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- Post 28 February 2012
- By EDNAKANE-WILLIAMS
- Hits: 489
Black History Month celebrates the perseverance of a determined people. Each year we're reminded of how African Americans have survived, overcome and excelled despite major obstacles, challenges and injustices.
Black women have always figured prominently in African-American progress, from education to entrepreneurship to activism. As strong pillars of their families and communities, African-American mothers often sacrificed their own advancement to make sure their children got a good education for a chance at a better future.
Women take pride in caring for others – children, spouses, loved ones as they age – often at their own expense. They readily forgo time, money, health and career opportunities to secure the well-being of family and friends. And like Black women before them, they meet these challenges courageously, head on.
AARP recognizes and supports Black women and their commitment to family. The association wants to raise awareness about its available resources to help women appreciate themselves more by improving their earning potential through education and planning for their future.
Research shows women are at greater risk of having insufficient financial resources in the second half of life due to lower earnings and work patterns that often differ dramatically from most men – like taking time off to raise children, caring for family members, working in part-time positions or in jobs without significant benefits.
Today, access to education has improved exponentially and young Black women are earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in numbers unimaginable half-a-century ago.
However, hard-working older Black women with basic educations, limited incomes and benefits, also dream of achieving new levels of financial stability and success, but can't afford advanced
training or college education.
For these women, AARP Foundation's Women's Scholarship Program is creating opportunities to support their dreams. Last year, AARP Foundation awarded over $500,000 dollars in scholarships, ranging from $500 to $5,000 each, to low-income older women of all backgrounds; one-fourth of the recipients were African American.
This assistance helped them get into college and training programs that had been out of reach. Now, they're adding value to the lifetime of skill and ability they've already developed.
The scholarship application period for the 2012-2013 academic year will be open until Friday, March 30, 2012 at 5 p.m. CST. Get more information about AARP Foundation's Women's Scholarship Program at www.aarp.org/womensscholarship.
But education is only part of the equation. Many women have cared for one or more older relatives, but haven't considered their own needs for the future. That's why AARP developed a campaign dedicated to helping women start planning for the future they envision for themselves – Decide. Create. Share.
Specifically, the campaign tools at www.aarp.org/decide help women think about important long-term plans, such as how they'll maintain their best health; what long-term care costs they'll face down the line and how to cover them; how to make sure their long-term wishes will be honored through advance directives; and how and where they want to live as they get older. While at AARP's site, African-American women, family and friends can also visit www.aarp.org/blackcommunity to interact online with other 50 - plus African Americans.
During February especially, African Americans work diligently to promote growth in the present to create an even greater legacy for future generations. AARP and the AARP Foundation are proud to be part of that growth.
Edna Kane-Williams is vice president for multicultural markets for the AAARP. | <urn:uuid:4eb2aa8c-2f09-4768-bd52-d6381486c1fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://atlantadailyworld.com/index.php/viewpoints/1186-older-women-expanding-the-legacy-of-black-history-special-commentary?showall=1&limitstart= | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967193 | 756 | 2.765625 | 3 |
What is Presence, Anyway?
A lot of times you hear people use the word "presence" to describe a player, usually to denote lack of it. I'm going to explain what presence is to you.
Unlike some jargon, it is a self-evident term. To have presence in the game is like having presence in real life. When you are in a place, you fill the space. If you're at a meeting or a party, and you have presence, people know who you are, and if they don't know who you are, they will soon.You have physical characteristics or a charisma that forces you into people's minds, whether they like you or not. Hence, presence. It means you're there. You are filling up space. Remember that: having presence means you take up space.
Recognizing presence is important too in assessing your teammates and opponents. For example, if you are mid and you notice the enemy top ducking into the gank bush or tribush a lot and a minute later he ganks you, you can guess he's doing to do that a lot more. That top is displaying presence. On the other hand, there are some top lanes where no matter how many times they receive ganks, or how much cs they receive, they will never know what to do vs. their opponent or in a team fight. Had a Wukong on my team last week, 1-8-7 at the end of the game. He got stomped in lane. He did okay in a couple of team fights but he still went brutalizer and triforce ingredients. He had 8x armor and 8x MR at 35 minutes or so. He either died or left fights immediately. No presence. We weren't able to carry him.
On the other hand, I've seen people lose a lane by kills and cs, but they stubbornly stay in the game and make plays. Yesterday I played as Twisted Fate. I went 1-3-2 in lane. I got ganked by Udyr 5 times, and the enemy Cass was something like 6-4-1. At the end of the game, I was 4-4-10, Cass was 8-8-1, and the Udyr was 1-6-3. What happened? I had stronger and smarter presence post lane. And our own jungler made plays at bottom and top while Udyr didn't do much in the other lanes. Our Vlad was super fed, and on the whole, our team had larger presence. I went 3-1-8 in postlane after a 1-3-2 start. Cass went 2-4-0 after a 6-4-1 start. She was the most fed on the team. On the whole, the game was very even at a casual glance, but I feel we were always the stronger team. The Cass took Doran's Ring first and Heal/Ignite and cheesed our Skarner, for starters. Later, she got ganked by 4 people, got skarner ulted, then healed, then gold carded, then died without dealing damage to any of us. Presence counts.
Entire games are won based on teams having a total stronger presence. This is why they say don't surrender, and why sometimes people know a game is winnable even if behind in some cs and kills.
Here's another common example: Karthus and Singed. Ever see a bad Karthus just die a lot but still get a lot of kills, and be a general all around pain? It's because Karthus, as a champ, generates a lot of presence, just from his ultimate. The entire map must beware lest their health get too low. You won't really get away after all. And his passive means it's okay if dies--that's strong presence too. As has been written: Karthus isn't about winning the lane, he's about winning the game.
As for Singed, more than once have I seen a Singed feed at top then quietly just gas the entire map and slowly take towers down one by one. Any Singed that has even a basic understanding of Singed gets this: if he gets beefy enough, he is very hard to push against, but he himself pushes with ease, simply by running around a little bit to choke down minions. He also baits easily and gets away easily and has a lot of sustain. He is extremely annoying. Everyone hates playing against him and he is a popular candidate for laugh-spamming to troll for this reason. I've watched in horror as a team ganks Singed two or three times, takes his tower quickly, and then ignores him for 10-15 minutes while he farms and pushes top, getting another dragon or tower or two, winning one or two small team fights. Then, he pushes so hard you have to pay attention to him. Then, he wins, because the rest of his team didn't own hard enough and your ad carry, the only one who can really stop him now, isn't good enough and/or farmed enough. Sad days.
What presence means in a Top
A top with presence isn't scared because he is countered. He wards. He is not afraid of the enemy jungler. He knows how to countergank and to help his jungler gank, and roam to help steal the enemy's buffs. He might teleport to bottom lane. He helps with dragon sometimes. He ganks mid. He initiates and/or peels, he can kill anyone on the enemy team in a 1v1 situation. If he wins, he starts spreading domination to mid, then bottom.
What presence means in a Mid
A mid with presence has a good handle on where the enemy mid and jungler are at all times. He knows when blue is going to come up. He knows to go and get it. He knows how to farm and take both his and the enemy's wraiths. He knows when to push and defend his lane, knowing that mid towers are the most important. He knows when to go in and out of the jungle. He wards. He ganks bottom and top. He knows how to get a ton of cs. He can pick off stragglers.
What presence means in a Jungle
A jungler with presence knows when everything gets back up and usually knows where the other jungler is. He ganks, counterganks, and knows which lane needs the most help. He knows when to ditch a lane. He knows that if other jungler has stronger presence that all his lanes will do better. He knows how to steal stuff. He has a good idea how warded the map is. He buys wards, especially if he has no lantern. He buys oracles. He knows who is best to be fed. He knows when to dragon or baron, cover a lane, and when to push a tower down.
What presence means in an AD Carry
An AD carry with presence knows who to hit in lane (the other carry usually) and afterwards (whoever is nearest to you). An ADC with presence can CS and is farmed. An ADC with presence evades ganks and follows up on them. AN ADC with presence helps burn dragon down and has enough damage that anyone on the other team, even a Singed, Amumu, or other scary fatty, knows that they have a time limit to get their stuff done, otherwise they will die to the carry first. A team with an ADC who doesn't get this is crippled, and the other team knows it. In lower elo games, tanks and fat people from top and jungle know this and run the team over, because the carry has no presence. At late game, a carry often is the only possibility of pushing out a buff top or jungler.
What presence means in a Support
A good support gets in the bush, knows where to ward, knows where the wards are, knows who to buff and when, and doesn't feed. A support with presence saves lives over and over again, baits well, and gets kills for the team. A good support has great map awareness, just as good or better than the jungler's. A good support doesn't waste wards. A good support doesn't get caught. A good support knows where to go. A good support buys wards even when the other team has an Oracle's. A support with presence knows to buy Shurelya's and use GP10 quints and the Greed mastery to have the gold flowing.
Summary: Characteristics of people with presence
- Plays stronger champions (see above). They pick champions with globals, AOEs, mobility, cc, or otherwise strong, commanding moves.
- They understand every champion on the map. Some people are scared to engage because they feel they are countered, or don't know their opponent well enough.
- They have a deep understanding of their own champion and what he/she can do. They know many combos and don't only do the same thing over and over again. They have a good sense of whether or not they win the fight. They understand when they can't win, or what it takes to beat someone in a fight. They are fearless, yet not stupid. You can't write this guy off. He is always taken seriously.
- They use their strength to control areas. Simply by going somewhere, they demand that the enemy team either flee or die, or for the enemy to send someone to address them--the more of the other team they require, the stronger the presence. If one or even two of the enemy team's members aren't enough, the better. Ever see a singed or Cho'Gath or Dr. Mundo wailing on a tower, ignoring a non-support champion that is throwing everything at them for a while, or even for the duration of the whole tower? That's presence. Ever see them simply just go somewhere and everyone has to flee? That's presence. You are a stronger actual force in the game. Your tower is unkillable, theirs indefensible (or harder to defend), or the section of the jungle simply belongs to you. Hence...Mundo goes where he pleases.
May you always have great presence.
Old Man Eyebrows
This week's eyebrows: | <urn:uuid:31f87604-5c9e-4f45-a270-bd00c78b7713> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.reignofgaming.net/blogs/a-different-view/oldmaneyebrows/22198-all-about-presence-in-league-of-legends?cookieTest=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98099 | 2,128 | 1.507813 | 2 |
The Fairy Tale Project, as we’ve come to know it at LARB, was conceived in collaboration with Young Adult Section Editor Cecil Castellucci. We were both very excited by the idea of studying the lasting resonance of these ancient stories, which snuck like stowaways through the centuries, hiding in the nurseries during the dark ages, when stories about sex and romantic love were shunned. These tales are practically written on our DNA— who doesn’t know the story of Cinderella? Say “Snow White,” and seven dwarves pop into your mind. Analysis of these tales began in earnest in the early 20th century, with critics like Bruno Bettelheim, who used Freud’s techniques of psychoanalysis to shed light on fairy tale motifs. Adaptations are another form of analysis: by extracting and interpreting certain elements of the story, contemporary writers continue to make these tales relevant.
Aimee Bender’s extraordinary fiction is a direct descendant of the folktale. These stories are as various as wildflower species, a point Bender makes in her essay, but there are certain consistencies. In his wonderful introduction to the collection, Italian Folktales, Italo Calvino writes the following: “There must be fidelity to a goal and purity of heart, values fundamental to salvation and triumph. There must also be beauty, a sign of grace that can be masked by the humble, ugly guise of a frog; and above all, there must be present the infinite possibilities of mutation, the unifying element in everything: men, beasts, plants, things.” Like these early tales, Bender’s stories are full of transformation and unlikely occurrences, while her characters pursue their original purpose. In her essay “The Most Romantic Story Ever Told,” Bender considers the lasting significance of one of fairy tales’ greatest hits, “Beauty and the Beast.” Her exploration of this famous story is full of insight and surprise; like the best fairy tales, it is a reflection of ourselves, dressed in extraordinary clothes.—Clarissa Romano
Click here to read “The Most Romantic Story Ever Told,” Aimee Bender’s essay on Beauty and the Beast.
As part of our 2012 fund drive, we’re spotlighting some of our editors’ favorite pieces, none of which would be possible without the support of our readers. Give today and as an added bonus, all donors will receive our monthly Digital Edition. Please make a donation today: click here and you’ll be taken to a donation form generously hosted for us by UC Riverside. | <urn:uuid:5aeb4655-03e8-4270-8385-9d76848f7601> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/post/36895360277/the-larb-fund-drives-greatest-hits-clarissa-romano-on | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942969 | 541 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Boston, MA, November, 2012 -- The 1936 Fore River Bridge, a bascule bridge that fed nearly 40,000 vehicles daily into the greater Boston highway system and crossed a busy shipping and sail boat channel, is being replaced with a $280-million vertical lift bridge that will be one of the largest in the United States, designed by STV for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.
The new vertical bridge, with airy steel towers, will widen the channel from its current 175 feet to 250 feet to better accommodate large tankers; and will increase the height of the bridge to 60 feet for sail boats and commercial boats that do not require bridge openings. When the vertical lift bridge is raised (approximately 500 times per year), the vertical clearance will climb to 175 feet, enough for most commercial ships.
“The choice of a vertical lift bridge was driven by the need for a wide channel,” said Mark Ennis, P.E., PMP, STV project director. “If we had chosen a bascule bridge spanning a 250-foot channel, it would have been the largest/heaviest in the nation, which would have carried some risk.” The severely deteriorated, older bascule bridge was demolished 10 years ago when it was replaced with a temporary bridge that is now approaching the end of its service life.
The new bridge will have four lanes for vehicles, bicycle lanes, and ADA-compliant sidewalks. It will be located on the site of the 1936 bridge and will be operated from a control tower that provides visibility to both the roadway and waterway.
The vertical lift portion of new bridge was designed to 60% and the approach span structures to 30% by the STV-led design team. MassDOT selected a Joint Venture of JF White and Skanska-Koch, supported by Parsons Transportation Group, to be the construction and engineering design-build team to complete the job by the end of 2016. The new bridge, which connects the cities of Weymouth and Qunicy, Massachusetts, has raised engineering, environmental, aesthetic and community challenges.
Engineering / Environmental Challenges
The 325-foot movable lift span is expected to be constructed elsewhere and be floated into its final position at the bridge site. It will be composed of steel through trusses (with trusses outside the sidewalks) and a lightweight concrete deck. Overall, the bridge represents a conservative, safe and long-lasting approach.
In addition to the lift span there are 1,000 feet of approach span structure, and 1,000 feet of earth support structure on either side of the river.
In constructing the underlying substructure, including the four 60-foot-deep concrete plinths (which run from the deck to the water and are supported by steel encased concrete drilled shafts), engineers will have to avoid the 1936 bridge’s still-existing pile foundations, as well as utility tunnels and electric lines. The bridge alignment must also steer clear of an MWRA deep rock tunnel, an old ship yard and an electric power plant in the vicinity of the new bridge.
Compounding the engineering challenges, “major silt producing activities”, such as dredging in the waterway, cannot occur between February 15th and September 15th in order to minimize impacts to winter flounder and diadromous fish during spawning, juvenile development, and migratory periods.
The foundation plinths, which will hold up the towers, are made of concrete, but will be formed and stained to look like granite and have joints to simulate the look of large blocks. Portions of the towers (the tops and the sides facing the river) will be clad in a fine, stainless steel mesh, a design innovation that makes the towers appear lighter and obscures the stairways, elevators and utility conduits.
STV and the Mass DOT met 16 times over two years with the public and with a variety of community and local government groups to discuss the design and construction process, traffic issues and aesthetics. This interactive process played a major role in establishing many of the key features in the appearance of the bridge.
STV is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2012. Since its earliest predecessor firm opened its doors in 1912, the firm has grown to become a leader in providing planning, architectural, engineering, environmental, and construction management services for buildings and facilities, transportation systems, energy and infrastructure. STV is ranked 32nd in Engineering News-Record’s Top 500 Design Firms survey. STV is 100 percent employee-owned. For more information, visit our website at www.stvinc.com or follow @STVGroup on Twitter | <urn:uuid:8fcd0b4e-a76e-4d79-b86e-0204d333785c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pwmag.com/bridges-and-culverts/massdot-awards-325-foot-vertical-lift-bridge.aspx?rssLink=MassDOT+awards+325-foot+vertical+lift+bridge | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958591 | 956 | 1.882813 | 2 |
Public ParticipationOne of the goals of the Regional Transportation District's (RTD's) FasTracks program is to get the public involved in helping to shape their community as FasTracks is implemented. Participation and input from community stakeholders is a highly valued element of the FasTracks program. As a public agency, RTD understands the importance of integrating our rail systems into your cities and neighborhoods by incorporating community feedback as much as possible. Stakeholder participation, or public input, is analyzed along with other criteria such as technical, environmental and schedule feasibility and cost.
Public input, technical, environmental and schedule feasibility and cost are all weighed prior to decisions being made on a project. In order for your input to have the most impact, it is important that you provide that input at the appropriate phase of the project.
Make your input count because as the project progresses, input opportunities narrow and become more focused and the cost to implement changes greatly increases.
The best opportunity to provide input and make changes in a project is during the planning phase. As each project moves from planning to design to construction, public involvement opportunities narrow and become more defined as the budget and schedule are more impacted by changes.
- Planning Phase - Input is a requirement and critical part of planning; during this stage input has the biggest impact with the best opportunity to make changes to the project. Discussion is open to a broader range of topics to include: station locations, transit mode and track alignment.
- Final Design Phase - Input is more focused and generally limited to aesthetic and design elements including: appearance of bridge and wall treatments, shelters, barriers, fencing, landscaping, lighting fixtures, etc.
- Construction Phase - While construction is taking place, public involvement consists of keeping the public informed about what will be happening, when it will occur, and how long it will take. The public can provide input on what measures should be taken to alleviate the inconvenience of construction.
- Operational Phase - Education regarding how the transit system works, how to use the ticket vending machines and transit safety are among the focus of outreach during this final phase. During this phase, it is helpful for the public to offer feedback and comments on how operations can be continuously improved and modified.
Public Participation Resources
Stakeholder Participation Policy
Public Participation Presentation Slides
Public Participation Brochure | <urn:uuid:d35c6714-2a10-4202-aaaf-f7dc0c2168d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/main_93 | 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 | 0.945058 | 474 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan - Creating Value for All: Community-Based Tourism
Tourism is a rapidly growing industry throughout the world. It can contribute to poverty alleviation through creating new jobs and providing entrepreneurial opportunities for people from a variety of backgrounds, skills and experiences. Community-based tourism – a type of tourism that is owned and managed by the local community, has emerged as a mechanism to facilitate tourism activities in many developing countries, including Kyrgyzstan, whose government also recognizes tourism as a promising economic sector.
Community-based tourism (CBT) was introduced to Kyrgyzstan by the Swiss Association for International Cooperation, Helvetas, and was well supported by local communities. The first CBT group was established in May 2000 in Kochkor village (hereinafter CBT Kochkor) and since then the number of CBT organizations has grown to eighteen. The main objective of CBT groups in Kyrgyzstan is to promote sustainable Community-based ecotourism services that offer tourists unique experiences, generate incomes for rural families and preserve the natural and cultural heritage of the country. Among the services that CBT groups provide to tourists and tour operators are booking services for home-stays, yurtas/jailoo tourism and trekking, guided tours of cultural and historic sights, handicraft demonstrations and sales, car rentals and miscellaneous tourist information. The provision of these services is the main source of income for individual service providers and CBT groups. | <urn:uuid:02c61e0e-c5b9-40fb-be93-34dd44e1bbb8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.globalhand.org/en/browse/stories/all/document/33839 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953856 | 303 | 2.171875 | 2 |
Since the GHG Protocol first announced plans in February to upgrade the suite of 16 calculation tools available free of charge to the public, significant research has been conducted to determine how best to update the tools with the most recent information and how to make the format of the tools more user friendly.
The GHG Protocol Initiative has also consistently received feedback regarding the need for an improved, more user-friendly interface for the tools, such as integrated desktop software or web applications that combine all of the tools and eliminate the need for duplicate entry of the activity or energy data needed to estimate GHG emissions. Another goal of the tool upgrade would be to address these concerns by combining the tools into a single desktop or web application that will be easier to use.
Because the calculation tools have been offered free of charge to companies, the GHG Protocol is in the process of fundraising to finance this important upgrade of the tool. If you or company is interested in providing support for this work or know of any funding opportunities available, please contact Stephen Russell at email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:22ca2e4f-e147-404c-86dd-4ced1a0876f0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ghgprotocol.org/feature/ghg-protocol-currently-seeking-funding-major-tool-upgrade | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939545 | 215 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Greek myth was popular among French Neoclassical painters, particularly obscure scenes like this one, which allowed the artist to invent an entirely new image This drawing represents a scene from Homer's Iliad, when the messenger goddess Iris was sent by Zeus to warn Athena and Hera not to help the Greeks in the war against Troy. Following their loss to Aphrodite in the beauty contest judged by Paris of Troy, Athena and Hera sided against the Trojans in the war. The artist depicted Hera, with her attribute of the peacock, and Athena, dressed in her armor, coming upon Iris just as they are rushing off to the battlefield. This drawing may be one of several Iliad scenes drawn by Louis Lagrenée for Louis XVI. Its high degree of finish and monumental size suggest that it was a presentation drawing; so perhaps Lagrenée invented a number of possible compositions for the king to select one from and be developed into a painting. | <urn:uuid:20165b0a-9a85-4e83-b03f-a1ab2c52d8d2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.artsconnected.org/resource/99789/iris-approaching-athena-and-hera-gallery-label-current | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971687 | 193 | 3.75 | 4 |
"The only cultural image we ever see of mother-son closeness is a negative one" observed Kate Stone Lombardi. She has written a throught-provoking book, The Mama's Boy Myth: Why Keeping Our Sons Close makes Them Stronger. It is getting a lot of press. CBS here. NPR reviewed it. New York Times also provided some space toward it.
This book drew my attention because I have developed a passion for researching emotional closeness between men and women. The winds are blowing. Even though Freud is in the air, men and women in the twenty-first century are gaining some distance from a man who has inspired so much anxiety about closeness.
Since Freud sexualized closeness in imaginations of the Western world (including evangelicals who ironically stresss we are not to be conformed to this world) the romantic relationship is the only relationship where you could not freak out or be uncomfortable about expressing mutual deep tenderness. Of course, for many contemporary evangelicals, Freud holds sway.
The transformation from Freud for evangelicals is not going to happen overnight but it's happening in mother-son closeness and cross-gender friendships. Freud has so much power in the evangelical community and inspired much discomfort and anxiety over closeness.
But God is raising up men and women from a variety of places to debunk Freud.
Kate Stone Lombardi is a courageous woman. She understands the deeply embedded Freudian anxiety of a mother who chooses to relish and nurture deep emtional connection with her son.
Identifying the Freudian inspired taboo.
Lombardi so accurately identifies the notion the fears that mothers have that any closeness with their sons is in danger of an inappropriate sexualized connection. Ever since Freud, the conventional wisdom for mothers was that if they got "too close" to their sons, the closeness would be interpreted as something sexual. She nails it when she observes that love between mothers and sons after Freud became some kind of psychopathology.
She shines the light on social pressure on mothers to conform to outdated Freudian sexism and fear. In our culture, even more so in the evangelical sub-culture, closeness in the mother-son relationship is very suspect. People are going to think something strange or inappropriate is happening between mother and son if they detect physical affection, attention, or "unusual" emotional bonding.
She notes a how single mothers get the eye or are criticized. If they get too close, they are called to the carpet for creating a "mama's boy." It starts early on. Almost as soon as mothers discover their sons yearn and long for emotional closeness and deep tenderness with their mothers, mothers are told by husbands, brothers, fathers, even female friends that they are "too close" to them.
Lombardi does a courageous job of nailing how our culture has equated physical tenderness with a Freudian sexualized tenderness. Since I began developing cross-gender friendships, I understand the territory Lombardi sketches for us. In a Freudian world, there is no such thing as innocent, precious, intimate physical tenderness--it is all sexualized.
She notes the anxiety of mother after mother who longs for physical tenderness with their sons only to be told they are getting "too close." A mother who is criticized by her husband because she lies in bed with her seven year old after he comes home from school and opens his heartup to her. A mother who is warned by her sister that she was too affectionate with her young son because she enjoyed cuddling with him. One father told his wife, their son had "to learn to man up." Mothers who get strong messages to pull away and show distance to their teenage boys.
Lombardi's highlighting this made me think about evangelicals. In the evangelical world where for many Christianity is inherently "masculine," mothers run up against a Freudian-inspired "leave and cleave." For many evangelicals, the "leave and cleave" in Genesis 2:24 has come to mean deep emotional exclusivity in marriage. This is the outcome in a Freudian world for all closeness is a sexualized closeness. It makes sense.
In a world which interprets warm affectionate touch and emotional closeness as sexual (or something harboring unconscious sexual desires) the "leave and cleave" of Genesis 2 must mean emotional distance and divorce between mothers and sons. In the evangelical world post-Freud, there is a great pressure for adolescent boys to become detached from their mothers and learn to "man up" as they age into young adulthood.
Well, what about enmeshment? In the world of psychology, to become "enmeshed" with someone is to become emotionally entangled or ensnared with with a lack of boundaries. Lombardi courageously walks through this as she notes the mother-son relationship which experiences deep empathetic closeness is liable to be criticized as a relationship which is "enmeshed."
But Lombardi bravely sets forth a healthy emotional closeness is very different from an overcontrolling mother or one who has overidentified with her son: "It's not a slippery slope but rather two different dynamics. The two are often mistakenly conflated."
Of course, this is exactly what many in the evangelical world do when they see emotional closeness between a man and woman in cross-gender friendship. They interpret any kind of closeness or deep tenderness as sexualized (romanticized) because of the Freudian-inspied "leave and cleave" interpretations of Genesis 2:24.
More to come. | <urn:uuid:1344bb97-f576-4862-8fbd-ab9c778d7ee0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.danjbrennan.com/2012/05/a-mother-debunks-freud-reclaims-closeness-with-son-as-flourishing-.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96888 | 1,148 | 2.15625 | 2 |
St. Johns River Ferry
In operation since at least 1948, the St. Johns River Ferry provides motorists a break from the traffic and saves 38 miles of driving using the alternative route to the other side. The Ferry is endangered due to a half million or greater annual operating deficit, and the unwillingness of the State of Florida and/or the City of Jacksonville to maintain this vital transportation link. Also a historic tourist attraction, the current vessel is named in honor of French Explorer Jean Ribault.
Haydon Burns Library
122 North Ocean Street
Built in 1965 on the site of the 1903 Jacksonville City Hall, the modern design replaced the 1905 Carnegie Library across the street. Local Architect Taylor Hardwick made a bold statement with the design of a library that served Jacksonville for forty years. The unique modern era structure could easily be adapted to a number of uses.
LaVilla Shotgun Houses
Intersection of N. Jefferson and W. Duval Streets
Built between 1890 and 1930, the LaVilla "Shotgun" houses are three survivors of a distinctive style stored for future restoration, yet rapidly deteriorating beyond economical repair. Working people lived in these practical one story homes in which one could shoot a shotgun straight down the long interior hallway and out the front door.
400 North Hogan Street
Built in 1902-03, this was Jacksonville's oldest social club for men and the seventh oldest in the United States. Teddy Roosevelt made a campaign speech from the front porch. The privately owned, vacant building is across from Hemming Plaza, City Hall and the new U.S. Federal Courthouse.
Dr. Horace Drew Residence
Third and Silver Streets
The eclectic design of this 1909 structure borrows elements from the Tudor Revival, Queen Anne, and Spanish Colonial Revival styles. Its base is elevated more than adjacent residences, adding to the vertical projection of the multi-planed roofline, gables, and three-story tower. The composition is enriched by harmonious colors found in the gables with half-timbering over stucco, the clay tile roof, and concrete walls.
Annie Lytle School-Public School #4
1011 Peninsular Place
Built in 1917 at a cost of over $ 250,000 and originally known as Public School Number Four, it was renamed Annie Lytle School in honor of its former principal. Architect Rutledge Holmes designed a Neo-Classic portico that is now seen daily by motorists passing by on the three levels of the new I-10/I-95 Interchange.
Vandals frequently trespass inside the structure; drawn by rumors the building is haunted. They spray graffiti, and contribute to the deterioration of the building. The building remains structurally sound, and could be put to a number of uses.
Guaranty Trust and Savings Bank
101 East Bay Street
An excellent example of early twentieth-century bank architecture, the Guaranty Trust and Savings Bank incorporates the use of classical style to convey a sense of security and prosperity. The 1902 structure was skillfully doubled in size in 1919. The pressed grey Roman brick structure features limestone trim and finely detailed arches.
Known in recent years for its jaguar themed boarded-up windows, it points the way to Jacksonville Municipal Stadium on game day. A collapsed roof has led to significant water damage to the structure. A demolition permit for the structure is allegedly being sought.
Ford Motor Company Assembly Plant
Wambolt Street at the St. Johns River
One of over 1,000 buildings designed for Henry Ford by Albert Kahn (no relation to Jaguars owner Shahid Kahn) , an internationally recognized industrial architect. The building may be seen when driving westbound over the Mathews Bridge and looking east near the north end of the bridge. The 200 foot wide by 800 foot long building was an assembly plant for Model-T Fords. In its heyday Ford employed 800 people at the plant, and built 200 cars per day.
Atlantic Coast Line Locomotive #1504
1100 Block of West Bay Street
This P-5 design, 4-6-2 wheel arrangement coal-burning steam engine was built by the American Locomotive Company in Richmond, Virginia. It spent most of its working life pulling passenger trains between Richmond and Jacksonville, and was capable of speeds of nearly eighty miles per hour. Retired in 1952, it has been on display outdoors for fifty years.
Designated in 1990 as a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark, the engine survives in its original condition. Last refurbished in 1989, Number #1504 is rapidly deteriorating and should be restored and displayed indoors.
Barnett National Bank Building
112 West Adams Street
The design of the 1926 Barnett National Bank reflects the eclectic influences of commercial architectural styles of the 1920s. At Eighteen stories, it remained the tallest building in Jacksonville for over 28 years. A failed attempt at renovation has further damaged this historic building.
The Laure Street Trio
47 West Forsyth Street
Built in 1909, this ten-story reinforced concrete building was designed by H.J. Klutho. The Bisbee Building is an excellent example of the high-rise architectural concepts that were pioneered in Chicago. Jacksonvilles first skyscraper faces an uncertain future.
Florida Life Building
117 North Laura Street
This narrow eleven-story tower built in 1912 was and is Jacksonvilles purest expression of a skyscraper. The H.J. Klutho design featured terra-cotta ornamentation, much of it removed and in storage.
Old Florida National Bank
51 West Forsyth Street
The entire fašade of this 1902 Neo-Classical Revival style bank building is sheathed in marble. A 1916 modification added a spectacular skylight, later covered by a dropped ceiling. A 1978 restoration restored its 1916 splendor. Thirty years later, the Marble Bank is in need of attention if it is to survive long into its second century.
Fire Station #5
347 Riverside Avenue
Built to accommodate two fire wagons, five horses and 14 firemen in 1910, Station #5 served Jacksonville for nearly one hundred years. A 2003 economic incentive package to lure a Fortune 100 company to relocate nearby included the City of Jacksonville deeding the property to this company. The City retained the right to relocate #5, but has not seen fit to do so. The building that housed generations of firefighters, and was a working fire station as recently as 2008, is in danger of demolition.
Source: Jacksonville Historical Society | <urn:uuid:a4ee8209-2b1d-4127-98ab-e7464facc890> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2012-may-jacksonville-historical-society-twelve-worth-saving | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938768 | 1,322 | 2.640625 | 3 |
BS 5266-1:2011 gives recommendations and guidance on the factors that need to be considered in the design installation and wiring of electrical emergency escape lighting systems, in order to provide the lighting performance needed for safe movement of people in the event of the supply to normal lighting failing. It also gives recommendations for lighting in areas with fixed seating.
It has been updated to assist those engineers wishing to protect occupants from the hazards identified by risk assessments and also to evaluate existing premises to decide if they need to be upgraded to meet current requirements. The standard has also been expanded to give guidance to protect occupants from a sudden loss of the normal lighting supply.
To update your qualifications to the new standards, take a look at NAPIT’s Fire Alarm & Emergency Lighting course | <urn:uuid:54e85f62-5d2f-4d2c-bff4-57f0e86f66dd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.napittraining.co.uk/emergency-lighting-standard-update.aspx | 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 | 0.950048 | 156 | 2.1875 | 2 |
|For full Swimming World coverage of the entire 2011 FINA World Championships, including all videos and recaps, visit our Event Landing Page.
Guest editorial by John Dussliere, Santa Barbara Swim Club
CLOVIS, California, July 22. AS I write this, there are athletes collapsing and being pulled from the water in China at the World Championships 25k race. There are spectators acting as lifeguards. There are boats being dispatched to rescue competitors. There are also a few tears running down my face.
How have we let this get to this extreme? I have taken a pretty strong stand today via Twitter while I am coaching my own team at the sectional championships in Clovis, Calif. I want to thank my swimmers first and foremost for supporting this "volunteer" sector of my life as it has pulled me away from them from time to time.
Next, I must report that everything I write in this piece is an opinion that is mine and mine only, and does not reflect my involvement or the opinions of the U.S. Olympic International Operations Committee, the Open Water Steering committee, and the newly-formed Open Water Development Committee, all of which I am an active member.
Now to the business of the day: I made a promise to some very special people last October [when Fran Crippen died] that I would never tire in my efforts to never see another death in Elite International Open Water Racing. Today, I decided to no longer work in the background on this issue.
I began to get information during the past few days on what the real temperatures have been throughout the competition in China. I found that everyone's thermometer was coming up with different numbers.
In my experience, this has always been the case. The athletes' thermometers are usually pretty accurate, but favor getting out of practice; the coaches' thermometers are usually less extreme than the athletes on the hot or cold side. Then when the official race temperature is published, it always seems to fall into the safe zone. Hmmmmm.
So, this competition is no different from so many others. At times, the thermometer game is just that, a game. But now things are different. Extreme water temperature issues have become a matter of life or death. It does not matter what is official or what is anecdotal. We have once and for all proven that we, humans, cannot be trusted in this matter of reporting temperature. The trust is gone.
So, where do we turn? We presently have a couple studies on what temperature we can handle as humans. We also have a responsibility to each other to not put each other in harm's way. I was relieved to see that an old friend from 2006-08 Marcel Wouda, coach of the Dutch Olympic Champion, pulled his swimmers the day before the race. Then, I saw a report that Thomas Lurz of Germany, a guy that has more open water gold than a 49ers creek, pulled himself from the race yesterday as well.
Then, I started probing to see what our USA athletes were doing. No word, and I have good sources! I wanted them to make the right decision as I saw it and pull out. I was then relieved to hear that Alex [Meyer] and Haley [Anderson] pulled out, then very concerned that Claire [Thompson] was going to swim.
With some deeper thought, I was beginning to question why should these athletes and coaches be posed with this decision? That's not right! This decision should be made when the race committee sees the potential for the water temp to get into that high side danger zone.
Thinking even further: should this ever be a judgment call? This should be a clear rule. The best athletes in the sport at any given time know when something is not right or safe. As do their coaches. As do our officials. But the athletes, coaches and officials still do not have a definitive rule when it comes to temperature.
I don't want to offer that the results should have an asterisk this year, but I cannot believe that the results would be the same if the race had all of its original entrants and it were contested in a body of water that posed no temperature threat to its participants.
I have no scientific basis for pressing for a high temperature rule of 28 degrees Celsius, but when the athletes want this temperature, and the top coaches (of which I had an athlete in the Beijing Games) want this temperature; I tend to think it has value. There are lots of air and water temperature combo suggestions out there, but why not have a simple rule stating the high temperature may not exceed 28 degrees at any time during a FINA or USA Swimming sanctioned event?
I witnessed the effects of the cold water first hand in Melbourne 2007 Worlds after the 25k when my athlete did not recognize me or even remember I was there after the finish as he was being held up in the shower as the doc was trying to raise his core temperature.
I also stood in the church at a funeral of the greatest of young men last November. I have witnessed the effects of both "suggested" safe environments. We are wrong. Let's admit to being wrong.
Let's go forward together and not allow our athletes and coaches to be put in such a horrible position that could put them in harm's way or rob them the opportunity to compete when others might. Let's once and for all set a safe standard of 28 degrees Celsius and get back to the human capacity to compete, not survive. Let's never let a competition need an asterisk next to its results. If you think there is a "they" out there, you are mistaken. It is "we" that can bring this rule about.
Search For More News About: John Dussliere
Courtesy of: MSS | <urn:uuid:c40138b1-d2fe-433a-a986-3a1570de77eb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/lane9/news/27625.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977505 | 1,195 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Dione in Full View False Color
October 17, 2005
The cratered and cracked disk of Saturn's moon Dione looms ahead in this mosaic of images taken by Cassini on Oct. 11, 2005, as it neared its close encounter with the icy moon.
In this false-color mosaic, the clear-filter images are overlain by color composited from (compressed) infrared, green and ultraviolet images. The colors have been specially processed to accentuate subtle changes in the spectral properties of Dione's surface materials.
To create the color view, the color images were combined into a single black and white picture that isolates and maps regional color differences. This "color map" was then superimposed over the clear-filter mosaic. Gaps in the imaging coverage appear black.
Multiple generations of tectonics can be seen in this full-disk view. Near the eastern limb (at the right) are tectonic fractures, which may be similar to the bright, braided canyons that make up Dione's noted wispy terrain. Some of the bright, wispy markings can be seen at the left.
The softer ridges and troughs at the upper right appear to be about the same age as the cratering seen in that region. These appear to be older than the fracturing seen in the wispy terrain and the fractures seen at the right.
Scientists continue to be intrigued by the strikingly linear features seen crisscrossing the southern latitudes. The fine latitudinal streaks appear to crosscut everything, and appear to be the youngest feature type in this region of Dione.
A large impact basin hugs the south polar region (at the bottom, right of center). Northeast of the basin is a region of terrain that is relatively smooth, compared to the rest of the moon. This view of Dione is centered on 1.3 degrees south latitude, 167.6 degrees west longitude. For a clear-filter view see PIA07746.
The images in the mosaic were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at distances ranging from of 55,280 to 27,180 kilometers (34,350 to 16,890 miles) from Dione. The full-size versions of the mosaics have an image scale of 316 meters (1,036 feet) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute | <urn:uuid:d3c26572-54f7-4305-9bfd-198f0198df3b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/imagedetails/index.cfm?imageId=1794 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916109 | 587 | 3.328125 | 3 |
President Barack Obama bestows the Medal of Honor on retired Staff Sgt. Clinton Romesha for conspicuous gallantry Monday in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Romesha's leadership during a daylong attack by hundreds of fighters on Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan led to the award. Obama lauded former Staff Sgt. Clinton Romesha's bravery in fighting back an intense daylong barrage by enemy fighters. The Taliban descended on Combat Outpost Keating in the mountains near the Pakistan border at 6 a.m. on Oct. 3, 2009, shaking Romesha out of his bed into what Obama said has been called one of the most intense battles of the war in Afghanistan. The Americans were outmanned 53 to more than 300, but most survived against those odds. | <urn:uuid:10bc7912-aaac-46a8-832e-819120c9b365> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.crescent-news.com/editors%20pick/2013/02/12/medal-of-honor-recipient | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963706 | 160 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Australian football was first introduced to Japan in 1910, by Mr A W McLean from Melbourne, but for the next 75 years the further development of the game seems to be unknown.
In 1986, Australian Football was re-introduced to Japan when Hawthorn and Carlton played at Yokohama Stadium in front of 25,000 people. The first match in Japan was named "Aussie Bowl '86" and was broadcast to Australia.
This led to the first Japanese club being formed in 1987 at Keio University. Aussie Bowl '87 pitted Hawthorn against Essendon and featured the first match between Japanese teams as the curtain raiser.
The Keio Hawks defeated the Waseda Bombers and this was the start of Australian football competition in Japan.
Current Japan AFL Top League Teams
The Samurais finished eighth in 2008 and were showing signs of steady improvement going into IC11.
However, a mix of stiff competition and poor form saw them fall from the rankings.
Despite a gallant effort against Sweden in their final match, where the Samurais lost by four points in a thrilling last quarter, the Samurais were winless during the main part of the tournament and finished last in the division 1 rankings. | <urn:uuid:6b44f34e-9cbc-4dab-8116-d24400932999> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://aflcommunityclub.com.au/index.php?id=611 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98315 | 251 | 1.695313 | 2 |
210. Twenty Years After Solidarity: The State of Democracy in the Post- Communist World
In his opening remarks, Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined three categories of democracy: functioning, malfunctioning, and fictitious. Functioning democracies are characterized by political and economic pluralism. Poland represents one of the most successful "functioning democracies" in the post-communist world. Malfunctioning democracies, such as many former Soviet states today, may aspire to democracy, but are crippled by legacies of the communist past. In fictitious democracies, the organs of the Communist Party remain but the regime pursues limited, reformist economic and social policies, such as in China. Brzezinski also pointed out that wide-scale, growing poverty impedes the movement toward democracy in many post-communist countries.
Former Foreign Minister Geremek and Czech Ambassador Vondra both reflected on the importance of Solidarity in the region's history. Geremek credited the Catholic church for its role in preparing the Polish citizens for the nation-wide resistance movement and identified the visit of Pope John Paul II, in particular, as a crucial moment in developing feelings of independence and national solidarity. He attributed the success of Solidarity primarily to the workers, who had been pivotal in fighting oppression throughout Polish history and, as the backbone of the communist system, were able to avert criticism from authorities. Geremek asserted that part of the success of Solidarity was that it gradually added political demands to economic ones, such as demanding that the Communist Party limit rather than abolish censorship to avoid provoking Soviet intervention.
"Solidarity brought to Poland the experience of democracy," the former Foreign Minister said. Geremek brought his own experience with democracy and reform to Poland in 1980, after spending the previous year as a scholar at the Wilson Center. Geremek also acknowledged the role played by external factors in defeating communism, such as large Western credits and the Helsinki Commission's emphasis on human rights. To ensure the success of reform and democratization elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, Geremek expressed a need for the continuity of Western credits to the region and urged that the enlargement of NATO and the EU be made an international priority.
Ambassador Vondra identified Solidarity as a genuine catalyst for reform and Poland as a model of dissent for Czech youth unable to travel to the West. Solidarity's rise sparked the dissemination of hundreds of thousands of copies of samizdat (underground publications), while Western support further aided dissenters in attracting maximum attention. According to Ambassador Vondra, the Czech Republic continues to benefit from the Solidarity model, upon which the current, close Czech-Polish cooperation on economic and human rights issues is based. The same principle of reform and democracy which Solidarity sparked in Eastern Europe also played a primary role in the cooperation leading to NATO membership for Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland.
Former Congressman Solarz was struck by Solidarity's ability to "balance aspirations for freedom against communist repression and domination," by relying on incremental progress to achieve its goals. He closed the session with the statement that the movement can still serve as a model to help advance democracy worldwide.
Mr. Geremek spoke at a Wilson Center Director's Forum on September 25, 2000. The above is a summary of the event | <urn:uuid:f91b4591-e95a-43df-a0e6-690e7888c1b8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/210-twenty-years-after-solidarity-the-state-democracy-the-post-communist-world | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964167 | 676 | 2.515625 | 3 |
The Hindu Goddess Kali, is known as the goddess of time and change. She represents the power of transformation that occurs with the destruction of the ego. She is the essence of Divine Love to which we surrender, when we begin our journey toward healing and spiritual growth. Although the Goddess Kali is a fearful sight, with skin totally black, four arms, a protruding tongue, and a girdle of human PP-412-010lls, she is in truth the Divine Mother. She battles the demons of false consciousness and frees us from the illusion of form. Transcendence to pure love is then possible. The Kali Yantra is a symbol combining the transformative energies of Kali, within the “Yantra”, a geometric symbol used to focus the mind. Drawing, wearing, or concentrating on this symbol is said to have both spiritual and Magickal Power. At the center is a small dot, the bindu, point of creation. It also represents Kali, as Shakti, the activating energy of creation. Surrounding the Bindu are five concentric triangles that represent the five Koshas. The koshas are the sheaths of the human condition. The physical sheath is known as, the Annamayakosa ; the life force is the Pranamayakosa; Manomayakosa is the mental/emotional sheath; Vijnanmayakosa is wisdom; and Anandamayakosa is Bliss. The two circles are symbols of life and death. The Lotus blossom symbolizes the eight chakras and the eight principles of Prakriti; the manifesting universe; earth, air, water, fire, ether, manas Lower mind), buddhi (higher mind), and ahamkara (ego). The Kali Yantra is a meditative tool used to focus the mind on spiritual growth and union with the Divine.
- Made of high quality excelsior pewter
- Adjustable cord (30 inches/76.2 cm) with laminated ends and pewter accent bead included
- Made in the USA by American artisans | <urn:uuid:13f89e3a-51d4-461e-aa20-8678735c8592> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.moonlightmysteries.com/talisman-amulet-pentacle-pentagram-necklaces-pendants-70/eastern-yoga/kali-yantra-of-transformation-hindu-goddess-pendant.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913036 | 440 | 2.265625 | 2 |
In Spring 2006 the depression of two very successful men made newspaper headlines in Maryland: Phil Merrill, a renowned publisher, entrepreneur and diplomat in the Washington area took his own life. Eleven days later Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan withdrew his candidacy for governor of Maryland because of his struggle with depression.
For weeks, newspapers covered male depression, including the stories of Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Archbishop Raymond Roussin, Mike Wallace, William Styron, Art Buchwald, and Robin Williams.
That was unusual. Because, in the majority of media stories and infomercials, depression is regarded as a feminine thing … a result of all of the hormonal shifts and baby-making stuff. The reality? Six million men, or seven percent of American men, suffer from depression, and millions more suffer silently because they either don’t recognize the symptoms, which can vary from women’s, or they are too ashamed to get help for what they see as a woman’s disease. These 7 techniques were written for men to address the hidden desperation so many feel, and to expose the truth about mood disorders and gender.
1. Get a male perspective.
When I hit bottom after the birth of my second baby, I was lucky enough to see Brook Sheild’s beautiful face on “Oprah” describing how I felt. In her book, and in Kay Redfield Jamison’s “An Unquiet Mind” and Tracy Thompson’s “The Ghost in the House,” I found female companionship, as they articulated what was happening to me. That alone made me less scared.
There are some wonderful books tackling the male perspective of depression. Among them: “I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression” by Terrence Real, “Unmasking Male Depression” by Archibald Halt, and, of course, the classic, “Darkness Visible” by William Styron. There are also an array of blogs by men on the topic of depression and mental health. For example, check out “Storied Mind,” “Chipur.com,” “Knowledge Is Necessity,” “Lawyers with Depression,” “Midlife-Men.com,” “Finding Optimism,” and “A Splintered Mind.”
2. Identify the symptoms.
Part of what makes male depression so misunderstood is that a depressed guy doesn’t act the way a depressed lady does, and the feminine symptoms are the ones most often presented in pharmaceutical ads and in glossy brochures you pick up at your doctor’s office . For example, it is not uncommon for a man to complain to his primary care physician about sleep problems, headaches, fatigue and other unspecified pain, some or all of which may be related to untreated depression. In her Newsweek article, “Men & Depression,” Julie Scelfo writes, “Depressed women often weep and talk about feeling bad; depressed men are more likely to get into bar fights, scream at their wives, have affairs or become enraged by small inconveniences like lousy service at a restaurant.”
3. Limit the alcohol.
An interesting study by Yale University discovered that men and women respond to stress differently. According to lead scientist Tara Chaplin, women are much more likely to feel sad or anxious as a result of stress, whereas men turn to alcohol. “Men’s tendency to crave alcohol when upset may be a learned behavior or may be related to known gender differences in reward pathways in the brain,” she said. The tendency, however, puts men at more risk for alcohol-use disorders. And since alcohol is, itself, a depressive, you really don’t want a lot of it in your system. Trust me on this one.
4. Watch the stress.
You can’t drink away your worries, so what DO you do? I offer ten stress busters. But I imagine the most important way to manage stress for men is to work in a job and environment that isn’t … well … toxic. Unfortunately, the more impressive your title, the more stress brewing underneath your skin. Dr. Charles Nemeroff, a psychiatrist who treated both Tom Johnson (president of CNN during the 90s) and philanthropist J.B. Fuqua says stress is a major factor in male depression and a CEO’s (or any executive’s) higher stress level makes them more vulnerable to the illness. The pressure can become unbearable. Unfortunately, some men will have to choose between good mental health and the corner office.
5. Help another dude.
At age 46 Philip Burguieres was running a Fortune 500 company. Now he lends a hand to CEOs who are living lives of quiet desperation and have nowhere to turn. In an interview with PBS, Burguieres said, “I am open about my own experience, and I share my story with other CEOs in lecture settings several times a year [because] I have found that helping other people helps me, and keeps me healthier.” Art Buchwald, another very successful depressive, said in a “Psychology Today” interview some years back that talking about his depression helped him as much as the people he was talking to. It seems to me that the more misunderstood the illness, the greater the need to reach out and help each other.
6. Find an outlet.
One of my male friends who is a tad depressed right now says all he needs to feel better is 18 holes of golf. I’m not sure that chasing the little white ball has the same therapeutic faculties as a high-impact hour of counseling, but I trust that he knows himself better than I know him. What I do know without a doubt is that men are much happier when they can retreat into a “man cave” or a safe corner of the world and do their thing. Some might need a little assistance finding that happy place. So keep trying on those pastimes until one fits and lets you take a deep breath.
7. Tend to the marriage.
Depression leads women into affairs and divorce. But I suspect there are even more casualties with men’s depression. In a poignant blog post, John A. discusses his longing to leave a good marriage as the “active” face of the illness. He writes, “We often focus on the passive symptoms, the inactivity, the isolation, sense of worthlessness, disruption of focused thought, lack of will to do anything. But paradoxically the inner loss and need can drive depressed people to frenzied action to fill the great emptiness in the center of their lives. They may long to replace that inadequate self with an imagined new one that makes up for every loss.” Yet, by loving the partner beside you, even though it can feel counterintuitive and unnatural, you can protect yourself (to a certain extent) from the blows of depression and make yourself more resilient to future episodes.
Click here for even more depression busters for men.
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Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 14 Jun 2010
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Borchard, T. (2010). 7 Depression Busters for Men. Psych Central. Retrieved on June 20, 2013, from http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/06/14/7-depression-busters-for-men/ | <urn:uuid:914667c9-2368-4309-8517-d43e7c19516c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/06/14/7-depression-busters-for-men/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956402 | 1,591 | 2.015625 | 2 |
Philippine Archbishop Acknowledges Partial Blame for Rapid Population Growth
In an unusual statement from a high Church official, Philippine Archbishop Guadencio Rosales acknowledged that the Catholic Church must share the blame for the rapid increase in population growth in the midst of widespread poverty in the country. Twenty-seven million people in the Philippines (more than a third of the population) live on a dollar a day and struggle to meet even the basic needs for food and shelter. Rosales rejects all but “natural” family planning methods and totally ignores the importance of empowering women as a solution.
In his statement to foreign press correspondents, Rosales’ suggested that the solution is to motivate people to plan their families the natural way and exercise discipline in the bedroom according to the China Post. Rosales not only rejected artificial family planning, he didn’t even acknowledge any role for women in planning their own families as he said that it is wrong to tell people “here is the solution, take a rubber”… "a person who cannot discipline himself in the bedroom will not properly discipline himself in traffic.”
The Philippines, a primarily Catholic country, has an annual population growth rate of 2.36 percent, resulting in 1.7 million new births a year, making it one of the highest in Asia. The country’s population is expected to double from 84 million to 168 million over the next thirty years reports Agence France-Presse. Bolivia and Kenya, poor counties where the Catholic Church has a great deal of influence, also have extremely high annual population growth rates of 2.2 and 3.2 percent respectively. Yet Italy, even with the Vatican ever present, has the lowest fertility rate in the world.
The Philippines is a signatory of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) that called on all countries to take the necessary steps to meet the family planning needs of their populations and to provide, by 2015, universal access to a full range of safe and reliable family planning methods, according to the UNFPA.
5/21/2013 Lawmakers Introduce CPC Truth in Advertising Bill - On Friday, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) introduced legislation that would allow the government to investigate crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) that falsely advertise abortion services. . . . | <urn:uuid:a30f9bd4-79cd-47ce-857e-0ddc75479fcd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.msmagazine.com/news/uswirestory.asp?id=8688 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950548 | 484 | 1.625 | 2 |
...continued from page 1
He asks us to include whole new ranges of geographical and other knowledge in our attempts to explain why civilization throve here and withered there.
Now, that doesn't mean that his work is error-free, or that his conclusions are completely correct. And in Guns, Germs, and Steel he is careful to point out that his thesis does not replace history and does not explain everything.
Rather he is merely asserting that certain physical conditions must be met before a great civilization can arise. These conditions don't guarantee the rise of a civilization and they don't, except in the broadest sense, determine the form that civilization will take.
Guns, Germs, and Steel was a great book.
Unfortunately, Jared Diamond is also a true believer in the religion of environmentalism, an apocalyptic belief system in which humans always seem to foul not only their own nest, but the nests of every other creature.
So he followed up Guns, Germs, and Steel with his testamentary book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
The subtitle suggested a discussion of the many ways that individual nations and empires, or the broader civilizations they may represent, make choices that determine the duration, resilience and dominance of their culture and of their polity.
But the book is not that at all. Instead, it's a bit of a screed limited solely to discussion of the ecological mistakes that can lead a society to defeat itself.
Alas, this is almost a trivial topic, unless you're a True Believer. Why? Most societies, cultures and polities fail, when they fail, for reasons having nothing at all to do with ecological mistakes.
It is true that some societies have collapsed because of ecological disasters, but most of these are not human induced. And over the vast sweep of history, the persistence of this or that culture rarely has anything at all to do with how they treat their local environment.
Even Jared Diamond's own examples are actually proof of the opposite of what he believes they prove.
For instance, in Collapse he talks about the fact that the statue-building Easter Island culture "ended" when their misuse of the fragile ecosystem of their tiny island eliminated the surpluses that gave them time to build their statues.
But what he fails to recognize is that the people did not die out. The statue-building culture continued with only one difference: They stopped building statues.
That culture was not replaced by another one; new people did not come in and drive out the old; there was no genetic discontinuity. In other words, all that happened was that they adapted to environmental change – just as cultures everywhere adapt to environmental change.
There was no "collapse," just change. This is precisely the area of history that Guns, Germs, and Steel did not address.
The inexplicable thing about Easter Island is not that they stopped building statues – it's that they ever started. Because they never had enough surpluses to make the building of stone monuments an obvious thing to do.
I've found that most criticisms of Guns, Germs, and Steel are either nit-picking that doesn't undermine his thesis, or straw-man arguments that attack Diamond for saying things that he does not say.
However, Collapse, being a religious tract, is wide open for serious criticism at almost every level, mostly because Diamond's philosophy is faith-based: He starts from the premise that human beings foul things up, and then proceeds to provide only the information that will support that premise.
In other words, he's doing exactly what Creationists and Intelligent Designists do: He bears witness to the faith through which he filters all his data, and thinks he has proven something.
It doesn't mean he's wrong; it just means he hasn't actually said anything scholarly or scientific.
Which brings me to the interesting but imperfect anti-book Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire (ed. McAnanay & Yoffee).
The book consists of a series of essays refuting, or trying to refute, the examples that Diamond uses in Collapse.
Some of the essays are closely reasoned critiques or scientific corrections that leave Diamond's arguments – never very strong – in tatters.
The articles on Easter Island, the Andean Indians and Mesopotamia, for instance, make it obvious that the religion of environmentalism is hopelessly inadequate as an explanation of human history – unless you know nothing about that history, or are willing to overlook all the inconvenient truths that don't bear out the eco-apocalyptic theme.
Other essays, however, are by believers in competing religions; Michael Wilcox's answer to Diamond's assertions about the collapse of Southwest Indian cultures is more petulant than scholarly.
Wilcox has a couple of valid points, but mostly he makes equally specious claims about the continuity of Indian cultures and the rectitude of Native American claims to ownership of all artifacts found in "their" territory, even though all genuine evidence indicates that the artifacts have nothing to do with the tribes that happened to occupy the ground when Europeans came.
When two faith-based groups argue over points of doctrine, those of us who care about the actual scholarship must politely close the door and let them have their little quarrels.
Truth is so elusive and complicated. So are individual human beings. Jared Diamond made a valuable contribution to our present way of thinking about the past with Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I still recommend it – and the way of thinking it represents – as part of the basic education of anyone who wants to go into history, fiction or any related story-telling art.
But often the author of a Great Book goes on to write books of a very different caliber. Just as Stephen Pinker went on from the fascinating and valuable Language Instinct to write books of absurd overclaiming about the science of mind, which fall completely over the line into faith rather than science, so also Jared Diamond went from his Great Book to a heartfelt diatribe about his passionate faith.
And yet the critics of both are often just as guilty of letting their own unprovable beliefs take the place of scientific or scholarly reasoning in their counter-arguments.
No one is immune to having core beliefs influence the way they reason about the world. Everyone has undiscovered beliefs that they don't even know they have because it does not occur to them that anyone could believe otherwise.
But when you claim that you're writing scholarly or scientific works, the value of your work will depend, not just on the beliefs of others that you challenge, but also your willingness to question or doubt your own conclusions.
Diamond and Pinker both adhere to that standard in the Great Books; both plummet from that standard to obvious ignorance of their own biases in subsequent works.
I do not doubt their sincerity; I merely question the value of those later works as science or scholarship. Both fall into the error of overclaiming; both commit the scientific crime of treating as proven that which has not even been tested....continued on page 3 | <urn:uuid:353ef4c3-4744-42ef-9ce1-728f731cd3f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/1editorialbody.lasso?-token.folder=comm/2013/01/23&-token.story=214569.112113&-token.disearea=3&-nothing&-token.disearea=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971516 | 1,464 | 1.960938 | 2 |
As residents start thinking about switching on the heat, it's also a good time to think about getting homes ready for the winter.
The Local Energy Alliance Program, LEAP, said weatherizing your home is about making sure it's properly insulated and that your windows and doors are completely sealed. By spending a little money in the beginning, you can save yourself more cash down the road on electricity bills.
Guy Caroselli, the Residential Energy Services Manager for LEAP, said, "When talking about air sealing and doing basic sealing of your house, the materials might cost a couple hundred dollars, but you're talking about paybacks usually three to six months often times. It's usually the most cost effective thing."
As a part of Charlottesville's 250th birthday, LEAP is providing $25 home energy reviews for the first 250 homes through the end of the year.
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Book Review: Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove
Week 2 of 2008 and the Book A Week challenge brings us Opening Atlantis, the latest offering from master of alternate history Harry Turtledove. I've been a fan of Turtledove's since I read Guns Of The South many, many years ago.
The premise of the book seems to be that part of North American (everything east of the Mississippi, judging from the cover art) broke off from the main continent. This landmass is much closer to Europe than the New World was, and thus is discovered and colonized much quicker (1451).
Part 1 of the book covers the discovery of the new continent, which is quickly dubbed "Atlantis." Breton fishermen know of the existence of Atlantis, and give this knowledge to an English fisherman in exchange for a third of his catch. The Englishmen see Atlantis as a place ripe for colonization, and move quickly to start a settlement there.
Things go quite well for them, even as French and Spanish colonies are founded on the coast south of the English. Atlantis is, after all, big enough for everyone. Until an English noble who backed the wrong people in the Wars of the Roses is exiled to Atlantis, and decides to make it his own kingdom.
Part 1 has definite American Revolution overtones, with it's rejection of unfairly-imposed taxation. It also sets the stage for settler/European conflict which dots the rest of the book. Part 1 does it's job, though; it sets the stage for the book (and the trilogy, for that matter), and introduces us to the family whose history we will be following -- the Radcliffes.
Part 2 shows Atlantis 200 years later, and a conflict between pirates led by Red Rodney Radcliffe and the English settlers of Stuart led by his cousin William Radcliff. Red Rodney has been preying on all manner of shipping around Atlantis, and this has made him some enemies. The settlers ally themselves with English and Dutch sailors to fight the pirates.
We see more tension between Atlanteans and Europeans in part 2. This section parallels the battles with privateers and pirates in our own timeline in the 1600s. We start to see that Atlanteans view themselves as independent, and that their European cousins see them as backwoods bumpkins who certainly aren't proper subjects of the Crown.
Part 3 gives us this timeline's version of the French and Indian War. This is one of the things that I really don't enjoy in alternate history, and it's a weakness that I found in Turtledove's Great War/Settling Accounts saga -- the determination to present parallels to wars that were fought in our own timeline. It becomes very predictable, and you end up reading to see which character is going to be the new timeline's Lincoln, or Washington, or Rommel, etc. The account of English Atlantean guerilla warfare in French and Spanish territory was interesting, but I'm hoping that the next book in the series doesn't start out with a meeting of a doppleganger Continental Congress getting ready to declare independence from England.
I really liked the fact that Turtledove is focusing on one family as the movers and shakers of English Atlantis. That's something new for him, and I think it works well. The book was enjoyable, with a couple of reservations that I've mentioned above. I wish there was an actual map of Atlantis in the book, though that is a possibility for the second book, I'm sure. There are some anachronisms in the book, which reviewers on Amazon.com have been quick to point out, but those aren't glaring to me. I was amazed at the ability of the English to start a successful settlement right away in Atlantis, but these settlers did not face many of the challenges that the first settlers in North America faced when they arrived here. Opening Atlantis is not up to Turtledove's usual standards, and is far inferior to Ruled Britannia, but is still worth reading. I'll have to read the second book of this trilogy to see if it really has any promise, though.
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“A Mirror on Which to Dwell”
When I agreed to write a cycle of songs for Speculum Musicae I decided, first, that it should be for soprano and chamber orchestra. The poems of Elizabeth Bishop impressed me because they have a clear verbal coherence as well as an imaginative use of syllabic sounds that suggest the singing voice. I was very much in sympathy with their point of view, for there is almost always a secondary layer of meaning, sometimes ironic, sometimes passionate, that gives a special ambiance, often contradictory, to what the words say. The order of the songs is entirely mine, alternating as they do between considerations about nature, love and isolation.
“A Mirror on Which to Dwell,” a line from the poem, “Insomnia,” is the title I chose partly because it seemed to characterize the general world of the poems, partly because I wanted the music to be a mirror of the words and partly because Speculum Musicae, the organization which commissioned the work in honor of the U.S. Bicentennial. Its first performance was by Susan Davenny Wyner and Speculum Musicae, Richard Fitz conducting, in New York City on February 24, 1976. The work is dedicated to the artists that gave its first performance. | <urn:uuid:4c4f3a22-8afc-488e-ac25-ad0a5702e82a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.schirmer.com/Default.aspx?TabId=2420&State_2874=2&workId_2874=26722 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969085 | 270 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Gay conversion therapy banned in state of California
'Gay reparation therapy' has 'no basis in science or medicine,
Governor Jerry Brown Monday made California the first U.S. state to ban a form of therapy designed to change the sexual orientation of minors. Brown denounced "reparative therapy" as having "no basis in science or medicine, and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery," Brown said on his Twitter feed. Signing the bill into law over the weekend, the action drew support from gay rights groups.
Under the law, doctors cannot provide therapy that seeks 'to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.' The law will come into force on January 1.
"This bill bans non-scientific 'therapies' that have driven young people to depression and suicide," Brown added.
Under the law, doctors cannot provide therapy that seeks "to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex." The law will come into force on January 1.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-gender (LGBT) rights groups were quick to praise the governor.
"Thank you @JerryBrownGov for signing #SB1172 into law and protecting #LGBT youth from psychological abuse!" tweeted The Trevor Project, which provides suicide prevention services to the LGBT community.
"LGBT youth will now be protected from a practice that has not only been debunked as junk science, but has been proven to have drastically negative effects on their well-being" said its head, Chad Griffin.
"We commend Gov. Brown for putting children first, and call on all states to take California's lead on this issue," he added.
There are other experts who disagree, considering such therapies as possibly helpful in some instances.
Exodus International, a ministry which reaches out to people in the homosexual lifestyle who do not want to remain there, has announced that it will no longer practice conversion therapy.
Exodus International President Alan Chambers addressed the crowd at the 37th annual Freedom Conference recently shared why the organization will no longer use reparative therapy to help those who struggle with same-sex attraction, and will use a model that focuses more on discipleship instead.
Chambers told The Christian Post that reparative therapy, which seeks to change Same Sex Attraction through activities like counseling and prayer, could set the person seeking therapy up for failure by giving him or her unrealistic expectations.
"As the president of Exodus International and, even more than that, as a Christian leader who is out in front of people all the time, it is my responsibility to lead honestly and transparently and to share with people that, just because you become a Christian,...your struggles don't always go away," he said. "You don't get to a place where you're never going to be tempted again."
Chambers says anyone who still believes in reparative therapy will still be able to minister with Exodus, but the organization will no longer formally supports such an approach.
© 2012, Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.
- - -
Pope Benedict XVI's Prayer Intentions for January 2013
General Intention: The Faith of Christians. That in this Year of Faith Christians may deepen their knowledge of the mystery of Christ and witness joyfully to the gift of faith in him.
Missionary Intention: Middle Eastern Christians. That the Christian communities of the Middle East, often discriminated against, may receive from the Holy Spirit the strength of fidelity and perseverance.
Keywords: Governor Brown, California, gay conversion, reparative therapy
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I would like to try something, but I am new to Linux. Is there a script similar to what you can do with DOS batch files that I could run to do the following:
Copy a quantity of files from a temp directory to the SD card; log this to a results file Copy the temperature to the results file via acpi -V Delete the copied files from the SD card Repeat the above process 100 times
This would provide a log of if this an intermittent problem that only occurs at higher temperatures.
where the temp directory is /directory/temp, the sd card is mounted at /media/sdcard, and your results and script are in /home/evbrown (all probably need to be changed), and your scripts is named script.sh.
The >> tells bash/csh/whatever to write to end of file, so you can use that to log pretty much anything.
The last line just calls the script again. May want to do something different so it doesn't run forever.
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Sobeys sells more red-listed, or harmfully fished or farmed, seafood species than any other major Canadian food retailer, says Greenpeace Canada.
Sobeys’ focus on fisheries engagement rather than removing species of concern from sale can help encourage change on the water, but the “company needs to act faster to discontinue products that do not have existing, credible, measurable improvement projects in place,” the Toronto-based environmental group said Thursday in a news release.
Species are red-listed by Greenpeace if the fishery or production methods negatively impact the fish or other marine species, lead to ecosystem alterations, have social implications or are poorly managed or corrupt.
Red-listed species Sobeys sells include farmed Atlantic salmon, Atlantic sea scallops, Atlantic cod, Atlantic halibut, haddock, yellowfin tuna and Chilean sea bass, Greenpeace said.
David Smith, Sobeys’ vice-president of sustainability, said the company disagrees with Greenpeace.
“It’s their list,” he said in an interview.
Smith said many of the species on the Greenpeace list are considered to be in good shape by authorities, including Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
“Rather than delist and stop selling things as Greenpeace wants, our approach is to seek to improve production processes,” he said. “We don’t only listen to them.”
Smith said Sobeys has no plans to remove open-pen farmed salmon from its shelves, as has been done by Overwaitea Food Group of British Columbia, the first Canadian grocer to achieve the environmental group’s green rating for seafood sustainability, with a score of 72 this year.
“We don’t follow the herd,” Smith said
The jury is still out on the impact of open-pen salmon farming, he said.
“There’s lots of science on both sides.”
Overwaitea attained the green ranking in part for its decision to remove open-pen farmed salmon from its stores, Greenpeace said.
“We commend this latest step by OFG to source seafood products that are more compatible with healthy oceans,” Sarah King, Greenpeace’s ocean campaign co-ordinator, said in a news release.
“It’s time the federal government and the salmon farming industry start getting the message that this product doesn’t fit in with the Canadian retail market’s growing sustainable seafood movement.”
Greenpeace has red-listed open-pen farmed salmon because of its negative impact on coastal ecosystems.
Overwaitea is the first large Canadian food retailer, and the third in North America, to stop selling open-pen farmed salmon, which has come under fire in Nova Scotia.
New Brunswick-based Cooke Aquaculture, which recently had to kill several hundred thousand farmed salmon near Shelburne Harbour infected with infectious salmon anemia, has expansion plans in Nova Scotia.
But opponents of that expansion, which is being supported by $25 million in government loans, say large-scale, open-pen aquaculture pollutes the marine environment and threatens traditional fisheries, including Nova Scotia’s lucrative lobster fishery.
Overwaitea introduced land-based closed-containment farmed salmon, which the Nova Scotia government says isn’t commercially viable, as a more sustainable alternative to open-pen farmed salmon in 2010.
With a score of 68, Loblaw finished second in this year’s Greenpeace ranking of supermarket seafood sustainability. Safeway, which has stopped buying open-pen farmed salmon from Chile, where Cooke has operations that have been hit by infectious salmon anemia, are considering closed-system alternatives to open-pen aquaculture.
Loblaw dropped from last year’s first place, while Safeway stayed at third spot with a score of 63. Metro finished fourth with a score of 56, Walmart was fifth with a score of 55, Sobeys and Federated Co-operative Ltd. tied for sixth with scores of 54 and Costco was last with a failing grade of 43.
Sobeys’ failure to remove or replace red-listed seafood was a key factor in the grocery chain’s drop from last year’s fourth place ranking, said Susanna Fuller of the Ecology Action Centre.
Consumers continue to see Greenpeace red-listed species in Sobeys’ stores and the grocer hasn’t “committed to good in-store labelling,” she said Thursday. “That makes it difficult, as a consumer, to make informed choices.”
However, Fuller commended Sobeys’ This Fish program, which allows consumers to trace seafood directly back to the vessel on which it was caught. | <urn:uuid:ec8f9f14-bb9b-4c1d-8e37-78d1bf70863c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/112095-sobeys-gets-grief-from-greenpeace | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944755 | 1,006 | 2.140625 | 2 |
(CNN) -- Royal Dutch Shell has begun preparatory drilling for an offshore oil well in the Arctic, the oil company announced Sunday, the first step in a long-controversial project.
U.S. authorities granted Shell permission to begin work on the well in the Chukchi Sea, about 90 miles off the Alaskan North Slope, in late August.
"Today marks the culmination of Shell's six-year effort to explore for potentially significant oil and gas reserves, which are believed to lie under Alaska's Outer Continental Shelf," company spokesman Curtis Smith said in a writen statement. "In the days to come, drilling will continue in the Chukchi Sea, and we will prepare for drilling to commence in the Beaufort Sea."
Steve Oomittuk, the mayor of nearby Point Hope, said he's keeping a wary eye on the Shell operation and has concerns about what the future will bring.
"There's nothing we can do now but I worry about the weather and the animals we depend on for our survival," he said. If "Shell finds what it thinks is down there then many other companies are going to come and then it will only be a matter of time before something happens out there."
The Obama administration gave Shell the green light to start "certain limited preparatory activities," including work related to the installation of a blowout preventer, on August 30. The government had been set to approve new drilling in Arctic waters off Alaska before BP's disastrous 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico prompted a review of existing plans.
That blowout at a BP well off Louisiana killed 11 workers, took nearly three months to cap and became the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Shell says it has taken steps "to do it right" in the Arctic, where the U.S. Geological Survey estimates more than 90 billion barrels of oil and nearly 1,700 trillion cubic feet of natural gas may be recoverable.
The shrinking of the region's sea ice -- which hit record lows this year -- has created new opportunities for energy exploration in the region. But environmental groups argue that Shell has failed to show it can handle a spill in the inhospitable region, roughly 700 miles north of Anchorage.
"While this is an interim step only, this is like a building inspector letting a developer start construction on a skyscraper on shaky ground before the safety plans are even complete," the environmental advocacy group Sierra Club said in a late August statement critical of the Obama administration. "It's premature, it's unwarranted and it's wrong -- especially when it's happening in one of the most pristine places on earth."
The amount of the Arctic covered by sea ice fell in late August to the lowest point since satellite observations began in 1979, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported. That trend has stretched into September, with 45% less coverage than September conditions in the 1980s and 1990s.
Climate researchers say this decrease in sea ice a symptom of a warming climate, caused largely by the combustion of carbon-rich fossil fuels. The science is politically controversial but generally accepted as fact by most scientists. | <urn:uuid:8ddd268e-a43f-4468-b2a6-eb78bedc9156> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnn.es/2012/09/09/us/arctic-oil/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957053 | 639 | 2.40625 | 2 |
First the Depression, then the Dust Bowl. Wikipedia talks about how Roosevelt tried to conserve soil and restore the ecological balance, but avoids mentioning that these actions preceded the worst effects of the Dust Bowl. How much you want to bet that environmentalist policies exacerbated the problem?
Originally Posted by SarasotaRepub
During President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first 100 days in office in 1933, governmental programs designed to conserve soil and restore the ecological balance of the nation were implemented. Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes established the Soil Erosion Service in August 1933 under Hugh Hammond Bennett. In 1935, it was transferred and reorganized under the Department of Agriculture and renamed the Soil Conservation Service. More recently, it has been renamed the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).
Additionally, the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation (FSRC) was created after more than six million pigs were slaughtered to stabilize prices. The pigs were sent to slaughterhouses and the meat packed and distributed to the poor and hungry. FDR in an Address on the AAA commented, "Let me make one other point clear for the benefit of the millions in cities who have to buy meats. Last year the Nation suffered a drought of unparalleled intensity. If there had been no Government program, if the old order had obtained in 1933 and 1934, that drought on the cattle ranges of America and in the corn belt would have resulted in the marketing of thin cattle, immature hogs and the death of these animals on the range and on the farm, and if the old order had been in effect those years, we would have had a vastly greater shortage than we face today. Our program -- we can prove it -- saved the lives of millions of head of livestock. They are still on the range, and other millions of heads are today canned and ready for this country to eat."
The FSRC diverted agricultural commodities to relief organizations. Apples, beans, canned beef, flour and pork products were distributed through local relief channels. Cotton goods were later included, to clothe the needy.
In 1935, the federal government formed a Drought Relief Service (DRS) to coordinate relief activities. The DRS bought cattle in counties which were designated emergency areas, for $14 to $20 a head. Animals unfit for human consumption Ė more than 50 percent at the beginning of the program Ė were killed. The remaining cattle were given to the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation (FSRC) to be used in food distribution to families nationwide. Although it was difficult for farmers to give up their herds, the cattle slaughter program helped many of them avoid bankruptcy. "The government cattle buying program was a blessing to many farmers, as they could not afford to keep their cattle, and the government paid a better price than they could obtain in local markets." | <urn:uuid:a83ff2ee-bea0-4c7a-8034-743b39c4639e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.conservativeunderground.com/forum505/showthread.php?53696-Missouri-Farmers-Fight-Rise-In-Hay-Thefts&p=541717 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975554 | 565 | 3.453125 | 3 |
If you're prone to turkey trauma, relax. Here's a foolproof recipe that ensures a perfect feast.
Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Rinse the turkey with cold water and blot dry, inside and out, with a paper towel. Place the neck, giblets, carrots, celery, and onion in a large roasting pan and arrange the turkey on top, breast-side up.
Loosely pack the stuffing in the neck cavity and inside the body. Fold the wings back and under the body of the turkey. Fold the neck skin under to enclose the stuffing and tie the legs together with butcher's twine.
Season the turkey with salt and pepper. Pour the broth into the roasting pan. Roast for 3 3/4 to 4 1/2 hours, basting frequently and tenting the turkey with aluminum foil two thirds of the way through the cooking process.
Test for doneness with a meat thermometer. The temperature in the thickest part of the thigh should be 180 degrees, in the thickest part of the breast, 170 degrees, and in the stuffing, 160 degrees.
Remove the stuffing and let the bird sit for 10 minutes before carving. Place the fresh herbs and orange slices on the turkey for a festive presentation. Serves 10 to 12.
If you're roasting a smaller or larger bird, use the chart below:
Turkey Roasting Times
10 to 18 lbs.:
3 to 3 1/2 hours (unstuffed)
3 3/4 to 4 1/2 hours (stuffed) 18 to 22 lbs.:
3 1/2 to 4 hours (unstuffed)
4 1/2 to 5 hours (stuffed) 22 to 24 lbs.:
4 to 4 1/2 hours (unstuffed)
5 to 5 1/2 hours (stuffed) 24 to 30 lbs.:
4 1/2 to 5 hours (unstuffed)
5 1/2 to 6 1/4 (stuffed)
This recipe is a part of these parties: | <urn:uuid:aaef4005-2ce3-4202-b2e5-c11b6323b20a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://spoonful.com/recipes/roast-turkey | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907489 | 425 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Rodeo - New York City, 1954 / Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans
Robert Frank’s America is a tough America. Of all the people depicted in the 83 photographs comprising Frank’s The Americans, only a few smile. Most people have empty expressions while they gaze into a bleak future. They are neither dreaming nor pondering. The small number of those devoted to evading a dreary fate either grimace or scowl. They are defiant.
Despite the diversity of Frank’s subjects—old or young, rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, rural or urban, gay or straight, black or white—all represent the stars and stripes. And what are Americans seeking? Freedom, presumably. Their austere posture is aimed at a life that promises more than it delivers. Frank travels across America trying to capture the moment when the naivety of each individual cracks and a flood of hard sadness comes gushing through.
Since the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibit of Frank’s photography is arranged to unfold in a specific order, the initial photograph sets the tone. It is entitled Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey, but we see no parade, no joy, no celebration, no destination. All we see is a brick building with two people looking out of their respective windows. The woman in the left window is partly obscured by the shade of a lowered blind, while the face of the person in the right window is completely covered by an American flag attached to a pole and flapping in the wind. It’s eerie: There is something ominous about an American flag—a widely recognized symbol of freedom—erasing the existence of an individual.
Further into the series, in Navy Recruiting Station, Post Office—Butte, Montana, all that is seen of human agency within a government bureau is two feet resting on a desk, one crossed over the other. There is no humanity here, only an American flag hanging prominently on the back wall. In another photograph, Bank—Houston, Texas, a similar idea is captured: an office full of vacant chairs, desks, and documents, with only a trace of humanity. A lone man works diligently in the background, insignificant compared with the entire financial institution. War and the economy, the image suggests, are beyond human control.
U.S. 90, En Route to Del Rio, Texas, 1955 / Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans
Freedom is a complex endeavor in Frank’s exhibit. Liberty can be obtained, but we must first enlist in the army to wage wars; music can be enjoyed, but we must first enter the factory to build jukeboxes. Another picture, entitled Factory—Detroit, depicts a black man sitting outside an industrial plant, his workplace. The building looks colossal next to him. Although at first this picture seems to contrast with the Butte and Houston images, it does not. All these men, despite their differences in status, are caught in the same system. All are lost in the labyrinth of bureaucracy. One secures the resources, one provides the funds, and one produces the automobiles—yet all long for autonomy.
Frank’s use of shiny cars and paved highways often represent salvation. The most explicit photographs suggesting this sentiment are Santa Fe, New Mexico, with its gas station sign that reads “Save,” and Chicago, which shows a car with religious stickers on the back that read “Christ Came to Save Sinners” and “Christ Died For Our Sins.” But Frank also reminds us that behind every mile of highway and car tire is a slave, whether behind an office desk or on a factory floor. Like Christ’s death on the cross, our freedom paradoxically requires sacrifice.
Yet Frank presents another paradox of freedom, a lonelier one. In Bar—Las Vegas, Nevada, a well-dressed man stands on an empty dance floor staring into a jukebox. It appears to be daytime as the sun comes through the windows. This man is free, but he is alone. He can listen to whatever he wants, but there are too many options. Likewise, in Casino—Elko, Nevada, a woman throws dice onto the craps table. The wide-open table suggests opportunity and possibility, a clear horizon. But no one in the photograph looks content; they seem to know the odds are always against them.
Where does all this effort and struggle get Americans? In Yale Commencement - New Haven Green, New Haven, Connecticut, an old man sits on a bench while a graduating class, dressed in their gowns, marches by. The man is disillusioned. He appears to know that, given time, the young will also become disappointed in life. They are too young to know that their pilgrimage is to nowhere.
Funeral - St. Helena, South Carolina, 1955 / Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans
In the end, what all Americans have in common is death. A photograph of several black men dressed in suits and gathered around automobiles, best captures this American defiance to even the cruelest of fates. The photo is entitled Funeral—St. Helena, South Carolina, and the man in the forefront, with his raised jaw, glaring eyes, lean cheekbones, and fingers resting on lips, exudes stoicism in the face of death. He has lost someone he cares about, and knows that someday he will be lost to those who care about him. Regardless of his position in society and the cosmos, he will not give in to despair.
What Frank could only have had a hint of in the late 1950s, was that this American resilience, this attitude of overcoming what seems impossible, would one day embody civil rights, women’s rights, disability rights, and gay rights—all avenues toward freedom. Frank may present a cynical view of America, but he captures the toughness that would eventually lead to greater liberties, though not complete, for the Americans of today.
Trolley - New Orleans, 1955 / Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans | <urn:uuid:5cabd561-fc4e-4fd4-b57b-65b73839e422> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/120550-robert-franks-the-americans/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945272 | 1,244 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Bad weather is hampering efforts in the search for three people missing off a New Plymouth beach since Wednesday afternoon.
Police are now using coastal forecasters to try and locate the bodies of climbing instructor Bryce Jourdain and 17-year-old Spotswood College students Stephen Lewis Kahukaka-Gedye and Joao Felipe Martins De Melo.
The three men are thought to have drowned after being swept out to sea during a rock climbing expedition at Paritutu Rock on Wednesday.
"The biggest challenge for us is the swell conditions in the sea and around the rocks," said Incident Controller Inspector Frank Grant.
"Tomorrow we're extending north up to the airport and perhaps a little bit further," he said.
Police have now contracted an oceanographer to try and map the currents, and track the whereabouts of the bodies.
Grant said a number of volunteers, alongside searchers from police, land search and rescue, army territorials and Red Cross, were conducting searches along the coastline today.
Taranaki Rescue Crewman Andy Cronin said it was difficult with the changing sea conditions but said searchers were "optimistic".
"[It's] Nice to see the community coming out to play their part. Teams are getting tired and sore, but all are pretty passionate about searching for those guys and bringing them back to their families."
Campbell Shaw, a local student who survived the tragedy, told ONE News the students were not tied to the rock when the wave hit.
But Shaw said they felt safe because they were on a flat area.
Searchers have found several items linked to the missing men, but have yet to confirm they belong to the missing climbers.
A police investigation into the disappearances is now turning to how the rock-climbing adventure went wrong.
Eleven Year 13 students from Spotswood College were doing a Taranaki Outdoor Pursuit Education Centre (TOPEC) rock-climbing exercise at Paritutu Rock when the accident occurred.
Police have begun interviewing students and an instructor who were part of the expedition.
"Yesterday police continued speaking to witnesses as part of the investigation into the circumstances which led to Wednesday afternoon's tragic incident," said Grant.
"Our investigation is likely to take several weeks to complete."
TOPEC Board Chairman David Grigg said today he had started an internal investigation into the incident.
"TOPEC is working to support our staff and community and will continue to respond to events as they unfold. We are working closely with the Police and Department of Labour as they commence their investigation.
"At this time, as search operations continue, our thoughts and
prayers are with the missing and their families," Grigg said. | <urn:uuid:3707e348-46c7-48ab-8943-e06a6db3d23f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/weather-hampers-search-rock-climbers-bodies-5017635 | 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 | 0.976341 | 558 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Lucian Freud completed just one portrait, “Woman Smiling,” of his former wife (and student) Suzy Boyt, with whom he had five children. Completed in 1958-59, it’s considered a landmark — a turning point in his career toward the expressionist style for which he’s best known. Christie’s will offer the painting in June at its Post-War and Contemporary Art Auction, where it’s expected to sell for $5.6-$7.2m.
That estimate may be modest. Freud’s work has been selling exceptionally well, and the painting is thought to be the most significant of his works to come to auction since his “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” sold in May 2008 for $33.6m—the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist. The painting, originally owned by the wife of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, last sold at another Christie’s auction in 1973. Its price: $8,000.
Read more at Christie’s. | <urn:uuid:8e023014-74fc-4c51-a19a-08345d8b2534> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.auctionnewsnetwork.com/art/rare-freud-comes-to-market/3305/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979091 | 224 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Biowarfare (ebola + smallpox)
tdlaing at nospam.dres.dnd.ca
Mon Nov 9 17:35:16 EST 1998
In article <OyNdIr#C#GA.263 at upnetnews05>, "Eric Beard"
<ericzbeard at email.msn.com> wrote:
> Concerning the use of ebola as a bio-weapon, the Soviets/Russians were
> rumored to have found a place in the smallpox genome to hide ebola,
> combining the two to form what is refferred to as "ebolapox" or "blackpox",
> with the contagiousness of smallpox and the mortality rate of ebola.
> This information was published in an article called "The Bioweaponeers" and
> its source was Dr. Ken Alibek (formerly Kenatyan Alibekov, a leading Soviet
> bioweapons engineer). However, the claim has been downplayed by researchers
> at USAMRIID, who say it may be possible but is highly improbable.
> Can anyone provide some solid information on the possibility of actually
> combining the two viruses?
It is possible--modified viruses are used as carriers, or "vectors" for
genetic material from other organisms all the time in molecular biology
(notably bacteriophage and adenovirus, but others as well, including
vaccinia virus, which is related to smallpox virus). However, researchers
would have to know the entire genetic sequence of the Ebola virus, know
which gene(s) is/are responsible for infecting and attacking the body, and
know how to splice it into the variola genome correctly to maintain the
integrity of the relevant genes from both organisms. And, they would have
to show that the recombinant organism would act as postulated (contagious
as smallpox, deadly as Ebola) without one inactivating the other, or the
combination having even more nasty attributes. Theoretically it's
possible (the show Millenium had that premise at the end of last season),
but technically it's quite difficult.
Speaking of smallpox, some infectious disease experts believe smallpox is
poised to make a comeback. It's been 20 years since the last known
naturally-occurring case and routine immunization against it has
stopped--meaning a whole generation is completely unprotected against it.
tdlaing at dres.dnd.ca
Remove "nospam" from my e-mail address in the header to reply.
All the standard disclaimers apply.
More information about the Microbio | <urn:uuid:1766d184-e418-411b-b661-6a7ed6b274a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/microbio/1998-November/013954.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937344 | 573 | 2.40625 | 2 |
Arizona Leads Nation in Entrepreneurial Growth, Study Reports
Published: Thursday, May 10, 2012
Updated: Monday, May 14, 2012 13:05
Arizona may be in the desert, but it’s fertile ground for entrepreneurs looking to launch their business.
Arizona had the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity in the nation last year, according to a recent Kauffman Foundation report.
In 2011, 520 adults for each 100,000 created a new business in Arizona per month — beating the national average of 320. While Kauffman research fellows caution that year-to-year changes may not be significant, the results mark an upward trend for Arizona, suggesting a startup friendly environment is coming to fruition in the desert.
“There have been so many positive changes in the entrepreneurial environment in Phoenix over the last two years,” said Fred von Graf, who runs the co-working space and tech accelerator LaunchSpot in Tempe. “The right people are in the right positions making really good changes.”
Von Graf started LaunchSpot in 2010 as a way to leverage his business connections and knowledge to make a difference in the community. LaunchSpot hosts rapid pitch events, offers free co-working space and plans to start an accelerator program for tech companies. By the end of the month, LaunchSpot plans to open at new location on Mill Avenue to pool from Arizona State University’s talent.
He hopes to fuel the entrepreneurial fire and produce more jobs for Arizona. Startups are the key to job growth since companies that are less than five years old create the most new jobs, according to the Kauffman Foundation.
But LaunchSpot isn’t a lone soldier in the quest for entrepreneurial support.
Von Graf attributes Arizona’s recent jump in the number of startup businesses to an increase of resources. The perfect blend of talent, capital and collaboration is popping up around the Valley at places like AZ Disruptors, Gangplank, SkySong Center and the Arizona Commerce Authority. To continue the upward trend von Graf believes that Arizona needs to continue to draw local and national attention to these resources.
While von Graf believes the increase of new business is due to the rise in resources, others believe it’s a response to the current economy.
“During any great period of change people have to become creative,” said Erik Johnston, an associate professor at ASU. “Arizonans in general have to be adaptive to change because we don’t have the stability of other states, so people who do well here tend to be entrepreneurial and able to adjust.”
Whether it’s the resources or the recession, supporters of entrepreneurship believe innovation needs to continue to be pushed at the educational level.
“ASU in general has been very focused on allowing students to create their own destiny,” said Johnston. “We are teaching them the skills to work together, to build stuff and to create proactive change – which is what the spirit of entrepreneurship is.”
He notes programs like 10,000 Solution, an online forum where students have posted more than 2,500 innovative solutions to societal problems, and the Policy Challenge, a partnership with ASU and the White House to identify and breakdown barriers to entrepreneurship.
“We want people to get in involved in their own lives,” Johnston said. “We want them to be able to look at different problems or opportunities within their environment and, instead of waiting for someone else to deal with it, we want to empower people to address it themselves. Quite simply that is what it comes down to. We want more empowered people.”
Stephanie Lee did just that when she opened Bébé EcoPosh in 2011.
When Lee, an ASU graduate student, was pregnant with her daughter Sophia she started searching for environmentally friendly baby products — like hybrid diapers that biodegrade within 90 days instead of traditional diapers that take up to 500 years.
“I wanted to start implementing a life change in myself to live a more greener life, and I wanted to bring Sophia up in that type of environment and instill those values in her,” Lee said.
But like most moms, Lee wasn’t satisfied with the bland eco-friendly products and sought out more stylish options.
“I realized that these products existed but there wasn’t actually one store online to purchase them, so I saw an opportunity to bring all these great stylish eco-friendly products to one place,” she said. “It’s not only | <urn:uuid:037abb89-1fb5-4103-9c64-7cafec8a98fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ecollegetimes.com/night-shop/arizona-leads-nation-in-entrepreneurial-growth-study-reports-1.2739761 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940823 | 952 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Earlier this month, as I made my way up Riverside Ave. after a forum at the Spokane Club on same-sex marriage, I did what most journalists do best. I eavesdropped.
Three well-dressed people in front of me had just heard the same discussion I had — Bishop Blase Cupich on how same-sex marriage could open a pandora's box of other marriage possibilities vs. City Councilman Jon Snyder on why legalizing same-sex marriage will curb discrimination — and were talking about how they'd vote. The woman in the middle asked the others if the referendum would allow immediate relatives to marry. She was fine with gay people getting married, she told them, but had gotten the impression that if Washington's R74 passes, a father could marry his daughter. She just couldn't stomach that.
Let's be clear: despite any slippery slope argument against it, R74 (read it yourself here) says nothing about extending marriage to people who are related, people who want to marry their pets or more than two people — just same-sex couples.
If you've seen this pro-R74 ad, you may be getting fuzzy facts too. Washington state's domestic partnership law already affords same-sex couples the same rights as married couples, including access during medical emergencies. So, to imply that R74 provides more legal rights during those times is deceptive.
Because of soundbites like those, we knew we had to clear up some facts when we wrote this week's cover story on same-sex marriage in Washington state. (A couple big ones: R74 does not offer any new legal rights to same-sex couples. It does protect pastors who want to refuse to marry same sex couples.) And if you've heard arguments about the effect on small business owners who won't want to participate in a same-sex ceremony, we've explored that too.
Since it's an emotional fight on both sides, we also wanted to help you understand the real people who are on the battlefield here and what's at stake for them. In the story, you'll hear from two same-sex couples in Spokane as well as the leader of the national opposition movement and a local pastor who worries about the effects of legalizing same-sex marriage.
Marriage equality is big news across Washington and across the country. Gallup is asking about it. So are ballot measures in Maine, Maryland and Minnesota. Yet, while societal acceptance of same-sex relationships is up, marriage equality efforts have failed in all 32 states where they've been put to a public vote.
If you're a Washington voter, you'll be next to decide on this issue. It's worth knowing the facts. | <urn:uuid:e302aeb6-a4c4-4964-8a2f-841ff197fd84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.inlander.com/spokane/blog-6835-why-we-wrote-this-weeks-cover-story-about-marriage-equality.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977028 | 547 | 1.539063 | 2 |
I touch upon a sensitive subject here, because I know that some of our TAC bishops and priests favour (without obliging their clergy in the matter) following the three-year lectionary used in the modern Roman rite, the current Anglican Use and most Anglican liturgies in use since the 1970’s.
I find it pointless to go into reasons for my reserves about the three-year lectionary when things are expressed that much better in the New Liturgical Movement – Doubts About the Three-Year Cycle. The article and the comments are food for thought.
There are a couple more considerations. I don’t think the lectionary for Mass should compensate for the absence of faithful from the Offices. More importantly, the lectionary of the Roman rite (or that of the Prayer Book) could have been improved along the lines of the early eighteenth-century Parisian missal or the medieval Norman uses including Sarum. Ferial Wednesdays and Fridays have their proper Old Testament lessons, Epistles and Gospels.
My other main reserve is the change made to the temporal cycle made in 1969 by the late Archbishop Bugnini: particularly the Sundays after Epiphany and Sundays after Trinity (Pentecost) becoming “ordinary” Sundays per annum, the abolition of Septuagesima and the Ember Days, the suppression of all the Octaves other than Easter. One positive aspect of the Pauline reform is the wealth of propers for ferias when no saint’s feast is appointed, and another is the wealth of prefaces.
I hope, in a future reform of the reform, that the old temporal cycle will be restored. I am much less bothered about saint’s feasts being displaced. Those of us who follow the Sarum Use find feasts celebrated on different days to what is prescribed in the classical Roman rite. For example, we celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus on August 7th instead of January 2nd.
I would also hope for a return to a single-year liturgical cycle, not only for the Scripture Readings, but also for the Gradual psalms, Alleluia verses and so forth.
Be sure to follow our Moderator at Eccentric Bliss, his personal blog! | <urn:uuid:5bbcd474-42f3-4511-b7f0-1c0203c1e627> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theanglocatholic.com/2010/01/three-year-lectionary/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949361 | 472 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Pointy Boot Fad Is Spreading in Mexico
Matehuala, Mexico (AP) - The customer known only as "Cesar of Huizache" had an odd request for shoemaker Dario Calderon: He showed him a cell-phone photo of a sequined cowboy boot with pointy toes so long, they curled up toward the knees. He wanted a pair, but with longer toes.
"I thought 'What's up with this dude?'" Calderon said at his shop in Matehuala, a northeastern Mexican city of farmers and cattle ranchers accustomed to a more stoic cowboy look. The boot in the photo measured 60 centimeters (23 inches) "but we made him a pair that were 90 centimeters (35 inches) long."
The mystery man from Huizache, a nearby village, wore his new boots to Mesquit Rodeo nightclub, where he danced bandido style with a handkerchief hiding his mouth and nose
"He was dancing and having a good time and he didn't care what people were saying about him," said Fernando Lopez, the master of ceremonies at the rodeo-themed disco.
Then he disappeared.
The next thing Calderon knew, it seemed like everyone wanted the bizarre, half-Aladdin, all-Vegas pointy boots, from little boys attending church ceremonies to teenagers at the discos.
Calderon fashioned the elongated toes from plastic foam and charged 400 pesos ($34) for the extensions. The competition began charging 350 pesos ($30) per 15 centimeters (6 inches) of new toe.
Boys who couldn't afford that used garden hoses to make their own. When one added glittery butterflies, another made 5-foot-long toes and added multicolor glitter stripes. When one added stars to the tips, others added flashing lights and disco balls, strutting them on the dance floor to attract the girls, like peacocks spreading their feathers.
"At the beginning I didn't like them very much, but the girls wouldn't dance with you if you weren't wearing pointy boots," said university student Pascual Escobedo, 20, his own covered with hot pink satin and glittery stars.
Nobody knows where Cesar's photo or the fad came from, since he was known to cross back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. But once it hit the sedate city of 90,000 people and auto-part and clothing factories about 18 months ago, it spread to nearby villages and showed up as far away as Mississippi and Texas, where some DJs at rodeo-themed nightclubs say it peaked a year ago and now has gone out of style.
"They would put all kinds of things on them, strobe lights, belt buckles, and those red lights that flash when you step on the shoes," said Manuel Colim, a DJ at the Far West Corral in Dallas, Texas, where a lot of Matehualan migrants live.
The pointy-boot fad coincided with a new dance craze of gyrating, drawer-dropping troupes dressed in matching western shirts and skinny jeans to accentuate their footwear.
They dance to "tribal" music, a mixture of Pre-Columbian and African sounds mixed with fast cumbia bass and electro-house beats. In Matehuala, all-male teams compete in weekly danceoffs at four nightclubs that offer prizes of $100 to $500, and often a bottle of whiskey.
The troupes are so popular, they're hired to dance at weddings, for quinceaneras, celebrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe, bachelorette parties and even rosary ceremonies for the dead. One group, Los Parranderos, or The Partiers, filmed a wedding scene for "Triunfo del Amor," or "Love's Triumph," a prime-time soap opera on the Televisa network.
"At the beginning there were people who would criticize us and would say, 'How tacky that you are wearing that. I wouldn't wear them,'" said Miguel Hernandez, 20, of Los Parranderos. "But we feel good dancing with the pointy boots."
One recent Matehuala competition drew about 800 people, who came to watch the dancers jump from side to side, spin and wave their arms or sensually shake their hips as their boots sparkled in the disco light and their toe extensions bounced from side to side.
Dancing tribal in pointy boots is "like going crazy," said Jorge Chavez, 16, whose group, Los Aliados, or The Allies, competed for the $100 prize. "We dance it as if we were chasing chickens. It's all about goofing off."
Housewife Laura Soto, 36, who watched the competition, convinced her husband to buy a pair of blue and silver pointy boots decorated with stars.
"The boots makes them look more sexy because you can tell they are daring," she said.
Soto's husband, Mario Fuentes, said he gave them to his 23-year-old son.
"I don't think I would look good in them," Fuentes, 45, said. "But I do like to come see them because they make everything more cheerful."
But as with every youthful fad, the pointy boots already are being replaced by low-rise Roper style boots, which also have lower heels.
"There are some steps where you have to cross your feet and throw yourself to the ground and you can't do that with the pointy boots," said Francisco Garcia, 18, of Los Primos dance crew, or The Cousins. "With the Roper boots it's easier."
At the Mesquit Rodeo competition, the Socios, or the Partners, took first prize for their energetic choreography. Dozens of teenage girls screamed when one of the dancers pulled his pants low enough to reveal a leopard print-thong.
The Socios had abandoned the pointy boots for Ropers. | <urn:uuid:1605bf5d-8928-4351-9893-7b3a4e72bdb2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cnsnews.com/news/article/pointy-boot-fad-spreading-mexico | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973239 | 1,256 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Chantry Row (built 1962, listed Grade II 1971) was designed in November 1962 and built to link Chantry Cottage to the Pantheon. It is one single storey building arranged to simulate a terrace of four houses, each painted a different colour and with dummy attic windows. Clough had toyed with the idea of building two similar rows to flank the new Piazza but only actually included the Gloriette. There is a viewpoint in front of Chantry Row which features one of the eight Ionic columns that Clough had acquired in the 1930s. Chantry Row consists of two de luxe suites: Chantry Row I (below left) has a double bedroom, bathroom and sitting room and Chantry Row II has two double bedrooms with en suite bathrooms and a central sitting room. The Onion Dome on Chantry Row was designed not only to add interest to Chantry Row but also to hide an unsightly chimney. It consists of half an octagonal turret with half dome painted green in imitation of copper. Seen from behind it is simply a facade. However, as Clough liked to point out, it was really only supposed to be seen from the front. | <urn:uuid:2ae9ca85-5be8-4b6b-b928-6c651157f989> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.portmeirion-village.com/en/visit/guidebook/chantry-row/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980736 | 242 | 2.34375 | 2 |
Dáil Éireann - Volume 105 - 16 April, 1947
Ceisteanna—Questions. Oral Answers. - Speculative Buying of Land.
Mr. Cafferky Mr. Cafferky
Mr. Cafferky asked the Minister for Lands whether he is aware of the speculative buying of land here by nonnationals; whether such speculative buying is unfair to potential Irish purchasers whose capital resources are limited; and if he will make a statement on the policy of his Department in relation to the purchase of land, in congested and non-congested areas, by non-nationals.
Mr. Moylan Mr. Moylan
Mr. Moylan: There is no power or present intention to prevent private sales of land whether to nationals or non-nationals and as regards sales to non-nationals, I have no information that any considerable number of such transactions has taken place. The sale of land to a new owner in no way impairs the Land Commission's power to acquire such land for the relief of congestion, should such course prove necessary.
Dáil Éireann 105 Ceisteanna—Questions. Oral Answers. Speculative Buying of Land. | <urn:uuid:a5171758-d9de-4b2f-a91d-a1e7bb85fa6f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0105/D.0105.194704160036.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923645 | 247 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Only Human (Spain 2004)
Thursday, May 10, 2012 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Jewish Community Library • 1835 Ellis Street, San Francisco
The Jewish Film Class: Focus on the Family
Family is at the center of Jewish life, sometimes for better or worse. This series will look at the presentation of Jewish families in three films, with a tilt towards the dysfunctional.
Taught by Library Director Howard Freedman. Films will be shown in video projection.
THURSDAY, MAY 10, 7 PM
Only Human (Spain, 2004)
This screwball comedy follows Leni as she brings her boyfriend Rafi to her Jewish family’s Madrid apartment to meet her neurotic mother, newly observant brother, promiscuous sister, eccentric grandfather, and largely absent father. Chaos ensues, put into motion by Leni’s revelation that Rafi is Palestinian, and by Rafi’s accidentally dropping a container of frozen soup on the head of a man several stories below.
85 minutes, in Spanish with English subtitles.
THURSDAY, JUNE 14, 7 PM
Broken Wings (Israel, 2002)
A recently widowed Haifa mother and her children struggle to function as a family in the aftermath of their loss. With the mother working night shifts to make ends meet, the resentful teenaged daughter is forced to assume the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings. When she shirks her duties on one occasion, the fragile family is thrown into another crisis.
84 minutes, in Hebrew with English subtitles.
THURSDAY, JULY 12, 7 PM
Radio Days (USA, 1987)
Celebrating its 25th anniversary, Radio Days is best known as Woody Allen’s warm and nostalgic tribute to the 1940s, when radio was central to American life. But its strength emerges through its compelling vignettes from the everyday lives of an extended working class Jewish family in Queens.
utes, in Spanish with English subtitles. | <urn:uuid:9c3c6e71-c5cf-469b-ba0c-95511660b5a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jewishfed.org/event/film-class-0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939148 | 416 | 1.632813 | 2 |
The iconic LCM (1946) began as an experiment in the Eameses’ apartment, where they were molding plywood in what they called the “Kazam! Machine.” The machine pressed thin sheets of wood veneer against a heated membrane that was inflated by a bicycle pump. Humble beginnings for what would become one of the world’s most widely recognized and highly coveted chairs. Low-slung, with an expertly crafted molded seat and back (no bike pumps are used today), this chair cradles you in a comfortable position. Its form relates directly to the human body and holds no secrets as to how it succeeds technically. The slender rod base provides superior strength, while rubber shock mounts buffer against jarring movement. This original is an authentic product of Herman Miller, Inc. Eames is a licensed trademark of Herman Miller. Made in U.S.A.
LCM stands for lounge chair with metal legs.
Molded five-ply seat and back; cherry, walnut, white ash or santos palisander wood veneer, ebony-stained ash veneer or red-stained ash veneer; chromed-steel or black powder-coated legs and back brace; rubber shock mounts; self-leveling nylon glides.
Design is for living. That maxim shaped a widespread shift in design during the 1940s and 1950s. It was a revolution of form, an exciting visual language that signaled a new age and a fresh start and two of its prime movers were Charles and Ray Eames. The Eameses were a husband and wife team whose unique synergy led to a whole new look in furniture. Lean and modern. Sleek, sophisticated and simple. Beautifully functional.
Yet Charles and Ray Eames created more than a "look" with their bent plywood chairs or molded fiberglass seating. They had ideas about making a better world, one in which things were designed to fulfill the practical needs of ordinary people and bring greater simplicity and pleasure to our lives. Read more > | <urn:uuid:e8d5ab5e-6df2-4b81-a5ea-b0b7e62a3833> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dwr.com/product/eames-molded-plywood-lounge-chair-lcm.do?sortby=newArrivals%3D1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966036 | 425 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Netroots Nation, the annual gathering of progressive bloggers and online activists, just wrapped up in Las Vegas. During four days of panel discussions, caucuses and speeches, 2,000 participants hashed out strategies to address the numerous challenges facing our nation. This year, due in part to national events as well as the support of Netroots founder Markos Moulitsas, immigrant rights got prominent billing.
This was my second Netroots and I attended in the hope of building stronger alliances with folks who might not think of immigration as their issue. I believe that just as African-Americans lead the Civil Rights Movement to build a nation that lived up to the ideals of all Americans, immigrants are leading a movement that concerns all of us in the United States and we, as citizens, should support them in this struggle.
With the recent events in Arizona, my colleagues and I wanted to enlist others in opposing SB1070, the new “Papers Please” immigration law, especially since the law is set to go into effect on July 29. With the support of conference organizers, we decided to do something right before the Civil Rights in the Modern Era luncheon plenary. We chose to model the action on a video made by a friend of mine in Los Angeles, Josh Busch. Set on the Santa Monica Promenade, the video “Immigration Check Point” has been a truly viral hit.
About ten of us, including several undocumented DREAM students, wore navy blue shirts and affixed paper ICE badges and patches to our hats and shirts with masking tape. Stating that we were enforcing a new law in “Native American lands”, we stopped anyone who looked “European” and let all others pass without hindrance. Many people were flustered by the confrontation but most everyone got the joke.
If our action offended anyone and resulted in thirty seconds of frustration, that was the point. As Americans, we should all be offended by actual laws like Arizona’s SB1070 that harass and profile communities 24 hours a day. It wasn’t about preventing Netroots participants from getting their lunch. Profiling and injustice is what we wanted folks to think about.
This week, we’re calling on everyone to join national actions to oppose this law. Find out more at Alto Arizona.
Will Coley is the founder of Aquifer Media,which assists nonprofit organizations, foundations and community groups create and utilize effective storytelling and compelling social media content in their community-building, advocacy and leadership development. | <urn:uuid:ccdac168-769d-4ead-b937-d82870e214c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.laprogressive.com/anti-immigrant-netroots-nation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957395 | 519 | 1.539063 | 2 |
- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com -
Jewish Bullies and Muslim Victims: Norway’s Anti-Semitic Culture
Posted By Lisa Richards On April 30, 2011 @ 1:31 pm In NewsReal Blog | Comments Disabled
Norway is quickly becoming one of the world’s leading capitals of Jew-hatred.
Pro-Israel author Bruce Bawer says his adopted homeland has willingly opened its arms to embrace Islamic terrorists. And there is a reason for this ideology of hate—radical leftism has a historical stranglehold on Norwegians.
It’s a phenomenon of a sort that I never encountered in all my years in the US, and that I once thought had been banished to the dustbin of history. It’s most virulent among the cultural elite—the academics, intellectuals, writers, journalists, politicians, and technocrats.
They’re overwhelmingly on the left, and intensely hostile to the West, to capitalism, to the US and to Israel. Before the fall of the USSR, an extraordinary percentage of them were Communists. They have replaced their affinity to the Soviet Union with sympathy for the great totalitarian ideology of our time: Islamism. Thus they romanticize Palestinians and despise Israel.
Part of the motivation for this anti-Semitism is the influx into Norway in recent decades of masses of Muslims from Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. Multiculturalism has taught Norway’s cultural elite to take an uncritical, even obsequious, posture toward every aspect of Muslim culture and belief. When Muslim leaders rant against Israel and the Jews, the reflexive response of the multiculturalist elite is to join them in their rantings. This is called solidarity.
Bawer told The Post Norway turned its back on Jews during the Nazi occupation. Although the country allied with America and Israel afterward, Norwegians as a whole never held any fondness for Jews. Since World War II, the county’s radical leftists have indoctrinated Jew hatred into students.
To advance their agenda, pro-Israel speakers are banned from Norwegian universities; Norwegians are taught to define Jews as the “bully” and Muslims as the “victim.” Any Norwegian with the audacity to show support for Israel, defend Jews, and even consider Islamic terror evil, is disregarded and shunned at institutions of higher learning. Only anti-Semitic “critics of Israel, apologists for terrorism, hard-line Islamists and relativizers of the Holocaust” are welcome on Norwegian campuses.
Page 2: People need to understand what’s really going on here.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/lisa-richards/jewish-bullies-and-muslim-victims-norway%e2%80%99s-anti-semitic-culture-2/
Copyright © 2009 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:67fdab4a-051d-4702-8c48-d81f0c9d350e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://frontpagemag.com/2011/lisa-richards/jewish-bullies-and-muslim-victims-norway%E2%80%99s-anti-semitic-culture-2/print/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934892 | 637 | 1.570313 | 2 |
chicken waterer works like a modern cat waterer. Water is poured into
the jug and flows out the hole into the dish.
Because chicken waterers were used outside on the farm, not many sets
(both jug and dish) remain.
This jug and dish were made by an unknown North Carolina potter. | <urn:uuid:48edbfce-a2cc-4439-841a-74f04c34d34d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mintmuseum.org/craftingnc/04-a-002.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963049 | 70 | 1.898438 | 2 |
Today, the ACLU of Maine Foundation defended the free speech rights of Dennis Bailey, creator of the anonymous political blog “The Cutler Files,” in oral arguments before the U.S. District Court in Portland. Bailey’s suit challenges the constitutionality of two Maine restrictions on political speech: one which requires political speakers to disclose their identity, and another which excludes blogs and other internet speech from the “news story” exemption to political speech regulations. Bailey was found to have violated Maine election law and was fined $200 by the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices. The ACLU of Maine believes that the fine violates Bailey’s right to free speech.
Source: ACLU. Read full article. (link) | <urn:uuid:773f9f2e-0167-42f2-9a13-0ae117f33cff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://reason.com/24-7/2012/09/21/anonymous-free-speech-at-issue-in-maine | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944841 | 150 | 1.78125 | 2 |
“Skinny.” Lean. Toned. Nothing compares to simply being healthy.
The buzzwords come and go, but the fashion of a healthy lifestyle never goes out of style.
The healthy lifestyle seems different to everyone, but some things look the same for all:
- Enjoying plenty of energy
- Maintaining an appropriate weight
- Eating with variety
- Moving every chance you get
- Not smoking
- Drinking in moderation
- Reducing stress
- Using sunblock
- Getting adequate sleep
- Etc. Etc. Etc.
There will always be an excuse as to why you cannot live this way, but remember:
We control our excuses. They do not control us.
Again, what constitutes a healthy lifestyle for one, will not be the same for the next. But the common denominator is the will to not make excuses and to make each day the very best A+ day you can make it.
“Skinny.” Lean. Toned.
It really doesn’t matter.
Carry on with YOUR VERSION of a Healthy Lifestyle!
So tell me….what does YOUR VERSION look like?
This post is brought to you by my #SnackJoy with The Laughing Cow. If you haven’t had the chance to connect with this community come join us on Facebook and Twitter! Joining our communities is like having a group of dedicated “snackers” at your fingertips! | <urn:uuid:638b88b5-5d9c-4374-bcc6-de44cd8972e4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sarahkayhoffman.com/2011/06/10/a-healthy-lifestyle-your-version/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940674 | 310 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Career advice, insights & tips for HR professionals
Standard competency based interview questions: people & organisation competencies - delegation 27/06/2012
Delegation - effective use of subordinates and other resources available.
Click to jump to section
Describe the type of decision making that you delegate to your subordinates. Give me an example.
When you last went on holiday, what did you do before you went away to organise your work?
When you got back from holiday, what did you do to familiarise yourself with what happened?
How do you decide what to delegate and to whom?
Give me an example of some work you had recently that you felt you could not delegate?
Can you cite an example in your own experience where you have been faced with delegating authority? How did it work?
Ortus is a leader in specialist Human Resources recruitment. We are one of the fastest growing specialists in this niche field and are growing internationally. | <urn:uuid:3647631b-a3c9-4a59-8254-5912661491e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.changeboard.com/content/1778/Standard-competency-based-interview-questions--people--organisation-competencies---delegation/?RedirectBackTo=/content/jobseeker/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952027 | 197 | 1.695313 | 2 |
As a long-term health care practitioner, I do my best to make people aware of all the possible hidden dangers we’re exposed to in the foods we eat. Without question, one of the substances that top’s the list is gluten.
Gluten is a “garbage” protein found in grains like wheat, barley, and rye that can have detrimental effects on the body. It is known that people with Celiac Disease can not handle gluten, which can cause a serious autoimmune reaction in the small intestine making it harder for the body to absorb nutrients. What most people (including medical doctors) don’t realize is that gluten can be detrimental to people without celiac disease as well. Since Celiac disease is hard to diagnose, it often goes unnoticed allowing the disease to manifest and increase the risk of developing other diseases like: autoimmune disorders, osteoporosis, neurologic problems, Type 2 diabetes, and even cancer. Some of the symptoms associated with gluten can include: fatigue, digestive issues (constipation, diarrhea, etc.), skin problems, mood swings, and weight gain.
Foods that contain gluten are as follows:
- Soy Sauce
- Foods that say “gluten-free” – due to cross contamination.
- Processed foods – soups, candies, cold cuts, non-fat or fat free foods.
- Foods that have Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein (HVP), Textured Vegetable Protein (TVP), and Natural Flavorings in the list of ingredients.
Grains that are naturally gluten-free are as follows:
- Flax seed
With the various symptoms I’ve mentioned above, if you’re experiencing other symptoms that don’t seem to go away using conventional methods, try taking gluten out of your diet. Since gluten makes it harder for your body to absorb nutrients from food, you never know if this may be the problem. There are some things in life that can create enormous benefits by doing minimal effort and simply avoiding gluten is one of them.
Thank you for reading,
Dr. Rudy Amicay | <urn:uuid:981e3b35-0dd4-4028-919f-1df65efa2158> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.amicay.com/gluten-celiac-disease/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926486 | 436 | 2.875 | 3 |
More essential underreported struggles from Ahni at Intercontinental Cry. This information is very important because it builds on the attributes that we will need no matter what happens in the world. Community of all types are the answer, binding together in common cause whether tribe, family, whānau, or any other combination that works. Using group knowledge as displayed in many of these articles showing the struggles of indigenous people around the world - they are our struggles too and we must support their fights for equality and learn from their successes.
underreported struggles 69
Nearly 70 indigenous leaders from Mato Grosso do Sul and various other regions of Brazil delivered the names of more than twenty thousand people
to Brazilian authorities, who endorsed the petition “I support the
Indigenous”. The unprecedented solidarity petition--which arrived in the
midst of increasing violations of indigenous rights in
Brazil--demonstrated a welcomed shift in attitude towards Indigenous
Peoples by urban populations in Brazil and by the International
The US departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Interior signed a memorandum of understanding
to start protecting sacred sites. The agreement came just a couple
weeks after thieves made off with rock carvings from a sacred Paiute
site in California's Sierra Nevada. There was some question, however,
concerning the seriousness of the inter-department pledge, given that
more than three dozen sacred sites are currently threatened across the
More than 600 people from the district of Cañaris, province of
Ferreñafe, Peru, blocked a highway and detained three geological
engineers employed by the Canadian mining company, Candente Copper. The protest was undertaken in response to the Peruvian government's failure to recognize a community vote in which 95% of participants rejected the company's presence.
Visit Intercontinental Cry to read about these issues and many others. | <urn:uuid:486a9526-29ae-4918-b103-9f5680f4b2e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mars2earth.blogspot.com/2013/02/underreported-struggles-69.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941822 | 378 | 2.234375 | 2 |
By: Mir M.Hosseini
A resurgence of civil unrest in the Shiite Muslim villages that surround capital Manama was silenced by force in Bahrain. Hundreds of people were put in jail in connection with the disturbances. The arrests, including those of leading Shiite clerics, have added to political and sectarian tensions in a country where Shiites are the majority. Although the Shia population is twice the size of the Sunnis who are in power, they cannot experience their basic freedoms.
In December 1994, a Shia cleric was arrested and deported for circulating a leaflet signed by 20,000 people demanding the restoration of Bahrain's Parliament, which was dissolved in 1975.
The Manama government has accused Tehran of trying to stir up trouble among Shiites since 1979, and ordered an Iranian diplomat to leave the country. Iran denied any involvement in the unrest. Using Iran as a scapegoat to justify refusal to grant political rights to their people, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and other Emirates also used the occasion as a propaganda tool to reinforce their positions. Bahrain's Caliphate denies a parliament, the most basic semblance of democracy through which people could have a say in shaping their future. Strongly backed by the West, countries created south of the Persian Gulf after WWII, practically remain as protectorates in essence. The U.S. also established its military presence in Persian Gulf states with the pretext of a dual containment policy towards Iran and Iraq.
On June, 6th, Bahrainis arrested in connection with a reported plot to overthrow the government said in televised confessions that they received military training in Iran and Lebanon and that they were gathering information on American forces in Bahrain, adding that they were trained by Hezbollah. Linking political dissidents to foreign countries has always been used as an accusation to justify suppressing voices of discontent and opposing groups.
Just like Afghanistan, Bahrain which used to be an Iranian province was separated in 1971 in a secret deal that Shah made with the UK to stay in power. Nevertheless, Bahrain is a ticking bomb with most residents of acknowledging their Iranian roots, wishing to re-integrate with Motherland Iran. | <urn:uuid:3b91e9f2-8684-43de-b28b-ce7c9b2f26af> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fouman.com/Y/Get_Iranian_History_Today.php?artid=955 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977624 | 426 | 2.671875 | 3 |
(Phys.org)—A small team of researchers with members from the U.K., China, and Germany has discovered that tree frogs adjust their posture to reduce the angle of their toe pads to avoid falling from an overhanging surface. They have published the results of their study in Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
White's tree frog are able to cling to hard surfaces even when that surface is tilted to a significant degree. They do so by secreting mucus in their toe pads which leads to capillary forces between the frog and surface that hold them together. But they also change their posture depending on how steep the surface is, and until now, the reason for that hasn't been clear.
To learn more, the researchers placed a frog on a tiled surface which itself was affixed to a movable plane. The tiles were also wired to allow for measuring the amount of force between the toe pads and the surface to which they were clinging as the angle of the surface was changed. The experiment involved increasing the angle of the surface and observing the frog's behavior as it strove to hold on.
Remarkably, the team found that the frog could maintain its grip on the surface up to an angle of approximately 150°, which is of course, nearly upside down. More importantly, they found that as the angle of the surface was increased, the frog responded by flattening its body against the surface. In order to do so, it had to extend its limbs. The higher the angle, the more the frog reached out, until eventually reaching its physical limit. The team noted that as the surface was tilted, the forces holding the frog to the surface continually decreased – until the frog adjusted its stance. Doing so, caused the forces to revert back to their original readings. This process was repeated until the frog eventually fell off the tiled wall.
The team likens the approach used by the frog to the way tape is used by us humans. To remove it once applied, one corner is pried away from the surface and then it's gripped and pulled back at a very sharp angle. The sharp angle breaks the bond between the tape and the surface. To continue holding onto the tile, the frog applies the same principle, but in reverse. By minimizing the angle of its toe pads with the surface, the frog is avoiding being ripped off by gravity as the surface angle increases.
Explore further: US lists tiny Puerto Rican frog as endangered
More information: Sticking like sticky tape: tree frogs use friction forces to enhance attachment on overhanging surfaces, Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Published online January 16, 2013 doi: 10.1098/rsif.2012.0838
To live and clamber about in an arboreal habitat, tree frogs have evolved adhesive pads on their toes. In addition, they often have long and slender legs to facilitate not only long jumps, but also to bridge gaps between leaves when climbing. Both adhesive pads and long limbs are used in conjunction, as we will show in this study. Previous research has shown that tree frogs change from a crouched posture (where the limbs are close to the body) to a sprawled posture with extended limbs when clinging on to steeper inclines such as vertical or overhanging slopes. We investigated this change in posture in White's tree frogs (Litoria caerulea) by challenging the frogs to cling onto a tiltable platform. The platform consisted of an array of 24 three-dimensional force transducers, which allowed us to measure the ground reaction forces of the frogs during a tilt. Starting from a crouched resting position, the normal forces on the forelimbs changed sign and became increasingly negative with increasing slope angle of the platform. At about 106°±12°, tilt of the platform the frogs reacted by extending one or two of their limbs outwards. At a steeper angle (131°±11°), the frogs spread out all their limbs sideways, with the hindlimbs stretched out to their maximum reach. Although the extension was strongest in the lateral direction, limbs were significantly extended in the fore–aft direction as well. With the extension of the limbs, the lateral forces increased relative to the normal forces. The large contribution of the in-plane forces helped to keep the angle between the force vector and the platform small. The Kendall theory for the peeling of adhesive tape predicts that smaller peel angles lead to higher attachment forces. We compare our data with the predictions of the Kendall model and discuss possible implications of the sliding of the pads on the surface. The forces were indeed much larger for smaller angles and thus can be explained by peeling theory. | <urn:uuid:46d59dac-06b2-42c3-9450-ce318ebd8409> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://phys.org/news/2013-01-tree-frogs-bodies-overhanging-surfaces.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967066 | 947 | 4.21875 | 4 |
By Brian Chan
Aquatic entomology is one of the most important aspects of fly fishing that both lake and stream anglers will be exposed to and learn from. This is a huge subject that one could literally study throughout their entire angling life. However, it is essential that we are at least able to identify those insects that are important trout food and that we also have a basic understanding of the insect’s life cycle and habitat preferences. An integral part of the aquatic entomology subject is recognizing how the various insect life stages move through the water and then applying that information to the way in which we present and/or retrieve our flies.
In streams, much of the aquatic insect life are able to utilize the current to move or drift them as they complete emergence cycles or simply move from one type of habitat to another. In lakes, the larval, nymphal and pupal stages of insects must propel themselves to locate food, avoid predators or reach the surface in order to emerge into the adult form. One of the ways fish recognize prey items is by the unique swimming or movement actions displayed by the food source. Let’s take a closer look at how the various life stages of the important aquatic insect orders move. Keep in mind that these are staple food sources for trout and other fish species found throughout the stillwater world.
Damselflies and Dragonflies
Damselflies and dragonflies of the Order Odonata are active swimmers while in the nymphal stage. Damselfly nymphs utilize a 3 lobed set of caudal lamellae or abdominal gills to propel them in a fairly slow, sinusoidal or snake-like motion through the water. They will swim for 3 to 8 inches; pause for up to a couple of seconds then resume moving. Fully developed nymphs swim more continuously as they urgently search out emergent plant stems to crawl up onto and complete the transformation to the adult stage. Dragonfly nymphs swim by venting water through the tip of their abdomen. This action gives the nymph a short, 3 to 5 inch quick burst of speed. Nymphs can sustain several of these fast movements in succession prior to taking a brief rest. In most situations dragonfly nymphs are happy to be crawling along the vegetation or lake bottom in search of food and usually only employ the “jet propulsion” swimming system to avoid predators.
Caddisflies (Order Trichoptera) undergo a complete metamorphosis or life cycle. Most species inhabiting stillwaters belong to the case maker group. These larvae live within a case which is built from bits of vegetation, particles of sand or other debris. Larvae move by using their 3 pairs of legs to crawl and pull their case slowly along the lake bottom and amongst the aquatic vegetation. Their cases leave telltale tracks in the marl or mud flats that cover shoal areas of the lake. Caddis pupa develop within the larval case. The fully developed pupae break out of their larval cases and swim quickly to the surface of the lake. Their ascent is aided by an elongated and feathered hind pair of legs which act as oars to quickly move them through the water. Pupae are often swimming up through 20 feet of water and are thus extremely vulnerable to predation by fish. The adult emerges from the pupal stage as soon as the pupa breaks the surface film. The actual pupal swimming action consists of relatively fast 3 to 6 inch long movements followed by brief pauses.
Mayflies (Order Ephemeroptera) are another common inhabitant of productive stillwaters. Most lake dwelling species are good swimmers that are capable of fairly quick but short bursts of speed. Developing nymphs seek food and cover amongst the vegetation growing up from the shallow shoal areas of the lake. When mature, the nymphs will swim to the surface to emerge into the dun or non-reproductive adult stage. The mature nymphs typically swim on a 20 to 30 degree angle to the surface of the lake. They swim in a sinusoidal motion in moderately fast 2 to 4 inch bursts. The nymphs will rest or pause regularly during their ascent. Once at the surface, a split forms along the back of the nymphal shuck to allow the adult form to emerge.
Midges or Chironomids
Midges of the Order Diptera are unquestionably the most diverse group of insects inhabiting fresh water. A typical small productive lake in western North America could be host to a hundred different species. Midges or chironomids also undergo a complete metamorphosis or life cycle. Larval and pupal stages are poor swimmers but both require an ability to move in order to complete their respective life stages. Most stillwater midge larvae live in the benthic or bottom substrate of the water body. In many instances the larvae construct simple “mud tubes” in which they peer out from to feed on detritus. Larvae do leave their tubes in search of more ideal habitat and in other instances can be swept out of their tubes by strong currents formed during a turnover event or a rapid fluctuation of water levels. In either case the movement of the larvae is restricted to an ineffective wiggling motion. Midge pupa typically develop within the larval tube. Fully developed pupa exit the larval tube and ascend vertically to the surface of the lake. The pupa do not actually swim but wiggle and squirm up through the water. Their ascent is aided by gases trapped beneath the pupal shuck. Often, movement is rather rapid during the last couple of feet before reaching the surface. It is not uncommon for pupa to ascend through 40 feet of water making it a very slow and vulnerable emergence process.
Overall, the movement of these aquatic insects is slow or at best they can move at a moderate speed for a very short distance. Some, like midges, only rise or elevate through the water column. It can be hard for many anglers to slow their retrieves down and then maintain the slower pace long enough to effectively retrieve the entire length of a cast.
The strip and hand twist are two basic retrieves that all stillwater fly fishers should be comfortable using with the various food sources being imitated. The strip retrieve is as simple as it sounds and it is the basic retrieve for almost all fly fishing situations. The rod hand lightly pinches the fly line between the thumb and index (first) finger while the retrieve hand uses the same two fingers to pull or strip in a set amount of fly line. It takes a lot of practice to conduct a 4 inch slow strip retrieve cast after cast for several hours but if that is how the damselfly nymphs are swimming then it is best to go with the flow. Without patience and practice, those 4 inch strips soon become 8 then 12 inch pulls! How slow is slow? For instance, to imitate a slow 2 inch strip retrieve count up to 2 seconds while the 2 inches is being retrieved. A fast 4 inch retrieve would count between 1 and 1.5 seconds per strip. Caddis pupa probably swims the fastest of these aquatic insect food sources. A fast 6 inch strip retrieve should take approx. 2 seconds to complete.
The hand twist is the other basic retrieve that should be mastered by all stillwater fly fishers. This is a busy retrieve, meaning that it requires more hand movement while at the same time helps to slow down the retrieve. The other advantage of this technique is that the angler has more control over the retrieve as the retrieve hand is always in contact with the fly line. The rod and retrieve hand start off in the same positions as the strip retrieve. The fly line is pulled down by the thumb and index finger of the retrieve hand while at the same time rotating the retrieve hand wrist outward thus leaving an open palm. The fly line is then hooked around the bay finger of the retrieve hand and then brought back to the thumb and index finger. This completes a full hand twist. As the manoeuvre is repeated coils of line will collect in the palm of the retrieve hand. It is best to release the fly line after 2 or 3 coils have accumulated. The hand twist is certainly the preferred retrieve to use when imitating the midge pupa either rising up through the water column or very slowly moving the pupal pattern horizontally through the water. In these instances a complete hand twist could take upwards of 8 seconds to complete.
The strip and hand twist retrieves will allow the angler to match the movement of these essential stillwater food sources. It can also be beneficial to impart a bit of irregular movement to your fly as it is being retrieved. In other words, try adding several very short, quick one inch strips in succession during any normal strip or hand twist retrieve. I routinely mix in 3 or 4 of these quick strip tactics into any stillwater retrieve. Sometimes this off tempo movement is enough to commit an otherwise slightly skeptical trout into taking the fly.
Wind drifting from an anchored boat is also an effective technique to present flies being fished with floating fly lines. It is used most commonly with mayfly nymphs, damselfly nymphs, caddis pupa and midge pupa. Although technically not a retrieve, wind drifting takes advantage of gentle wind conditions to naturally move the sunk fly in a subtle undulating motion horizontally through the water column. A cast is made sideways or perpendicular to the direction of the wind. A large arching bow develops in the fly line as the waves carry it downwind. The length of the leader and weighted versus un-weighted flies determine where in the water column the fly will travel. Make sure the rod is secure when using this tactic!
It takes practice in order to get comfortable with these retrieves. While on the water watch for the real insects and note their swimming and movement patterns. That will be the best check as to how realistic your retrieves are being conducted. | <urn:uuid:ed95bb9c-4844-4aad-b9e7-a18d55dd7dfc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gofishbc.com/how-to-fish/fishing-articles/acquatic-insects.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941629 | 2,049 | 3.375 | 3 |
It Could Happen to Us
November 2, 2012
By: Phil Ting
After watching the devastating coverage of Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast, the NYT piece For Years, Warnings That It Could Happen Here was perhaps the eeriest read. After years of climate scientists and city planners laying out the potential dangers, their predictions became reality: New York’s subway system flooded, electrical equipment was submerged, and some people even lost their lives. After watching the damage unfold, the Bay Area needs to ask itself: Are we ready?
The bad news, of course, is that we are in a geographic region prone to disaster. We sit atop fault lines, we are on the coast, and many hillsides throughout our area are unstable. The good news is that we are home to several forward-looking groups who have begun to rethink disaster preparedness and boost engagement. The SF Department of Emergency Management recently gamified the nagging task of making a plan and readying yourself for an emergency. And AlertSF, a text-based notification system for San Franciscans (and visiting tourists), will keep registrants posted on everything from flood and tsunami warnings to emergencies disrupting traffic.
We won’t be able to prevent the next disaster, and we may not even be able to predict it. But with good government groups and citizens working together, we can at least improve our chances of staying safe. | <urn:uuid:5db6ff18-3e26-418e-a10b-9f09b6dfb79a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.resetsanfrancisco.org/news/nov-2-12/hurricane-sandy-could-happen-california | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95535 | 288 | 2.453125 | 2 |
The Cozumel Island Raccoon (Procyon pygmaeus) lives only on the island of Cozumel, off the coast of Mexico. The Cozumel Island Raccoon is much smaller than the common raccoon from the mainland and only weighs 3 - 4 kilograms. Other distinctive features are a large black throat band with a light yellow or bronze colored tail and smaller teeth. They live in the mangrove smaps of the island. They are thought to have also lived on the mainland of Mexico, but through habitat destruction and hunting, the only place they live now is on the island of Cozumel. Also on the island of Cozumel, their numbers are declining, through habitat destruction and tourism might also have an impact.
Interesting fact: the Cozumel Island Raccoon is the smallest species of raccoon in the world.
The Cozumel island raccoon, cozumel raccoon bears is listed as Endangered (EN), considered to be facing a very high risk of extinction in the wild, on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species | <urn:uuid:ef404027-f667-468b-bb73-f8e1274d087f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thewebsiteofeverything.com/animals/mammals/Carnivora/Procyonidae/Procyon/Procyon-pygmaeus.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929945 | 234 | 3.390625 | 3 |
The equipment used for fly-fishing is very specialized and it takes some practice to learn to use it correctly. It's more important to match rod, reel, and line when fly-fishing than in any other kind of fishing. The reel and rod must be balanced in weight and the line must be the correct weight for the rod you are using. Rods are marked with the line weight they cast best. And fly-fishing is different because you cast the line, not the lure. The line must be heavy enough to cast, and you have to use a leader with it to separate the thick fly line from the lure.
Long, Limber Rods
Long, limber rods are needed to fly-fish and they come in different weights that you use for different kinds of fishing. A two-weight fly rod is considered ultralight and is used for casting very small flies, for catching smaller fish. An eight-weight rod is very heavy and is used for casting large flies, for big fish. Saltwater rods are even heavier and made for bigger fish and bigger baits.
Generally the lighter rods are shorter and don't cast as well into the wind. They're best for smaller waters and making shorter casts. Heavier rods are better for open waters and work better when there is some wind that you must cast against. The longer the rod, the longer the cast is a good general rule of thumb.
Fly rods come in many price ranges, too. Graphite rods generally cost more than fiberglass rods, and handmade bamboo rods are too expensive to use for anyone but the purists with lots of money. To start fly-fishing in fresh water for most species of fish, choose an inexpensive rod in six-weight that is about eight feet long. It's a good rod to learn on and will handle most kinds of fish without costing too much.
Check at local and mail-order sporting goods stores for inexpensive starter fly rod outfits. You can usually get a cheap rod, reel, and line for under $100 to get started. If you like fly-fishing and do enough of it to justify the cost, you can get a quality outfit for the kind of fishing you do.
A Choice of Reels
Reels are single action, multiplying, or automatic. On single-action reels, the spool turns one time each time you turn the handle, retrieving a short amount of line. On multiplying reels, a gear system turns the spool faster than the handle is turned, bringing in line faster. Automatic reels are spring-loaded and bring in the line when you press a lever.
For most fly-fishing the fly reel is there to hold the line and nothing else. You pull line off the reel by hand then cast it using the rod and you fight fish by stripping in line by hand. The line is reeled back on the spool after the fight is over. When fighting strong fish that make long runs, you'll need a fly reel that has a drag system, and you'll use it to fight the fish. Steelhead in fresh water and many kinds of fish in salt water require fly reels with a good drag system.
Saltwater reels must be made of noncorrosive materials and also must be strong enough to stand the high pressures of fighting a powerful fish. You'll need a large-capacity reel that holds many yards of backing as well as the fly line. Freshwater fish usually don't pull all the fly line out unless they're extremely big. Many kinds of saltwater fish will strip all your line off to the backing.
It's important to match the size of the reel to the rod and to the fish you're after. The reel should balance the rod so the rod doesn't tip toward either end when it's balanced on a finger held just above the reel where your casting hand will be. A balanced rod and reel will keep you from getting as tired while casting. The reel must be big enough to handle all the line you will need, as well as the pressure from the fish you're fighting, but not so big as to make the outfit too heavy at the reel end of the rod.
Lines Are Important
Fly line is important because it's what you cast, it controls whether the fly floats or sinks, and it controls how deep or shallow your bait goes down. Different kinds of lines allow you to make long casts with heavy wind-resistant flies, or to delicately place a tiny gnat on the surface of the water. Some fly lines are good for many kinds of casting while others are very specialized.
Fly lines come in weights just like rods. A one-weight fly line is the lightest and most delicate, while a fifteen-weight is mostly for saltwater big-game fish. For most of your fishing, a line in the midrange should be suitable, so look for something from four-to six-weight. Lines at that weight will handle everything from trout flies to bass bugs, and once you decide on the kind of fishing you will do, you can go to lighter or heavier line that will be better for specific types of casting.
Line and rod weights should match for best performance. You can go a little one way or the other when matching them up, but don't stray far apart in numbers. Keeping them together will give you the best results.
There are special fly lines for special jobs, too. Floating lines float and are used for flies that float, like bugs and dry flies, or flies that are fished near the surface like nymphs and streamers. For fishing deeper you need a sinking line, which come in different sink rates. Sinking lines are much harder to use than floating lines so stick with floating lines when you start fly-fishing.
Shooting-head lines are special lines that are heavier toward the end. They're useful for making long casts, which is what the name comes from. The heavy end on the line makes it shoot forward on the cast, resulting in longer casts. Weight-forward lines are similar but have less weight on the end so you can make a more delicate presentation even though you can't cast quite as far.
Leaders used to connect the fly to the fly line are made of monofilament line. They're thin and clear and less likely to spook the fish than the thick heavy fly line on the rest of the reel. Leaders can be a few feet long for fish that are not easily spooked, or many feet long for line-shy fish. For finicky trout, a two-pound test leader might be required, while a thirty-pound leader would be too light for some saltwater fish.
Tapered leaders are thicker at the line end and thinner at the fly end to make the fly act properly at the end of the cast. You can buy tapered leaders or tie your own. Bought leaders are quick and easy to use, but tying your own gives you flexibility to adapt to changing conditions.
Flies are usually small, light lures made of hair or feathers. They're wrapped and tied to a hook in such a way that they resemble something a fish feeds on. A dry fly floats and looks like an insect sitting on top of the water. Nymphs sink and look like the nymph version of an insect underwater. Streamers sink and are made to resemble small bait fish.
Fly-fishermen go to great length to match the fly to what the fish are feeding on, especially when trout fishing. Trout can be very finicky eaters and won't hit something that doesn't match what they're eating at the time. At other times they'll hit streamers and nymphs, which you can use if you can't determine exactly what the fish are feeding on at the time.
Saltwater fishermen usually use streamers because they resemble the baitfish the fish feed on. Saltwater streamers can be huge when fishing for big saltwater fish, often bigger than the trout sought by other fly-fishermen. White is a very common color for saltwater streamers because most saltwater baitfish have some white or silver in them.
With all flies, from those tied on a tiny #22 hook for small stream trout to a bucktail tied on a 6/0 hook for marlin, the hook must be very sharp. Using relatively light rods and line requires a sharp hook to penetrate the mouth of the fish with little pressure. Keeping a sharp point on your hook can often mean the difference between a strike and a hook-up. | <urn:uuid:41202f86-88c9-4e99-8e8b-ee33dbfb0a1c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.netplaces.com/fishing/fly-fishing/specialized-equipment.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955618 | 1,757 | 2.390625 | 2 |
New Lands, by Charles Fort, , at sacred-texts.com
It may be that we now add to our sins the horse that swam in the sky. For all I know, we contribute to a wider biology. In the New York Times, July 8, 1878, is published a dispatch from Parkersburg, West Virginia: that, about July 1, 1878, three or four farmers had seen, in a cloudless sky, apparently half a mile high, "an opaque substance." It looked like a white horse, "swimming in the clear atmosphere." It is said to have been a mirage of a horse in some distant field. If so, it is interesting not only because it was opaque, but because of a selection or preference: the field itself was not miraged.
Black bodies and the dark rabbles of the sky—and that rioting thing, from floating anarchies, have often spotted the sun. Then, by all that is compensatory, in the balances of existence, there are disciplined forces in space. In the Scientific American, 44-291, it is said that, according to newspapers of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, figures had been seen in the sky in the latter part of September, and the first week in October, 1881, reports that "exhibited a mediæval condition of intelligence scarcely less than marvelous." The writer suggests that, though probably something had been seen in the sky, it was only an aurora. Our own intelligence and that of astronomers and meteorologists and everybody else with whom we have had experience had better not be discussed, but the accusation of mediævalism is something that we're sensitive about, and we hasten to the Monthly Weather Review, and if that doesn't give us a modern touch, I mistake the sound of it. Monthly Weather Review, September and October, 1881—an auroral display in Maryland and New York, upon the
[paragraph continues] 23rd of September; all other auroras in September far north of the three states in which it was said phenomena were seen. October—no auroras until the 18th; that one in the north. There was a mirage upon September 23, but at Indianola; two instances in October, but late in the month, and in northern states.
It is said, in the Scientific American, that, according to the Warrentown (Va.) Solid South, a number of persons had seen white-robed figures in the sky, at night. The story in the Richmond Dispatch is that many persons had seen, or had thought they had seen, an alarming sight in the sky, at night: a vast number of armed, uniformed soldiers drilling. Then a dispatch from Wilmington, Delaware—platoons of angels marching and countermarching in the sky, their white robes and helmets gleaming. Similar accounts came from Laurel and Talbot. Several persons said that they had seen, in the sky, the figure of President Garfield, who had died not long before. Our general acceptance is that all reports upon such phenomena are colored in terms of appearances and subjects uppermost in minds.
That, about the first of August, 1888, near Warasdin, Hungary, several divisions of infantry, led by a chief, who waved a flaming sword, had been seen in the sky, three consecutive days, marching several hours a day. The writer in L’Astronomie says that in vain does one try to explain that this appearance was a mirage of terrestrial soldiers marching at a distance from Warasdin, because widespread publicity and investigation had disclosed no such soldiers. Even if there had been terrestrial soldiers near Warasdin repeating mirages localized would call for explanation.
But that there may be space-armies, from which reflections or shadows or Brocken specters are sometimes cast—a procession that crossed the sun: forms that moved, or that marched, sometimes four abreast; observation by M. Bruguière, at Marseilles, April 15 and 16, 1883 (L’Astro., 5-70). An army that was watched, forty minutes, by M. Jacquot, Aug. 30, 1886 (L’Astro., 1886-71)—things or beings that seemed to march and to counter-march: all that moved in the same direction, moved in parallel lines. In L’Année Scientifique, 29-8, there is an account of observations by
[paragraph continues] M. Trouvelot, Aug. 29, 1871. He saw objects, some round, some triangular, and some of complex forms. Then occurred something that at least suggests that these things were not moving in the wind, nor sustained in space by the orbital forces of meteors; that each was depending upon its own powers of flight, and that an accident occurred to one of them. All of them, though most of the time moving with great rapidity, occasionally stopped, but then one of them fell toward the earth, and the indications are that it was a heavy body, and had not been sustained by the wind, which would scarcely suddenly desert one of its flotsam and continue to sustain all the others. The thing fell, oscillating from side to side like a disc falling through water.
New York Sun, March 16, 1890—that, at 4 o'clock, in the afternoon of March 12th, in the sky of Ashland, Ohio, was seen a representation of a large, unknown city. By some persons it was supposed to be a mirage of the town of Mansfield, thirty miles away; other observers thought that they recognized Sandusky, sixty miles away. "The more superstitious declared that it was a vision of the New Jerusalem."
May have been a revelation of heaven, and for all I know heaven may resemble Sandusky, and those of us who have no desire to go to Sandusky may ponder that point, but our own expression is that things have been pictured in the sky, and have not been traced to terrestrial origins, but have been interpreted always in local terms. Probably a living thing in the sky—seen by farmers—a horse. Other things, or far-refracted images, or shadows—and they were supposed to be vast lions or soldiers or angels, all according to preconceived ideas. Representations that have been seen in India—Hindoo costumes described upon them. Suppose that, in the afternoon of Jan. 17, 1892, there was a battle in the sky of Montana—we know just about in what terms the description would be published. Brooklyn Eagle, Jan. 18, 1892—a mirage in the sky of Lewiston, Montana—Indians and hunters alternately charging and retreating. The Indians were in superior numbers and captured the hunters. Then details—hunters tied to stakes; the piling of faggots; etc. "So far as could be ascertained last night, the Indians on the reservations are peaceable." I think that we're peaceable
enough, but, unless the astronomers can put us on reservations, where we'll work out expressions in beads and wampum instead of data, we'll have to carry on a conflict with the vacant minds to which appear mirages of their own emptiness in the sometimes swarming skies.
Altogether there are many data indicating that vessels and living things of space do come close to this earth, but there is absence of data of beings that have ever landed upon this earth, unless someone will take up the idea that Kaspar Hauser, for instance, came to this earth from some other physical world. Whether spacarians have ever dredged down here or not, or "sniped" down here, pouncing, assailing, either wantonly, or in the interests of their sciences, there are data of seeming seizures and attacks from somewhere, and I have strong objections against lugging in the fourth dimension, because then I am no better off, wondering what the fifth and sixth are like.
In La Nature, 1888-2-66, M. Adrian Arcelin writes that, while excavating near de Solutré, in August, 1878, upon a day, described as superbe, sky clear to a degree said to have been parfaitement, several dozen sheets of wrapping paper upon the ground suddenly rose. Nearby were a dozen men, and not one of them had felt a trace of wind. A strong force had seized upon these conspicuous objects, touching nothing else. According to M. Arcelin, the dust on the ground under and around was not disturbed. The sheets of paper continued upward, and disappeared in the sky.
A powerful force that swooped upon a fishing vessel, raising it so far that when it fell back it sank—see London Times, Sept. 24, 1875. A quarter of a mile away were other vessels, from which set out rescuers to the sailors who had been thrown into the sea. There was no wind: the rescuers could not use sails, but had to row their boats.
Upon Oct. 2, 1875, a man was trundling a cart from Schaffhausen, near Beringen, Germany. His right arm was perforated from front to back, as if by a musket ball (Pop. Sci., 15-566). This man had two companions. He had heard a whirring sound, but his companions had heard nothing. At one side of the road there were laborers in a field, but they were not within gunshot
distance. Whatever the missile may have been, it was unfindable.
La Nature, 1879-1-166, quotes the Courrier des Ardennes as to an occurrence in the Commune Signy-le-Pettit, Easter Sunday, 1879—a conspicuous, isolated house—suddenly its slate roof shot into the air, and then fell to the ground. There had not been a trace of wind. The writer of the account says that the force, which he calls a trouble inoui had so singled out this house that nothing in its surroundings beyond a distance of thirty feet had been disturbed.
Scientific American, July 10, 1880—that, according to the Plain-dealer, of East Kent, Ontario, two citizens of East Kent were in a field, and heard a loud report. They saw stones shooting upward from a field. They examined the spot, which was about 16 feet in diameter, finding nothing to suggest an explanation of the occurrence. It is said that there had been neither a whirlwind nor anything else by which to explain.
It may be that witnesses have seen human beings dragged from our own existence either into the objectionable fourth dimension, perhaps then sifting into the fifth, or up to the sky by some exploring thing. I have data, but they are from the records of psychic research. For instance, a man has been seen walking along a road—sudden disappearance. Explanation—that he was not a living human being, but an apparition that had disappeared. I have not been able to develop such data, finding, for instance, that someone in the neighborhood had been reported missing; but it may be that we can find material in our own field.
Upon Dec. 10, 1881, Walter Powell and two companions ascended from Bath in the Government balloon Saladin (Valentine and Tomlinson, Travels in Space, p. 227). The balloon descended at Bridport, coast of the English Channel. Two of the aëronauts got out, but the balloon, with Powell in it, shot upward. There was a report that the balloon had been seen to fall in the English Channel, near Bridport, but according to Capt. Temple, one of Powell's companions, probably something thrown from the balloon had been seen to fall.
A balloon is lost near or over the sea. If it should fall into the sea it would probably float and for considerable time be a conspicuous
object; nevertheless the disappearance of a balloon last seen over the English Channel, cannot, without other circumstances, be considered very mysterious. Now one expects to learn of reports from many places of supposed balloons that had been seen. But the extraordinary circumstance is that reports came in upon a luminous object that was seen in the sky at the time that this balloon disappeared. In the London Times, it is said that a luminous object had been seen, evening of the 13th, moving in various directions in the sky near Cherbourg. It is said that upon the night of the 16th three customhouse guards, at Laredo, Spain, had seen something like a balloon in the sky, and had climbed a mountain in order to see it better, but that it had shot out sparks and had disappeared—and had been reported from Bilbao, Spain, the next day. In the Morning Post, it is said that this luminous display was the chief feature; that it was this sparkling that had made the object visible. In the Standard, December 16, is an account of something that was seen in the sky, five o'clock, morning of December 15, by Capt. McBain, of the steamship Countess of Aberdeen, off the coast of Scotland, 25 miles from Montrose. Through glasses, the object seemed to be a light attached to something thought to be the car of a balloon, increasing and decreasing in size—a large light—"as large as the light at Girdleness." It moved in a direction opposite to that of the wind, though possibly with wind of an upper stratum. It was visible half an hour, and when it finally disappeared, was moving toward Bervie, a town on the Scottish coast about 12 miles north of Montrose. In the Morning Post it is said that the explanation is simple: that someone in Monfreith, 8 miles from Dundee, had, late in the evening of the 15th, sent up a fire-balloon, "which had been carried along the coast by a gentle breeze, and, after burning all night, extinguished and collapsed off Montrose, early on Thursday morning (16th)." This story of a balloon that wafted to Montrose, and that was evidently traced until it collapsed near Montrose does not so simply explain an object that was seen 25 miles from Montrose. In the Standard, December 19, it is said that two bright lights were seen over Dartmouth Harbor, upon the 11th.
Walter Powell was Member of Parliament for Malmesbury, and
had many friends, some of whom started immediately to search. His relatives offered a reward. A steamboat searched the Channel, and did not give up until the 13th; fishing vessels kept on searching. A "sweeping expedition" was organized, and the coast guard was doubled, searching the shore for wreckage, but not a fragment of the balloon, nor from the balloon, except a thermometer in a bag, was found.
In L’Astronomie, 1886-312, Prof. Paroisse, of the College Bar-sur-Aube, quotes two witnesses of a curieux phénomène that occurred in a garden of the College, May 22, 1886—cloudless sky; wind tres faible. Within a small circle in the garden were some: baskets and ashes and a window frame that weighed sixty kilograms. These things suddenly rose from the ground. At a height of about forty feet, they remained suspended several minutes, then falling back to the place from which they had risen. Not a thing outside this small circle had been touched by the seizure. The witnesses said that they had felt no disturbance in the air..
Scientific American, 56-65—that in June, 1886, according to the London Times, "a well-known official" was entering Pall Mall,, when he felt a violent blow on the shoulder and heard a hissing, sound. There was no one in sight except a distant policeman. At home, he found that the nap of his coat looked as if a hot wire had been pressed against the cloth, in a long, straight line. No. missile was found, but it was thought that something of a meteoritic nature had struck him.
Charleston News and Courier, Nov. 25, 1886—that, at Edina,, Mo., November 23, a man and his three sons were pulling corn on a farm. Nothing is said of meteorologic conditions, and, for all I know, they may have been pulling corn in a violent thunder storm. Something that is said to have been lightning flashed from the sky. The man was slightly injured, one son killed, the other seriously injured—the third had disappeared. "What has become of him is not known, but it is supposed that he was blinded or crazed by the shock, and wandered away."
Brooklyn Eagle, March 17, 1891—that, at Wilkes-Barre, Pa., March 16th, two men were "lifted bodily and carried considerable distance in a whirlwind." It was a powerful force, but nothing else was
affected by it. Upon the same day, there was an occurrence in Brooklyn. In the New York Times, March 17, 1891, it is said that two men, Smith Morehouse, of Orange Co., N. Y., and William Owen, of Sussex Co., N. J., were walking in Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, about 2 o'clock, afternoon of the 16th, when a terrific explosion occurred close to the head of Morehouse, injuring him and stunning Owen, the flash momentarily blinding both. Morehouse's face was covered with marks like powder-marks, and his tongue was pierced. With no one else to accuse, the police arrested Owen, but held him upon the technical charge of intoxication. Morehouse was taken to a hospital, where a splinter of metal, considered either brass or copper, but not a fragment of a cartridge, was removed from his tongue. No other material could be found, though an object of considerable size had exploded. Morehouse's hat had been perforated in six places by unfindable substances. According to witnesses there had been no one within a hundred feet of the men. One witness had seen the flash before the explosion, but could not say whether it had been from something falling or not. In the Brooklyn Eagle, March 17, 1891, it is said that neither of the men had a weapon of any kind, and that there had been no disagreement between them. According to a witness, they had been under observation at the time of the explosion, her attention having been attracted by their rustic appearance.
There is an interesting merging here of the findable and the unfindable. I suppose that no one will suppose that someone threw a bomb at these men. But enough substance was found to exclude the notion of "lightning from a clear sky." Something of a meteoritic nature seems excluded. | <urn:uuid:6879f06a-b10a-4b40-99e9-57be49854749> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sacred-texts.com/fort/land/land27.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982049 | 3,893 | 2.625 | 3 |
- Policy Resources
- News & Analysis
- Your State
Austin Guest on March 20, 2009 - 1:35pm
by NATHAN NEWMAN and GORDON LAFER
published in The Oregonian
March 20, 2009
In order to comply with new transparency requirements under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, state governments across the country are scrambling to report to the public how they spend recovery dollars. Unfortunately, no existing state government Web sites that are accounting for the recovery funds report the number of jobs created by private contractors. Without such data, the sites are close to meaningless.
Fortunately, Oregon is leading an effort to require contractors to report the number of jobs they create, as well as the hours worked and wages received by their employees. These proposed requirements would ensure Oregonians' tax money actually goes toward creating quality jobs.
The benefits are clear. If contractors are creating quality jobs, they should get more public funds. If they aren't, the state can stop funding them and target resources to those programs that are succeeding at job creation. Such standards will make Oregon a model state in terms of the criteria for receiving federal stimulus funds, since all state governments must report quarterly on the number of jobs created by contractors under the recovery act.
Such accountability is clearly demanded by the public.
In a January poll by Lake Research Partners, 76 percent of Americans said they considered it "extremely important" or "very important" that state governments track "what companies and government agencies are getting funds, for what purposes, and the number and quality of jobs being created."
The need for such standards has never been more urgent, since public work -- in states across the country -- has increasingly been outsourced to private contractors, often resulting in waste and misuse of taxpayer dollars.
In 2006, for instance, mismanagement by private contractor Accenture caused 30,000 children to drop off the rolls of Texas' Children's Health Insurance Program, while in Massachusetts, outsourcing of oversight of the "Big Dig" construction project to Bechtel resulted in millions of wasted taxpayer dollars.
Here in Oregon, the Department of Administrative Services estimates that the state spent more than $4 billion on private contracts in just the past 22 months, with about 40 percent of Multnomah County's budget going toward private contracts. With such colossal failures piling up in other states, Oregonians must be sure they are receiving quality service and quality jobs in exchange for the huge sums provided to contractors.
As they move to direct more than $6.48 billion in recovery funds toward "shovel-ready" projects in the next few months, Oregon lawmakers have a rare opportunity to make a huge difference in the state's economy, at a time when it is desperately needed. By insisting that contractors have the same accountability as government agencies, lawmakers can put measures in place to ensure that money goes into the hands of the hardworking families who have been hardest hit by the recession.
If Oregon legislators pass the proposed provisions, they will have safeguarded the interests of all Oregonians, and made the state a model for the country as a whole
Nathan Newman is interim executive director of the Progressive States Network. Gordon Lafer is a professor at the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center. | <urn:uuid:c1966c40-5e15-4b08-8136-93cf40b89f61> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://progressivestates.org/press/op-eds/accounting-jobs-in-the-stimulus-cash | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957104 | 663 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Launched in May 2011 by the former Liberal Quebec government, the Plan Nord is a sustainable development program for northern Quebec that establishes the framework for the long-term economic and social development of an area that covers approximately 72 percent of Quebec’s territory (463,323 square miles).
The government will deploy the Plan Nord over the next 25 years through a series of phases and is expected to lead to 80 billion Canadian dollars ($81.8 billion) in public and private investments. The Plan Nord focuses primarily on the mining, forestry, biofood and tourism industries and places great emphasis on the development of energy, transportation, communication and social infrastructure, such as housing.
In this context, the Quebec Finance Minister announced the following measures in the 2012 budget speech:
- Focusing on natural gas to stimulate the development of new mineral resource processing projects. Thus, Gaz Métro with the support of the Quebec government will undertake feasibility studies with a view to building a gas pipeline to supply the Côte-Nord region. Such a pipeline would represent an investment of approximately CA$750 million.
- The Caisse de dépôt et placement du Quebec (manager of public- and private-sector pension funds) and CN (a Canadian railway company) are teaming up on a project to build a rail link between the port in Sept-Îles and the various mining projects in the Labrador Trough. If the project proceeds, it would represent a multi-billion dollar investment.
- In 2012 Hydro-Quebec will undertake studies on the extension of the power transmission grid to Nunavik from the Complexe La Grande facility.
When the Plan Nord was launched in 2011, the Quebec government announced the creation of a new government corporation, the Société du Plan Nord, which will be responsible for coordinating government funding to implement the strategic plan formulated by the government in connection with its five-year action plans relating to the Plan Nord. Bill 27 creating the Société du Plan Nord is still being reviewed by the lawmakers. Under the circumstances, the government announced the creation of the Plan Nord Transition Office. This office is taking over the short‑term mandates and responsibilities that will eventually be entrusted to the Société du Plan Nord.
It is worth noting that two other major economic arms of the Quebec government, Hydro-Quebec and Investissement Quebec, were assigned important roles in their respective areas of expertise, namely the development of energy strategies and the coordination of public investments in private-sector projects.
In the 2012 budget, the Quebec government refined the role of Investissement Quebec, not only vis-à-vis the Plan Nord but in the natural resource sector generally.
Investissement Quebec already controls two subsidiaries operating in the natural resources sector, Société québécoise d’exploration minière (SOQUEM), which specializes in mining, and SOQUIP, which specializes in hydrocarbons. For better coordination of its investment strategy in resource development companies, the government announced in the 2012-2013 budget the creation of Ressources Quebec, a new Investissement Quebec subsidiary. That new entity will consolidate all of Investissement Québec’s current equity interests in mines and hydrocarbons, with SOQUEM and SOQUIP becoming subsidiaries of Ressources Quebec. The primary role of Ressources Quebec, made official on April 18, will be to establish more private partnerships with private entities in the mining and hydrocarbon sectors.
Ressources Quebec will be allocated over CA$1 billion, of which CA$500 million will be invested in equity interests in specific Plan Nord projects and the other CA$500 million will be invested in projects in the overall the Plan Nord territory. Thirteen developers have already been informed that the government is considering investing in their projects.
SOQUEM, now a Ressources Quebec subsidiary, will be allocated a further CA$100 million over five years for investments in mining projects.
Furthermore, the profits generated by the equity interests taken by Ressources Quebec will be deposited in a new fund announced in the budget speech, Capital Mines Hydrocarbures, and reinvested in future projects.
On Sept. 4, Quebec’s voter elected a minority Parti Québécois (PQ) government. The announcement of the new government’s vision for the Plan Nord is eagerly awaited. The new government has proposed to adopt an “integrated strategy for resources in the north in order to guide development projects” and may do some tinkering with the Plan Nord, such as changing the nature of the program to “Développement nordique”. It will be interesting to see how and if the new government will support infrastructure projects such as roads, transmission lines and railways in order to allow the new development projects to get off the ground in the north. Some have speculated that the new government will require some form of equity participation in projects in order to finance infrastructure projects. | <urn:uuid:032dc648-cae0-481b-9191-ffd599814b1f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.insidecounsel.com/2012/10/17/regulatory-an-overview-of-quebecs-plan-nord | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922643 | 1,019 | 2.546875 | 3 |
If you're debating on whether or not to schedule a college interview, this article does a great job at convincing you to do so. It says:
"The college interview process, though often optional, is a great way for you to get your questions answered, put a face to a name, and explain any bumps in your high school record face to face. We’ve mentioned before that students who vocalize their desire to attend a particular college increase their college admittance odds – what better way than during a college interview?"
Is that true, I wondered? Would it really increase your chances of being accepted if you came in for an interview? To find out, I talked with a few of the admissions counselors to see what they recommend. I asked: If I apply to Simmons, would it help me if I went in for an interview?
Their answer? DEFINITELY!
Every single counselor suggested applicants should stop by for an interview because the more they know about you, the better. They explained their interviews are very informal, and more of a "get-to-know-you" information session, rather than the official job type of interview.
Ashley, a counselor who has been interviewing students for about three years, says coming for an interview really strengthens your application and gives her a sense of your passion and enthusiasm for college - something, she says, she can't tell from a piece of paper.
Cheri, another counselor, says an interview is the best way for an applicant to shine and stand out from the others. And, if you haven't already, now is the perfect time to schedule a one-on-one.
By the way, the article mentions that some college's might not always have the time to interview every applicant. But counselors are ALWAYS available to meet with you... because they want to! And if you can't make it to Boston, ask if they'll be in your area because sometimes they'll even come to you. | <urn:uuid:591dfc78-5376-415c-8b06-54712eaa45a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://admissionsblog.simmons.edu/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968758 | 404 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Release Date: January 27, 2003
|New Recycling Technology to be Tested
At Virginia Coal-Fired Power Plant
Universal Aggregates Plans to Turn Coal Combustion Waste Into Useful Products
KING GEORGE, VA - Each year Mirant's Birchwood Power Facility in King George, VA, pays to have more than 100,000 tons of coal combustion ash disposed of in a municipal landfill. A new Department of Energy project may soon demonstrate that this ash has significantly more value than as the daily cover material for a community's solid waste.
The department recently signed a cooperative agreement with Universal Aggregates, LLC, of Bridgeville, PA, to design, construct and operate a manufacturing plant at the Birchwood Power Facility that will turn the ash into lightweight aggregate that can be used to make a variety of construction materials, from masonry blocks and concrete to asphalt paving material.
Construction of the plant is expected to start within the next two weeks, and the facility is scheduled to begin operating in 2004. The federal government will provide $7.22 million of the 30-month project's $19.58 million cost. A formal groundbreaking ceremony is planned for early spring.
The project could pave the way for a new type of recycling technology for coal-burning power plants. Ash for Universal Aggregates project is produced as a by-product of the power plant's "spray dryer" scrubber system. Scrubbers are used on many coal-fired power plants in the United States to reduce sulfur pollutants, but currently less than 20 percent of the 28 million tons of residue produced annually by these scrubbers is reused and most of that is from "wet" scrubbers.
As new environmental standards take effect, power companies are expected to install more scrubbers, including the "spray dryer" technology used at the Mirant plant that produces a dry by-product rather than a wet residue. While air quality will improve, scrubber waste tonnage will inevitably increase, placing greater burdens on landfills and adding increasing waste disposal costs to consumers' electric bills.
The Universal Aggregates process is designed to recycle the by-products from either wet or dry scrubbers, thereby lowering the costs of waste disposal while reducing the environmental drawbacks of landfilling.
In the process, ash from the spray dryer and other solid wastes from the power plant are blended in a mixer to produce a uniform granular material. The loose, moist material is then fed to an extruder that further mixes the material, then forces it through the holes of a metal die to form wet "green" pellets. The soft pellets are dried and hardened in a curing vessel specially designed to allow the solids to continue flowing without hanging up.
After curing, the hardened pellets are crushed and screened to specification, then stockpiled for sale as manufactured aggregates. Once in operation, the project will produce 167,000 tons of aggregate a year. The construction aggregate market in the United States is estimated to be about two billion tons annually.
The Birchwood Power Facility project will be the final step to verify that the aggregate manufacturing process and equipment is ready for future commercial use. Currently there are 21 spray dryer facilities in the United States that produce an adequate amount of by-product to economically justify the installation of similar aggregate manufacturing facilities.
Prior to the current project, the technology was tested at a six-ton per day pilot plant at CONSOL Energy Inc.'s Research and Development Campus in South Park, PA. Universal Aggregates is a joint venture of CONSOL and SynAggs, LLC, a Pittsburgh, PA-based company.
P.J. Dick, Inc., of West Mifflin, PA, will serve as the engineering and construction contractor for the Birchwood Power Facility project.
The project is one of six demonstration projects funded by the Energy Department as part of its "Power Plant Improvement Initiative." Begun in late 2000, the initiative provided federal matching funds to projects that would use innovative technology to enhance the environmental or operating performance of coal-fired power plants. The effort served as the precursor to President Bush's expanded program to develop even more advanced clean coal technologies for the nation's power industry.
The Universal Aggregates project is being managed by the Energy Department's National Energy Technology Laboratory, the major technology arm of the department's Fossil Energy research and development program.
|Contact: David Anna, DOE/NETL, 412-386-4646| | <urn:uuid:ad7e0989-e72f-4fc6-9ace-ff312bde37d4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/press/2003/PrinterFriendlyHTML_1_49120_49120.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933459 | 915 | 2.953125 | 3 |
One of the most frequent questions I'm asked is why an aspie (or suspected aspie) suddenly goes "cold" and backs off on an otherwise good relationship.
It's a difficult question and the answers would vary considerably from one person to another and would depend greatly on the circumstances. Nevertheless, I'll try to point out some possibilities.
I generally like to stay positive on this blog and assume that people are not necessarily "evil" but simply misguided. Unfortunately, I do have to acknowledge that there are some people out there who take advantage of others.
I read a book a few years ago on "sociopaths in the workplace" and I was stunned by the figures. They suggested that sociopaths were so common that most workplaces (small business) had at least one or two.
The fact is that there are lots of people out there who really feel very little for others and who are very manipulative. I'd like to say that aspies aren't like this but I'm sure there are a few.
One of the problems is that sociopaths and aspies can present similarly on the surface. There's not a huge amount of immediately visible difference between "lack of emotional connection" versus "inability to convey emotion". Similarly, manipulative behaviour can often come across as simply "needy".
Since the aspergers diagnosis is based on purely subjective criteria, it's not unlikely that in some cases, sociopaths may be misdiagnosed as aspies.
You have been warned.
Now let's move onto more genuine and solvable reasons.
This is one of the biggest reasons. The aspie detects an approaching change in the relationship; perhaps you're talking about moving in, having children or maybe you're simply becoming assertive about routines; tea times, household chores or furniture placement.
Whatever the reason, the aspie change resistance kicks in. As we know, aspies are not the world's best communicators and half of the time they'll be completely unaware that the problem is change resistance. To them, they're just unable to cope with the TV being moved to the opposite side of the room. They don't know why they don't like it but they can think of lots of fancy excuses. The aspie may find it easier to go quiet and say nothing than to speak their mind.
The NT side of the relationship will often take this "quietness" to indicate grudging acceptance and may exacerbate the situation by repeating it (for instance, moving more furniture). By the time the "quietness" is really noticed as a problem, it's often too late and the aspie has gone "cold" on the relationship.
NTs can assist with change resistance problems by becoming aware of unusual "quietness" in their partner and encouraging discussion. Aspies can help by making more efforts to communicate, even if it means resorting to written forms.
Next time I want to look at the role that Depression and Self Doubt plays in causing aspies to back off on relationships. | <urn:uuid:9343400f-abd9-48fc-a7b0-52c8aa8bbb06> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://life-with-aspergers.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-do-aspies-suddenly-back-off-in.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978843 | 624 | 1.765625 | 2 |
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Calling all snake hunters. The state of Florida wants you.
Actually, Florida wants you even if you've never hunted snakes. And there's cash at stake.
The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is inviting anyone and everyone to join a special snake-hunting mission called the 2013 Python Challenge.
Florida is trying to rid the state of dangerous Burmese pythons. It's believed thousands are slithering around South Florida.
The Python Challenge invites people to hunt the snakes on public lands.
The hunt starts this Saturday. There are two divisions: one for the general public, the other for python permit holders.
The contest will award cash to the winning hunters in each division: $1,500 for capturing the most Burmese pythons and $1,000 for nabbing the largest one. The largest Burmese python ever documented in Florida was 17 feet long.
Florida's Exotic Species coordinator Kristen Sommers hopes the challenge teaches Floridians never to release nonnative animals into the wild.
"We encourage responsible pet ownership. In fact, FWC sponsors amnesty events throughout the year where nonnative animals can be relinquished to the FWC and they're found new homes."
Floridians who decide they no longer want to keep a nonnative species as a pet can call 1-888-IVEGOT1 (483-4681) and the state will find the animal a new home.
State law now prohibits people from selling or owning Burmese pythons as a pet. Federal law bans the importation and all interstate sales of the snakes.
If you want to join the snake hunt, you can register online at PythonChallenge.org.
The hunt kicks off at the University of Florida's Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center on Saturday at 10 a.m. | <urn:uuid:40a23301-4457-44ee-b124-6e70c7be1f2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/florida/article/291364/4/Cash-prizes-for-bagging-Burmese-pythons-in-Florida | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910748 | 383 | 2.3125 | 2 |
SQL Server 2005 added the STOPAT option for the RESTORE DATABASE command. This sounds great - we can stop at some point in time during the database backup process was running! Or? No, we can't. Here follows some tech stuff why not, and then what the option is really meant for:
A database backup includes all used extents and also all log records that were produced while the backup process was running (possibly older as well, to handle open transactions). When you restore such a backup, SQL Server will from backup media copy the data pages to mdf and ndf file(s), log records to ldf file(s) and then do REDO (roll forward the log records) and possibly also UNDO (rollback open transactions - this is skipped if you specify NORECOVERY option). Why does it need the log records? Because you can do modifications in the database while the database backup is running. After backup process was started (and before it finishes) you can both modify pages not yet copied to backup media, but also pages already copied to backup media. So, the data pages in themselves do not present a consistent state of the database. At restore time, SQL Server uses the log records included in the database backup to "sync" the modifications that were performed while the backup process were running. So, what you end up with is what the database looked like at the end time of the backup process. I'm sure this is well documented somewhere in Books Online so I won't dive further into the tech stuff here.
So, what is the purpose of the STOPAT option for RESTORE DATABASE?
It is to give you an early warning, in case you try to restore a database backup which is too late for a subsequent STOPAT operation for a log restore. Here's an example:
- 13:00 db backup
- 13:10 log backup
- 13:20 log backup
- 13:30 db backup
- 13:40 log backup
- 13:50 log backup
Say you now want to restore to 13:15. Intuitively, you say that you will restore 1, 2 and for 3 you do STOPAT 13:15. Yes, that is right.
But say you are under stress, and perhaps even used some tool which confuses things for you? So, you end up restore 4, 5 and for 6 you try STOPAT 13:15. Clearly, you can't stopat 13:15 for backup number 6 (it only covers 13:40 to 13:50). I.e., restore of 6 gives you an error message. So, you have to re-start the restore process (1, 2 and 3), which could take a long time (if the backups are large). If you had specified STOPAT 13:15 when you restore backup 4, SQL Server would have given you an error immediately, so you wouldn't have wasted valuable time restoring unnecessary backups!
That is the purpose of STOPAT for RESTORE DATABASE. | <urn:uuid:f546b7ae-c3e8-4706-aed3-87d2a53890d7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www2.sqlblog.com/blogs/tibor_karaszi/archive/2010/12/28/point-in-time-restore-of-database-backup.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948371 | 624 | 1.796875 | 2 |
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M is for mass strike
A-Z of Socialism article by Mark Thomas, June 2008
"...for the first time [it] awoke feeling and class-consciousness in millions upon millions as if by an electric shock... the proletarian mass... quite suddenly and sharply came to realise how intolerable was that social and economic existence which they had patiently endured for decades in the chains of capitalism. Thereupon there began a spontaneous general shaking of and tugging at these chains."
This is Rosa Luxemburg's description in The Mass Strike of the impact of the strike wave that swept the Russian Empire in January and February 1905.
More mass strikes followed in October and December, leaving the Tsar's autocratic regime battered if not yet overthrown. In all there were 23 million strike days in Russia during 1905, far outnumbering anything seen previously in Russia or the more advanced industrialised countries.
For the first time the strike weapon was the central driving force of a revolution. The experience of the Paris Commune in 1871 had been full of lessons for Karl Marx, not least that workers could not simply lay hold of the existing state machine, but had to smash it. But strikes were marginal, reflecting the predominance of small scale artisanal workshops in the city. Now the mass strike revealed itself, in Luxemburg's words, as "the method of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution".
The experience of revolution throughout the course of the 20th century vindicated this insight time and again. There were revolutionary mass strikes in Russia in 1917, Germany in 1918-23, Italy in 1920, Hungary in 1956, France in 1936 and again in 1968, Iran in 1978-79 and Poland in 1980.
Luxemburg was concerned above all to draw out the lessons of 1905 for the German working class, the most powerful of her day.
In "normal" periods, outside of revolution, a division between politics as the realm of parliamentary representation and economics as the sphere of trade union bargaining is deeply entrenched. In both, workers are often passive by-standers, only occasionally asked to participate in elections or in limited strike action to strengthen the hand of the union negotiators. The mass strike sweeps all this aside, as workers enter the struggle on their own behalf, and barriers between economics and politics are dissolved.
It is not just that militant economic struggles can lead to clashes with the state, its laws and police, but mass political strikes provide a huge stimulus to economic strikes, especially among sections of workers who previously had little or no tradition of militancy or even union organisation. The "ceaseless reciprocal action" between economic and political issues in mass strikes acts to constantly recruit new forces to the battle, as new groups of workers stir, and raise their own demands, perhaps for the first time.
This leads to a point Luxemburg makes in response to the arguments put forth by the trade union leaders of her day, and ours. "How can a mass strike be attempted without the overwhelming majority of workers being already unionised and with full trade union treasuries to ensure hardship doesn't drive workers back to work?" cried the leaders of Germany's well organised unions. Luxemburg responds that it is the mass strike itself that draws new groups of workers into union organisation, in a way the normal course of trade union affairs could never do.
In Russia a "feverish" work of unionisation set in after the first mass strikes of 1905. The strikes and factory occupations in 1936 in France saw the membership of the main trade union federation, the CGT, rise from 1 to 5 million. Luxemburg gives one condition for this: the strikes must be "fighting strikes" that really threaten to settle accounts with the exploiters. When they are top-down strikes, controlled in scope and duration, they will tend at best to be limited to those already encompassed by trade union organisation.
Mass strikes, Luxemburg observes, above all change workers themselves and on a scale and with a speed years of socialist propaganda alone could never achieve. In January 1905 workers petitioned the Tsar and called him "little Father"; by December a significant minority were determined to overthrow him. Through the mass strike workers cease to be the passive victims of capitalism and become an active revolutionary force.
The Mass Strike took fire above all at the powerful layer of trade union officials in Germany who reacted in horror to any hint that the "Russian" methods might be contemplated at home. In "backward" Russia, where workers lacked legal rights, such militant methods might be suitable, but they were wholly inappropriate, dangerous even, in "advanced" Germany. Luxemburg's book was a devastating attack on this complacent outlook.
But Luxemburg underestimated the danger the trade union bureaucracy - and its allies inside the Social Democratic Party - represented. She argued they would be "swept aside" if they resisted the mass strike once it was in motion. But the roots of reformism go much deeper than this suggests, and the capacity of the trade union bureaucracy to derail even the most powerful strike movement has been proved repeatedly.
But, finally, we should also note that more than once a strike begun as a bureaucratic manoeuvre, initiated and controlled from above, has turned into something much more militant. In May 1968 a one-day general strike called by reluctant trade union leaders in solidarity with students facing de Gaulle's riot police turned, in the following days, into an enormous wave of factory occupations that challenged an advanced Western capitalism.
Both available from Bookmarks.
The Patterns of Mass Strike by Tony Cliff is available online.
Access to this website is free - help us keep it that way. Please make a donation. | <urn:uuid:8e699d96-790d-4373-831d-d5d0585dbd07> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10430 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961866 | 1,169 | 2.5 | 2 |
I have always thought of Herman Maril as an abstract artist -- not in the usual sense of non-representational, but in the dictionary sense of making an abstract, epitomizing or summarizing. The fine exhibit of Maril's work currently at St. John's College in Annapolis only confirms that opinion.
Maril (1908-1986) was a Baltimorean whose career spanned six decades, from the late 1920s to his death. The show's 49 paintings and drawings give us as true a picture of Maril's art as we're likely to get, thanks to curator David Scott, an art historian and former director of the National Museum of American Art. He concentrates on a group of major paintings from Maril's later years, when his style was fully developed, but also includes early works and drawings.
Paintings from the 1920s through the 1950s show him working under such influences as cubism and American regionalism, but also developing qualities of composition and color that are among the hallmarks of his best period.
The core of the show, however, is contained in a group of 16 paintings from the artist's last quarter-century that reveal the essential Maril.
These late works are bigger, brighter and lighter in feeling than Maril's early works. And more to the point, they possess the quality of epitomizing rather than depicting that Scott aptly terms (in the show's title) Maril's "Search for the Essence."
Maril always presented recognizable subject matter, primarily seascapes and studio and house interiors. But his paintings are not about reproducing their subject matter. On one level they are about the formal aspects of picture-making, such as color, space and composition, and the interaction between the abstract and the representational aspects of an image. Thus a painting such as "Ebb Tide" (1967) is really an arrangement of geometric areas of color as much as it is a picture of sky, sea and sand.
On another level, these works are about the emotional content of the visual world -- the joy or serenity or excitement that can be produced by our experience of sea or sky or even something as simple as a color.
"The Morning Paper" (about 1980) presents a counterpoint between the bright red-orange of the table and yellow of the flowers in the foreground and the soft blues, grays and browns of the room's walls and floor behind. But it's also a summation of what the figure positioned between the foreground and background -- Maril reading in a rocking chair -- must be feeling at such a time: quiet pleasure in this relaxed activity mixed with delight in the luxury of being able to spend this time, right here, doing this.
"Kitchen" (about 1970) is almost self-conscious in its geometric and spatial arrangements. But it's also about greeting the day -- about the pleasure of re-experiencing familiar objects and textures and the way the light falls across a room.
Scott has also included a selection of Maril's ink drawings. They are rewarding in their own right, and ones related to paintings throw light on the processes of Maril's creativity. The drawing of "Dialogue at Five" (1960s) quite obviously predates the painting (1970), since the latter has been pared down (six figures instead of 12, for instance) into a much more elegant image.
This show, thanks in no small part to Scott, is an opportunity to get to know Maril's work really well.
What: "Herman Maril: Search for the Essence"
Where: Mitchell Gallery of St. John's College, Annapolis
When: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday evenings, through Dec. 14
Call: (410) 626-2556 | <urn:uuid:26584c10-b9e9-4ec0-a064-185e5f72c541> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-10-31/features/1995304147_1_maril-abstract-artist-paintings | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967927 | 797 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Hepatitis A is a virus that is carried by contaminated food or water. The virus is shed in the stools of an infected person during the incubation period of 15 to 45 days before symptoms occur and during the first week of illness. Blood and secretions may also be infectious. The virus does not remain in the body after the infection has resolved, and there is no carrier state (a person who spreads the disease to others but does not become ill).
How This Hurts the Liver
The liver becomes inflamed. This causes short-term mild to severe symptoms.
There is no specific treatment for hepatitis A. Rest is recommended during the acute phase of the disease when the symptoms are most severe. People with conditions acute hepatitis should avoid alcohol and any substances that are toxic to the liver (hepatotoxic) including acetaminophen (Tylenol®). | <urn:uuid:1ac9845c-1a70-4dda-96fa-9ca98506f118> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.choa.org/Child-Health-Glossary/H/HE/Hepatitis-A | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963959 | 179 | 3.890625 | 4 |
The Rose Project funds programmes which address maternal and child healthcare in Malawi. Mother to Child HIV transmission is the second most common form of HIV transmission in Malawi and accounts for 30,000 babies being born with the virus each year. If you place an HIV positive expectant mother on treatment during pregnancy, the risk of transmission to her child is almost eliminated. In addition the all important health of the mother is looked after, in turn improving her chance of caring for her child long-term and the rest of the family. There are two principal obstacles to providing healthcare to mothers and infants.
- Lack of healthcare workers to administer healthcare programmes: in clinics hospitals and the community
- Lack of good infrastructure: so many healthcare clinics and hospitals are wholly inadequate to house patients and provide medical and nursing services.
Read on to find out more
In 2006 The Rose Project funded a new HIV outpatient clinic in Lilongwe the capital of Malawi called Lighthouse. At this clinic, there is a strong focus on treatment to prevent mother to child HIV transmission in pregnancy. To date 11,000 patients have been placed on Aids treatment at Lighthouse, of whom 3,000 were pregnant women.
In 2008, The Rose Project and Lighthouse were keen to extend this treatment to provide for pregnant t women living in the rural areas. In May 2008,the rural prevention of mother to child HIV transmission programme began .Counsellors travel out from Lighthouse to the rural ante natal clinic on motorbikes. Over the four year period of the programme 4700 expectant women tested HIV positive and have been referred for treatment.
This programme is part funded by Irish Aid
In 2009, The Rose Project funded the new Bwaila Maternity Hospital which was opened by Dr Mary Robinson. This hospital replaced a shed like structure which was built in 1939 - as a temporary structure to manage 4,000 annual births! Prior to its closure, the hospital was managing 11,000 annual births-
The new Bwaila Maternity hospital (the busiest maternity hospital in Malawi) is responsible for 15,000 births each year . Whilst there is an acute shortage of skilled healthcare workers in Malawi, the situation has improved over the last five years. This is due to the increase in intake of medical and nursing students to the university -the results are already visible at Bwaila Maternity Hospital.
When the new hospital opened there was no resident obstetrician - however there are now two. This is making a substantial difference. Funded by Fredom from Fistula Foundation (Scotland)
Malawi has the highest incidence of maternal mortality for a non conflict country. Many women have just one antenatal visit which results in a high level of complications when patients present for delivery. In addition the incidence of HIV amongst the women attending the hospital is high leading to complications. There are only 5 obstetricians in the country for a population of 15 million people.
Mother to child HIV transmission during pregnancy is the second most common form of HIV transmission in Malawi and accounts for 30,000 babies being born HIV with the virus each year. With treatment this is preventable. Prevention of mother to child HIV transmission in pregnancy, is central to the care provided at Bwaila Maternity Hospital.
A number of international organisations have joined forces with The Rose Project in the past 4years in an effort to improve maternal and infant care at the hospital. These include Freedom from Fistula Foundation Scotland , the University of North Carolina, and Haukeland University Hospital Norway.
These organisations in partnership with the District Health Officer are presently implementing a number of training programmes for midwives and it is envisaged that a residency programme for medical graduates in the specialty of obstetrics will begin shortly at the hospital. This is good news!
The Rose Project continues to fund Rachel Macleod, senior midwife manager who works in the labour ward at the hospital.
In 2010 Freedom from Fistula Foundation (Scotland )opened a fistula unit at Bwaila Maternity Hospital. Obstetric fistula is a serious problem in the world's poorest countries, where most mothers give birth without any medical help. To date 400 women have had fistula repair transforming their lives.
The photographs of the Labour Ward below have been taken with the patients permission
29th January Midwife Vicky at the end of a night shift filling in the register. Vichy delivered 12 babies this night!
President Joyce Banda Dr Mary Robinson with Mary Donohoe Founder of The Rose Project pictured at the opening of the hospital in 2009
The Rose Project in partnership with the Norwegian & Malawian nurses's organisation funded a wellness centre for healthcare workers in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi.. The principle is to provide medical care for healthcare workers in a confidential environment. HIV counselling, testing and treatment is also provided for the workers and their families.
Wellness Centres have proven to be remarkably successful in Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi and Zambia, in some cases halting the attrition of nurses from these countries. In addition the centres through their services have been successful in boosting morale generally for these front-line workers.
HIV has taken its toll on this profession in terms of members lost to the virus. In addition, the strain on the individuals working in such an overwhelmingly challenging environment is substantial.
This centre is being managed by the Malawian Association of Nurses with assistance from the Norwegian Nurses Association. Staff from the both the Lighthouse and Bwaila Maternity are supported at this centre. | <urn:uuid:f8ddf5fb-2933-4a28-95a8-9f9e2c80e0ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.roseproject.org/projects/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952275 | 1,131 | 2.8125 | 3 |
The RockIt Scientist is a very diverse music programme that features Progressive/ Hard/ Classic Rock, Blues, Brass Rock, Latin/ African Rock, Jazz and Metal music.
As "non-commercial/ non-Top 40" music ranging from the mid sixties to the present day is featured, the intention is to cater for the more discerning music listener, with no age limits or restrictions imposed or implied. An open mind and a love of music is mandatory!
The programme, which is broadcast on 1485am Radio Today, every Friday evening between 10pm and 1am, is presented by Leon Economides, who has worked with radio greats such as Tony Sanderson (Chuckle and Chat Show on Radio 5), Chris Prior (The Priority Feature on Radio 5), Phil Wright (The Dinosaur Days on 5fm), and Rafe Lavine (Rock Classics and The Great Unknowns on Radio 5, and the original RockIt Scientists on SAfm).
Radio Today is also available nationwide on the DStv Audio Channel 70. | <urn:uuid:97603a98-9ec6-470a-a010-5c5aa7254ce7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rock.co.za/rockit/clint2.html | 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 | 0.911921 | 210 | 1.882813 | 2 |
Monday – Friday: 9 AM – 10PM
Saturday: 12 PM – 5 PM
Check out the Library Blog!
The library at Ex’pression College is full of great magazines, useful DVDs, fun video games, books of all kinds, and software-based tutorials. It is also where students come to obtain their textbooks, get tutored by our free drop-in tutors, and receive research or paper-writing assistance from the librarian. For assistance or questions regarding the library, checkouts, the resources, the catalog, or any other relevant queries, please contact Heidi at email@example.com or call 510.594.6955.
The library’s catalog is available online for searching:
New items are constantly being added to the library. Requests may be made by emailing or calling the librarian or in person. Acquisition of requests is not guaranteed.
The DVD/video game list can be downloaded here:
- DVD/video game list! (Excel file)
The most recent books added to the library can be found here:
- New books! (Excel file)
Don’t have Excel? Google Drive allows you to upload and view Excel files online. You can also use Open Office to access word processing docs, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. Get Open Office here.
All students have access to our Library Information Resource Network (LIRN). This is a web-research tool for students and staff to find and read a wide range of magazines/articles/books, etc. LIRN can be accessed through www.lirn.net.
For instructions on how to use the LIRN database, click here to download instructions.
Ebrary is a new resource available to students. It gives students, staff, and faculty access to thousands of e-books for free from anywhere with access to the internet. To access ebrary, go to http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wintzen and enter your Campus Computer Account (Network) to log in.
After their first week at Ex’pression, students have the privilege to check out 3 DVDs/video games and 4 books at a time.
DVDs/video games are due in 3 days; books are due in 7 days.
Books and video games may be renewed; DVDs may not be renewed on the same day. Books may be kept for up to 3 weeks as long as they are consistently renewed. Video games may be renewed 1 time. To renew books or video games, email firstname.lastname@example.org or call 510.594.6955.
Fines and Fees:
Magazines that are not current (i.e. not in red binders) may be checked out for 3 days and late fees are $.50 per day.
Library overdue fines are $1 per day per DVD/video game and $.50 per day per book.
The library has a slot in its door where patrons may return items if the library is closed.
Once a patron has reached $10 in fines, their account is suspended until this amount has been paid. Any student with fines attempting to graduate will not receive his diploma until their fines are paid.
Any time a student checks an item out of the library, he is responsible for that item. Any item that is lost, damaged, or unreturned becomes the financial responsibility of the student who checked it out. This consists of paying for the price of the item, plus an additional processing fee of $35.
GE textbooks are on loan for only the length of the term in which the student is registered in the class. If the class is dropped or the student has to retake it, the book still needs to be returned at the end of the term. Not returning a GE textbook will result in a fine – the price of the book with an additional $35 processing fee. | <urn:uuid:26f94656-5e17-4c7f-97cf-e66fb0a69b6a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://students.expression.edu/wintzen-library/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930669 | 806 | 1.625 | 2 |
Odors and smells are often a sign of trouble. Hereís a quick guide to what your nose might be telling you:
Burning Plastic Smell
This could be coming from a wiring short or an electrical fire. Or, if somebody just flicked a cigarette out the window, it may have blown back in the window and is burning the carpeting or upholstery in the back seat. Better stop and investigate.
Antifreeze has a sweet, almost pleasant odor. But it usually means your engine or cooling system has a coolant leak. Check the temperature gauge to see if the engine is getting hot.
If you see any steam coming out from under the hood, stop and shut the engine off.
CAUTION: If you open the hood to investigate, be careful because hot steam can burn you. Let your vehicle sit and cool down before you attempt to add coolant or stop leak to the cooling system.
Coolant leaks can also occur inside the car, in the heater core under the dash. A leak here may form a wet spot on the carpet on the passenger side.
Smells Like Burnt Toast
This usually means the engine has an oil leak, and oil is dripping onto a hot exhaust manifold or exhaust pipe. A small leak is nothing to worry about, but you should check the engine oil dipstick to make sure the oil level is not getting too low. The fix is to replace the leaky gasket or seal that is allowing oil to leak out of the engine.
A similar smell can also be produced by burning automatic transmission fluid if the transmission or transmission oil cooler is leaking oil onto a hot exhaust pipe. This type of leak will require an undercar inspection. The source is often a leaky transmission pan gasket , input shaft seal or driveshaft seal, or pipe that connects the transmission to the oil cooler in the radiator.
If you are following a diesel truck, bus or school bus in traffic, the fumes are entering your car through your heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system fresh air inlet, or your side windows if they are open. Roll the windows all the way up, and choose RECIRC if your HVAC system has a button or selection for recirculation mode. This will block off the outside air and reduce the odor.
If your car or truck has a cabin air filter, noticing outside odors is a symptom that the activated charcoal in the cabin air filter has probably reached the end of its service life. Activated charcoal can absorb odors, but it only lasts about a year or so. Better check your cabin air filter and replace it with a new one if it is more than a couple years old. See your Ownerís Manual for the location of the cabin air filter (it is usually buried behind the glove box or is located in the cowl area at the base of the windshield).
Carbon Monoxide Smell
Unfortunately, carbon monoxide has no odor. You might smell exhaust fumes, but you canít smell or see carbon monoxide fumes (which are a component of exhaust). Carbon monoxide fumes mean your exhaust system is leaking. This can be very dangerous, especially during cold weather when the windows are closed, because carbon monoxide can make you dizzy or even overcome you before you realize what is happening. If your car has an exhaust leak, get it fixed.
Musty Mildew Odor
If you get a blast of musty odor that smells like a men's locker room or a pair of dirty socks when you turn on the air conditioner, it means mold and mildew is growing on the surface of the A/C evaporator inside the HVAC system. The evaporator is very difficult to get to, so there is no easy way to clean or replace it. You can try to spray an odor-killing aerosol like Lysol into the A/C ducts and into any openings you can find in the HVAC housing under the dash, but it may take a professional odor treatment to get rid of the smell. A special long spray wand can b used to snake inside the HVAC housing to spray deodorizer and/or biocide directly onto the A/C evaporator. Mold grows here because it is a wet and dark environment.
New A/C evaporators may have a special chemical treatment or anti-bacterial coating to inhibit germ growth.
If you smell a musty odor all the time inside your car whether the A/C is on or not, you probably have wet carpeting because of a water leak around a window seal, or because the drain hose from the A/C evaporator is plugged and is spilling water inside the car and onto the carpeting. This same type of odor often occurs as a result of flood damage and can be very difficult to remove. You may have to replace the carpeting if you canít dry it out and mask the smell with air freshener.
Rotten Egg Odor
Gasoline contains a small amount of sulfur, and when you first start your car you may notice a rotten egg or sulfur smell. The smell is produced by the catalytic converter as it converts the sulfur into hydrogen sulfide. This is normal for some cars, but may be worse if the brand of gasoline you are using contains higher than average levels of sulfur.
Danger! If you smell gasoline inside your car, the fuel tank or fuel lines may be leaking. This can be a very dangerous situation. Stop and get out of the car, then look underneath for any signs of fuel leakage. If the odor is strong, it might be wise to have the car towed to a repair shop for repairs rather than risk driving a potential fire bomb!
If your car catches fire, stop, get yourself and any passengers out as fast as you can, and get as far away from the vehicle as you can. Call 911. Let the fire department deal with it. Donít attempt to open the hood or attempt put it our yourself. Gasoline fires can spread very quickly, and there is always the danger of the fuel tank exploding!
New Car Smell
That unique new car smell that you often notice inside a brand new car is not necessarily a good thing. The smell comes from volatile organic hydrocarbons (VOCs) that are slowly evaporating from the plastics and carpeting inside the car. Some of these compounds are known carcinogens that can cause cancer! See the Healthy Car Report for a summary of which cars produce the highest levels of VOCs from their upholstery and interior plastics.
If you just bought a new car and it smells unusually strong inside, it might be a good idea to leave the windows partially open when the car is parked (preferably while it is parked inside your garage so some lowlife doesnít break into it). The VOCs that are evaporating from the upholstery and carpeting will form a haze on the inside of the windows, as if someone had been smoking inside your car. Just remember, you are breathing this stuff every time you are inside your car until it eventually goes away (which may take up to 6 months or more!).
Suffocating Obnoxious Odor
You are probably driving down wind of a hog farm or a municipal sewage treatment plant. Hold your breath, plug your nose, and step on the gas until you are out of range. Also, replace your cabin air filter because it isn't stopping the smell.
That bean burrito you had for lunch may be catching up to you. Nothing is wrong with your car. Roll down the windows and turn on the A/C to blow out the smell. If a passenger is the guilty party, lower their power window to pull the odor their way.
Smells Like Curdled Milk
It probably is. You kids may have spilled their milk in the back seat and forgot to tell you. Food and liquids spilled on the seats or carpeting can produce very unpleasant smells, especially during hot weather. Get some carpet or upholstery cleaner and clean up the spill as best you can, then mask what's left with some air freshener.
Really Nasty Dead Fish Smell
Somebody doesn't like you and has played a nasty trick on you. Check under the seats for a dead fish.
Air fresheners are available in a wide variety of scents these days, and come in many different styles. Choose one that you find pleasant to take the edge off your drive.
Many air fresheners come with a hook or loop of string so they can be hung from your rear view mirror. But police don't like this because it obstructs your vision. People have actually been stopped and ticketed for this! Better hang your air freshener in a less obvious location.
Air fresheners are also available that mount over the A/C ducts and release a scented perfume. These are good if your car has a tendency to develop an A/C evaporator odor during damp weather. | <urn:uuid:fd45d795-5f84-424b-ae9a-a6d24f0f28c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aa1car.com/library/troubleshoot_odors.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945785 | 1,853 | 2.140625 | 2 |
The ambient noise of common machines and the unexpected sounds that come from familiar objects have been a part of music for some time, but over the last fifteen years French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has been joining the two, using instruments and objects to construct complex, apparently self-sufficient systems that play music without any beginnings, endings, or performers. Videodrones (2001) isolates and amplifies the hum that all video signals make when hooked into audio systems. From Here to Ear (1999) now showing at the Barbican in London, is an aviary that resonates when its finches alight on electric guitars. In Harmonichaos, which was on view at Paula Cooper Gallery until this weekend, Boursier-Mougenot affixes the grooves of harmonicas to the mouths of vacuum cleaners, and the staggered grid of thirteen pairs produces an undulating, reedy drone.
The set-up of Harmonichaos could only be the product of a playful mind, even though its appearance deflects suggestions of human involvement. Both the vacuums and harmonicas have an assembly-line sameness, and while they perform according to design, their functions have been diverted away from the needs for clean homes and entertaining song that they were intended to meet. As a viewer and listener, you're made to feel like a confused outsider: a system of switches modulates the intensity of the air flow, as well as the sound emanating from the vacuum cleaners, but it's nearly impossible to identify the source of these fluctuations. False clues are sent by a randomized blinking of bulbs on the vacuums' bodies. As usual, Boursier-Mougenot brings a sense of humor to his work, from the irony of the hokey harmonica becoming eerie when forced to drone (like the accordion in the music of Pauline Oliveros) to the punning title. He finds both harmony and chaos in ...
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey upset the purpose of portraiture--rather than preserving the memory of its subject in his best light, the painting of the title grew gradually uglier to record Grey's sins, even as he kept the beauty that facilitated his sinning--but left intact art's status as an attribute of rich, leisured living. The arch moral tale is invoked twice in "Virtuoso Illusion: Cross-Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde," an exhibition currently on view at MIT's List Visual Arts Center. Michelle Handelman's hour-long, four-channel video Dorian, 2009, loosely retells Wilde's novel with club kids standing in for opium eaters. In her ghoulishly lit self-portrait Dorian Grey, Manon appears messily caked in makeup, wearing a baggy gray suit, like the corporate conscience of a hedonist spirit. Both of these works introduce to drag a story about beauty, representation, and pleasure, and the anxieties that attend them. This suggests there's more to "Virtuoso Illusion" than an exercise in gender studies; as exhibition curator Michael Rush writes, "[i]n each major historical advancement of experimental art, cross dressing has been present as a strategy that has expanded the possibilities of the perception-bending intentions of artists (as opposed to merely gender-bending)."
Google's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" centers around faith in the power of the keyword to unlock its bottomless treasure chest and put the right answer in one window. Years have passed since the company's ranking algorithm outpaced the approach of human navigators filing information into channels -- an approach that Yahoo has been trying to keep alive by farming the digital labor to users themselves. But even as search algorithms make dinosaurs of the Dewey decimal and other brain-powered systems, it might be worth considering the benefits of staying open to a plurality of variously scaled methods.
These issues converge in Danny Snelson's work as a writer, editor, and archivist. His titles increasingly overlap in the internet's library without walls--an environment that often embodies the Foucauldian idea that "one never archives without editorial frames and 'writerly' narratives (or designs)," as Snelson put it in an email. As an archivist, he has made substantial efforts to preserve endangered cultural artifacts -- making them universally accessible and useful, you might say -- on behalf of PennSound, an audio archive specializing in recorded poetry, and UbuWeb, where, at the suggestion of founder Kenneth Goldsmith, he scanned out-of-print titles and reformatted them as PDFs for free distribution via the site's /ubu channel. The PennSounds and UbuWebs of the internet undertake preservation projects that small presses and recording labels can't touch due to financial reasons, thus ensuring that experimental work will continue to reach audiences in years to come. Distribution networks like these matter in an environment where the internet (for those without access to academic libraries, at least) is often the first and last stop for research -- a realization that impelled Goldsmith to formulate a radical ontology in the title of his 2005 essay, "If it doesn't exist on the internet, it doesn't exist."
Brian Droitcour is a writer, curator, and Russian-to-English translator. From 2002 to 2007 he lived in Moscow, where he covered art for The Moscow Times and Artchronika, a Russian monthly magazine. In 2008 he moved to New York, where he started working for Rhizome, first as curatorial fellow, then as staff writer. As a translator he's worked on several exhibition catalogues and art anthologies.
Jon Rafman's Google Street Views and the accompanying essay he wrote for Art Fag City's IMG MGMT series are sure to get several well-deserved mentions in end-of-the-year lists. Tom Moody on Google Street Views: "Jon Rafman's gathering of images from Google Street Views isn't really collecting at all but solid, groundbreaking journalism. Obviously untold hours were spent perusing this recent-but-everyday tool for images in very specific, focused categories. Photos that look like art photos, photos of mishaps, photos showing the success and failure of Google's face-blurring software, photos that show class issues in a supposedly 'universal' product (the down and out are more likely to be photographed unsympathetically than the up and in). As much as one hates to see more attention paid to the monopoly that aspires to put the happy face on Big Brother, this is worthwhile, thoughtful research." Kool-Aid Man in Second Life is a distorted twin to Google Street Views, another set of screen captures singling out accidental beauty and quirks of surveillance, only this time in a fantasy world that lets Rafman personify his searching gaze in a pitcher of fruit drink.
кремль.рф (kremlin.rf) won't go live until early next year, but the Russian presidential administration's new Cyrillic URL already made waves last month, when Russia became the first country to register top-level ...
The stage at St. Petersburg's Sergey Kuryokhin Modern Art Center was set for a blast of live electronic music, with seating for ten performers, each station equipped with samplers, laptops, and electric guitars. As the audience arrived the musicians tinkered with the controls; one stood near a huge glass jug, adjusting wires submerged in its murky liquid. But when the appointed time for the concert's start arrived, the performers retreated to the wings, and recorded music came up and continued for the next twenty minutes. It seemed almost like a wry comment on the detachment of the physical presence of the performer from the source of sound in electronic music. But in fact it was an unannounced presentation of past issues of Tellus, the 1980s journal of experimental sound produced by Harvestworks, selected by director Carol Parkinson. As it faded, the musicians took their places, at last, to perform Third Eye Orchestra, a piece written and conducted by Hans Tammen. It was a controlled improvisation, where Tammen lifted numbered cards indicating which of the score's instructions should be read at that moment. The musicians, all local recruits, visibly relished both the spontaneity and the monstrously loud sound that only an ensemble of many amplified electronic instruments can produce.
The Harvestworks evening was part of the program of the third edition of Cyberfest, an annual festival conceived and organized by Anna Frants, a New York-based artist and gallerist, Marina Koldobskaya, director of the St. Petersburg branch of Russia's National Center for Contemporary Art.
United States of America
The Abrons Arts Center of Henry Street Settlement is proud to present DECENTER: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show, curated by Andrianna Campbell and Daniel S. Palmer. Opening February 17, 2013 and on view through April 7, the exhibition celebrates the legacy of the Cubist paintings and sculptures in the historic 1913 Armory Show by featuring a group of 27 emerging and internationally recognized contemporary artists, who explore the changes in perception precipitated by our digital age and who closely parallel the Cubist vernacular of fragmentation, nonlinearity, simultaneity, and decenteredness. The show highlights the sponsorship of the 50th anniversary exhibition by the Henry Street Settlement in 1963, the occasion which announced the building of what is today known as the Abrons Arts Center located at 466 Grand Street, New York, NY, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The exhibition commences on the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show, Sunday, February 17, with a 1913 Armory Show Centennial Event, which will feature panel discussions about the 1913 exhibition, as well as the theme of perception and art in the digital age, followed by an opening reception. The show exhibits a group of artworks in the gallery, and also features digital works displayed at www.decenterarmory.com. The site launches February 17.
At the 1913 Armory Show, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors showcased the “New Spirit” of modern art. A backlash of scathing criticism showed how baffled the general American public was by the seeds of abstraction in the Cubist artworks, which quickly became a shorthand expression for the structural changes precipitated by modernity. They not only redefined artistic practice, but also altered our understanding of the process through which we perceive the world. On its 100th anniversary, we will celebrate the Armory Show by posing the question: What is the legacy of Cubism in the hundred years since the Armory Show’s radical display of modern art, and especially, how has this become relevant today?
Accordingly, this exhibition celebrates the centenary of the groundbreaking Armory Show by assembling artworks that analyze the digital revolution and the ways it has affected our perception of the world. Artists as varied as Sara VanDerBeek, Gabriel Orozco, Liz Magic Laser, and Abrons AIRspace residency program alumna Amy Feldman evoke the formal innovations of the historic avant-garde but differ through an embrace or flirtation with digital mediation. Artists today like Andrew Kuo, Tony Cokes, and Cory Arcangel are inspired by the inter-cultural circulation of images, ideas, and data in a worldwide network. While Pablo Picasso and fellow Cubists combined archaic Western forms and appropriated exotica to shatter inherited modes of representation, today ubiquitous computing and the digital image explosion create an intersection of the physical and the virtual, and in doing so, have decentered the locus of artistic praxis.
Although the far-reaching historical significance of the Armory Show was examined through a partial re-creation on its fiftieth anniversary in 1963 (sponsored by the Henry Street Settlement), even then, scholars acknowledged that the exhibition’s social import could not be replicated simply by re-staging the show. In order to honor that “New Spirit,” and the collaborative process through which the 27 members of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors organized this radical exhibit, the 2013 show will inhabit all available exhibition spaces at Abrons and also feature a corresponding online component of digital works. This web-based portion of the show, accessible at www.decenterarmory.com, will grow as artists invite others to contribute in a process that highlights the diversity and expansiveness of the 1913 show’s legacy as it relates to our world today.
This event celebrates the 1913 Armory Show, exactly 100 years after its doors opened to the public. What is the legacy of the exhibition, and how has it been understood and misinterpreted? Is there a “new aesthetic” brought about by perceptual shifts in the digital era? How do these changes align with the formal innovations of the historic avant garde? These two discussion panels, organized in conjunction with Abrons Art Center’s “Decenter: An Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show,” will address the legacy of the 1913 Armory Show, and the ways that perception and artistic practice in the last hundred years has been radically transformed by our digital era.
Panel Discussion: The Legacy of the 1913 Armory Show:
Charles Haven Duncan (Collection Specialist, Archives of American Art)
Franklin Evans (Artist, New York)
Andrea Geyer (Artist, New York)
Marilyn Satin Kushner (Curator and Head, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections, New-York Historical Society; Co-curator of The Armory Show at 100)
Mary Murray (Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute)
Panel Discussion: Perception and Art in the Digital Age:
Introduced by: Israel Rosenfield (City University of New York)
Ethan Greenbaum, Barbara Kasten, Andrew Kuo, Travess Smalley, Sara VanDerBeek
Moderated by: Brian Droitcour
1) Several people have asked me about submitting videos of readings, or video works where words appear as images. The Wordworks series is mainly about writing, rather than performance, video, or other mediums. Any submission should have a core of text that people don't have to press "play" to read. I welcome the inclusion of diverse media objects in submissions as complements to text, but not as replacements of it.
2) Submissions should be able to fit in a Rhizome blog post, without requiring readers to go to another site to read it. I'm aware of the strong traditions of electronic literature, hypertext, interactive fiction, etc., where writers make use of the entire browser window, from the background color to the forward and back buttons. I read and enjoy works like that, but for Wordworks I'm looking for writing that does not exceed the format of the post. This is just an arbitrary decision that I have made in order to maintain continuity throughout the series.
Thanks for reading and responding! | <urn:uuid:9001eb62-d137-4b12-9469-4108a610e247> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rhizome.org/profiles/briandroitcour/?posts=8 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947213 | 3,099 | 1.523438 | 2 |
A global pesticide company announced in early 2012 that it plans to start selling a new GMO, a.k.a. genetically engineered, product to farmers as early as the 2014 growing season, a move weed scientists have been predicting for years, since weeds have been growing increasingly resistant to the chemical glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.
Monsanto said its Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans are genetically engineered to withstand sprayings of not just the Roundup weedkiller, but also dicamba, a chemical weedkiller that disrupts plants' hormonal system and causes them to grow in abnormal ways that usually lead to death. (Dicamba is a developmental toxin.)
The introduction of GMOs in the 1990s was supposed to lower pesticide use in the United States, but it’s done anything but that. In 2009 alone, farmers dumped more than 57 million pounds of glyphosate on food crops, according to the USDA. Just as overusing antibiotics in farm animals causes antibiotic resistance, pesticide abuse causes weed resistance, resulting in massive, hard-to-kill superweeds. Because of this, nonorganic farmers are forced to use more pesticides, sometimes even reverting to older, even more dangerous types.
While Monsanto is pairing dicamba with Roundup—which, by the way, is already detected inside of the nonorganic food we eat—other companies are rushing to bring new GMOs to the market. Dow Agrosciences is hoping to introduce its 2,4-D–tolerant corn and soy. (2,4-D has been classified as a probable carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and the European Union classifies it as an endocrine disruptor.)
Last year, veteran weed scientist David Mortensen, Ph.D., weed ecologist at Penn State University, crunched the numbers and found that commercial introduction of crops genetically engineered to withstand dicamba and 2,4-D will likely lead to an increase of 60 to 100 percent in the amount of herbicides used, adding millions of pounds of toxic pesticides into the food chain and environment.
Organic sounds pretty tasty about now, doesn't it? | <urn:uuid:91376a25-5542-44aa-8715-e61d695c3da9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.organicgardening.com/living/new-gmos-more-chemicals-more-dangerous?cm_mmc=LivingLightlyNL-_-1160168-_-01072013-_-the_new_gmos_more_chemicals_more_dangerous_readmore | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954308 | 439 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Heavy ice is blamed for thousands of power outages that persist across the FOX 7 viewing area. The weight of ice on tree limbs is causing some of them to touch lines, creating an electrical arc which blows fuses along the power grid. More troubling for power crews are the tree limbs and branches that fall and snap lines and power poles. Tuesday, Vectren reported about 3,000 customers still without power, but as of Wednesday, nearly everyones power is back on. In Kentucky, Kenergy and Kentucky Utilities are reporting around 8,000 outages. Several shelters have been set up for those without power and without heat. The Evansville Red Cross has one shelter open at its headquarters on Stockwell Road. There is also a shelter in Boonville at the Main Street Baptist Church, as well as shelters in Clay, Kentucky, McLean County, Kentucky and Hopkins County, Kentucky. | <urn:uuid:5719d906-6bd3-48aa-a117-e859e7b5c44c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tristatehomepage.com/fulltext-news?nxd_id=4772 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961578 | 180 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Dialogues to Streamline Water Use in the Mekong Region
25 September 2008 | News story
The Mekong Region is one of the fastest growing economies in East and Southeast Asia, and on September 22 – 23, 2008, IUCN officials from the surrounding countries gathered in Bangkok to begin planning a project that will include a series of dialogues aimed at incorporating private sector, government and civil society needs into water governance decisions in that critical area.
The Mekong Region Water Dialogues (MRWD) will convene representatives from Cambodia, China, Lao PDR, Thailand and Viet Nam to address their shared challenges in managing Asia’s seventh-longest river: growing environmental pressures, weak environmental governance and limited opportunity for non-governmental actors to make their voices heard.
As industries like mining, fisheries, agriculture, tourism and energy increasingly depend on well-managed water systems, while local communities and ecosystems also rely on the river for survival, different water users risk becoming competitors for the highly interconnected resources.
The dialogues’ objective is to improve the decision-making process around water investments by providing the opportunity for all stakeholders to participate and enabling different perspectives on water-related development to be considered before decisions and actions are taken.
“For years, water governance in the Mekong Region has been a monologue, not a dialogue,” said Helena Ahola, first secretary at the Finnish Embassy, the project’s donor. “This needs to be a country-demand-driven and flexible process, a neutral forum where people can discuss openly.”
The dialogue process started in 2006 with a regional forum, and Thailand, Laos and Cambodia all held National Dialogues in subsequent years.
As the initiative enters a new phase, in Viet Nam and each participating country, a National Working Group composed of members of different water-related sectors and communities will identify water-use topics, then prioritize and facilitate discussion of those topics at national-level dialogues.
Each dialogue will generate and refine key issues for the next, and will provide material for developing policy briefs and national issue papers to be distributed to decision-makers and the media and to be considered at the Regional Dialogues.
To create a continuous, multi-year process, information from the National Dialogues will be discussed at the Regional Dialogues, and then adjusted for further conversation back at the national forums, and so on. Part of IUCN’s facilitating role in the dialogues will be to monitor and modify the topics according to feedback from the dialogues’ participants, keeping it a multi-stakeholder-guided process.
“The dialogues offer an opportunity for IUCN to fill the gap in water governance in the region,” said Ganesh Pangare, head of the Asia Regional Water and Wetlands Program. “IUCN’s mix of state and non-state members puts us in a unique position to facilitate this process.”
For more information, please contact Ms. Tran Minh Phuong at firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:3c4b332e-1bca-4413-8733-e98865469387> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cms.iucn.org/es/noticias/noticias_por_fecha/2008_news_sp/septiembre_news_2008/?1612/Dialogues-to-Streamline-Water-Use-in-the-Mekong-Region | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.905147 | 643 | 2.265625 | 2 |
Tom Lynch: Catasauqua World War II Air Ace
U.S. World War II veterans are dying at the rate of 1000 a month. As they do, it is difficult to remember that they were once youthful men and women who patriotically at the risk of their lives took on the most soul-destroying regimes that the world has ever known and defeated them soundly.
But for all those who came back to live full lives in quiet suburbs with grandchildren at hand, many never did. And among their number was a bright, talented young man named Tom Lynch who grew up in Catasauqua, Pa.
Old photos show a boyish face, what the 1940s would have called “matinee idol” good looks. Lynch could have been a poster model for the Boy Scouts and in fact was an Eagle Scout and a highly decorated one.
Whatever his post-war fate might have been, it clearly would have been one of promise. But after a string of 20 aerial dogfights that put him high among the ranks of America’s aviation aces, Lynch was to meet his end heroically and tragically over the South Pacific.
Tom Lynch was born in 1916. His father started working at Bethlehem Steel as a laborer but by the 1930s had an office job. He looked forward to the day when his son, who had an interest in engineering, would join him there. From Catasauqua High School in 1937. Lynch went on to study engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Here he met Rosemary Fullen, his future wife.
But such peaceful pursuits were out of joint with the times. By1940 the world was in flames. That summer Hitler’s army had goose-stepped into Paris. And in the Pacific, Germany’s Axis ally, Japan, despite American protests, was eyeing the resource-rich colonies of European powers that had fallen under the Nazis heel.
In the Lehigh Valley, where prosperity from government defense contracts had Bethlehem Steel humming again, ending the Great Depression, and where isolationist sentiment was strong, many feared American involvement was inevitable.
Against this background, Tom Lynch joined what was then the Army Air Corps. Flying, with its World War I era “knights of the sky” image, had an inevitable appeal to young men. In March, 1941, Lynch was assigned to the 31st Fighter Group of the 39th Fighter Squadron.
December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor day found Lynch at Bear Field in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had spent most of that year in training flights and drills preparing for the war everyone knew was coming. Those who were with him later recalled that Lynch, who was a silent type, was deep in thought most of that day.
The men of the 31st Fighter Group were not too happy when the rest of the 39th Fighter Squadron left for England in early January, 1942 without them. But later that month they were put aboard the USS Ancon bound for the Pacific. It was February 25 before they arrived in Brisbane, Australia.
Lynch saw his first air action on May 17, 1942. Taking off from Port Moresby, New Guinea, he and fellow members of the 31st challenged a flight of Japanese planes. For unknown reasons the enemy fled without firing a shot.
On June 15, 1942 the sky over Port Moresby was buzzing with Zeroes. Rising to meet them, Lynch found four enemy planes attempting to corner him. “A cannon burst blew a huge hole in the side of my plane,” he recalled later. “The plane was loggy for a few minutes after that but it was still going when a second burst drilled my motor and put me out of the fight.”
Lynch knew his plane was doomed. Confronted by either plunging into the shark- infested Pacific or crashing on a beach, he saw a native fishing boat and took his chances. Smashing into the water he at first could not get the escape door to open. With a strenuous effort, he broke his arm in the process. Swimming for his life Lynch was picked up by the fishing boat.
His friends later recalled Lynch’s most outstanding day was December 27, 1942. As flight leader of 12 P-38’s, he managed to swoop down on 25 enemy planes that were trying to pounce on some US P-40’s ahead of him. “His enthusiasm was obviously high,” the official account notes. Lynch shot one plane almost in half and than shot down another.
Now out of ammunition, Lynch left the sky, jumped into a fresh plane and took off. “What was so unforgettable about that day,” recalled a friend, “was that Tommy went charging back to Port Moresby, leaped out of No.19 (his plane), ran to another in commission P-38, shouted to those standing by, open-mouthed: “The sky is full of Japs…maybe I can get back in time!”
Lynch’s last flight was on March 8, 1944. He had just returned from home where he had been married. Lynch and fellow ace Richard Bong, travelling about 300 mph, swept down over some enemy fuel barges.
Then Bong noticed that behind him, Lynch’s right propeller had blown off and his engine was smoking. Clearly hit by enemy fire from the barge, Lynch’s plane was falling. Bong saw his friend bail out and seconds later heard a bang as his plane exploded. “And that is the last I ever saw of him,” he said.
Several months later Bong, unannounced, flew into Allentown Airport and met Lynch’s family. After telling them what he knew of their son and brother’s passing, he took off circling the field and tilting his wings in salute to honor to his fallen friend.
Days later on August 6, 1945, Richard Bong was killed while testing an experimental plane for the military. The only thing that dwarfed the headlines of his death was the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the event that ushered in the end of World War II.
Copyright 2012 WFMZ. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | <urn:uuid:901a64c6-4455-436d-ae6b-31ef89b7832e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wfmz.com/features/History-s-Headlines/Tom-Lynch-Catasauqua-World-War-II-Air-Ace/-/142386/8557046/-/view/print/-/xxugtn/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988759 | 1,310 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Group 9 - GM Inline Four Cylinder Engine
Group 9 received a 2.2 liter 4 cylinder GM engine for their Reverse Engineering Project. The engine was nonoperational when received but otherwise in good condition. This project was completed in cooperation with group 24. The engine was divided amongst the two groups with group 9 being responsible for the belt drive system, camshaft and crankshaft. Group 24 on the other hand was responsible for the header and pistons. The project was to be completed over the course of a semester and was broken down into 5 stages or gates.
Gate 1 is the Request for Proposal. In this a work proposal is laid out. The work proposal discusses the overview of the work plan, the tools and time required, and the group's capabilities and shortcomings. Gate 1 also lays out a management proposal. The management proposal gives an overview of the management plans. This lays out the responsibilities of each member and the role they will play. This also assigns each person a leadership role based on their expertise. Meeting times are also planned out as well as a plan to resolve conflicts. Gate 1 also deals with the initial product assessment. This is where several questions about the product are answered based on an initial assessment.
Gate 2 is the Preliminary Design Review. This is where the product is dissected and documented with images illustrating how the engine was taken apart. A difficulty is assigned to each task as well as details whenever difficulties occur. A cause for corrective action is also here detailing further how problems were resolved and how well the previously discussed plans (management and work) played out.
Gate 3 is the Coordination Review. Here each part is analyzed in detail post disassembly. Each part is analyzed in terms of function, shape, material, manufacturing process, and the forces acting on it. Upon analyzing the parts design revisions are proposed to improve the product. To increase the thoroughness of the review certain parts were solid modeled while others were analyzed with engineering analysis.
Gate 4 is the Critical Project Review. This is where the product was reassembled while keeping the same level of detail as when the product was dissected. At this point the product was reevaluated compared to before the disassembly.
Gate 5 is the delivery. This includes finishing the wiki accompanied by a compliance matrix ensuring the completion of all parts. This stage also encompasses an oral presentation of the results of the project.
The project was successful in achieving the outlined objectives (refer to introduction). The product was disassembled and reassembled successfully while being analyzed along the way. Below are the results of this project.
The main objective of this project was to dissect and analyze an assigned product. Group 9 was given a 2.2 liter 4 cylinder gm engine. The engine was nonfunctioning upon the start of the project. Understanding how products work and how to apply engineering logic to real world products is a very important skill to develop for engineers. This project reinforced these key skills as well as allowed for the improvement of group working skills. This project also gave a chance to showcase technical writing skills and decision making skills. | <urn:uuid:53a148ba-c8a3-4ca7-afbc-56693367d6ed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gicl.cs.drexel.edu/wiki-data/index.php?title=Group_9_-_GM_Inline_Four_Cylinder_Engine&oldid=42244 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976276 | 631 | 1.742188 | 2 |
“For those who have the eyes to see, the vulnerabilities of the industrial food system are clearly evident. Primary among them is the following reality:
The free flow of cheap food is entirely connected to, and dependent on, the free flow of cheap oil
Cheap oil is history. Continued easy availability of oil at any price is threatened by four tenuous factors: terrorism, war, natural disasters, and economic breakdown. Each of these things has the potential to disrupt the free flow of oil. Each of these variables can and will, to some degree, negatively affect the hyper-refined division of labor and the just-in-time delivery system that the free flow of industrial food depends on.
The price of food will go much higher. You can count on it. Oil shortages and high energy costs must trickle down to the food consumers. Perhaps the trickle will turn to a flow. God only knows how things will play out.”
In another chapter, The Theology of Food Independence, I write:
"The probability of Peak Oil and the assurance of higher energy costs means that the food from corporations will be more expensive. Beyond that, natural disasters and geopolitical happenings will make some or all corporate foods unavailable at times and in places. Disruptions in the food supply could be minor, short-lived and and localized, or they could be major, long-lasting (even permanent), and widespread. To depend on the Industrial Providers in the face of this reality is foolishness."
With those things in mind, today, a reader of this blog (and a reader of the book) sent me the following article link:Rising Food Prices Take Aim at Wallets
The article indicates that food prices have risen 8% in the last year. That is a significant increase. It is only the beginning.
I say harsh things about the Industrial Providers in my book. I say harsh things about the industrial system. I warn of the vulnerabilities and the consequences of being totally dependent on a system that is not sustainable.
I am not a prophet. One need not be a prophet to understand and see the dangers that lie ahead of us. The handwriting is on the wall.
That said, the question that begs our attention is: “What can a person do?”
As the situation worsens, as more people become aware of the gravity of their situation, a lot of ideas and “solutions” will be put forth.
From the very beginning of this blog, I have presented what I believe to be the wisest course of action. It is to simplify your life, eliminate debt, find a piece of earth to cultivate, acquire tools of self sufficiency, and learn the skills of self sufficiency. These are among the unwritten tenants of the Christian agrarian movement. Some people might call it survivalism or maybe even fanaticism. I call it living life the way God intended it to be lived. It is a lifestyle that is focused on, and centered around, faith, family, and Livin’ The Good Life.
If you are unfamiliar with this way of life, I recommend the book: Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian | <urn:uuid:6d673d5b-c938-4358-9e0c-f516c1728dbd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thedeliberateagrarian.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952524 | 657 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Photo: Getty Images
Tag rugby is a non-contact, fast-moving game that is suitable for adults or children, and for boys and girls to play together.
Its safe, non-contact nature, combined with the fun and liveliness of the sport, means that tag rugby is now the RFU’s official version of the game for under-7s and under-8s.
- No contact, but gumshield advisable
- No kicking of any kind
- When a tag is made, the tagger stops running, holds the tag above their head and shouts “TAG!”
- When the ball-carrier is tagged, the ball must be passed to a team mate within three seconds
- Competitive matches should not be more than seven a side
The use of a either a tag belt or tag shorts replicates a tackle and is clearly seen when an effective tag has been made. Teams are seven-a-side with a preferred gender mix of at least three men and women playing at one time. (Teams can choose the gender of the seventh player).
The game has suggested progressions to allow the development of players and introduce more elements of the 15-a-side game. Coaches should use tag rugby to make their players see where space is and encourage evasive running into spaces and not faces.
Tag is a fast-growing version of the game, and the RFU encourages all clubs and playing organisation to look to organise regular tag rugby activity to increase fitness and participation. | <urn:uuid:24096870-d8e2-41b9-87ac-863e801f4c66> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rfu.com/thegame/formsofrugby/tag | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946368 | 312 | 2.578125 | 3 |
King's wins Industry Interchange Award
Posted on 19/05/2011
King’s College London has been awarded a prestigious Industry Interchange Award from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to work in collaboration with the Nestlé Research Centre (NRC) to understand the interactions between genes and ingredients in food, and how they can affect human health.
This award – a first for the College – will enable King’s academic Dr Franca Fraternali and colleagues from the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics to access the state-of-the-art bioinformatics facilities at NRC in Lausanne, Switzerland. Senior Researcher Dr James Holzwarth from NRC will also spend time in the King’s laboratories learning new techniques in the analysis of Protein-Protein Interaction data developed at King’s.
The genes and their encoded proteins determine important functions for health, such as how efficiently we metabolise food, how we respond to the environment and how we detoxify our body from potentially harmful agents. Over time, environmental factors can cause genetic variations and may lead to modified proteins, which can display an altered function. The goal of this research is to understand the possible impact of these alterations on human health, diet, exercise and other lifestyle factors.
Dr Silva-Zolezzi, Head of the Functional Genomics group at Nestlé, said: ‘Our main research aim is to understand how certain ingredients can benefit our health. We believe that increasing our understanding of Protein-Protein Interaction networks is very relevant to our nutritional approach and will help guide our research.’
Dr Alison Campbell OBE, Director of Innovation at King’s, commented: ‘We’re delighted to have won this award to work in partnership with Nestlé. This collaboration gives us the opportunity to share particular King’s knowledge and expertise in Protein-Protein Interactions, and further explore their potential to affect our health.’
People movement is considered one of the best forms of knowledge transfer and BBSRC developed the scheme to enable researchers to move in either direction between the science base and industry. Reciprocal access to facilities and expertise can be of great strategic advantage to the UK science base. Long term beneficial relationships may be established and academic scientists are put in a good position to identify opportunities to realise the social and economic impact of fundamental research.
Notes to editors
This project between King’s and the Nestlé Research Centre (NRC) focuses on the analysis of recently published large-scale maps of pairwise Protein-Protein Interactions (PPI), transcription factor-target (TFT) interactions, three-dimensional structure of Protein complexes and other complementary datasets to enable a detailed understanding of the molecular mechanisms at the basis of protein function and its perturbation. In particular, the interplay of PPI and TF in DNA methylation (Epigenomics) will be investigated.
King's College London
King's College London is one of the top 25 universities in the world (2010 QS international world rankings), The Sunday Times 'University of the Year 2010/11' and the fourth oldest in England. A research-led university based in the heart of London, King's has nearly 23,500 students (of whom more than 9,000 are graduate students) from nearly 140 countries, and some 6,000 employees. King's is in the second phase of a £1 billion redevelopment programme which is transforming its estate. King's has an outstanding reputation for providing world-class teaching and cutting-edge research. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise for British universities, 23 departments were ranked in the top quartile of British universities; over half of our academic staff work in departments that are in the top 10 per cent in the UK in their field and can thus be classed as world leading. The College is in the top seven UK universities for research earnings and has an overall annual income of nearly £450 million.
King's has a particularly distinguished reputation in the humanities, law, the sciences (including a wide range of health areas such as psychiatry, medicine, nursing and dentistry) and social sciences including international affairs. It has played a major role in many of the advances that have shaped modern life, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA and research that led to the development of radio, television, mobile phones and radar. It is the largest centre for the education of healthcare professionals in Europe; no university has more Medical Research Council Centres. King's College London and Guy's and St Thomas', King's College Hospital and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trusts are part of King's Health Partners. King's Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre (AHSC) is a pioneering global collaboration between one of the world's leading research-led universities and three of London's most successful NHS Foundation Trusts, including leading teaching hospitals and comprehensive mental health services. For more information, visit: www.kingshealthpartners.org
For more information about King’s College London, please visit www.kcl.ac.uk
For further information please contact Emma Reynolds, Press Officer at King’s College London, on 0207 848 4334 or email email@example.com | <urn:uuid:5b2800ce-67bc-4eba-9976-5f6039ad77a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kcl.ac.uk/newsevents/news/newsrecords/2011/05May/KingswinsIndustryInterchangeAward.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923694 | 1,092 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Thanks to the Kindle and iPad, paperless reading is becoming more and more common. Even without these devices it’s sometimes handy having an ebook on your laptop or PC. Thanks to Baha’i eBooks Publications you can get more than 70 Baha’i eBooks completely free in both ePub (iPad, iPhone, Android suitable) and Mobi (Kindle suitable) formats.
The project, which was started in late 2009 by a couple of Australians and an American, was created “to make the Bahá’í Writings more readily available to a world that is becoming ever more technologically advanced, by publishing them in formats that can be read on all electronic devices.”
Books available range from the Kitab-i-Aqdas to a compilation of the Ridvan messages from 1950 to 2011. There are even books in Spanish, German, French and Chinese – though the selections are much more limited at the moment.
Visit Bahai eBooks Publications to Download Free Baha’i eBooks. And don’t forget also that if you are after a PDF or Word Doc of many of the Baha’i writings you can find them in the Baha’i Reference Library. | <urn:uuid:2992d4f0-6fbc-49a1-aae7-ff43bbc1288b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bahaiblog.net/site/2012/01/13/where-to-find-free-bahai-ebooks-online/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9362 | 257 | 1.835938 | 2 |
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- One of the thousands of mourners for Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste died June 18 following the Haitian priest's funeral in Port-au-Prince.
Jean-Juste, a Port-au-Prince archdiocesan priest, died in a Miami hospital May 27 at age 62. A passionate advocate for the impoverished in Haiti and for Haitian refugees in the United States, he had lived in the U.S. since the 1970s and founded the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami.
Although some news reports quoted eyewitnesses as saying the unidentified man who died after the funeral was killed by gunfire from U.N. peacekeeping forces, a statement from the U.N. mission to Haiti said the peacekeepers "categorically deny the allegations."
Sophie Boutaud de la Combe, a spokeswoman for the mission, told the Reuters news agency that U.N. soldiers fired about five shots into the air to disperse a crowd that was throwing rocks at them.
Following the funeral Mass at the Port-au-Prince cathedral, an estimated 2,000 people processed with the coffin to the presidential palace to show their displeasure with the policies of President Rene Preval. Jean-Juste had been a longtime supporter of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was forced from office and has been in exile since 2004.
The body of Jean-Juste was taken to his rural home town of Cavaillon, where he was buried next to his mother. | <urn:uuid:c5e8d720-b016-4ffd-b530-e96a57161efc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ncronline.org/print/news/global/one-killed-funeral-fr-jean-juste-haiti | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974516 | 313 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Summer is here.
Folks are flocking to the Gulf Coast.
One of the consequences of this crush of citizenry is that there are more people around to do stupid things — like go into the water when they shouldn’t.
As more and more visitors came to the Coast, the tourism industry, anxious to prevent problems, pushed for more and more rules to keep tourists out of harm’s way; harm’s way is bad for business. However, many tourists come to the Coast to get away from all the rules and regulations that kept them confined back home. They did not go on a coastal vacation to be told what to do.
However, when it comes to swimming in the Gulf, being told is what they need.
They need to be told when there are jellyfish in the water. They need to be told if there is a shark sighting, and they need to be told when the surf is dangerous.
Dangerous surf is a tough sell. People love the waves and are disappointed when the Gulf is calm. The bigger the better. They buy boogie boards. They body-surf. They play, cavort, get knocked around. Get pushed under. Get in trouble. Get caught in a rip current. A few even get drowned.
So the tourism industry, in cooperation with local law enforcement, set up a warning system — flags — to tell you what you should do.
Yellow means be cautious. Red means danger — swim at your own risk. And two red flags means double danger, stay out of the water. Double red flags also mean that if you go out there anyway, you could be fined $100, which would put a crimp in any vacation.
There was an offshore storm a couple of weeks ago. The Gulf got angry and the waves came crashing. Up went a red flag. But onshore, on the beach, it was sunny. So some vacationers, down to do what they wanted to do, not what they were told to do, went out in the water anyway.
Meanwhile, the waves began to reshape the floor of the Gulf where people swam — moved sand around, piled up sandbars in some places, cut trenches in others.
Now, everyone knows, or should know, that the water that comes in waves onto the shore has to go back out. And water, being inclined to take the path of least resistance, will go back out in the trenches cut by the waves. The trenches got deeper and the outgoing water got swifter and pretty soon there was a first-rate rip current.
A rip current can pull you out. If you don’t know how to deal with it, if you fight it, you can exhaust yourself and drown. Most visitors don’t know how to spot rip currents and how to get out of one, so when rip currents start forming, the red flag goes up to tell folks to be extra careful.
Only some folks aren’t.
Late one afternoon, the emergency vehicles and lifeguards converged just down the beach from us. A teenager was missing. Despite the red flag, three boys had ventured out, and only two got back. Lifeguards searched until dark.
They found him the next day.
Then came the news that there had been another drowning further west.
With the Gulf still angry and rip currents roaring, the double red flags went up and the beach patrol began patrolling. It was a dangerous situation.
But some people went in anyway.
Tickets were handed out.
One of the ticketed was award-winning country singer Jason Aldean.
Aldean paid his fine and then went online to complain and to tell fans that he was “pretty sure” that he would not have drowned in knee-deep water and that he was “a little bitter” at the way he was treated by the local “Barney Fife.”
Well, a storm of comments followed — some siding with Aldean, but more chiding him for his lack of respect for the law and law enforcement. Aldean then posted an apology, which was followed by another storm of comments.
Well, this is what I think about that. If Aldean and all those posters had been down on the beach with me when they were searching for the 19-year-old who drowned, they might have seen things differently. If they had seen the lifeguards risking their lives in the twilight surf, had seen their shoulders sag in disappointment when darkness called it off, and if they thought about how long the night was for friends and family as they wondered and feared what the next day would bring, they would know that breaking the rules — whether one red flag or two — is more than an individual act. Others are involved.
There are times when knee deep is too deep.
Harvey H. (Hardy) Jackson is Eminent Scholar in History at Jacksonville State University and a columnist and editorial writer for The Star. Email: email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:8909ad3c-f42c-4960-bfac-02670f8237da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://annistonstar.com/bookmark/19054647 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98095 | 1,041 | 2.28125 | 2 |
ALAMITO, TEXAS. Alamito is on Farm Road 169 at Alamito Creek, three miles north of Plata in eastern Presidio County. The community was established in 1870, when John Davis settled there with several Hispanic families in his employ. For protection against Indian attack Davis built a large adobe house with a corral for horses and mules attached to the back and a chapel for religious services when a priest was available. He raised horses and cattle on the open range, cultivated a large peach orchard, and made peach brandy. His employees' families raised corn, wheat, beans, and other vegetables, which Davis freighted to Fort Stockton for sale. With a good supply of food and peach brandy and with plenty of water and shade from the creek, the settlement was a favorite stop for travelers. Alamito had a post office from 1884 until 1892. The community operated a school as early as 1908, when Selena Hord was the teacher. In the 1911 Presidio County scholastic census Alamito's Precinct No. 2 reported fifty-seven students from a total population of 392.
John Ernest Gregg, History of Presidio County (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1933). Carlysle Graham Raht, The Romance of the Davis Mountains and Big Bend Country (Odessa, Texas: Rahtbooks, 1963).
The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this article.Julia Cauble Smith, "ALAMITO, TX," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hva45), accessed May 25, 2013. Published by the Texas State Historical Association. | <urn:uuid:0bb7c83c-59ce-45e1-bfd6-7c2509bf9029> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hva45 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942348 | 364 | 2.546875 | 3 |
18.00.020 STANDARD ISSUE UNIFORM
Officers required to wear a uniform shirt may wear either the long sleeve or short sleeve shirt, year round.
Officers wearing the short sleeve shirt may wear either a white, black, or navy blue crew neck T-shirt or V-neck T-shirt.
Officers wearing the long sleeve shirt may wear either the uniform necktie, a black or navy blue crew neck T-shirt, the Department approved dark blue turtleneck shirt or dark blue dickey.
The only footwear (shoe or boot) authorized in the Uniforms and Equipment Registry is to be worn with the Department-issued uniform and will conform to the following specifications:
v Black in color
v Plain toe (no stitching, designs or markings)
v Leather (or similar appearing material)
v Capable of being highly polished
v Loafers or athletic shoes of any type, material or construction, are not approved
v Rubber over-shoes for motorcycle officers may be approved
Special footwear is authorized for bicycle officers.
No other footwear, except as stated above, will be authorized for wear with the Department-issued uniform. Officers who are unsure of the footwear standards should obtain pre-approval prior to purchase.
Footwear will be kept highly polished at all times.
Wearing the Uniform Off Duty
Officers may wear their full uniform when going to and from work.
Officers may, with prior approval in writing from the Chief of Police:
v wear their full uniform or dress uniform off duty when attending personal functions such as weddings or funerals
v wear their full uniform or dress uniform off duty when attending a charity event
v wear their full uniform or dress uniform off duty when attending a dance or ball | <urn:uuid:aad595e3-d047-4d81-bfa6-937278b4c437> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bellevuewa.gov/Other/Police/PolicyManual/18.00.020.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936752 | 360 | 1.921875 | 2 |
McGuinness, L. and Stevens, I. and Milligan, I.M. (2007) Playing it safe? a study of the regulation of outdoor play for children and young people in residential care. Working paper. Scotland's Commissioner for Children and Young People.
The aim of the research was to describe and explain the barriers to, and opportunities for, outdoor play and recreation that exist in residential child care services. The research focussed on six residential facilities which represented a cross-section of the sector. Interviews were conducted with two young people, one manager and two basic grade staff members from each of the facilities. The findings were analysed using data display and reduction and the following key findings emerged.
Actions (login required) | <urn:uuid:5c1f5fe4-2071-4cf0-b7f1-d41f0b6a0df5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/10366/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964297 | 150 | 2.25 | 2 |
At its most basic level, militarizing cyberspace would involve “giv[ing] a military character to” it, “equip[ping][it] with military forces and defenses” and/or “adapt[ing][it] for military use.” Determining the degree of militarization would also hinge upon determining the degree to which the military as an institution is the primary actor in responding to cybersecurity challenges. During the last four years, we have seen all of these occur alongside a growing role for the military in responding to the nation’s cybersecurity challenges. This is despite assurances that the United States was not militarizing cyberspace.
On a number of occassions, civilian and military leaders have assured us that the United States was not militarzing cyberspace and that the military was not taking the lead in responding to cybersecurity challenges. This has at times caused controversy. In the spring of 2010, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) called for a greater role for the Department of Defense in national cybersecurity, a call that the head of USCYBERCOM, Gen. Keith Alexander, seemed to resist.
Several months later, in summer 2010, concerns about possible militarization were raised again when the Wall Street Journal reported on a National Security Agency (NSA) program called “Perfect Citizen.” The program would allegedly involve NSA surveillance meant to detect cyber attacks against private companies and civilian critical infrastructures. Reports that a contractor involved with the program had called it “Big Brother” only added to concerns. In response, the NSA assured us that “Perfect Citizen” was only a research and development project and that the military was not taking over civilian cyber security.
These assurances did not allay concerns about militarization. A year later, in his July 2011 speech introducing the first Department Of Defense Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn III felt the need to address “concerns that cyberspace is at risk of being militarized.” He told his audience, “We have designed our DoD Cyber Strategy to address this concern.” This involved an “emphasis on cyber defenses”–as opposed to offense or retaliation–that was meant to illustrate DoD’s committment “to protecting the peaceful use of cyberspace. […] Indeed, establishing robust cyber defenses no more militarizes cyberspace than having a navy militarizes the ocean.”
The first problem with Lynn’s assurances, however, was that this very same strategy and his speech to introduce it provided one more piece of the militarization puzzle. In his speech, he noted that the new DoD strategy would treat “cyberspace as an operational domain, like land, air, sea, and space. Treating cyberspace as a domain means that the military needs to operate and defend its networks, and to organize, train, and equip our forces to perform cyber missions”–i.e. “giv[ing] a military character to” it, “equip[ping][it] with military forces and defenses” and “adapt[ing][it] for military use.” While assuring listeners that DoD did not intend to militarize cyberspace, he all but used the dictionary definition of “militarize” in describing the intent of the new strategy.
The second problem was that the speech and strategy did not address the other aspects of cyberspace militarization that we knew had already taken place by July 2011. The creation of a dedicated military command certainly constitutes “equip[ping][it] with military forces and defenses.” We also already knew that these military cyber forces would have an offensive as well as defensive mission–i.e. that they were “adapt[ing][cyberspace] for military use.” But as I noted at the time, neither the DoD strategy nor Lynn’s speech addressed the issue of how our military cyber forces would be used offensively, making the strategy both disingenuous as a PR document and incomplete as a strategy document.
Almost one year later still, in June 2012, we learned that even as Lynn and others assured us that the DoD strategy was primarily defensive, the United States had been conducting covert, offensive cyber attacks against Iran. Cyberspace, which our leaders had characterized as a miltiary domain, had been successfully adapted for military use by our dedicated cyber forces. Again, this is the definition of militarization.
But what of the question regarding the military’s role in national cybersecurity? Senator McCain has not been alone in calling for a greater military role. For example, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said that the military should be in charge of cybersecurity and should have more of an offensive orientation.
The Pentagon has proposed that military cyber-specialists be given permission to take action outside its computer networks to defend critical U.S. computer systems — a move that officials say would set a significant precedent.
The proposed rules would open the door for U.S. defense officials to act outside the confines of military-related computer networks to try to combat cyberattacks on private computers, including those in foreign countries.
What’s more, the Washington Washington Post report indicates that this proposed expansion in the role of military cyber forces in the domestic space “is significantly narrower than what the military originally sought.”
Finally, James Lewis, a leading cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has recently said that an October 2012 speech on cybersecurity by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta indicates that the Department of Defense is effectively taking over U.S. cyber security.
If the United States has not yet fully militarized cyberspace, it has taken significant steps in that direction. Official policy has characterized it as an operational miltiary domain, has equipped it with military forces, and has adapted it for military use. We hear powerful voices calling for an expanded military role in civilian cybersecurity and see strong indicators that, at minimum, the military will indeed play an increasingly important role, perhaps even the central role in our nation’s cybersecurity. | <urn:uuid:9b43c151-8249-4032-8043-93594ea07532> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/sites/seanlawson/2012/11/02/is-the-united-states-militarizing-cyberspace/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972307 | 1,283 | 2.34375 | 2 |
Big Insurance and its Bag of Tricks
The ink may have dried on the federal health care reform bill, but the health insurance industry isn’t packing up its bag of tricks and going quietly into the night. Instead, insurers actually appear to be stepping up their attempts to game the system, seeking to exploit the window of opportunity before new rules and regulations take effect. They’re scheming to (a) inflate their rates, (b) kick customers with health issues off their rolls, and (c) employ creative accounting to reclassify costs, all in the interest of maximizing short-term profits.
WellPoint, the country’s biggest health insurance conglomerate (operating subsidiaries in 14 states under the Anthem and/or Blue Cross and Blue Shield brands), isn’t satisfied with picking just one of these strategies. Instead, it has chosen (d): all of the above. For example:
- WellPoint’s California subsidiary, Anthem Blue Cross, sought rate hikes of up to 39 percent in California this spring. The proposed hikes produced serious blowback, making the company a poster child for health reform in the final months before passage of the reform package in late March. California regulators employed an independent actuary to review WellPoint’s filings, and the review found serious errors (all in the company’s favor) that showed the company’s request was completely unjustified.
- WellPoint has earned itself a barrage of negative publicity recently over reports that the company used a computer algorithm that targets women diagnosed with breast cancer for reviews and cancellations of their coverage.1
- And, more quietly, WellPoint’s accountants have been busy reclassifying costs from the administrative category to the health expenses category. This is significant because one of the elements of reform that takes effect next year, in 2011, is a requirement that companies spend at least 80 percent of premium dollars on actual health costs in the small group and individual markets, or rebate the difference to customers. By simply reclassifying costs that would normally be considered administrative costs, WellPoint can skirt the intent of the new rule to nominally meet the requirement without actually reforming its “deny and discriminate” business model.
Luckily, small business owners–a key voice in the reform debate and among the most severely impacted by WellPoint’s bad practices–aren’t taking all this lying down. Small business owners across the Main Street Alliance network are continuing their fight to hold the big insurance companies accountable and make sure business owners, their employees, and the communities they serve can get good health coverage without breaking the bank.
The state of Maine has been a battleground of the health care fight for years, and Maine small businesses are used to facing off with Anthem of Maine (another WellPoint subsidiary). Meet Melanie Collins, owner of Melanie’s Home Childcare in Falmouth and a leader with the Maine Small Business Coalition and Maine People’s Alliance.
Collins traveled to Washington, D.C. three times over the past year to join other small business owners in the fight for health care reform. She met with Members of Congress, stood with Senate leaders at a DC press conference, and marched in the front line of a column of thousands of people protesting Big Insurance outside the annual conference of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the industry’s lobbying arm.
Collins is continuing her organizing work back home in Maine, where insurer Anthem filed a lawsuit against the state2 for denying its 2009 request for an 18.5 percent rate increase for individuals. Collins and other Maine People’s Alliance leaders packed the courthouse at a hearing on March 19 to demonstrate against Anthem’s suit, and on April 22 a Maine Superior Court judge issued a decision ruling in favor of the state–and Anthem customers.3
It isn’t known yet whether Anthem will appeal the decision. Either way, the company has already requested a new increase of 22.9 percent4 for a pair of individual plans that cover over 10,000 people, so this fight isn’t over.
Collins is no stranger to Anthem’s antics. When Maine launched its new Dirigo Health Agency in 2003, Collins was excited to enroll for the new DirigoChoice health plan (a public-private partnership administered at the time by Anthem). Collins contacted Anthem, but was repeatedly steered away from DirigoChoice and back toward Anthem’s all-private plans. Collins persisted, and when she finally got past Anthem’s smokescreen, she recounts, “The Dirigo office informed me that I’d probably qualify for a substantial subsidy. As it turns out, I did qualify and the price was about 80 percent less than Anthem’s comparable coverage!”
It seems Anthem didn’t want Dirigo to succeed because the new program created real competition for Anthem’s own line of private insurance products. As if to underline this point, Anthem announced its decision not to renew its contract to administer Dirigo with only a month’s notice, apparently hoping the program would be forced to fold. But Dirigo lives on… and so does a conviction among many Mainers that Anthem doesn’t have their best interests at heart.
“As a small business owner, I care about my customers–the kids I care for and their families,” Collins says. “Does Anthem care about its customers? I don’t think so. My business is built on trust–but Anthem has broken our trust repeatedly.”
Eyes Wide Open
As the implementation battles over health reform continue to unfold, Collins says it’s important to keep a bright light shining on Anthem, WellPoint, and the rest of the insurance industry. “We’ve got to keep watching the insurance industry like a hawk,” she says, “because we know companies like Anthem and WellPoint will do everything in their power to defend their profits and shirk their responsibilities to small businesses and communities across America.”
- Waas, Murray, “Corrected: WellPoint routinely targets breast cancer patients,” Reuters, April 23, 2010, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63M5D420100423 [↩]
- “Insurer Fights Maine Regulator on Premiums,” Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704059004575127533188447508.html [↩]
- “Court Upholds Anthem Rate Hike Denial,” Maine Public Broadcasting Network, April 22, 2010, http://www.mpbn.net/Home/tabid/36/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3483/ItemId/11874/Default.aspx. [↩]
- “Anthem requests 22.9% rate hike,” Bangor Daily News, January 7, 2010, http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/134245.html [↩] | <urn:uuid:38cd0cbe-78ba-4905-bda4-1a871681c687> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://allianceforajustsociety.org/842/maine-small-business-owners-take-on-big-insurance/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939836 | 1,478 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Google: Governments seek more about you than ever
by Elinor Mills
A new report from Google shows a rise in government requests for user account data and content removal, including a request by one unnamed law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality–which the company refused.
The latest Google Transparency Report, released today, also shows historic traffic patterns on Google services via graphs with spikes and drops indicating outages that, in some cases, indicate attempts by governments to block access to Google or the Internet. For instance, all Google servers were inaccessible in Libya during the first six months of this year, as was YouTube in China.
But the truly interesting data are the statistics on requests made to the company by governments for either access to user data or to remove content.
Some countries had large amounts of user data requests. The United States leads that pack, with 5,950 such requests pertaining to more than 11,000 users or accounts, and to which Google complied 93 percent of the time. That’s up from about 4,600 requests in the second half of last year. Other countries seeking lots of user data were India (more than 1,700 requests involving more than 2,400 accounts), France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Google says it complied most of the time in those cases, except in France.
The actual numbers are likely larger than what is reported because Google is prohibited by law from revealing information on requests from intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency or FBI, notes online privacy advocate Chris Soghoian, who released a report on law enforcement surveillance earlier this year. | <urn:uuid:5a7e9007-9009-4ed4-89b7-439e6aabd06c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://revolutionradio.org/?p=22026 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00076-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948689 | 326 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Missionaries of Africa are committed to Encounter and Dialogue
- all people are created by one and the same God, and therefore
form one family, the human family, irrespective of colour, race, culture
- the Holy Spirit is in dialogue with each and every person, and in
their respective cultures and religions, and therefore our encounter
and dialogue with others is encounter and dialogue with the Holy Spirit
working in them.
- there can be no peace without peaceful encounters and dialogue between
people of different cultures and religions.
- follow in the footsteps of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose life
and instructions remain for us the "way" and 'model' of
our encounters and dialogue.
- to put into practice the Church's teaching which has dialogue
(interreligious - Intercultural) as an integral part of its Evangelising
a legacy and responsibility inherited from our founder, Cardinal Lavigerie,
well stipulated in our "Constitutions and Laws" (Chapter
1 article 5); and especially encounter and dialogue with Muslims (Chapter
1 article 1) and repeatedly confirmed by our General Chapters.
in Africa, our first collaborators, believe that peaceful encounters
and dialogue between religions (followers of different religions)
are an essential condition to bring about "justice, peace and
reconciliation" in Africa. (Cf. Synod of Bishops, " The
Church in Africa in service to Reconciliation, Justice and Peace,
Lineamenta Chapter III)
"The proclamation of the Gospel and the service
of others require that we feel a solidarity with the people among
whom we live. This may open the way to dialogue with other religions
and other cultures in an atmosphere of mutual respect."
(Constitutions and Laws, chapter I article 5)
Fr. Richard Nnyombi Coordinator for JPIC and Encounter and
Contact : Email | <urn:uuid:5aba5d66-8ec9-471e-8a44-9608c1e05789> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.africamission-mafr.org/religionsgb.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913111 | 390 | 1.945313 | 2 |
The Artistry of Gil Mares
Trends in the arts are cottage industries of their own. Critics and academics and the marketers of fashion are driven to coin names and brand individuals and styles. A process that sometimes muddies our understanding of art as much as it informs it. Some artists confound and outrun attempts to quantify and pigeonhole their unique vision and talent. Gil Mares is such an artist.
His photographs are evocative, confined intensities. Kingdoms of color and light and shape, found in what is disguised as mundane sensory information,found in what is affixed to the ordinary objects and surfaces of our world:
What appears to the average eye as a beaten and barnacled bow of a ship
yields brilliant, abstracted panels of light and color in intricately orchestrated arrangements.
A tattered, peeling window on an old, abandoned building becomes a luminous phantasm, providing the focus for a previously overlooked psychic and sensory reality. A found community of forms. A population of objects in newly-acknowledged relationship.
Gil Mares' aesthetic is predicated on the power of exclusion. Knowing exactly what needs to be left out of the field of artistic apprehension. The result is that only the essential elements remain and resonated within the boundaries of what is viewed. It is a confinement of context and the interrelationships between objects in a field of space, until their "apparentness" as real things dissolves into vibrant abstraction. This is his unique visual idiom.
His sensibility revels in the possibilities of harmonized disparities. His elegant, discriminating sentience exposes only the most intense artistic reality.
His eye is always "right." His work manifests that quality of style so pure that the viewer becomes one with what is viewed. So pure, that the personality of the artist is exactly equal to the artistic expression. There are no externals to intrude upon the authority of what is presented.
For all practical purposes, his is an extinction of self in service of the intensely seen world, intensely felt. He and we are there in absentia. It is a purity that is fed by the precision of his artistic humility. He is devoted to the subject and its most perfected expression, more than to the ego that needs to create.
The control is so inconspicuous, the process so transparent, that the elements communicate only their artistic reality. The works never come across as stagy. As sets of particulars that force some contrived expression, or manufacture some "statement of ideas" about what art is supposed to be, or satisfy expectations that are merely topical or trendy, pretty or posed.
These windows he is presenting us open into worlds we recognize as brilliant locations of visual ecstasy. It is as if we were recognizing or remembering what we have always known as the beauty that is always around us, just occurring beyond our notice. As if we, too, would have seen it this way, even though we weren't the ones to see it first.
T. S. Eliot said that, with the arrival of the truly new, ". . . art never improves, but . . . the material of art is never quite the same." I don not propose to classify Gil Mares' work or compare it to others'. I will leave such comparisons for those whose training and inclination it is to expose and expound upon such qualities and concerns. His artistry defies simple or singular elucidation. The works represent a range of subjects, and a rich and distinctive vision. The material of his art is like no other. It is particular, but not eccentric. Exquisite, not artificial. His work is accessible, but not ordinary. The caliber of his talent is undeniable and authentic.
The visual arts move us without words. Paraphrase and explanation are poor substitutes for the beauty and clarity found in the works themselves.
These photographs are Gil Mares' gift to every soul and spirit hungry to see through the practical and rudimentary veneer of the "sensible" world into a deeper existence. To arrive at the house of our higher senses. To explore a more brilliant temporality.
Swim in these atmospheres! Immerse yourself in the metaphysics of these forms! In the sensed presences stirring beneath surfaces! In the magic of this illuminated terrain and these deeply felt immensities!
Enjoy his work. His gift. | <urn:uuid:4bf04c8d-3e56-4ab0-a75b-32fd46825d27> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gilmaresphoto.com/critique.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961468 | 899 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Small business in the Toronto area are encouraged to be proactive when it comes to complying with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. Making businesses accessible to everyone is not only a way to empower the community but it is also a smart business move as it will increase the amount of customers.
Entrepreneurs in the area should also consider running their business operations out of Toronto self storage, as units are available to supplement the high cost of office space.
Under the AODA, business are required to create a plane for disabled people with service animals and devices that offer assistance, like wheelchairs or canes, providing easy accessibility or even alternatives like deliveries or carry-outs.
The Toronto City Council has not approved its 2013 budget and by not doing so, a number of city and provincial fees are set to kick in on January 1. With costs expected to increase in the coming year, businesses will need to take advantage of any money saving tools available.
Jiffy offers businesses plenty of options for Toronto storage, whether one needs to store filing cabinets or office supplies. What's more, the company is currently holding a contest for a new iPad 3, which is a device that just about every business person could use to help improve productivity. | <urn:uuid:16702342-168c-4d93-9644-f433ae1a0400> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jiffystorage.com/jiffy-news/toronto-news/toronto-business-storage/small-businesses-smart-to-meet-aoda-requirements/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954147 | 252 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Some of the innovations of Reagan Library are immediately apparent in the combination of navigable Myst-like landscapes with linked texts. Others can only be read through repeated encounters with the four fictional systems of text that correspond to four "worlds." Mingling instructions, stories, and "nonsense" texts (which can be eliminated by re-visiting and re-reading), Reagan Library is a meditation on forgetting and loss in which text and image work together interactively in an intricate and compelling way.
Author description: Reagan Library is an odd mixture of stories and images, voices and places, crimes and punishments, connections and disruptions, signals on, noises off, failures of memory, and acts of reconstruction. It goes into some places not customary for "writing." I think of it as a space probe. I have no idea what you'll think.
Instructions: Each page contains an image and some text. The image is a QuickTimeVR panorama. Dragging the mouse within the QuickTime window moves the virtual camera. Certain images within the panoramas are cues for hypertext links. The cursor takes on the image of a globe when it encounters one of these. Generally, clicking on an object moves your viewpoint close to that object by replacing the current panorama. Occasionally you'll click on an object and find yourself in a different space, marked most notably by a change of color and lighting. There are four spaces in this version of the Library. The texts that accompany the images are also multiform. Pay attention to the small squares or color bars that mark the end of each passage. They're not entirely decorative. If you visit a page more than once, you'll notice the text has changed. The text should become more coherent (if not more sensible) on repeated visits. Simply re-loading a page does not constitute a new visit. You must leave and land elsewhere before you can return. Most pages contain several text links in addition to the graphical links in the QuickTime movie. Lines entirely in italics represent important messages from the Library. More information is available in the introduction and in Reagan Library's "red zone."
Previous publication: Reagan Library was published by Moulthrop in 1999 and in Gravitational Intrigue: A Little Magazine Publication, volume 22cd, May 1999. Reagan Library is also available on Moulthrop's site, http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. | <urn:uuid:92e83726-92c2-442a-88ea-6b6db8a63169> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/moulthrop__reagan_library.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.922022 | 508 | 2.15625 | 2 |
Emerson, Thomas, 1785-1871.
[Wakefield, Mass.]:;Wakefield Municipal Gas & Light Department,
Photo courtesy of the Wakefield Historical Society.
"Thomas Emerson was one of Wakefield's most respected citizens. Born in Reading (now Wakefield) on October 2, 1785, he was descended from a Puritan ancestry. Due to his family's limited means, he was not well educated, yet he rose above this obstacle and eventually became one of the most prominent members of the community. In 1810 he formed a successful partnership with Ebenezer Nelson for the manufacture of shoes. The partnership lasted a short time and eventually Mr. Emerson as sole owner increased the business until it was one of the most successful in the community. The factory was located on the present site of the Wakefield YMCA and produced men's shoes. Mr. Emerson was the first manufacturer in the town to inaugurate a system of cash payments to his workers in place of the previous barter system. He frequently purchased new machinery and introduced new methods for the profit of his workers. Mr. Emerson was kind and sympathetic to the poor and was a contributor to many philanthropic and missionary enterprises. In 1825 he sold his farm and surrounding buildings to the town for the sum of $3,275 to establish the Town Almshouse. He was instrumental in the formation of the South Reading Mechanical & Agricultural Institution in 1833 which was located at the corner of North Avenue and Albion Street and served as both Vice President and President. In 1844 he was elected President of the South Reading Bank, a position he held until his death. He was very well liked and was appointed to nearly every town office by his fellow citizens. He was also chosen to represent South Reading in the Legislature for eight years and served as Senator for two years. Mr. Emerson was an active member of the Congregational Church. Mr. Emerson died on November 29, 1871." -- Text from calendar by Jayne M. D'Onofrio.
Wakefield (Mass.) -- History -- Pictorial works.
Emerson, Thomas, 1785-1871., "Thomas Emerson," in NOBLE Digital Heritage, Item #12271, http://heritage.noblenet.org/items/show/12271 (accessed June 19, 2013). | <urn:uuid:f0bcb4be-1f81-445f-a0f1-7a35401d08a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://heritage.noblenet.org/items/show/12271 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985502 | 482 | 2.484375 | 2 |
How Washington, D.C., got its name
The city was named by the three commissioners, charged with supervising the construction of the public buildings, at one of their then monthly meetings on September 8, 1791. These three men were recently appointed by President Washington. Secretary of State Jefferson came down from the capital in Philadelphia to present the agenda of what the President wanted the commissioners to decide. Selecting the name for the city was one item and Washington told Jefferson to assure the commissioners that they had complete freedom. Of course, everyone knew that the city would be named after Washington. One name bruited about Philadelphia before the meeting was "Washingtonople." Jefferson described the meeting in a letter to Washington: the commissioners were "peadmonished that it was your desire that they should decide freely on their own view of things." No matter: "they concurred unanimously in... every point with what had been thought best in Philadelphia." The commissioners named the city "Washington." They also had to name the ten mile square the city was in, mandated by the Constitution, in which in 1791 there were already two existing towns, Georgetown and Alexandria. They chose the name "Columbia."
As far as I can ascertain there was no debate about "Columbia" either. During the Revolution, Columbia became the goddess protecting America against Britannia. For example Phyllis Wheatley sent a poem to General Washington in 1775, and it was published in the Pennsylvania Magazine in 1776, which contained these passages:
"Celestial choir! enthron'd in realms of light,
Columbia's scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom's cause her anxious breast alarms,
She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms....
Fix'd are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes Columbia's arm prevails.
Anon Britannia droops the pensive head,
While round increase the rising hills of dead.
Ah! cruel blindness to Columbia's state!
Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.
Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev'ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading,Washington be thine."
In 1784 Washington wrote to Lafayette's wife: "When the weight of so powerful an advocate is on our side, will you My Dr. Marchioness deny us the pleasure of accompanying him to the shores of Columbia?"
During this period the many counties and cities named Columbia got their names. So if one were to create a district which would represent all of the United States of America, the name everyone seemed to agree on was "Columbia." In the competition for the capital, some Pennsylvanians planned a city on the Susquehanna to be named Columbia.
In letters, debates and official documents the ten mile square along the Potomac was called the "Federal District." However, officially the congress met in "The City of Washington in the Territory of Columbia." In the early debates in Congress about the city, both names were used. Take this example in 1803 the House turned to the affairs of the "District of Columbia" and began discussing a bill to return portions of the "Territory of Columbia" to Virginia. I suppose the "Territory of Columbia" was no longer used after the District lost what home rule it had in the second half of the 19th century.
Go to Introduction | <urn:uuid:ff447014-687a-4e5f-bc7a-4393b05b190e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bobarnebeck.com/name.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968351 | 720 | 3.375 | 3 |
Innovation leap from Henkel: First PU-adhesive to be certified by Germanischer Lloyd for bonding rotor blades
Rotor blades have to withstand extreme stressing. In wind turbines, the tips of the blades whip through the air at peak speeds of up to 300 km/h. Their quality depends not least on the reliability of their adhesive bonds. Germanischer Lloyd has now certified the first polyurethane adhesive for the wind power sector: Henkel’s Macroplast UK 8340. With this product, Henkel is consistently pursuing its strategy of developing sustainable adhesives solutions that offer genuine value added in terms of ecology, quality and economy.
Wind turbines must perform reliably for a specified service life of 20 years without major repairs. And the rotor blades of large turbines have to satisfy especially stringent standards regarding fatigue strength. Conventionally, they are bonded together e.g. by using epoxy adhesives certified for this application by Germanischer Lloyd (GL). With Macroplast UK 8340, Henkel is now the first company to develop a GL-certified polyurethane adhesive for rotor-blade production. The new technology offers multiple benefits to wind turbine manufacturers, allowing them to optimize processes, improve productivity and reduce costs. At the same time, this forward-looking product from Henkel has excellent sustainability credentials.
For applications in the wind power sector, Henkel already offers a broad range of products, including UV- and weather-resistant sealants for steel tower segments, anaerobic threadlocking systems, and various adhesives for component bonding as well as waterbased release agents for the demoulding of GRP. Macroplast UK 8340, the new two-component polyurethane adhesive, underscores Henkel’s technological leadership in adhesives and sealants. Compared to epoxy technology for instance, this innovative polyurethane adhesive for rotor blade bonding offers significantly greater freedom during the production process.
Macroplast UK 8340 impresses users with its rapid curing. Polyurethane-based adhesives react faster than the conventionally used epoxy resins and thus accelerate the process and significantly boost the productivity. “Thanks to the lower exothermal reaction during application, this two-component Henkel adhesive considerably reduces both the duration and the temperature of the tempering phase,” says Hartmut Pilz, Market Manager Wind. For rotor blade manufacturers, this means considerable energy-saving potential, which has a positive ecological impact on the overall assessment. At the same time, because it is applied at low temperatures, the adhesive reduces the likelihood of stress cracking.
Another positive feature of the new PU adhesive is its excellent wetting behavior, which considerably shortens time-consuming and costly preliminary work such as sanding and laminating. Compared to conventional adhesives technologies, Macroplast UK 8340 offers far greater scope for optimizing production processes and opens up a new dimension in rotor-blade construction. The innovative PU technology from Henkel improves the efficiency of the entire production process and sets new standards in sustainability. | <urn:uuid:eedcc733-1fd1-4162-bb05-6df38b1f1cfe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.henkel.com/henkel-headlines/2008-11860-wind-of-change-18391.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.90756 | 628 | 1.625 | 2 |
MRNY Wins Anti-Discrimination Agreement at American Eagle to Defend Transgender Rights. PLUS Bill O'Reilly's Bigoted Response
Make the Road New York Staff
/ Make the Road New York
Members of Globe, MRNY's LGBT justice project, announce the victory at American Eagle in Union Square, Manhattan.
Make the Road New York announced a major victory against American Eagle Outfitters, a national clothing retailer, for systematically discriminating against transgender people [NY Daily News].
Long at the forefront of efforts to protect the civil rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, MRNY began its groundbreaking investigation of job discrimination after two of MRNY's transgender members were turned down for jobs at local fast-food restaurants. After dispatching matched pairs of equally qualified undercover applicants (one transgender, one not) to a variety of NYC employers, MRNY discovered a widespread pattern of discrimination against transgender job applicants. (Download the report here.)
MRNY then filed a complaint with the New York State Attorney General, prompting a formal investigation that uncovered an array of discriminatory practices at American Eagle. These included a "Personal Appearance Standard" policy that required all employees to "wear gender appropriate clothing" because "it is inappropriate for men to wear women's products and for women to wear men's products."
As a result of our complaint, the Attorney General compelled American Eagle to revise its policies to ensure equal employment opportunities and respectful treatment of transgender employees. And while news of MRNY's victory has generally been celebrated in the media, Fox's Bill O'Reilly once again exhibited his intolerance, and disregard for employment law, by declaring his disgust with the victory.
MRNY's groundbreaking legal victory will impact more than 60 American Eagle stores and 2,100 employees throughout New York State!
We could not have won this victory without the generous supporters of friends like you, but we need your help to continue our work to combat job discrimination. Please donate today.
"Today, with 12,600 dues-paying members, MRNY is a unique amalgam of worker center, legal clinic, citizenship school, mutual aid society, policy shop, protest factory and church. Its four offices in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Long Island are an egalitarian oasis for members, who gather there for conversation and classes..." | <urn:uuid:474633f7-b81f-4212-8e5d-16d223b9db2c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.maketheroadny.org/article.php?ID=1289 | 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 | 0.940946 | 465 | 1.5 | 2 |
Marlene H. Dortch, Secretary
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, SW
Washington, DC 20554
ET Docket Nos. 04-186, 02-380
Dear Ms. Dortch:
The nonprofit Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN) in western North Carolina and the nonprofit Access Humboldt network in northern California are established community-based rural broadband providers. MAIN has provided Internet access services to the rural mountain region of North Carolina since 1996 and is one of the longest-surviving, community-based ISPs in the United States. Access Humboldt provides broadband media services for public safety, health, education and government in rural North Coast communities, including tribal lands.
Community-based ISPs provide service in the most sparsely populated rural areas and in some of the poorest urban areas. We can provide this service because unlicensed access requires no fees and uses equipment that, because of economies of scale, costs a fraction of what equipment for licensed spectrum costs.
We are joined by the undersigned rural development and advocacy organizations in voicing our strong opposition to a proposal by FiberTower Corporation (“FiberTower”), Sprint Nextel Corporation (“Sprint Nextel”), the Rural Telecommunications Group, Inc. (“RTG”), and the Wireless Communications Association International (“WCAI”) requesting that the Commission “take immediate action to authorize limited fixed licensed use of a limited portion of the vacant TV Bands White Spaces (“White Spaces”) channels in rural and tribal areas.”
While this proposal may be in the best interest of these companies and their respective trade organizations, it is unequivocally not in the best interest of rural and tribal communities. Indeed, this proposal to license portions of the vacant “white spaces” TV bands will do lasting harm to the vacant TV channels’ potential, as unlicensed spectrum, to boost local innovation, local network investment, local economic development and job-creation, and community self-help in rural and tribal communities.
As the Commission’s own engineering studies have documented, and a voluminous public-comment record has affirmed, cognitive radios now exist – and will continue to evolve – which can co-habit the White Spaces without interference, both for backhaul links and last-mile broadband services. This technology will allow non-profits and small companies to strengthen existing community networks and deploy new ones. But this will only happen if the Commission ensures enough spectrum for manufacturers to see a viable market in which to invest.
If the Commission were to accede to the Fiber Tower Coalition’s proposal, manufacturers’ incentives for further innovation and refinement of long-distance backhaul radios would be greatly eroded. The proposal would take more than the 6 channels requested, as it would destroy the usefulness of adjacent channels due to out-of-band emissions. It is our understanding that while TV white spaces devices would be required to protect the new licensed backhaul service, the TVWS devices would also be required to accept interference from the licensed service. It should be self-evident that such a major reduction in unlicensed spectrum would likewise result in a major reduction of investment and innovation.
In addition, the need to create new rules for this licensed backhaul service will create new uncertainty and delay. Although the FiberTower coalition claims that they can use “off the shelf” technology to deploy immediately, the Commission would still need to propose new rules to resolve complex questions such as appropriate power limits, what constitutes “rural,” and other matters on which the Commission has not previously sought public notice. The delays inherent in this proposal, therefore, are very likely to discourage manufacturers from moving forward with the kind of full-bore development of white spaces technologies which our rural and tribal areas so desperately need.
It is our understanding that the FCC has already opened two proceedings to help with the problem of licensed backhaul: the NOI on reforming Part 101 and the effort to make FSS/MSS spectrum available. Rather than jeopardize the advance of unlicensed wireless broadband by reducing its potential spectrum and by introducing further delays and uncertainties, the FCC should look to these new proceedings to provide more spectrum for licensed wireless backhaul.
We greatly appreciate the Commission moving to expedite the deployment of unlicensed white spaces technologies. After working so hard in 2008 to support the Commission’s unanimous vote on the white spaces, our constituents have become very discouraged by the delays of the last two years. We look forward to the September 23 meeting and vote.
Mountain Area Information Network
34 Wall Street, Suite 407
Asheville, N.C. 28801
1915 J Street
Eureka, CA 95502
|Center for Rural Strategies
Media Working Group Inc.
|Tribal Digital Village Network
Institute for Local Self-Reliance
Handmade in America | <urn:uuid:66d788e1-4415-4765-b371-49820231b150> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://main-fm.org/2010/09/17/2344/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932253 | 1,014 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Make a donation, make a difference.
Your donation will be gratefully received and will help us to continue our work improving children’s food. We believe that every child should have the healthy balanced diet, and food skills that they need to fulfil their potential as adults. With your help we will continue our work to:
- Help more children learn to cook healthy food, giving them the skills and confidence to make healthy food choices
- Work with schools to encourage more pupils to claim the free healthy school meal that they are entitled to – which for some may be their only good meal of the day
- Continue to improve food in schools, nurseries, pre-schools, children’s centres and other settings – so that when children eat better they do better!
- Expand our work to reach those children who really need our support – such as children in care, young carers, older people and their families and children with special educational needs
Click here to donate:
“One boy, who we sent to the Let’s Get Cooking club training day because he often has to look after himself as Mum is very ill and Dad is not around, went home and cooked for his Mum – he was so proud of himself and for that many thanks. Your session made him feel in control and positive and his life is not often like that!”
Jane Leo, Horton Primary in Bristol
“Teaching people to cook can change the way they eat, forever.”
Jonathan Bletcher, District Public Health Lead, South Staffordshire PCT
Thank you for your support
If you would like to set up a regular donation or if you work for a company who’d like to support us please contact us on 0114 299 6901 or email firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:63993d1a-1867-4377-ae50-a19eb3842938> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.childrensfoodtrust.org.uk/parents/donate | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979805 | 374 | 1.726563 | 2 |
With German Chancellor Angela Merkel setting conditions for the eurozone, France’s ambition to dominate European policy has been thwarted.
The failure of Doha will virtually halt multilateral trade liberalization for years to come.
China’s real core interests are not in territorial expansion and hegemony over its neighbors, but in upholding the human rights and improving the welfare of its own citizens, which is the world’s core interest in China.
Developing countries have learned over time that real income growth and employment expansion are driven by productivity gains, not exchange-rate movements.
With the US, and now Europe, facing long roads to recovery, Asia’s emerging economies can no longer afford to count on solid growth in external demand from the advanced countries to sustain economic development.
A commitment conditional on reform progress will not bring back private investors immediately. Only bold and largely unconditional commitments by both the European Union and Italy can break this dangerous impasse.
Academic studies suggest that the top tenth percentile of income distribution in the US, and elsewhere, is also moving farther away from the median earner.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the ECB’s monochromatic price-stability mission and utter disregard for financial stability is its radical departure from the central-banking tradition.
While the United States runs a large trade deficit with China, it also runs deficits with 87 other countries. A multilateral deficit cannot be fixed by putting pressure on one of its bilateral components.
In short, economies and policies adjusted in an unsustainable fashion, to some extent obscuring the need for a more sustainable pattern of adaptation.
The argument for a measured deficit-reduction program is to buy time for the structural shifts that will expand accessible external demand and fill in the gap in aggregate demand.
Government plays a central role in financing the services that people want, like education and health care.
Fixed investment in China is close to 50% of GDP – which must be a world record. Credit to state firms and to households continues to grow rapidly. Isn’t this a version of exactly what derailed Japanese growth?
Investment managers have a moral and professional responsibility to play their role in bringing some discipline into the banking system.
With retrenchment and balance-sheet repair only in its early stages, the zombie-like behavior of American consumers should persist.
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- 3Local Exaggeration Rampant in China
- 4China to Let Private Investors into Subway Construction This Year: Media
- 5Foreign Trade Inflated by at Least $75Bln in Jan-April Period: Paper
- 6Credit Suisse Fined HK$1.6m in Hong Kong for Regulatory Breaches
- 7China Mengniu Acquires Yashili in a HK$6 bln Deal
- 8China to Survey Soil Nationwide Following Cadmium-tainted Rice
- 9C&W Investments in Asia Pacific Soar, Investors Upbeat about China: Report
- 10Myanmar's Moment? | <urn:uuid:d5c4090c-cc41-445b-9dd5-16937f87c91c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://english.caijing.com.cn/economist/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.910333 | 653 | 1.78125 | 2 |
July 19: Butt out
The objection of some American Jews to conducting an analysis of the legal status of the West Bank is incomprehensible.
Sir, – The objection of some American Jews to conducting an analysis of the legal status of the West Bank is incomprehensible (“40 US Jewish leaders condemn Levy report on legalizing outposts,” July 17).
The report in question was a study conducted by a team of highly respected jurists headed by a retired Supreme Court justice.
Had the protest been based on the document’s veracity the dissent might be understandable.
However, of the seven Jewish leaders cited, none was recognized as an expert in international jurisprudence.
Their opposition seems to be based on their concern that the findings might influence the Israeli government to opt for positions contrary to their political outlook. One may expect that, similarly, they would object to archeological investigations that might confirm the ancient and continuing Jewish connection to the Holy Land.
The motto of these American Jewish spokesmen may be summarized as, “Don’t confuse us with the facts.”
Sir, – The news story that 40 prominent US Jews have condemned the Levy report should be taken with a grain of salt, given the differing interests of American Jews and Israelis.
The primary concern of Israel is physical survival. This has always been true, and especially so now that extremist groups in the region are ascendant. American Jews, on the other hand, while sincere in their empathy and concern for Israel’s security, are nonetheless far-removed from the consequences of territorial largesse. Consciously or not, they are also influenced by their social standing in the Diaspora – and the greater their social status, the more crucial the societal ramifications of Israel’s actions.
It is no accident that the signatories to the letter of complaint are prominent figures in society and that the letter emphasizes the repercussions of Israel’s actions on international opinion.
Even during the Holocaust many prominent American Jews were afraid to speak out for fear of ruffling feathers.
Sir, – I would suggest to those Jewish leaders that by adopting the Levy report Israel would at last be sending the correct message to the world that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people. This would do more for our prestige than all the interfering busybodies.
It is not they who are surrounded by enemies sworn to their destruction. It is not their families that have to scurry like moles back and forth into shelters when the enemy attacks with missiles and rockets. The Palestinians have never altered their charter calling for our destruction, and openly teach their children to become “martyrs” and kill Israelis.
To the 40 US Jewish leaders I say go pedal your wares elsewhere and leave us to run our own affairs.
Looks of a settler
Sir, – Yaakov Katz reported in “Shin Bet thwarts plot to kidnap soldier as bargaining chip” (July 17) that “cell members spotted a female settler near Ma’aleh Adumim and considered abducting her.”
To the best of my knowledge, my four daughters are living, breathing and innocent Jewish Israelis, not abstract aliens. The same goes for tens of thousands other young women living in Ma’aleh Adumim (and in other settlements).
Since there are no external features distinguishing a female settler, it is even possible that a female Jerusalemite could have been abducted by mistake.
Sad, ironic contrast
Sir, – The irony and very sad contrast could not be more blatant: Haredi Jewish leaders and laymen demonstrating against any kind of national service in the Zionist state (“Eda Haredit protest against IDF draft draws thousands,” July 17) versus an Arab-Muslim citizen calling on her own community to do national service as an obligation of all citizens of Israel (“Time for the Arab community to do national service,” Comment & features, July 17).
Even more unfortunate is how both haredi leaders and Arab MKs, the ostensible political leaders of their constituencies, spare no words in denigrating the idea of being obligated to do any kind of national service, even for the benefit of their own communities.
One can only hope that a different parallel will win out in the end: that ordinary haredi citizens ignore their rabbis’ dramatic prohibitions against national service, and many Arab citizens actively seek national and even military service despite their leaders’ condemnations and protests.
Sir, – I was impressed by and gratified to read Anet Haskia’s “Time for the Arab community to do national service.”
Many of us, including me, were not aware that there are Arab women who think this way. This is an encouraging attitude and I commend her for her bravery in expressing herself.
I hope her words make a favorable impression on our Arab citizens; they are so logical and a step in the right direction.
We can be comrades in arms and we can be good neighbors.
It’s so unfair
Sir, – In “Emulating immolation” (Editorial, July 16) you rightly contrast the system of social justice in Israel with the situation in Tunisia. Before we become too self-righteous, however, allow me to point out a couple of draconian measures I have observed over the course of several years operating a modest pro bono legal clinic at Rehovot’s public library.
The first is the idea of a tsav ma’asar, which to my mind is a form of debtor’s prison. The notion that a debtor can be taken off the street and incarcerated for failure to pay a debt is an antiquated, socially destructive measure that has been removed from systems of debt enforcement in enlightened countries the world over.
Why does this sword continue to hang over the heads of debtors in the modern State of Israel? To be sure, creditors need to be protected, but not at the expense of a law-abiding individual’s right to remain free.
The second is the notion of holding parents responsible and slapping liens on parental bank accounts if an adult son fails to pay alimony. Again, my heart goes out to divorced mothers who are denied the dignity of spousal support, but the arm of the law is simply too long if parents are targeted for their divorced son’s failures.
These are just two examples of a society and culture that does not tolerate failure and allows creditors and the state to run rampant in pursuit of their “pound of flesh.” If we are to alleviate the despair of those who feel “hunted” by the system, we need to figure out ways to encourage and re-build – even if we err on the side of being overtolerant – rather than isolate and liquidate lives.
The writer is a lawyer
Sir, – My family and I were recently privileged to spend a sabbatical in Israel. While money was no problem during our year’s stay, I was exposed firsthand to the country’s rapacious nature of pricing and the virtual absence of consumer protection.
The question begs: How long will the 15 or so tycoons who own and control so much of the Israeli economy continue to strangle the middle class? Would it be so bad if they earned a few billion dollars less so that the average Joe or Jane could earn a bit more and experience human dignity? Social justice was the key message for Jeremiah and Isaiah.
How many more Moshe Silmans does Israel require before change occurs?
DAVID C. SAIDOFF
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