Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.
(The Lumina Foundation and the Gates Foundation underwrite coverage of the alignment between K-12 schools and postsecondary education and business and industry, respectively, in Education Week.) | <urn:uuid:8a99ef12-6966-45ad-9f49-cac88287e070> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/college_bound/2012/04/new_report_chronicles_latino_college_completion_by_state.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935716 | 540 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Recently PBS aired The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. The series has inspired this sequence of blog postings about aspects of my personal park explorations over the years. I’m using ArcGIS Explorer (AGX) in the investigation. See other national park blog posts for more (including details on performing some functions listed below).
We’re moving through my Fav 7. Today, Redwood…the last stop. In exploring my other top parks, a theme rings out—geology and related threads. In a trip to this park, the geologic setting is very much evident but in my view, it’s impossible to not be humbled to silence and awe not by the landscape, but what’s on it—living things, the Redwoods. These trees, Sequoia sempervirens, represent the tallest and are among the longest and oldest living entities on planet Earth…and they only live in one place—along the US Pacific Coast from southern Oregon to Big Sur, California. In preparing for this entry, I did a bit of Web research on the trees, the park(s), and aspects such as the importance of fog as a key part of the overall water supply for the trees. Also, I was excited to see that the redwoods (range, threats, sustainability, history) were the October 2009 cover story of National Geographic magazine.
Using AGX, I do several things I’ve not covered in this series so far: Download and add a park boundary shape file from the National Park Service Data Clearinghouse (NOTE: Not all NPS data are ready for immediate direct use by AGX), plan a trip to a few key park sites, and check the weather for our trip.
To start, I create a Redwood folder for content (layers, Web research, views). Next, I add the NPS Klamath area parks boundary file and zoom to the Redwood NP extent. Where to go next?
A great place to stay in Crescent City, CA is the Hampton Inn. Using its address and ZIP (100 A St, 95531), I locate and add it to my map. The places I want to visit include the Hiouchi Information Center, the Stout Grove (by way of the Howland Hill Scenic Road), and the Klamath River Overlook. I use the Notes feature to pinpoint the places I want to explore.
Using the AGX Route function, I add the route sequence and execute the multistop route and derive a useable map for my day’s travels.
What’s the day’s weather like for the Redwoods? Check out the AGX Weather Forecast Add-in.
Stay tuned for the final installment in this series. | <urn:uuid:2d602e9f-a10f-41c6-bdff-9ab84be2870b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.esri.com/esri/gisedcom/2009/10/28/my-national-parks-and-arcgis-explorer-part-9/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912923 | 573 | 2.171875 | 2 |
“All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came.”
— John F. Kennedy (5/29/17—11/22/63)
This Memorial Day you will inevitably see many posts about the famous raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima. And to me this flag is more than a victory photo. It is hope for the future, because out of the 5 Marines and 1 Sailor that raised this flag 1 Ira Hayes was a Pima Native American from Arizona and another Michael Strank was a foreign born man fighting for the USA. Remember these men and thank them because 3 of them didn’t even make it home to see the dream they were fighting for.
(Source: The New York Times)
Through the lens of Chris Hadfield, Happy Earth Day!
Over the course of his ISS mission, Col. Chris Hadfield has been taking some of the most incredible photos of Earth ever seen. In this video, the Station Commander takes us to the best seat in the house to gaze at the visual splendor of our changing world.
(Source: Flickr / whitehouse) | <urn:uuid:661f3b14-2325-4228-9900-a804ee644c8d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://janf.tumblr.com/tagged/photos | 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 | 0.932947 | 303 | 1.796875 | 2 |
“The War Memorial”. My Grandfather is one of the men whose name is on this memorial Frank Charles Bentley, although I see that he is “W Bentley” on the photograph. I wonder why?. He was born in Henham on January 21st 1881 and was married in Henham Parish Church on May 23rd 1904 to Rosetta Parker. He died on March 25th 1918, has no known grave & his memorial in France is on the Pozieres Memorial, Somme, France on panels 28 & 29. He was a private in the 7th Bn, Bedfordshire Regiment & his service number was 17561.
He had 6 children, Charles, Albert, Annie, Florrie, Esther my mother, & Nellie. His wife died on Christmas Day 1923 and the children were fostered until they were old enough to look after themselves. His father was Alfred Bentley and his mother was Martha Rickett. Alfred was born September 30th 1841 in Debden & married Martha in Henham on May 2nd 1868. I have found them on the 1881 census living at Wood End Green, Henham & he was a higgler. Alfred’s parents were John Bentley & Hannah Camp. | <urn:uuid:901c42b3-2fe4-497e-8b73-34b89d2d67f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.henhamhistory.org/HenhamHistoryTheBentleyFamily.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.994829 | 255 | 1.585938 | 2 |
For investors, May started out as a month of great promise. On May 1, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
climbed 65.69 points, closing at 13,279.
Since then, however, that promise has turned to plummet.
The Dow posted losses on 12 of the next 14 trading days, culminating with a drop of 46 points last Friday. In all, since May 1, the Dow has lost 6.17%.
But did you know there was a way you could have avoided the bulk of the damage?
All you had to do was hold the dividend stocks
in the 30-stock DJIA that offer the highest current yield
In fact, numerous academic studies have verified the impressive contribution of dividend stocks to long-term market performance. According to certain studies, dividend yields have been responsible for as much as 90% of stock returns over the past century.
And Standard & Poor's
reported last year that the dividend component was "responsible for 44% of the total return" of the S&P 500 over the 80 years from 1930 through 2010.
That is quite impressive considering nearly a third of S&P stocks don't even pay a dividend.
Dividend Stocks and Downturns
However, what these studies don't show is just how effective dividends can be in cushioning the impact of a short-term decline
in stocks - both in terms of resisting downward price pressure and offsetting capital losses.
So, let's look at some numbers from this month as the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a whole fell 836.83 points, or 6.30%, from May 1 to May 17.
Keep in mind, of course, that they're not based on a scientific study, but rather casual observation.
What you'll learn may make you see dividend stocks in a different light.
To continue reading, please click here... | <urn:uuid:2578f079-71ed-4813-be17-00728d59aadf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://moneymorning.com/tag/high-dividend-stock/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966925 | 384 | 1.796875 | 2 |
“So therefore I dedicate myself to myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger - because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.” —Jack Kerouac
“Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. Is it so astonishing that the two voices often contradict one another? And then to which one should we listen? Too often reason deceives us; we have only too good a basis for challenging her; but conscience never deceives us; she is the true guide of man. She is to the soul what instinct is to the body.” —John Rousseau
- As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now always occupied his mind- about life and death, and chiefly about death. He felt himself nearer to it.
- “Love? What is love?” he thought.
- “Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.” These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former agitation and obscurity. He fell asleep. | <urn:uuid:034b0fbc-dff2-4af8-bbf9-a2f83d6d9305> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://serendeee.tumblr.com/archive/2012/2?before_time=1328743857 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981893 | 329 | 2.21875 | 2 |
Room to View: Family Television Use in the Australian Context
Education and Arts
Communications and Arts, Centre for Research in Entertainment, Arts,Technology, Education and Communications
Although Australian media consumption follows general Western trends toward increasingly media rich households, there seems to be a distinctly regional response to how media technologies are incorporated into the Australian home. Although a majority of Australian families with children have a second (and many a third) television set, few choose to locate these technologies in children’s bedrooms. Thus, Australia’s high level of screen entertainment media is not associated with a high level of children’s bedroom access, as would generally be expected. When family conflict does arise regarding television viewing, it is just as likely to be about “where to watch” as “what to watch.” Through the use of an audience ethnography approach, this article explores how Australian parents and their children make sense of their television viewing in the home environment, highlighting how new and multiple media technologies are integrated into the spatial geography of the antipodean family home. | <urn:uuid:a2945095-ef38-4d84-a872-16ddd43f98f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworks/863/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954547 | 218 | 2.421875 | 2 |
Mental Health in the Headlines: Week of October 22, 2012MENTAL HEALTH IN THE HEADLINES
Week of October 22, 2012
Mental Health in the Headlines is a weekly newsletter providing the latest developments at Mental Health America and summaries of news, views and research in the mental health field. Coverage of news items in this publication does not represent Mental Health America’s support for or opposition to the stories summarized or the views they express.
Nearly 80 percent of people with depression report that they've experienced some form of discrimination, according to a new study…more
NEWS FROM MENTAL HEALTH AMERICA
Tell Congress to Act to Avoid Sequestration: TAKE ACTION!
View plenary sessions from the 2012 National Zarrow Mental Health Symposium and Mental Health America Annual Conference: http://www.fromhousingtorecovery.org/.
Vote for America’s Mental Health in 2012: Use our Voter Guide to Rights and Issues.
The MHA Career Center matches the best employers with the best talent in the mental health field. Find your employment match at http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/go/mhacareercenter.
IN THE NEWS
Children with ADHD Fare Worse as Adults: Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder ADHD symptoms tend to fare worse as adults than do other kids, according to a new study. Researchers, whose findings are reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that they have less education and lower income, on average, and higher rates of divorce and substance use. The researchers followed 135 white men who had been rated hyperactive by their school teachers back in the 1970s and referred to the hospital. Based on interviews done when the men were 41 years old, on average, they found that those who had ADHD symptoms as kids left school 2.5 years before the comparison group. Only four percent had higher degrees versus 29 percent of their peers. In both groups, salaries went as high as $1.5 million a year. But in the comparison group, the average salary was about $175,000, compared to $93,000 in the group with ADHD. (Reuters, 10/15/12)
Large Percentage of People with Depression Say They Are Victim of Discrimination: Nearly 80 percent of people with depression report that they've experienced some form of discrimination, according to a new study. British researchers, whose findings are published in The Lancet, used questionnaires to gather information about discrimination encountered by nearly 1,100 people treated for depression in 35 countries. The responses showed that 34 percent of the patients said they had been avoided or shunned by other people because of their mental health problems, 37 percent said that anticipated discrimination had stopped them from initiating a close personal relationship, and 25 percent said they had not applied for work at some point because they expected they would face discrimination. However, many patients who anticipated discrimination did not experience it, including 47 percent of those who believed they would face discrimination in finding or keeping a job, and 45 percent of those who were worried about discrimination in personal relationships, according to the study. Researchers say fear of discrimination may keep many people from seeking needed treatment. (HealthDay News, 10/18/12)
Teen Rejection Can Lead to Chronic Disease Later in Life: Being excluded or rejected or otherwise ostracized by your peers can have a lasting impact on the health of adolescents, researchers say. A study looked 147 young women aged 15 to 19, who were at high risk of becoming depressed because they either had a parent or sibling with depression or because they scored high on a test of attitudes linked to depressive thinking. Researchers found that students who are singled out for taunting or personally rejected by a friend can have measurable effects on the immune system. If sustained, these changes can increase risk for diabetes, heart disease, stroke, mental illness and some cancers later in life, even among those considered to be at the top of the teen social hierarchy. Published in Clinical Psychological Science, the study found that girls that had been recently targeted for rejection had higher levels of substances indicating activation of genes that produce two inflammatory proteins. (Time, 10/18/12)
The Knight Science Journalism Tracker praises an article reprinted in Reporting on Health on the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study and the central role of childhood trauma in such things as chronic disease, mental illness, and criminal behavior in adults. The author, Jane Stevens, is writing a book on it and has dedicated two websites on the topic— http://acestoohigh.com/ and http://acesconnection.com/.
An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times argues that “Mental health care at stake in 2012 vote.”
The Duluth News Tribune profiles the son of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone and his plans to start an organization to make sure the federal Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 improves the lives of mentally ill and addicted Americans as it was designed.
The Wall Street Journal looks at “The Long Battle to Rethink Mental Illness in Children.”
Stateline reports on the Oklahoma Collaborative Mental Health Re-Entry Program, which helps to keep individuals with mental illness out of prison.
Kaiser Health News reports “Patients Often Find Getting Coverage For Eating Disorders Is Tough.”
NPR looks at studies showing that teenage brains are vulnerable and responsive to positive feedback.
The Huffington Post on “New Hope for Mental Health.”
Our Health Matters writes on “Pushing for Mental Health Parity.”
CNN reports on the use of fish oil to treat traumatic brain injuries.
The Atlantic looks at laws limiting voting rights and their impact on people with mental health conditions.
NPR reports on new links between stress and depression.
Violence, Poverty Harm Mental Health of Children Living near Texas-Mexico Border: Violence and poverty harm the mental health of children living near the Texas-Mexico border, a new study shows. Researchers looked at the mental health of children and teens living in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in 2007 and again in 2010. All of the children were Mexican or Mexican-American and lived in homes below the poverty level. None had a history of diagnosed mental illness. The psychosocial and behavioral scores of the children in El Paso did not change significantly between 2007 and 2010. However, the children in Ciudad Juarez showed significant increases in social problems, rule- breaking and aggression scores over the study period. While the researchers found an association between living in increasingly violent surroundings and mental health decline, they did not establish a cause-and-effect relationship. (HealthDay News, 10/19/12)
Children with Mental Health Disorder More Likely than Other Kids to be Bullies: Children with mental health disorders are more likely than other kids to be bullies, according to a new study. Researchers at Brown University analyzed survey responses from parents of nearly 64,000 children ages 6 to 17 who were identified as having a mental health disorder, and those who were identified as bullies. An estimated 15 percent of U.S. children in 2007 were identified as bullies by a parent or guardian, according to the responses, which were part of the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health. Depression was associated with a three-fold increased risk of being a bully, while a diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder increased the risk six times. Oppositional defiant disorder is characterized by ongoing episodes of anger and hostility, especially toward authority figures, such as parents, teachers or other adults. (ABC News, 10/22/12)
MORE NEWS AND VIEWS
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Mental Health in the Headlines is produced weekly by Mental Health America. Staff: Steve Vetzner, senior director, Media Relations.
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For comments and suggestions, send an e-mail to Mental Health America at firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:db043213-1fd0-4a61-baf1-0492bdc74f2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/index.cfm?objectid=89DA25AA-C4E3-DC1E-D3D197DCD8633AE4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951676 | 1,800 | 2.203125 | 2 |
was born in 1951 in Prague and since 1961 has been living in Teplice in the northern part of the Czech Republic. She graduated at a medical secondary school and now is a rehabilitation nurse in the hospital in Teplice. She has been writing poetry since 1985.
The author is influenced by the spiritul traditions in Czech and also in foreign poetry and by nature as being there moves her and fills her with contemplation. The author notices not only the outer phenomena in nature and in the human behaviour, but she also concerns on the „something“ which is hidden behind everything, she perceives remarkability of being and of the whole universe.
She has taken part in several literary competitions in the Northbohemian region and also in different places. Some of her poems were published in the local newspaper and in the collection of the poetry group XXVI. In 1994 came out her first book of poetry “In the Fisherman’s Net“ – at Rad publishers in Prague. In 2000 was published the book of poetry „With the Flavour of the Land“ and in 2002 „The Overgrown Paths“, both by ALFA-OMEGA publishers in Prague. The books consist of nature lyrics, reflexions of life and poems with spiritual theme. „The Overgrown Paths“ contains also two longer epic poems dedicated to two famous Czech women – lady Zdislava fromLemberk, who lived in the 13th Century and to the doctor Vlasta Kalalova – Lottiova from the 20th Century. Despite the many centuries that divide them, they are close to each other because of their heroic humanism. She is a member of the literary club „Pegas“ in Melnik.
Marie Dolistova has also
written lyrics for songs with biblical theme, which were set to music by the
Northern Bohemian composer Jan Buzek Ph.D. He composed a cantata for bass
baritone, soprano, elocutionist, mixed choir and orchestra with the lyrics of
her poem "The Legend of St. Adalbert", (1996).
The premiere was in Teplice on 12 April 2001, performed by the Northern Bohemian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Northern Bohemian Philharmonic Choir and Soloists. | <urn:uuid:e91a870b-5933-4fc8-9a24-57a8c8ca92c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.volny.cz/dolistova/EN-Index.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968447 | 477 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Some village officials view the lawsuit filed last week by the U.S. Justice Department declaring that Palatine's zoning laws discriminate against group homes as a challenge to their governing powers.
But municipalities both locally and nationwide also regard the lawsuit as a potential threat to their ability to maintain local control. They are keeping a close watch on the legal proceedings while pledging their support.
"(Zoning) is a power that local officials guard fairly strongly," said Rita Athas, executive director of the Northwest Municipal Conference, a coalition of 35 north and northwest suburbs, which has backed Palatine in the case.
"The local process is set up for a public hearing to provide for community input," Athas said. "That's the whole idea of zoning laws. Those living closest should determine what's best for an area."
In support of a group home housing 11 recovering alcoholics and addicts in Palatine, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit contending the village's restrictive zoning laws violate the U.S. Fair Housing Act by discriminating against disabled people.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court, came a day before a 90-day injunction barring the village from evicting the home's occupants was set to expire, and after a November federal court ruling that prohibited the village from regulating the Oxford House group home at 931 S. Mallard Drive.
But Palatine officials contend they are allowed to enforce their municipal zoning laws, which require a special-use permit for unlicensed, unsupervised group homes that house more than eight unrelated people. Those zoning requests require a public hearing and are judged on a case-by-case basis.
The Oxford House group home opened without ever applying for the special permit.
Palatine officials say they expect to prevail with an appeal of the November ruling, which is pending in the 7th Circuit Appellate Court in Chicago.
But the federal government and Oxford House officials disagree.
"What we're dealing with here is municipalities proclaiming that their zoning ordinances are not subordinate to federal law, and federal law is the supreme law of the land," said Steve Polin, an attorney and director of community affairs for Maryland-based Oxford House Inc.
"It's all consistent with NIMBYism," he said referring to the concept of "Not in my back yard."
Polin said the Justice Department's complaint essentially mirrors one that Oxford House filed a year ago with the federal government, and which resulted in the November ruling.
Palatine officials say they aren't discriminating against the disabled, they are only trying to enforce their own laws.
"We're hoping we'll hear from the Appellate Court that they are upholding the constitution of the state of Illinois and the United States of America, which accords due process," Palatine Mayor Rita Mullins said.
Municipalities, including Waukegan and Skokie, as well as cities up and down the East Coast that are grappling with similar lawsuits on behalf of group homes, hope so too.
Others, such as Schaumburg, which has pledged $1,000 toward Palatine's legal fight, are concerned the case might set a precedent affecting their own zoning laws.
"We felt this was something to do with local zoning. What are our rights of local zoning," said Schaumburg Village Manager George Longmeyer. "Some of the federal agencies feel exempt from local zoning. We disagree."
According to Matthew Klein, a Palatine village attorney, the Illinois Municipal League and the National Institute of Municipal Law Officers have also thrown their support to Palatine.
Oxford House has gotten the Justice Department to bring action in 13 other cases throughout the country. The outcomes have varied, with most communities and group homes reaching settlements. | <urn:uuid:4540db6c-1ea2-4428-ab2b-b98ef15c8b4e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-03-21/news/9403210079_1_zoning-laws-oxford-house-group-home | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969126 | 773 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Workshop on Scientific Requirements for Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids
(Workshop Sponsored by NASA; co-sponsored by Ball Aerospace and Science Applications International Corporation)
Dates: September 3 through 6, 2002
Venue: Hyatt in Arlington, Virginia
The workshop will consist of Invited Oral presentations and contributed poster presentations with the primary theme of:
"Scientific Requirements for Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids"
as described in the workshop homepage. This topic addresses what we need to find out about possible impactors and how well we need to know it. All invited talks will focus on this topic.
Related themes suitable for posters may also include:
- Mitigation scenarios and strategies
- Mission concepts and proposals
- Effects of impacts on earth
- Human exploration and resource extraction
We expect that the workshop environment and the ample time allocated for posters will facilitate effective discussion of subject matter presented in the posters. We invite participants to contribute poster presentations falling under any of the above themes.
An overhead projector will be available to facilitate discussion among all participants during the extended question and answer periods between the talks. In addition, we will also provide an LCD (computer video output) projector. The approximate space allocated per poster is 3.5 feet (width) by 4 feet (height).
Poster space is limited to ~40 presentations, so the Scientific Organizing Committee will confirm acceptance of your abstract shortly after its submittal. | <urn:uuid:a81d8cdc-efe3-4007-99d3-25d849d82313> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.noao.edu/meetings/mitigation/format.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912507 | 301 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Properties of Real Numbers
When analyzing data or solving problems with real numbers, it can be helpful to understand the properties of real numbers. These properties of real numbers, including the Associative, Commutative, Multiplicative and Additive Identity, Multiplicative and Additive Inverse, and Distributive Properties, can be used not only in proofs, but in understanding how to manipulate and solve equations.
We're now going to talk about a number of properties that we can use with real numbers and these properties can be used when we are dealing with an operation on the same level. So what I mean by that is like strictly addition, strictly multiplication. Okay? And, all these properties tend to have two definitions, we have one for addition, and one for multiplication.
So first let's start with a associative and basically what associative is saying is if you have a string of operations that are all the same, your order doesn't matter. So what we could do is, if we're dealing with 1+2+3 we could add 1+2 first, and then add 3 so we'd get 1+2 is 3 plus 3 would be 6, or we could do 2+3 first which would be 5+1 you get 6 as well. So order is not going to matter as long as they are on the same sort of playing field.
The same thing holds true for associative. For multiplying all the way across, we could do 4x5 first and then multiply by 6 or 5x6 and then multiply by 4, you're going to end up with the same thing.
Okay. Another property is commutative, and basically what commutative is saying is that your order the numbers are listed doesn't matter either. So if we are adding 3+7, it's going to be the same thing as 7+3. Likewise with multiplication, 10 times 4 is equal to 4 times 10. You can easily try those out for yourself.
The next property is what's called the identity and basically the identity property is going to be the number that you either add or multiply to the number to keep it the same. So if you are dealing with addition, everything on this side is addition by the way, you are going to add zero. Any number plus zero stays the same whereas your identity property, anything times one, your number will remain the same. So identity of multiplication is just times one.
For the inverse property, is basically the number that you want to either add or multiply to a number to get back to the identity. So if you are adding you want to add in the opposite the negative number of whatever you're dealing with. So if you're dealing with four you want to add in negative four negative four is the inverse of four. Likewise with multiplication, you want to get back to your identity so you want to multiply by the reciprocal the one over whatever you're dealing with so one ninth is the inverse of 9 because when you multiply them together you get one.
Okay, so everything up until now has had an addition definition and a multiplication definition, they're pretty much the same but basically we're dealing with addition first multiplication. The last one is a combination of the two and it's called the distributive property which is basically if we are multiplying a number into a sum we can distribute that number in. So what we have here is four times quantity 7+2 is the same thing as four 4x7+4x2. You can just distribute that 4 in, okay?
So just a number of properties that come up pretty much on a daily basis when we're dealing with Math you may have seen a number of these in concept just to make sure we know the names as well as we go forward. | <urn:uuid:ee46ed6d-bda5-46e8-bc6b-0514ea63fc8f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://brightstorm.com/math/algebra-2/real-numbers/properties-of-real-numbers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962252 | 769 | 4.09375 | 4 |
Going Wild over WebLessons
WebLessons has partnered with the Dallas Zoo to offer teachers and students a series of free WebLessons for elementary and secondary grades. The new WebLessons cover a variety topics related to earth and life sciences. Learn more by visiting the Dallas Zoo Education Site
Successful TAH Partnerships
WebLessons is partnering with over 50 schools and district consortia in 24 states in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education Teaching American History grant program. Congratulations to all the 2009 recipients. For more information, visit the official TAH Awards Site
"The WebLesson format guides student learning for any concept. This format
can easily be adapted for any online course. In the future, teachers will
have the ability to use this unique technology to create their own
lessons. It is unlike any other online technology that I have seen."
Full Service Community Schools - Apply Now The US Department of Education will soon be accepting applications for a $2.5 million Full Service Community Schools grant aimed at "encouraging coordination of educational, developmental, family, health, and other services through partnerships between (1) public elementary and secondary schools and (2) community-based organizations and public/private ventures." Learn more at the FSCS Grant Site If you are interested in submitting an application, Contact WebLessons to find out how we can help. | <urn:uuid:0a20753e-17cb-4b07-9a7b-912398bf09f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.weblessons.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.903693 | 284 | 2.046875 | 2 |
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Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is experiencing a “severe” respiratory infection that is making it hard for the cancer-stricken leader to breathe less than a week before he is due to start a new term.
“Comandante Chavez has faced complications following a severe lung infection,” Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said in a nationally-televised statement last night. Chavez, who Villegas said must “strictly adhere” to his medical treatment, remains in a Havana hospital after undergoing a fourth cancer- related surgery more than three weeks ago.
Vice President Nicolas Maduro again described the 58-year- old leader’s recovery as “complex” yesterday after returning from an extended visit with Chavez. The government has not said what type of cancer Chavez has suffered from since June 2011. The president declared himself “cancer free” ahead of October elections that he won.
“Any time a cancer surgery leads to a lung infection it can be a significant risk to recovery and can be potentially life threatening,” said Michael Pishvaian, an oncologist at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University in Washington. Pishvaian has not treated Chavez.
With Chavez scheduled to be sworn in for a third six-year term on Jan. 10, opposition leaders warned that any move to change constitutional procedures for the inauguration would be considered a “coup.” If Chavez can’t take office as scheduled, the head of the national assembly is sworn in and must call elections within 30 days, according to the constitution.
The current head of the assembly, Diosdado Cabello, said on Dec. 22 that the opposition should “forget about January 10” and that Chavez’s inauguration could be postponed. Cabello, a rival of Maduro, is expected to win re-election in an assembly vote tomorrow.
“We’ve seen that by talking about the continuity of Chavez’s government they’ve been openly talking about a theory that in my opinion is unacceptable because it doesn’t respect the constitution,” Ramon Jose Medina, the deputy head of the opposition alliance, said in a phone interview yesterday. “That would be a coup d’etat.”
If Chavez doesn’t appear Jan. 10, Cabello must decide whether it’s a “temporary absence” or an “absolute absence.” If doctors say Chavez needs more time to recover, Cabello can appoint himself as interim president for 90 days while Chavez convalesces. If he judges that Chavez will never recover then he must declare an absolute absence and call for elections within 30 days. In either case, Cabello should take the presidency on a temporary basis, Medina said.
Chavez said on Dec. 8 that voters should elect Maduro to protect his legacy if his illness prevents him from remaining in office. Medina said the opposition is preparing itself for elections and will select a candidate by consensus to run against Maduro since there won’t be time to have primaries.
“Whatever they’ve decided on, we’re ready to defend the constitution,” Medina said, adding that the opposition would seek help from regional bodies such as Union of South American Nations and the Organization of American States if the government doesn’t adhere to the constitution.
Maduro and Cabello, speaking at a coffee-packing plant yesterday in Caracas, said they had just returned from Cuba where they swore an oath in front of Chavez to remain united. Cabello dismissed rumors of a rift between himself and Chavez’s anointed successor.
“Here we have all the ministers in a new stage, because 2013 will be a year of work,” Maduro said. “The only transition going on here is the transition to socialism.”
Venezuela’s bonds have gained as investors bet that Chavez’s health will force new elections and the possibility of a new government that would introduce market-friendly policies, said Bret Rosen, a Latin America strategist at Standard Chartered Plc in New York.
“If there is an election there is a non-trivial chance of some kind of change,” Rosen said in a phone interview. “If the president is healthy then the chances of an election are zero. If he’s incapacitated then there’s some possibility of elections which means some possibility of his party losing power.”
Yields on Venezuela’s 9.25 percent dollar-denominated bonds due in 2027 rose 3 basis points, or 0.03 percentage points, to 8.77 percent, according to date compiled by Bloomberg. The price fell 0.26 cents to 103.88 cents on the dollar. Prices yesterday reached their highest since Aug. 2007.
Maduro yesterday criticized opposition leaders and media outlets for spreading “false” rumors about Chavez’s health. Maduro called for unity and said that Chavez will be back in Venezuela “sooner rather than later.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Charlie Devereux in Caracas at firstname.lastname@example.org; Corina Pons in Caracas at email@example.com
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andre Soliani at firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:99d962ee-7ae1-499d-af57-9148d0bb066a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-01-03/chavez-has-trouble-breathing-from-severe-respiratory-infection | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950761 | 1,143 | 1.804688 | 2 |
A billboard in Lisbon, Portugal encouraging workers to support a general strike against the imposition of austerity. The world capitalist crisis persists despite claims by government and corporate media of a recovery., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
Portugal Hit by General Strike against Austerity
22 Mar 2012
Portugal's major cities ground to a halt Thursday as unions began a 24-hour strike against austerity measures agreed by the government in return for an international bailout.
Garbage went uncollected, ports closed, trains stood still, public transportation was disrupted and other public services were affected by the country's second general strike in four months, reports AFP.
The metros in Lisbon and Oporto, Portugal's second-largest city, were closed because of the strike, forcing tens of thousands of commuters to find an alternative way to get to work or school.
The majority of ports, including the port of Lisbon and Viana do Castelo in the north, were closed, according to the country's biggest union -- the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP) -- which called the strike.
About two dozen ships were forced to change their routes to go to other ports because of the action, it added.
The strike disrupted rail service between Lisbon and Oporto and halted garbage collection in several cities including the Lisbon suburb of Almada and the southern city of Evora which is famous for its Roman ruins, the union said.
Demonstrations and rallies are also planned for 38 cities and towns across the country, including Lisbon, Evora and Coimbra, in the afternoon.
The CGTP, which is close to the Communist Party, called the strike in February to protest against a reform of the labour code that makes it easier to hire and fire workers.
It is also angry over government austerity measures such as the elimination of public employees' Christmas and vacation bonuses -- each roughly equivalent to a month's pay -- among measures to rein in the public deficit.
Speaking ahead of the strike, CGTP secretary general Armenio Carlos called the labour law reform a "Machiavelic attempt to suppress workers' rights".
Unlike the last general strike held in Portugal on November 24, 2011, Thursday's strike does not have the backing of Portugal's second-biggest union, the historically more moderate General Worker's Union (UGT) which reached an agreement with the government over the labour law reforms.
Portugal is locked into a three-year programme of debt-reduction measures and economic reforms in return for a 78 billion euro ($103 billion) financial rescue package from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. | <urn:uuid:dc9bc9d7-f8b5-4cc6-97b3-8b36a76f1614> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2012/03/portugal-hit-by-general-strike-against.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963984 | 536 | 1.765625 | 2 |