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From Portland Afoot
Portland's Transit Mall is a couplet of streets including exclusive bus and light rail lanes running along 5th Avenue (southbound) and 6th Avenue (northbound) between Southwest Jackson Street and Northwest Irving Street in downtown Portland.
What it looks like
Unusual traffic rules
Numerous bus routes and MAX's Yellow Line and Green Line run along the mall, thanks to a rail realignment completed in 2009. The buses and trains weave back and forth across the right two lanes on the mall.
A single lane of auto and bike traffic also runs to the left of the two dedicated transit lanes. Right turns by cars are prohibited.
Safety concerns
In October 2010, a TriMet Safety and Service Excellence Task Force found that, "based on employee comments," the mall "is a 'hot spot' in need of review."
Bicycle parking
The rebuilt Transit Mall removed bike parking in the form of several dozen blue bike staples, which some felt were unsightly and didn't match the mall's color scheme. In their place, TriMet installed several chrome-colored bike racks.
TriMet-riding blogger AdriC criticized the new racks in 2011, saying that "the rough edges scratch the bikes" and suggesting that TriMet's "leaning rails," which are labeled with stickers saying "NO BIKES PLEASE," should be allowable parking spots.
"TriMet," AdriC wrote, "if your furniture needs instructions, you need new furniture."
The Transit Mall's exclusive lanes were established in 1978, and expanded northward to Irving Street in 1995. It was among the first transit malls in North America, with predecessors in Minneapolis's Nicollet Mall and Vancouver BC's Granville Mall.
One of the mall's original goals was to reduce downtown auto congestion and improve air quality.
"A Tri-Met document says downtown air in 1972 was so dirty it violated federal health standards one day out of every three," The Oregonian reported in 2002.
Did you find this page useful? Could it get better? You're meeting Portland Afoot in its toddlerhood! You can help build this free online guide to low-car life in PDX by clicking "edit" in the right sidebar and adding what you know. Or just leave your questions or ideas below. Thanks for visiting! | <urn:uuid:ec349a60-0d56-44d5-9ca4-700aa4e90358> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://portlandafoot.org/w/Transit_Mall | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963131 | 474 | 1.507813 | 2 |
The Keller Center is pleased to welcome Paul Polak, social entrepreneur, author, inventor, and founder of International Design Enterprises, to Princeton University on Friday, November 12, 2010. Polak, author of Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, will share experiences working in developing countries with his non-profit organization and will discuss his design approach to solving the world's greatest problem: poverty.
The event is sponsored by the Keller Center and made possible by generous support from the William Pierson Field lectureship. A reception will follow.
For the past 25 years, Paul has worked with thousands of farmers in countries around the world--including Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Nepal, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe-to help design and produce low-cost, income-generating products that have already moved 17 million people out of poverty.
Before establishing IDE, Paul practiced psychiatry for 23 years in Colorado. To better understand the environments influencing his patients, Paul would visit their homes and workplaces. After a trip he made to Bangladesh, he was inspired to use the skills he had honed while working with homeless veterans and mentally ill patients in Denver to serve the 800 million people living on a dollar a day around the world. Employing the same tactics he pioneered as a psychiatrist, Paul spent time "walking with farmers through their one-acre farms and enjoying a cup of tea with their families, sitting on a stool in front of their thatched-roof mud-and-wattle homes."
Paul's ability to respond with innovative solutions-such as the $25 treadle pump and small farm drip-irrigation systems starting at $3--helped IDE increase poor farmers' net income by $288 million annually.
IDE received a $14 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation in 2006. In 2004, Paul received Ernst & Young's "Entrepreneur of the Year" award in the social responsibility category. And Paul was named one of the Scientific American "top 50" for his leadership in agriculture policy in 2003. | <urn:uuid:05cd717c-1c96-43cd-8f17-580e6ae2f655> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://commons.princeton.edu/kellercenter/2010/11/leadership-dialogue-with-paul-polak.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960908 | 420 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Dave Apling and family and friend have torn a page out of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a summer waterway adventure as long as the storied Mississippi River.
Only Apling's craft is hardly a raft, and the 2,400-mile route - Mackinac Island, Mich., to Marco Island, Fla. - is hardly the muddy Mississippi, though just as long.
“I'm 60 years old. I still work a little bit,” says Apling, whose family owns Devil's Lake Water Sports at Manitou Beach, Mich. “But I'm trying to do things to keep it interesting.”
Having sold pontoon boats - highly popular in southeast Michigan's Irish Hills lakes - for 20 years, Apling was intrigued by trying long-distance cruising in such a craft. He noted that the Great Lakes-Erie Canal-Atlantic Coast water route is well-traveled, but to his knowledge no one has done it by pontoon.
“After making the trip to Florida in a motor yacht (a 40-foot Hatteras), I started thinking that the same trip could be done in a pontoon - equipped with the right space, layout and engine.” He approached Maurell Products, of Owosso, Mich., makers of Crest pontoon boats, with his idea and specifications.
The result is a three-pontoon, 30-foot boat with an 8-foot, 6-inch beam, the latter being the legal limit for highway towing without a special permit. The boat length was sized to accommodate the long-range fuel tanks and a big payload, up to 3,900 pounds.
“They recommended putting a triple tube on it,” Apling said, noting that each pontoon is 25 inches in diameter. He adds: “You could carry the entire Detroit Lions football team on here.
“They went with a 30-foot length to be able to carry that kind of fuel weight up there,” he said, referring to tandem, 62-gallon tanks hidden under lounging berths just ahead of the center console. Two other berths are built in behind the console, and a portable toilet with raise-up curtains is installed just ahead of the transom. Fully equipped, Apling estimates the craft would cost about $36,000.
It is equipped with a 225-horsepower, state-of-the-art outboard engine built for saltwater use. The powerplant can push the boat to 36 mph and can cruise at 26 mph. It can easily cruise up to 10 hours at a stretch, although Apling notes, “after eight or nine hours the fun starts to go out of it. But it depends on where you're at and where you want to be.”
Too, he advises, “It's a cruise and adventure, not a race.”
He is certain, for instance, that the fisherman in the crew, his long-time friend Clark McKelvey, will want to wet a line along the way. “Clark will fish. I know he will.”
The rest of the crew comprises sons Patrick, 34, and Michael, 36, and grandson Andrew, 16.
The first leg of the adventure began last Monday at Mackinac Island, and Apling covered 239 miles to Port Sanilac, in Michigan's Thumb, in just nine hours. Tuesday was an easy six-hour run down to Toledo Beach Marina south of Monroe to complete the first 349-mile leg. At Toledo Beach the crew gathered up for the expected 18-day run to southern Florida's Gulf of Mexico coast.
“We haven't had a hitch with the boat so far,” the skipper said.
The rest of the run will be divided into three six-day segments. He, Patrick and Andrew left Thursday to cross Lake Erie and enter the Erie Canal at Buffalo. The canal will take them to the Hudson River at Troy; they then head downstream to New York City.
“We plan to stay in hotels and motels,” said Apling. “At the end of the day I really enjoy a nice dinner, relaxing and reflecting. Camping is not in my blood.” He added that he wants to show his grandson some of the sights in New York, where there will be a crew change.
Son Mike will join Apling for the next leg of the adventure, probably stopping at Atlantic City, N.J., then Norfolk, Va., before entering the Intercoastal Waterway, a series of shoreline channels protected by islands and barrier reefs.
Even though the New York-Norfolk leg will include open-ocean motoring, Apling plans to stay within a half-mile of shore. “The closer you are, the more you can see. Looking at open water is just looking at the same thing.”
McKelvey will accompany him on the final leg. Exact ports of call and refueling stops may change depending on weather, fuel needs and mood. “A lot will depend on conditions. We won't be racing. It's not a speed thing.”
Hilton Head, S.C., Savannah, Ga., and Jacksonville are among the bigger targets.
“If worse comes to worst, 90 per cent of the places you go by you could just beach this boat,” Apling noted. Fully trimmed, it draws just two-and-a-half feet of water. “But you really need three feet of water under the pontoons.”
Once he and McKelvey reach Stuart, Fla., on the Atlantic coast, they will turn inland via the Okeechobee Waterway, which transits the famed Lake Okeechobee, which feeds fresh water toward South Florida.
“We'll dump out (of the inland passage) at Fort Myers. Then it's just three-four hours to Marco Island.” Apling owns a condominium there.
At trip's end, the skipper said, “We may keep it a while in Florida. It would be good in the Gulf.”
Otherwise the plan is to truck the rig back to Michigan. Pontoons, however, have become very popular with Florida boaters, especially on intercoastal waterways and the Gulf, Apling said.
So he and his crew are off on a summer odyssey that the fabled Huck Finn might have drooled over. Or at least understood.
Speaking of crew, Apling never had a doubt about finding enough hands. “We've had a lot of volunteers.” | <urn:uuid:bce3f0bc-13f1-4886-a3b6-76151bb57907> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.toledoblade.com/Amateur/2001/07/15/Trip-of-a-lifetime.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95501 | 1,394 | 1.609375 | 2 |
With the arrival of the “first commercially available quantum computer,” the D-Wave One, we look at what it is and what open source can contribute.
In the observable world that we inhabit on a daily basis, any given object typically has separate, well-defined sets of states: it either is or it isn’t. Everything else is merely variations on that theme.
In the domain of quantum mechanics, where effect can sometimes precede cause and other such wacky constructs, states can actually be something quite a bit less defined: something in between. Instead of a ball being red or blue, for instance, it can be purple. But not just any one shade of purple: It can be more reddish, more blueish, or anything in between – at the same time.
Mind blown yet? Just you wait, because what’s coming down the road soon will be a type of computing that will use such quantum states to compute solutions to problems at unimaginable speeds.
Molest Me Not With This Pocket Calculator Stuff
Linux and open source technology have long dominated the supercomputer sector. The latest report reveals that 462 of the Top 500 Supercomputers use the Linux operating system. Windows? Two supercomputers. Our open source cousin BSD? One.
It’s easy to gloat about the dominance of Linux in this sector (I just did), but while Tux is rocking the world of mega-computers, these systems pale in comparison to the potential of quantum computing. The Canadian vendor D-Wave Systems makes the world’s first commercial quantum computer, the D-Wave One, a system that they claim has managed to use quantum computing to find the best way to fold a protein.
Proteins can be folded in many ways because they’re composed of many chains of amino acids. For a computer, protein folding is a massively complex physical and mathematical puzzle that can take huge resources on even supercomputers. It’s the kind of problem that requires a scientist to outsource computations to helpful volunteers’ systems with distributed computing [http://folding.stanford.edu/English/HomePage], but it’s a problem that needs solving because when proteins don’t fold themselves correctly, the results can be diseases like Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s.
Scientists think that proteins fold themselves correctly because the correct configuration is also the state of lowest energy, the state at which the protein becomes stable. These lowest energy states were what the D-Wave One was set to find, and it seems to have accomplished it – a big step in demonstrating that it is truly a quantum machine (although the jury is still out on that question in some camps).
So how did the D-Wave One perform this Herculean task? For that answer, I’ll introduce a very famous feline.
Really, I Feel Fine
The most classical way of visualizing quantum mechanics is using the example of poor Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment to visualize the nature of simultaneous quantum states.
Take a cat, stick it in a box. Attached to the sealed container is a mechanism that contains a radioactive substance that may or may not decay while the cat is in the box. If the decay does happen, it triggers the release of a poison gas within the box and the cat dies. If it doesn’t decay, the cat lives to mouse another day.
Besides hating cats, this Schrödinger guy was onto something: Using this thought experiment you can imagine what having more than one state at the same time would be. Until you open the box later and actually observe whether the cat is dead or alive, you don’t know. The life of the cat depends on the quantum effect of the radioactive decay. While the box is closed, the cat exists in both states: a probability wave that keeps going until someone comes along to find out what happened to the cat.
It gets better: The many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics suggests that once the box is opened, an observer in one universe will find a finished feline and an observer in another universe will find a frisky feline. The simultaneous, coherent, dead–not-dead state of the cat undergoes decoherence when observed. The wave collapses and we are left with one state.
Of course, in the many-world theory, where all states are theoretically possible, in one universe that cat could have jumped out, killed the physicist in revenge, and gone off to invent cat litter and die of a catnip overdose years later. This is a very unlikely outcome statistically, and that’s important to understand. Yes, all states are possible within a coherent probability wave, but only those with the highest probability have a chance of being observed when the wave collapses.
Bit By Qubit
The idea of applying this kind of indeterminant-state phenomenon to a machine for computational purposes has been around for a while, but really started moving from the theoretical to the physical around the turn of the 21st Century, when innovation in quantum computers really revved up.
At the heart of a quantum computer lies the qubit, a piece of information that is analogous to a classical bit in a binary processor. A bit can be in one or two states: on or off. This binary form of switch forms the basis for every computer processor (and transistor).
But qubits can exist in the state of coherent superposition described above, meaning they can be in many states at the same time. This means that for all intents and purposes, you can work on many computational algorithms at the same time. How many? It depends on the number of qubits you have in a quantum computer: it’s 2^x, where x is the number of qubits. A single qubit can work on two calculations at once. A two-qubit system can work on four simultaneous computations. A 128-qubit system – like the D-Wave One – is reported to be? 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 calculations. At the same time. If a petaFLOPS is a quadrillion calculations per second, and a brontoFLOPS is a quadrillion teraFLOPS, then a 128-qubit machine can churn out the equivalent of 340,282,366,921 brontoFLOPS.
Currently, the world’s fastest supercomputer is Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which gets up 16.32 petaFLOPS. Sequoia would not only eat D-Wave One’s dust, it would eat nearly every dust molecule in the universe.
A few limitations keep D-Wave One from outthinking every computer ever. The first is actually determining results. Like the infamous cat, if you were to try to observe the state of the qubits to get a particular solution to a problem, the act of observing the qubits would instantly collapse each qubit down to one state. So quantum physicists use a trick known as entanglement that lets the states within the qubit be indirectly observed at a distance.
Another limitation is, frankly, very few people on the planet actually understand this stuff and can develop the best algorithms for these systems to use. There are no programming languages for building quantum applications – yet.
However, this is a problem open source might once more step in and solve.
Although the D-Wave One does not yet have a distribution of Linux, developers interested in working with and visualizing quantum computing can use open source tools to help get started.
- jQuantum. jQuantum is a program that simulates a quantum computer. Users can design quantum circuits with jQuantum and let them run. The current state of the quantum register can be visualized. GPL.
- Squankum. Squankum is a quantum computer simulator that enables the visualization of a single qubit. You can also observe the representation on a Bloch sphere [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_Sphere], a useful tool for understanding many-state situations. GPL.
- Q++. Q++ is a cross-platform C++ template library used for simulating quantum computation. Q++ enables testing of quantum algorithms by providing a quicker way to create programs compiled for speed. LGPL.
- Quantum Toolkit. A quantum mechanical toolkit and 3D viewer for C++, this app enables visualization via images, surfaces, and volume plots using OpenGL. GPL.
Many more quantum computing simulators are out there – not all of them open source. A great resource can be found on the Quantiki wiki site.
High-performance computing represents the cutting edge of where Linux is now. Thanks to accessible open source tools, quantum computing could soon be within our grasp as well.
Vendor D-Wave scores big with a sale to NASA's Quantum Intelligence Lab.
Many package updates and Steam integration highlight the latest from the Mandriva-based community Linux.
Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013.
ack is a grep-like, command-line tool that has been optimized for programmers to search large trees of source code.
New features in SUSE Studio 1.3 include enhanced cloud integration, VM platform support, and lifecycle management.
The Linux Foundation recently announced that the Xen Project is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
Open source version of LiveCode is now available for developing apps, games, and utilities for all major platforms.
OpenDaylight is an open source software-defined networking project committed to furthering adoption of SDN and accelerating innovation in a vendor-neutral and open environment. | <urn:uuid:7f321a32-5f21-404d-bb91-4ec89ecd1f5b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/Features/Quantum-Computing | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912995 | 2,102 | 3.203125 | 3 |
The average charter school doesn’t do any better educating kids than the typical traditional public school, according to a new study released Wednesday. In some cases, charter schools do worse.
The report from the Center of Research on Education Outcomes compared the reading and math test scores of charters and traditional public schools that shared traits.
The study concluded that 37 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were significantly below what students would have earned at local traditional public schools.
The report wasn’t all negative. Researchers found charter school students do better the longer they’re in charter schools. While students’ learning declines the first year, they post huge gains during their second and third years.
What makes this study so important is that the group reviewed about 70 percent of the nation’s charter schools.
Expect advocates on both sides of the charter debate to cite this study as leaders debate new rules over charters | <urn:uuid:ffbb5261-fa23-4691-ad48-737ab45c374c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2009/06/page/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974642 | 190 | 3.078125 | 3 |
Arthur Spindler's autobiography is an extraordinary story of courage during the second world war when Poland was occupied by the Nazis. By a mixture of good fortune, clever deceptions of both the Germans and the Poles, Arthur and his wife managed to survive. Passing themselves off as non-Jews, both Spindlers worked for the Germans while Arthur was secretly active in the Polish Resistance.
Arthur survived the Germans only to fall victim to the occupying Russians, and was jailed by Stalin's regime in the USSR. As the Holocaust survivors age, there is an increasing urgency for them to record their stories, each adding another dimension to this most terrible chapter of modern history. Arthur Spindler was 22 years old when the Nazis invaded, and observed events with a mature, unclouded outlook, all the while sustained by his own natural ebullience and cheerfulness. His retelling of those years retains that sense of immediacy, so reading his words or hearing his stories is akin to hearing tell of something that only happened yesterday The many black and white photographs, many of family members, add to this impression. | <urn:uuid:4e7596d3-fc08-41c0-84dd-6b3f2c0043de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://books.google.de/books?id=luC7AAAAIAAJ&dq=related:ISBN1560622415&lr=&hl=de | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974241 | 222 | 2.703125 | 3 |
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Perhaps it was the afternoon sun casting purple, blue and yellow hues through stained glass
Maybe it was the upbeat tunes from Rabbi Cary Kozberg’s guitar.
Whatever the inspiration, spirits were among worshippers at the Kabbalat Shabbat service tailored to residents with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia at the Wexner Heritage House long-term care center.
A man raised a hand and rocked to and fro in his wheelchair. One woman, her legs covered by a blue-and-white Star of David blanket, smiled as she sang along. Another tasted the challah and grape juice and joked, “I drink a little wine and I’m drunk!”
“Today was a good day,” Kozberg said after the service as he moved through the room addressing each worshipper by name, grabbing hands and patting shoulders.
Although some might argue that spiritual care is lost on people with dementia, Kozberg says just the opposite is true. After more than two decades working in the field, he insists: “People with dementia do not lose their spirituality. They do not lose it.”
In fact, he said, “a lot of times dementia takes the intellectual filter, and when it’s compromised, the spirit really comes out and people will become so much more human and alive.”
The rabbi directs spiritual-care efforts at the Wexner Heritage Village campus, which includes Heritage House. He began what he thought would be a one-year stint in 1989 and has since found that the position has given him a chance to be the kind of rabbi he wants to be – one who works with people who are disenfranchised. He has likened dementia patients to the tablets shattered by Moses – broken but still sacred.
“Even with the loss of memory and executive functioning and reasoning ability, people can still experience joy, they can still experience love, they can still experience respect, they can still relate to people,” he said.
A 2012 report by the Alzheimer’s Association estimated that 230,000 Ohioans age 65 or older had Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, in 2010 and that 250,000 will have the disease in 2025. Of the state’s roughly 191,000 nursing-home residents in 2009, 27 percent had very mild or mild cognitive impairment and 42 percent had moderate or severe impairment, the report says.
Kozberg’s work helps patients strengthen the ties they have to their former religious lives, said Nancy Pawliger, whose 104-year-old “vibrant, feisty” mother is a Heritage House resident. While her mother has not been diagnosed with dementia – she has “areas of confusion” – Pawlinger sees how the weekly songs and prayers take residents back to reassuring times from their lives.
She recalls Kozberg taking a Torah scroll to a seemingly unresponsive man on a stretcher and seeing the man light up “because someone accepted him as a person who was still alive.”
Heritage House is among a number of faith-based long-term care centers in central Ohio that address the spiritual needs of patients with dementia. Most use traditional music and Scripture to tap into residents’ long-term memories.
For example, at Westminster-Thurber Community, a Presbyterian center, chaplain Mark Arni uses colorful felt characters for Bible study and plays common hymns, such as “Amazing Grace” and “How Great Thou Art,” on the piano.
And at Mother Angeline McCrory Manor, a Catholic community, Sister Eileen Rosinski said Catholic residents often respond instinctively to hymns, recitation of the rosary or receiving the Eucharist – as well as nuns in traditional habits.
Outside such places, congregations are often more-focused on the needs of young families than on ministering to the elderly, Kozberg said. It’s important to “embrace our helplessness” and admit that we don’t yet have a solution for dementia, he said.
“Even though we can’t cure it, we can’t fix it, it doesn’t mean we can’t do anything. They have needs that all of us have, and they can be responded to.” | <urn:uuid:494a452a-860c-438b-8c57-616fd4100978> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://journalgazette.net/article/20130303/NEWS11/130309887/1006/news | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967279 | 917 | 1.882813 | 2 |
GETTING CONNECTED — Pictured, from left: Sharon Russell, Nils Wikman, SCENe Coordinator Virginia Krebs and National Honor Society President Abby Fornes. Photo by Dave DeLuca.
SPRINGVILLE — Springville Concord Elder Network Coordinator Virginia Krebs said that, with the modern technology wave taking the world by storm, a need has arisen for assistance to those who need help maneuvering the present day advancements.
When this dilemma caught Krebs’ attention, she thought about how the SCENe organization could help. SCENe is a community-based entity made up of volunteers who dedicates themselves to “promoting the empowerment of older people to age well, within our area,” according to Krebs.
The program’s mission statement said that SCENe “helps people age successfully, by coordinating services, identifying resources, offering educational and wellness programs, volunteer opportunities and advocating for aging in place options, in our community.”
The program targets senior citizens aged 50 and older and “helps them remain active, respected and vital members of the community.
SCENe is a non-profit, public organization that uses partnerships with others, to assist local senior citizens. This entity is supported by Healthy Community Alliance Inc., a non-profit rural health network; the Health Foundation of Western and Central New York and the town of Concord. It has also joined hands with local individuals and civic, business, community and faith-based institutions.
Krebs worked with SCENe volunteer Sharon Russell, who facilitates the organization’s Caregiver Support Group, to bring SCENe’s mission into the Springville-Griffith High School.
Krebs and Russell designed a course that matched area seniors with 17- and 18-year-old high seniors at Springville-GI. S-GI seniors who belong to the National Honor Society would teach those who were 50 and older how to use computer technology.
“SCENe has had many conversations with older adults, who recognize the importance of computer literacy, but feel technology has gotten too complex for them to catch up now,” Krebs said.
She said that computers have gotten easier to use and that social media, email and Skype® can connect area seniors to friends, children and grandchildren, when distance or busy schedules keep them apart. “For people who have mobility issues or no longer drive, secure Internet banking and shopping can help them remain independent,” she said. “Students have grown up with this technology. Students and older folks have a natural affinity for each other. This really is a perfect match.”
The classes will be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 3 – 4 p.m., beginning Feb. 28.
S-GI business teacher Nils Wikman will administrate the classes, with the students’ doing much of the hands-on instruction. Classes will take place at the high school, in room 100.
A recent survey done by Generations on Line showed that 65 percent of senior citizens, 75 and older, do not own a computer. Krebs and Russell said that they believe that the Senior to Senior Program will give participants more confidence, when using technology.
“The immediate goal for many will be a comfort level with a computer,” Russell said. “From there, according to each individual’s goals, learning to use the computer for research, shopping and communicating with friends and family from the comfort of their own home [will be next on the agenda]. GI senior students’ teaching student area seniors is about more than computers. In a society where families are often distanced from each other, we can bring generations together relationally, to glean from and influence each other. The time structure is a good alternative, for those who rely on the van service and don’t want to go out at night.”
“SCENe is grateful for the support of Nils Wikman and Vince Vanderlip, our high school principal, who is innovative and open to new ideas,” Russell added. She is a class monitor, at the high school.
The first Senior to Senior class will be held on Feb. 28. To register, contact SCENe at 592-7599. For more information, call Krebs at 592-9885.
There is a class size limit of 22 people, so Krebs recommended acting soon, to register and ensure a spot.
“We hope that this student to senior activity is the just the beginning of a mutually beneficial relationship between the Springville Griffith School community and SCENe volunteers,” Krebs added. | <urn:uuid:aef5ac95-b039-4115-8f6a-5dc5e158c8b2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.springvillejournal.com/news/906-Senior_to_Senior_computer_assistance_program_takes_off.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943166 | 968 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Unintentional Eye Movement in Dogs
Nystagmus in Dogs
Nystagmus is a condition defined by the involuntary and rhythmic oscillation of the eyeballs; that is, the eyes unintentionally move or swing back and forth. Nystagmus can occur in both dogs and cats and is a characteristic sign of a problem in the animal's nervous system.
Symptoms and Types
There are two types of nystagmus: jerk nystagmus and pendular nystagmus. Jerk nystagmus is characterized by slow eye movements in one direction with a rapid correction phase in the opposite direction, while pendular nystagmus is characterized by small oscillations of the eyes with no movement being distinctively slower or faster than the other. Of these two types, jerk nystagmus is more commonly seen in dogs. Other common signs associated with nystagmus include head tilting and circling.
There are a variety of causes that may lead to nystagmus, many of which stem either from a peripheral vestibular or central vestibular disease. Sometimes called the “balance system,” the vestibular system is the sensory system responsible for maintaining proper balance of the head and body.
Peripheral vestibular diseases that may lead to nystagmus include hypothyroidism, traumatic injuries (such as those acquired in a car accident), and neoplastic tumors. Nystagmus-causing central vestibular disorders include tumors, thiamine deficiency, viral infections (such as canine distemper), and consequent inflammation, heart attacks, hemorrhages in the heart, and exposure to toxins (such as lead).
Nystagmus is often diagnosed via an analysis of cerebrospinal fluid, which can also reveal inflammation associated with the disorder. Brain imaging (e.g., CT scan) is another diagnostic procedure used to identify brain abnormalities. Otherwise, your veterinarian may conduct analysis on the urine and bacterial cultures and serologic testing to check for infectious agents in the body.
Treatment and care varies and is entirely dependent upon the underlying cause of the disorder and the severity of symptoms. In general, if a central vestibular disease (rather than a peripheral vestibular disease) is diagnosed, more intensive care will be required.
For dogs experiencing anorexia and vomiting, fluid therapy (including the administration of fluids through IV) may be necessary to prevent dehydration. Your veterinarian may also prescribe certain types of medication depending on the diagnosis.
Living and Management
Post-treatment care is dependent on the cause diagnosed as well. However, most veterinarians recommend a neurologic exam approximately two weeks after initial treatment to monitor for improvement or progression of the disease. Secondary symptoms, such as dehydration due to excessive vomiting, should also be monitored and addressed.
Prognosis varies, but dogs with a peripheral vestibular disease rather than a central disease tend to have a better prognosis with improved chance of recovery.
Because there is such a wide variety of causes that may lead to nystagmus, there is no distinct method of prevention. However, keeping your dog safe indoors without access to lead and other toxic materials, is recommended.
Any disorder of the neurons that may be characterized by rolling, circling, falling, etc.
The prediction of a disease’s outcome in advance
The involuntary rhythm of the eye at night
A medical condition in which the body has lost fluid or water in excessive amounts
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Anyone who has ever had a dog or cat wishes just one thing — that he or she has a... | <urn:uuid:71f0eab1-a3e9-40ea-b3e9-79bde3213c5e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.petmd.com/dog/conditions/neurological/c_dg_nystagmus?page=show | 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 | 0.924263 | 849 | 3.328125 | 3 |
It looks like Kate has found a way to ease the discomfort of morning sickness with the help of hypnotherapy. Read on for all the details and to see what our expert has to say!
Kate Middleton Still Suffering From Morning Sickness
Jessica Kay, who says she’s friends with Kate, tells Australia’s New Idea Magazine, “Kate still looks at food and feels nauseous. She’s been plagued with that feeling you have when you’ve had food poisoning and your stomach’s shrunk. She finds it very hard to eat a full meal and gets full very quickly.”
“The hypnotherapy is taking away any negative thoughts connected with food from the morning sickness, and replacing them with cravings for healthy, nutritious food,” explains Jessica.
According to her pal, Kate’s snacks include avocados, berries, oatmeal and broccoli.
As HollyBaby.com previously reported, Kate was diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum (acute morning sickness), back in December when she was taken to King Edward VII Hospital in London. The Duchess was treated with intravenous fluids to increase her electrolytes and to get hydrated.
The Benefits Of Hypnotherapy
Hypotherapist Charles Whobrey, who runs My Sunny Mind in Los Angeles, tells HollyBaby.com EXCLUSIVELY, “More and more women are seeking hypnotherapy during their pregnancy to help with a wide range of health concerns, including morning sickness which can be quite debilitating. After weight loss and smoking cessation, the use of hypnotherapy for pregnant women has drastically increased over the past couple of years.”
“We have seen so many benefits for pregnant women such as lower levels of stress and anxiety, easier deliveries, faster recovery rates, and just an overall happier pregnancy,” says Charles. “Even stressed out, first-time dads can benefit from hypnotherapy!”
When asked if Kate should continue with hypnotherapy after her morning sickness subsides, Charles tells HollyBaby.com, “Yes, I would highly recommend that Kate continue with hypnotherapy. Kate is in the public eye, so she probably experiences higher levels of anxiety in the first place. Everyone can benefit from positive visualizations of health and wellness, and re-creating beliefs that no longer serve you.
Should The Duchess Have A Water Birth?
Now that Kate is undergoing hypnotherapy, maybe she will decided to have a water birth. We are happy to see that Kate is getting the help she needs, and we can’t wait to meet the royal baby. HollyMoms, are YOU excited to meet the royal baby?
–Reporting by Sandra Clark
More Kate Middleton’s Pregnancy News:
- Kate Middleton: New Fears For Her Pregnancy — Details
- Prince William Visits Pregnant Kate Middleton In Hospital
- Kate Middleton Leaves Hospital After Acute Morning Sickness Treatment | <urn:uuid:7739d5fd-326f-4b07-a302-2a85d7407940> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hollywoodlife.com/2013/01/24/kate-middleton-hypnotherapy-morning-sickness-treatment-pregnancy-hyperemesis-gravidarum/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954317 | 621 | 1.546875 | 2 |
The PATLIB Network supported by the European Patent Office
The European Patent Organisation (EPO) is an intergovernmental organisation currently having 27 member states (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Portugal, Rumania, Sweden, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey and United Kingdom). In a near future three further countries will become members of the European Patent Convention (Lithuania, Latvia and Poland). The executive body of the European Patent Organisation - the European Patent Office - has its seat in Munich, a branch in The Hague and sub-offices in Berlin and Vienna.
In cooperation with the national patent offices of the member states the EPO supports a Network of patent information centres ("PATLIB Centres") throughout Europe having evolved from a grouping of national PATent LIBraries widely distributed in the member states. A numbers of PATLIB Centres are located in national patent offices and universities. The main aim of the PATLIB Network is for the patent information centres to be able to communicate and to work with each other in a feasible and convenient way.
The PATLIB Centres provide patent information by searching available national and international patent databases. Depending on the national system for intellectual property rights, many Centres additionally provide information on other intellectual property rights like trademarks, design and models. The PATLIB staff performs searches for their clients or provides advice in searching or using patent information made available in the Centre's public library. A number of Centres have developed patent awareness modules, workshops or training programmes for their users. Some Centres cooperate with patent attorneys or business advisers who regularly visit the Centre to provide clients with advice in the area of intellectual property rights. A number of Centres have acquired their own specific profile by providing special services and products. Examples of specialities are pro-actively contacting potential clients such as small and medium size enterprises ("SMEs") who are generally nor able to afford an in-house information bureau and offering assistance, organising so called "patent clinics" where clients can make appointments to obtain basic advice from patent attorneys or business advisors free of charge and providing interactive training packages.
PATLIB users may be students, inventors, researchers, small and medium sized enterprises ("SMEs"), patent agents or members of the general public.
The PATLIB system is beneficial for users for several reasons. The PATLIB Centres form part of the public sector so they are non-profit instances. As a result users may only be charged minimal costs of usage. Furthermore, the PATLIB Centre staff is familiar with the national system of intellectual property rights. They are proficient in local languages and are aware of local service needs.
One aspect of the support to the PATLIB Network provided by the European Patent Office is the organisation of an annual PATLIB Conference for the Centres. The PATLIB Conference takes place in a different European city each year and is organised in close cooperation between the Vienna sub-office of the EPO and the national patent office of the host country. During the three Conference days the participants are briefed about PATLIB activities in the host country, learn about different developments on the patent information market as well as in the EPO and are presented with reports on certain bilateral or multilateral cooperation projects between a member state and the EPO. External speakers from institutions and academia are invited to present results of their work or their point of view on "hot topics" in the patent field. Workshops with demonstrations and discussion groups are organised for smaller numbers of participants within the framework of the Conference. In parallel with the Conference training courses for the general public or specific user groups (for example "SME's", students, patent attorneys)is organised. Furthermore, a public exhibition on patents and patent information products is held in parallel with the Conference. Participation in the PATLIB event is free of charge but registration in advance for the Conference itself and the training courses is required. After the event the PATLIB Proceedings are produced and distributed free of charge.
Another aspect of the support is the production of the PATLIB Address Directory which is also provided free of charge to all interested circles. The Directory contains the contact data of the individual Centres as well as information on products and services provided by the PATLIB Network.
Within the framework of the multilateral co-operation programme with the EPO member states on patent information training, PATLIB Centres are entitled to benefit from seminars and courses organised upon request of the national offices at premises proposed by them. The EPO offers standard courses on patent information products as well as tailored and customised courses on patent information related issues.
As a further important support function the EPO provides the Centres with patent information on CD-ROM free of charge upon request.
The PATLIB Network continually expands. In 1995, there were 116 Centres. In October 2003, the number had increased to 283.
In several member states an expansion of the local PATLIB Network with smaller patent information units in addition to new Centres is planned. Such a system is already implemented in Italy, the so-called Patent Information Points ("PIPs").
Please visit the PATLIB pages on the EPO Homepage: http://www.european-patent-office.org/epidos/conf/patlibal.htm
The site provides E-mail links to contact the EPO PATLIB Team for further information. | <urn:uuid:b3e41ae7-4d5b-45e3-852d-f5e574b23465> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wipo.int/sme/en/best_practices/patlib.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931423 | 1,125 | 1.773438 | 2 |
| With applications stretching across a remarkably wide spectrum, geotextiles continue to make inroads as a key sector for nonwoven materials worldwide. End uses range from civil engineering tasks such as road and railway construction, drainage and soil stabilization to geosynthetics for agricultural and ecological uses. In fact, applications, performance criteria and characteristics vary so widely that some manufacturers have given these specialty fabrics their own classification as “geononwovens.” No matter what they are called, however, these highly engineered nonwoven materials—paradoxically—face both heightened demand in certain markets and tough economic conditions in others.
According to the Dodge Index Report published by McGraw-Hill, in 2005 the U.S. construction market is expected to see modest slippage for housing and strengthening for nonresidential building. “The path for public works in 2005 remains a tough call. State fiscal conditions are showing some signs of improvement, but more spending restraint could be coming from the federal government, and the next multiyear federal transportation bill still awaits passage,” stated Robert Murray, vice president of economic affairs for McGraw-Hill Construction.
Offering a European perspective on the current market climate was Wolfgang Aue, group marketing manager for geotextile specialist Polyfelt GmbH, Linz, Austria. “The geotextile markets in Europe are growing at a fairly low rate. In almost all countries the growth of the construction business is below GDP growth.”
Overall, worldwide growth is slow in the civil engineering area with U.S. sales slightly stronger than in Europe. “Worldwide, we are not yet facing a real recovery of the economic setback,” opined Blair Rawes, director of sales and marketing, civil engineering for Colbond BV, Arnhem, The Netherlands. Mr. Rawes characterized the global marketplace in general as quiet and anticipating recovery.
“As far as Colbond is concerned, we notice growth in the building industry market segment in the U.S. In Europe, tunneling shows strong growth, while the Eastern European countries exhibit substantial increases with Enkagrid in soil stabilization projects,” he said.
In terms of specific growth sectors, steady and sustained growth continues in drainage, separation and stabilization applications. Agriculture and construction are both on the rise and geocomposite products have outpaced industry growth in a number of applications. Geographically, the largest growth markets are Eastern Europe and Asia, particularly Southeast Asia.
Specialize To Succeed
Historically, geotextiles has been known as a commodity-driven market with high volumes and competitive pricing structures. By adding new characteristics to nonwovens, many roll goods producers are finding new niches and innovative ways to add value to their products. “The nonwoven geotextiles market in general tends to be more commodity in nature,” said Dennis Norman, vice president strategic planning and communication for PGI, North Charleston, SC.
Mr. Norman reported that PGI continues to see opportunities for products that offer value-added characteristics. “Nonwovens are uniquely positioned in their ability to be highly engineered materials that can provide certain qualities. Those companies that can develop a nonwoven product that meets certain needs and can proactively take those solutions to customers will have an advantage.” Mr. Norman added that an example of a product PGI is working on is a material for shrimp farmers to protect shrimp crops from contamination and decrease variability in water temperatures.
Colbond BV is also keeping an open mind when it comes to innovative niche applications. The company specializes in 3D polymeric drainage products, which it sells under the Enkadrain and Colbonddrain brands for civil engineering, building and industrial applications. “Our research strategy focuses on targeted product development, looking for new possibilities and applications by optimally utilizing our core competencies,” commented
Mr. Rawes. In civil engineering, Colbond registers growth in the European tunneling segment where the company provides drainage to new deep base tunnels in Switzerland. This drainage product meets extremely high fire resistance specifications.
You Have To Grow To Win
Despite tough market conditions in certain areas, some manufacturers are gearing up for growth through capacity expansions and new product launches. One company poised for expansion in the geotextile arena is Polish roll goods manufacturer Novita SA. Plans for a new six-meter-wide line for the manufacture of geotechnical nonwovens are underway, with start-up slated for the second half of this year. The new line will enable the company to offer novelty products and thus enhance its portfolio. In addition to expanding Novita’s range of geotechnical nonwovens, the new line is also expected to improve the products’ resistance parameters. “The specialty materials will make our entire line of products more attractive and competitive,” commented Radoslaw Muziol, vice president, sales and marketing for Novita.
“Up until now, Novita has concentrated on servicing its domestic market, the aim being to achieve a leading position among Polish geononwoven producers. With our new line, we will be ready to compete with manufacturers all over the world, and our portfolio will be in line with the largest European concerns in terms of quality,” offered Mr. Muziol. He added that while Novita is considered one of the most versatile producers among both domestic producers as well as importers in Poland, numerous EU manufacturers have been much more active in Poland since the country’s accession to the European Union last May.
Russian company Komitex JSC has taken on a similar expansion strategy in response to year-on-year growth in the Russian market. In 2004 the company added a Dilo needlepunch line—the first to come onstream in Russia— which has improved the quality of Komitex’s geotextiles, broadened its product range to include 100-1000 gpsm weights and a 5 meter maximum width and bumped capacity to 30 million square meters per year.
In addition to its roll goods focus, Komitex also operates its own polypropylene production line. “Installation of this line provided us assurance of availability and quality of the raw materials necessary for geotextile production,” stated Komitex’s vice president Victor Pshunetlev.
Adding Value Where It Counts
Another noteworthy growth strategy for producers has been the introduction of new, value-added products for highly specialized geotextile applications. In the agricultural sector, one such product is PGI’s patent-pending Agriban agricultural barrier product line. The spunbond polypropylene-based product is designed to protect such crops as bananas by forming a multifunctional barrier around the banana bunches, protecting them from physical external damages, diseases and pests without insecticide use. Because it is not perforated, the product offers a full physical barrier as well as breathability and UV-resistance.
“Nonwoven fabric-enhanced performance products available through the Agriban brand by PGI are proving to be a very competitive alternative to existing polyethylene film products,” Mr. Sánchez continued. The technology base developed by PGI in support of the Agriban barrier product line has been found to enhance fruit coloration, minimize sunburns, achieve a better distribution of the fruits into the bunch from top to bottom, increase the generation of ripening gases and provide an outstanding physical barrier to keep away not only insects but other physical elements such as dust and volcanic ash.
Also from PGI in the agricultural sector is “Agribon,” which is used to protect plants and crops from insects and cold weather. “Used as a crop cover, Agribon creates a stable, protected environment from seed to maturation,” Mr. Sánchez said. The product was launched 10 years ago and continues to grow in usage, having achieved an 80% marketshare in Latin America. While most of the growth has been in the Latin American region, worldwide sales are increasing.
Other Key Geotextile Innovations
The latest innovation from SI Geosolutions, Chattanooga, TN, is its Pyramat with X3 fiber technology. Previously introduced in its line of conventional stitch-bonded turf reinforcement mats, the unique shape of the X3 fiber helps capture more seed, more soil and more water for faster vegetation growth. The high performance turf reinforcement mat is a permanent, non-degradable rolled erosion control product that is composed of UV-stabilized, synthetic fibers that are processed into a three-dimensional matrix.
New from Colbond BV is its Enkadrain B10 product, which the company reports has achieved significant success in Europe since its launch in mid-2004. Enkadrain B10 is a light and flexible composite matting made up of a drainage core of looped polypropylene filaments that give it a high drainage capacity. This is provided on one or both sides with a nonwoven filter fabric. The components are thermally bonded together over the entire contact area. Each of the nonwoven filters extends 100 mm to one side of the core in opposite directions.
Also in 2004, Enkamat II was introduced in the U.S. Designed as a solution to erosion control problems, Enkamat II is a next generation turf reinforcement mat combining the technology of the original Enkamat with cutting edge developments of fiber-reinforced biodegradable materials. Featuring a 95% open structure, the product creates the optimum micro-environment to enhance seed germination and plant emergence. The biodegradable component of Enkamat II is designed to create the right environment to enhance seed germination by insulating the seed bed, absorbing and retaining optimal moisture.
For Polyfelt GmbH, new geotextiles products have come in the form of reinforced high strength geotextiles with different kinds of polymeric yarns such as the Polyfelt Rock HM, which features a bicomponent mix of polypropylene and aramide. Also new from Polyfelt is Geodetect, which is an innovative geotextile-based monitoring system. It consists of Polyfelt Rock PEC high strength geotextiles equipped with optic fibers linked to a monitoring device and a PC or laptop.
The system is designed to increase the safety of civil-engineering infrastructure through cost-effective predictive maintenance, especially in sensitive areas. Geodetect is a system developed for the measurement of strain in application areas such as roads and railways, retaining walls, tunnels and other underground structures and pipes (for gas, water or oil).
In other Polyfelt news, at the beginning of the second quarter of this year, the company will bring onstream a 9500-ton, high performance geotextile line in Linz. The E11 million investment is designed to increase production capacity for geotextiles and further develop the company’s own cutting-edge technology. Polyfelt’s Linz site is expected to benefit from its close proximity to new EU members and the other growth markets of Central and Eastern Europe. Additionally, the company’s newest sales office in New Delhi is expected to help Polyfelt gain a foothold in the booming Indian market for geotextiles.
Powerful Pricing Pressure
Offsetting this push toward innovation in the geotextiles market is an undercurrent of serious concern from manufacturers regarding the current raw material situation. Due to resin cost hikes, producers are being forced to pass on price increases to customers throughout the industry.
According to SI’s director of marketing Deron Austin, “There are four key factors impacting the continued escalation of polypropylene resin: (1) crude oil prices are close to $50 a barrel; (2) the demand in the U.S. has increased 6.7% and exports are up 20.6%; (3) historically, there have been other, more profitable end uses for propylene–the feedstock used to produce polypropylene resin; and (4) resin producers are currently operating at over 97% capacity.”
Mr. Austin added that SI Geosolutions’ parent company SI Corporation is one of the largest independent users of polypropylene resin in the world, consuming more than 400 million pounds per year.
As far across the globe as Poland, manufacturers are feeling the same squeeze when it comes to raw material pricing. For Novita, in addition to constant price increases, the current climate has resulted in a lack of security due to the fact that only short-term supply contracts are available. “The raw material for the manufacture of geononwoven and geosynthetic materials is crude oil. Any fluctuations in the oil market directly affect this market,” said Mr. Muziol. “Considering the fact that long term raw material deliveries are necessary to complete major investments and the fact that purchase prices are steadily rising—there is a substantial risk in being involved in this market,” he commented.
For Colbond BV, another company reporting “soaring” raw material costs, one possible response is replacing or combining raw materials. “This, however, is no short term action and requires careful and thorough consideration prior to market introduction,” said Colbond’s Mr. Rawes. He explained that effective January 2005, Colbond increased prices worldwide for its entire product range, with the increase in the 8%-10% range. “Since January 2003, polyester, polyamide and polypropylene chips costs increased 30%-45% (20% of which happened in 2004) and a turnaround has not yet been observed,” he said. “We delayed the price increase for as long as possible; however, the magnitude of cost inflation unfortunately leaves us no other option than to pass on part of the costs to the customers.” | <urn:uuid:26e60e8e-3629-446d-8e50-6197a92a9a4d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nonwovens-industry.com/issues/2005-04/view_features/geononwovens-hang-tight/contents.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940665 | 2,906 | 1.546875 | 2 |
World Continence Week Kicks off
In launching World Continence Week 2012 in Melbourne on 22 June, Minister for Ageing Mark Butler said an estimated four million Australians are affected to some degree by incontinence.
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PDF printable version of World Continence Week Kicks off (PDF 174 KB)
22 June 2012
Launching World Continence Week 2012 in Melbourne today, Minister for Ageing Mark Butler said an estimated four million Australians are affected to some degree by incontinence.
“Bladder and bowel health is an essential component in preventing incontinence. It’s a health issue that impacts an estimated four million Australians, including men, women, children, carers, families and the community.”
“The Government is committed to improving the lives of people living with incontinence. We’re doing this by investing $17.3 million over four years in the National Continence Program (NCP) and $337.8 million over four years for the Continence Aids Payment Scheme (CAPS),” Mr Butler said.
Through the NCP, the Government provides support to the Continence Foundation of Australia to promote bladder and bowel health through the Bladder Bowel Collaborative project.
Key activities from the project include the National Continence Helpline, the Every Body’s Business forums for health professionals, Bridge Magazine for consumers and a national conference on incontinence.
The NCP also created The Toilet Map, a website with information for more than 16,000 public toilets across Australia. The website attracts more than 1,000 users per day, with an iPhone application also available for download.
World Continence Week 2012 is on from Sunday, 24 June, to Saturday, 30 June, and is organised by the Continence Foundation of Australia.
More information on bladder and bowel health and incontinence prevention and management is available at the bladderbowel website
For more information, please contact the Minister’s Office on 02 6277 7280
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Permanent birth control
Tubal ligation (often referred to as “having your tubes tied”) and tubal implants are surgical options available to women desiring a permanent form of birth control. Both procedures prevent the egg from traveling from the ovaries into the fallopian tubes, which is where fertilization normally takes place. These procedures are not meant to be reversed and should only be considered by women who are finished having children and do not want to become pregnant in the future.
Women who may wish to become pregnant in the future should discuss other birth control options with their doctor.
In a tubal ligation, the fallopian tubes are cut or closed so the egg cannot travel from the ovaries into the uterus, and sperm cannot pass through the fallopian tube to the egg. The surgical technique used will depend upon your personal health situation.
- Mini-laparatomy – this is done with a small abdominal incision, about two inches in length.
- Laparascopy – a viewing instrument and surgical tools are inserted through small incisions in the abdomen to perform the procedure.
- Postpartum tubal ligation – this is performed 30 minutes to 36 hours after vaginal delivery through a small incision under the belly button.
Patients typically go home the same day of surgery and can resume all normal activities within a week. No backup form of birth control is needed following the surgery; however, tubal ligation is not 100 percent effective at preventing pregnancy. Over time, the fallopian tubes may grow back together, leading to pregnancy in a small percentage of women.
Patients should discuss with their doctor the benefits and risks of this procedure, including which tubal ligation methods are most effective at preventing future pregnancy.
Tubal implants (Essure)
Essure is a minimally-invasive alternative to tubal ligation. A lighted telescopic instrument, called a hysteroscope, is inserted into the vagina, through the cervix and into the uterus. A coiled implant is then inserted through the hysteroscope and into each fallopian tube. Once the implants are placed, the hysteroscope is removed through the vagina. Over time scar tissue develops around each implant, creating a barrier between the fallopian tube and the uterus. | <urn:uuid:bf961dd8-a61f-4932-b5e2-775a31ca30b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ecommunity.com/c/index.aspx?id=351&pg=10859 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938878 | 465 | 2.28125 | 2 |
You can put this solution on YOUR website!
Note that when the line of the graph is vertical the slope is undefined.
You were given two points:
(1,4) and (r,5)
The slope is undefined. This means that the value of r must be a value that produces division by zero, which is not allowed in math.
What could be the value of r?
undefined slope = (5 - 4)/(r -1)
The only answer that makes sense is r = 1. When r is 1, we get a ZERO in the denominator of this fraction, which makes the slope undefined.
How did I get 1 for r? I set the denominator (r - 1) to zero and solved for r.
r - 1 = 0
r = 1
Got it? Is this clear? | <urn:uuid:b095cbbd-f766-436b-9047-d83dffcfce67> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.algebra.com/algebra/homework/quadratic/word/Quadratic_Equations.faq.question.132226.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954907 | 178 | 3.34375 | 3 |
This kit is comprised of the student workbook and the teacher's manual. Encouraging student-teacher interaction, the teacher's manual features comprehensive chapters which include everything needed for the lesson, including jingles, exercises, lessons, study notes, tests, checks, writing activities, and more. Lessons are scripted, with directions for students italicized, important concepts and words bolded, and charts included to help teachers and students visualize each idea. Student page numbers are referenced to help both parent and child easily find their respective places. "How to get started" and "jingle guidelines" provide additional hints and information for the teacher. Answers for the student practice and tests (included in the student workbook) are included chronologically. 458 three-hole-punched pages, softcover.
Divided into a jingle section, reference section, practice section, and test section, students will need to flip to the necessary section in order to complete their lesson practice. The jingle section contains the lyrics to all the jingles, while the practice section provides a variety of activities, including matching, editing, multiple-choice, short answer, writing exercises, charts and other forms of written skill practice. Each test in the test section is divided into four areas: grammar, vocabulary, language skills and a weekly summary. Tests involve a variety of questions which should be familiar from the practice section. The reference section contains vocabulary words, an initial set-up plan, general reference notes, samples, and charts. 112 pages, softcover.
An audio CD with the jingles and introductory sentences is also included to help students remember elements such as parts of speech.
This level 5 kit covers the eight parts of speech; sentence types; sentence structure; capitalization, reference, usage, verbs, pronouns; adjectives, punctuation; writing letters; expository, persuasive, descriptive, narrative, creative and journal writing; poetry; and figures of speech. | <urn:uuid:6c483ca8-07ef-4f64-a83c-82624e80788f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://answers.christianbook.com/answers/2016/product/610327/shurley-instructional-materials-inc-shurley-english-level-5-kit-questions-answers/questions.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933169 | 399 | 3.140625 | 3 |
Recent reports show a massive increase in coal dependency caused by fossil fuel subsidies to be addressed at World Climate Summit.
According to the International Energy Agency's (IEA) latest findings, coal and oil subsidies pose the greatest challenge to the renewable energy market. As the world's largest exporter of coal, Australia's carbon emissions have grown nearly 300 percent since 1970, according to the IEA's last annual report on CO2 emissions. Worse, that percentage is regional, excluding the huge amounts of coal shipped overseas to some 20 dependent countries.
The IEA blames electricity/heat generations and transportation as the major culprits of nearly two-thirds of carbon dioxide emissions. IEA's World Energy Outlook 2011 report, to be released in early November, the agency recommends a halt on fossil fuel subsidies to reduce emissions and encourage renewable energy development.
In a recent interview with EurActiv, IEA chief economist Faith Birol said the current $409 billion equivalent of fossil fuel subsidies are only encouraging a wasteful use of energy.
Birol added that the cuts in subsidies is the biggest policy item that would help the world move towards a trajectory of 2 degrees in global warming, reducing CO2 emissions and helping renewable energies get more market share in the process.
In the current scenario, seven countries are introducing carbon pricing that would cause a 3.5 degree trajectory, which would cause “irreversible impact,” according to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with a mass extinction rate of anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of the world's species.
These topics will be central at the upcoming Climate Change conference in Durban, South Africa this December. According to research by Bloomberg New Energy Finance in 2010, governments around the world are spending 12 times as much on fossil fuel subsidies than on renewable energy. Phasing out aid for fossil fuel consumption subsidies and encouraging more spending on renewable energy will be critical in determining next year's market share for renewables.
By. Carin Hall of Energy Digital | <urn:uuid:79a3f33f-a6b6-475a-88bd-d191e142a3bb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Renewable-Energy-Being-Held-Back-by-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-IEA.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91556 | 405 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Joe ShusterJoe Shuster, (1914-1992), Canadian born artist
Joseph Shuster was born on July 10, 1914 in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Jewish immigrants from Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He was a cousin of one of Canada's most popular comedians, Frank Shuster. As a youngster, Joe Shuster worked as a newspaper boy for the Toronto Star and as a hobby, he liked to sketch. The sights and sounds of a big city newspaper, the hustle bustle of its offices, and the fantasy world of the newspaper's color comics, all had a powerful impact on him.
At the age of ten, his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where, at the age of 18 he and his friend Jerome Siegel published a short-lived "Science Fiction" magazine. Shuster made the drawings and Siegel did the writing creating a super character that a few years later evolved into a comic strip. Employed by DC-National the pair produced a variety of comic stories including the lead feature in the company's issue of the first "Action Comics". Their 1938 character, "Superman," was an enormous success that led to what is referred to as the "Golden Age of Comic Books."
When Superman first appeared, its hero, Clark Kent, worked for the Daily Star newspaper, named by Shuster after his old employer in Toronto. When the comic strip received international distribution, the company permanently changed the name to the Daily Planet.
Joe Shuster very quickly became famous as the co-creator one of the most well-known and commercially successful fictional characters of the 20th century. At the time, in the midst of the Great Depression, he made a very good living from producing Superman stories. However, the copyright to his and Siegal's work belonged to their employer and when the company refused to compensate them to the degree they believed appropriate, the pair sued. In 1948, the New York State Supreme Court limited their settlement to $60,000 each, at the time a large amount for someone, but very small compared to the multi-millions in profits their employer was generating annually. After the bitter legal wrangling, Joe Shuster left the comics business and his and Siegal's byline was dropped by DC comics.
In 1978, Siegel & Shuster again filed a legal action against DC Comics for royalties from the Superman character. In the face of a great deal of negative publicity over their handling of the affair, DC reinstated the byline dropped more than 30 years earlier, and granted the pair a lifetime pension of $35,000 a year. | <urn:uuid:412a8543-bfd9-4c76-92cb-2f00bc22a046> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.encyclopedia4u.com/j/joe-shuster.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980139 | 529 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Breaking down the walls
Backlash ... the Irish Catholic Church. Photo: AP
MARIE COLLINS was 13 and in Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children when she was abused. It was the hospital chaplain, a Catholic priest. He went to jail for it, many years later, like so many of his colleagues in Ireland, but only after decades of misery for Collins.
"I never connected his abuse with the church," she says. "I thought it was somehow my fault and that I was a bad person who had brought it on myself. I had years of depression and agoraphobia that included nine admissions to psychiatric wards."
As a young adult, anxious that other children not be hurt as she had, she told a priest in her parish. "He told me it was probably my fault, that I must have led the poor man on, but that I was forgiven and I could go away and forget about it."
Marie Collins. Photo: Crispin Rodwell
That priest's sentence of guilt outweighed any promise of forgiveness. Collins did go away, into more years of silence and depression. The misery did not lift until after her attacker, Father Paul McGennis, was jailed in 1997 over offences involving her and another child he abused 18 years after Collins. He was later convicted of having raped a third girl, 24 years after he attacked Collins.
She has no doubt the validation given to her by those court cases, and the later findings of four major inquiries into child abuse, helped her to recover. She says of the opening up of Ireland's cesspit of secrets: "I think it's helped everybody, really, except the Catholic Church . . . It's certainly worked for survivors. Even as late as the 1990s, it was difficult for any survivor to be heard or believed in any way. That's not the case any more."
Australia's royal commission into child sex abuse, announced last week by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, will look at the Catholic Church and other institutions. In Ireland, the church has been the focus of inquiries because its traditional reach there incorporated almost all schools, hospitals, orphanages, charities and welfare organisations.
And it is the church hierarchy that has time and again been found guilty of covering up scandals and protecting perpetrators in its ranks.
"The revelation that had the biggest impact was not that the church had abusers," Collins says. "It was news of the systemic cover-ups that angered people."
In her case, the bishop to whom she took her story told her the priest concerned had no complaints against him: "But they had known 30 years earlier he was an abuser. A few months after he abused me, the church found out he was doing it. He used to take indecent pictures of the children and he sent them to the UK for processing, and Kodak . . . picked out a roll and sent them to police here. The police commissioner did not investigate, but brought the pictures to the archbishop. They took him out of the hospital and put him in a parish."
Ireland's Prime Minister, Enda Kenny, a practising Catholic, was so outraged by stories such as this that following a damning report last year, he launched an attack on the Vatican that made world headlines.
The Cloyne inquiry found a 1997 letter from the Vatican criticising a new policy by the Irish church hierarchy of reporting all offenders to police. The Cloyne report documented, as had three other inquiries before it, patterns of clerical deceit.
Breaking with decades of subservience to the church by Irish politicians of all stripes, Kenny stood up in Ireland's parliament and attacked Rome.
He said the report exposed an attempt "to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic – as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism . . . the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican. The rape and torture of children was downplayed or 'managed' to uphold, instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and reputation".
Rome removed its ambassador to Ireland, and Dublin closed its embassy to the Vatican. Ireland has since reinforced its determination to act on secular principles of child protection by making it mandatory to report sexual abuse.
Meanwhile, ordinary Catholics aghast at the scandals have voted with their feet. While national attendance at weekly mass is about 45 per cent, in Dublin the figure is less than 20 per cent – both a huge drop from the 90 per cent attendance of 30 years ago.
Dublin's archbishop, Diarmuid Martin, said in February: "The fact thousands of children were abused within the church . . . is a scar the church will bear for generations. There is no way in which what happened can be consigned out of the way into the archives."
Of the Murphy report into the misdeeds of the Dublin archdiocese before his time, he said: "I offer to each and every survivor my apology, my sorrow and my shame for what happened to them . . . the Archdiocese of Dublin failed to recognise the theft of childhood."
The church has set up new structures to deal with abuse. Andrew Fagan, director of child safeguarding for the Dublin archdiocese, says the new system reports all complaints to police immediately: "Civil law and civil procedure takes precedence."
Church volunteers are now trained to be abuse-aware and to develop practices that involve careful supervision of children "to ensure our churches are as safe as they can possibly be. And people are carrying that information into other situations – it is making our society safer".
Despite the positive developments, Marie Collins feels she can no longer be part of the church. She still believes in God and has tried to regain her faith in the institution, but each time has found herself slamming into what she believes is a wall of resistance to change on child abuse.
In February, she went to Rome for a Vatican seminar on child abuse for bishops around the world. There she met a church official who gave her hope because he was passionate about the need to tackle the problem. Soon afterwards, he was demoted. | <urn:uuid:c0b69d91-c8d7-4c7f-aab7-a424a7c03371> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smh.com.au/world/breaking-down-the-walls-20121117-29iwu.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985794 | 1,269 | 1.734375 | 2 |
It depends on the plate its holding.
Arceus' type depends on the weaknesses of the plate's type it's holding. As a normal Pokemon with no plate, it's only weakness is fight.
Arceus can also only be one type at a type, due to only be able to hold one plate at a time, so there are no weaknesses/ resistances granted by dual types. Check the type chart to see what types are weak to what types.
EDIT: I misread/understood the Q; Arceus ??? type has no weaknesses, but cannot be used w/o hacking. | <urn:uuid:a8978b1b-e648-4193-bc2c-d77d15a9564d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pokemondb.net/pokebase/120462/what-weakness-does-arceus-have?show=120484 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956219 | 126 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Willard S. Krabill: Sexuality Pioneer for the Community, College, and Church
This project, which I worked on with supervisor Keith Graber Miller of the Bible and Religion Department, has made me reflect on why it is we do biographical research; why we examine some peoples’ lives and not others. Some people are well known because of some heroic event, making it obvious that theirs is a story worth telling. I thought also about the contrast between autobiographies and biographies. While neither is a fool-proof way of getting all the facts about someone’s life, it is exceptional to note a difference between those who choose to write their own memoirs and those who don’t get around to it because they are too busy with other causes and needs they observed.
Among his many other accomplishments as a father, spouse, physician, and church leader, Willard Krabill was instrumental in helping Mennonites negotiate their way through changing cultural understandings of sex and sexuality.
He remained open and yet grounded, helping Mennonites come to terms with their sexuality in a healthy way that was clearly and notably in contrast to the “get [sex] wherever you can” attitude becoming more accepted in American culture.
A necessary element of studying a life is having resources from which to study and analyze actions and reactions. Fortunately, Krabill’s family saw the importance of remembering his life and helped him to record ten hours of audio interviews with him shortly before his death in January 2009. They acted on a favored African proverb of Krabill’s, “when an old man dies, a library burns down.”
As I read and sorted through this “old man’s” library I learned of his life experiences and how he began playing his significant role in the Mennonite church. Although I never had the privilege of meeting Krabill, the audiotapes gave me insight about what things specifically influenced his life. These included incidents in his growing-up years, such as watching his father have the courage to be a pioneer in the education field and lose his job because others did not agree with him.
Another was hearing about the sexuality course Krabill took as a continuing education course in California that prompted him to begin Goshen College’s own Human Sexuality course.
Another important resource for this project was personal interviews with former colleagues, such as Norman Kauffmann and Anne Krabill Hershberger; and two of his children who live in the Goshen area: Merrill Krabill and Jeannie (Krabill) Miller. Norman Kauffmann was dean of students during the time Krabill was advocating for a sexuality course at Goshen College. Dr. Kauffmann’s support was an integral part to making changes on campus and a source of encouragement for Willard Krabill. In an interview with his youngest son, Ron, Krabill stated, “Norm was always behind me in everything I did.”
Another important player in making changes on campus was then-president J. Lawrence Burkholder. Unfortunately, I missed interviewing Dr. Burkholder personally because he died on the very day I had arranged to talk with him. Anne Krabill Hershberger, Krabill’s youngest sister, was another source of encouragement to Krabill. It was she that edited the book Sexuality: God’s Gift. In addition I am planning on continuing to interview colleagues of Krabill’s or former students whose lives were guided by their contact with him.
In the book, Mennonite Peacemaking, sociologists Leo Driedger and J. Howard Kauffman draw on a sociological concept from Peter Berger called plausibility structures. These are conversations, interactions, and other social factors that form a context that can support beliefs.
The authors of Mennonite Peacemaking used these structures to talk about how Mennonites’ response to war has changed throughout our history. They name people who re-formed the understanding of the meaning of pacifism ideological brokers, a term that identifies someone who responds to changing societal conditions without abandoning previously accepted convictions.
I have changed these quotes from the book to apply to the sexuality issues Krabill dealt with: “The Mennonite brokers struggled with a formidable task—how to reconstruct beliefs [about sexuality] in ways that paid deference to Anabaptist tradition and yet rang credible in modern Mennonite ears.”
“The ideological brokers, following the forays of the activists, sought to reconstruct [sexuality] in ways that would lend it credibility as Mennonites traveled through the throes of modernity. To discard it outright would have been to erase … the distinguishing mark of Mennonite identity.”
When Krabill came onto the sexuality scene in the Mennonite Church and on Goshen College’s campus in the 1960s and 1970s, he functioned as an ideological broker in part because he helped open up conversations about sexuality on campus and in the church. Similar to most other Protestants and Catholics in the first 60 years of the 20th century, Mennonites tended to avoid speaking openly about issues related to sexuality. It was not something normally addressed in church services and only minimally discussed in homes, nor was it a popular topic in Mennonite publications; the 1956 Mennonite Encyclopedia has no entry for sex education or sexuality.
There were some Mennonite authors who wrote sex education manuals. In 1942 Mennonite C.F. Derstine, for example, wrote a pair of books, The Path to Beautiful Womanhood and The Path to Noble Manhood. These two books vary in their description of anatomy depending on the audience and one other thing: the book for girls states that men only want virgin, clean women.
For boys, they are cautioned against associating with loose women. These research-free arguments include the idea that masturbation drains “life fluid” and thus energy; in addition, it can cause mental disturbances.
That was the common belief among most religious writers – and even medically trained speakers on sexuality – since the 18th century. Krabill once gave Keith Graber Miller a 1909 pamphlet circulated in Mennonite circles that identified about 20 different ailments associated with male masturbation.
To Derstine’s credit, he did have helpful suggestions, such as something along the lines of “children will learn about sex so make sure it is in the right context,” but he failed to give helpful suggestions for how to do so; he suggested a literal “birds and bees” explanation for children.
The most helpful suggestion in the group of books I read came from H. Claire Amstutz in 1956. In Growing up to Love: a guide to sex education, he pointed out that sexuality is not something you teach a child about all at once, in the same way you do not raise a child in one afternoon. It is a lifelong process that should be approached at deeper levels as the child becomes able to understand more.
At the time Krabill started the human sexuality class on campus in 1974, there were few, if any, other Christian college campuses with semester-long sexuality courses, and certainly none of the other Mennonite Colleges had such a course. In the early 1980s he was also a part of a Human Sexuality Study Committee made up of representatives from both General Conference and Mennonite Church Mennonites, out of which came a document that was grounded in the Bible and provided a guide for churches to study and discuss sexuality. The booklet talks about the meaning of the account in Genesis in which indicates that God created man and woman in God’s image and that they were created male and female in the beginning.
Their sex was not something that appeared after the fall, making it some sort of punishment. God’s intention was to make sexual beings, not only for purposes of procreation but for the relationship that could be formed between two such beings. He led the way in encouraging the Mennonite church to be honest with members about the sexuality present in them and fostering safe places for discussion by providing honest guidelines rooted in the Bible.
In the context of society’s changing sexual mores, Krabill functioned as an ideological broker by making an effort to help Mennonites affirm the good of sexuality and sexual expression while also speaking about guidelines for appropriate sexual practice. Like Most Protestant and Catholic groups, Mennonites had always supported saving genital-genital sexual intercourse for a covenanted marriage relationship. For a time this was not different from the sentiment of society as a whole, generally, whether or not it was always successful in practice. And it was usually stated as a negative: genital sexual relating before marriage is bad. The 1960s sexual revolution changed cultural perceptions of sexuality as the pill was invented and use of it became common. This was the first time that a quite simple and reliable contraceptive was invented that could be separated, in timing, from the act of heterosexual intercourse; one could take the pill throughout the month and be prepared for sexual engagement at any time with a low risk of pregnancy. Krabill sought to counter the trend of sexuality as self expression; instead, he insisted, “our sexuality is who we are, not what we do.”
And that, “Having a proper theology of the body would lead us to feel exuberant about the way our bodies allow us to express ourselves, enjoy a wide variety of sensations, reach out to others in fostering relationships, experience this good creation, and reflect the image of God.”
He remained grounded in the church tradition, yet “reshape[d] doctrines to make them chime with credibility in the context of new conditions.”
Krabill attempted to normalize discussing sexuality by emphasizing its unavoidable presence in every situation. It was from this context that he hoped to open the church to discussions about homosexuality. In a 1995 Sexuality Sunday School elective at College Mennonite Church where he was a member, he introduced his section on the background of homosexuality this way:
“It’s important to realize that the term human sexuality is redundant actually because only humans have the gift of sexuality. Other mammals have sex, have gender, have instincts, sexual reflexes, they copulate they reproduce sexually. But only humans have true sexuality; that rich tapestry of feelings of attraction of affection of affirmation of appreciation of reaching out which is all part of our sexuality. That need for intimacy or connectedness with other human beings. Our quest for wholeness, really. A biblically affirmed dimension of our humanity, sexuality is a marker of our humanity…. As we talk about homosexuality it is important that we place it in the context of our overall sexuality. In Genesis 1:27 you recall that we were created sexual “in the beginning.” Sexuality was not added after the fall. We are created by design male and female both in God’s image, sexual beings, and I am a sexual being from my birth to the day I die. This is a sexual body. We are whole creatures body, mind, and spirit, and these whole beings happen to be sexual in God’s good wisdom and we should rejoice. We are all sexual beings, married or single; young or old; celibate or otherwise. Sexual intercourse does not define our sexuality. Marriedness and singleness do not grade our sexuality. Sexual intercourse, genital interaction, is but a small part of our overall sexuality, which really includes everything about us that defines us as either male or female. It includes my body, my male feelings of masculinity, my male roles in home and community, society. My overall sense being male in a world that is populated by females as well. My sexuality is much more than my erotic feelings or any genital activity.”
This pointed out in an acceptable manner the importance of recognizing the sexuality in all people and the importance of accepting all persons, whether their sexuality is like or unlike that of the majority of people.
His role as a physician allowed him to speak clearly and articulately about the body and body parts and sexual bodily functions, without embarrassment. Perhaps more importantly, his education as a physician gave him credibility with those with whom he came in contact. He had established himself early in his life as a public speaker, beginning with his role in the peace problems committee that was part of the church peace oratorical commission after his graduation from Goshen College; this continued to benefit him as the topics he spoke on became less comfortable for listeners.
His knowledge of students’ sexual lives as campus physician and, over time, as teacher of Human Sexuality, gave him a window into sexual realities that essentially no one else in the Mennonite world had at the time. At the same time, Krabill was honest and realistic about what he was observing in students’ sexual behavior. He was quite empathetic with those students who discovered their same-sex orientation, and put in place the primary support systems for gay and lesbian students on campus. Most students exploring their sexual orientation eventually found their way into the Human Sexuality class and were guided by Krabill there and outside of the classroom context into understanding themselves. Krabill also understood fidelity and covenant to be a part of same-sex relationships (similar to what he saw in heterosexual ones) and was instrumental in opening the Mennonite world to consider blessing same-sex relationships. So he had the unique opportunity of being both aware of what was happening in the lives of young adults and in a position in which people trusted his authority on the subject.
Krabill sought to speak positively about sexuality; rather than focus on the badness of sex before marriage he supported the goodness of sexuality within appropriate contexts. That allowed him to promote relatively traditional views of sexuality but helped him provide a different sort of rationale for avoiding too early engagement in sexual intercourse, or engagement outside of a covenanted context. He also wanted sexuality to be something that is more freely discussed (like society was beginning to at the time), although in the right context and with the appropriate understanding that sexuality comes from God and with that there are certain responsibilities attached to that gift. He believed that sexuality could and should be celebrated.
Although this supported what society was beginning to display, it is also shown in the Bible. Part of what allowed Krabill to function as an ideological broker was that Krabill was conversant in the language of the Bible and the church, and also conversant in medical language and academic idioms. He was intentional about developing this quality; in 1984 he was scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Religion and Wholeness at the School of Theology at Claremont, California.
That plus his gentle, authentic spirit are what allowed him to make inroads in Mennonite congregations and the classroom.
Another major focus was his work on intimacy, which he saw so lacking among men and women who came to his medical practice and so little discussed in academic textbooks. He emphasized his position as a doctor and said, “never have I seen anyone die from the lack of sexual intercourse. I have, however, seen many people die premature deaths because they felt rejected and lonely, and they lacked intimacy.”
The importance of intimacy is how it is beneficial to both parties involved.
By putting sexuality in the context of humanity Krabill opened up the Mennonite understanding of sexuality to include elements of the sexual revolution. He did not uphold society’s way of expressing these elements, but supported a more positive view of sexuality than was true for some previous generations. He encouraged a deeper exploration of elements of sexuality. Most notable was his support of persons with a homosexual orientation as children of God and his encouragement for a closer look at the meaning of sin in relation to sexual orientation and behavior.
Another important element was the inclusion of all the elements that must be in place before a healthy sexual relationship can take place. Krabill’s understanding of sexuality permeated both his career as a doctor and his role as the physician on the Goshen College campus. He was, according to his sister, Anne, “an articulate author, spokesperson, and innovator” even into his retirement years.
He emphasized the importance of a complete understanding of persons as whole beings, mind, body, and spirit.
He hoped this would lead to a whole church, despite disagreements. His friend and colleague, Norman Kauffmann affirmed Krabill’s important contributions and expressed his belief that Krabill left an important legacy: that of his published works from which the church can continue to draw insight on important issues related to sexuality.
Amstutz, H. Clair. Growing up to Love: A Guide to Sex Education. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1956.
Derstine, C.F. Manual of Sex Education. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1943.
Derstine, C.F. The Path to Beautiful Womanhood. Scottdale, Pannsylvania: Herald Press, 1940.
Driedger, Leo and Donald B. Kraybill. Mennonite Peacemaking: From Quietism to Activism. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1993.
Hershberger, Anne Krabill, ed. Sexuality: God’s Gift. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 2010.
Human Sexuality Study Committee. A Working Document for Study and Dialogue: Human Sexuality in the Christian Life. Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House and Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1985.
Kauffmann, Norman. Interview by the author. Goshen, IN. June 25, 2010.
Krabill, Ronald. “Comments at Willard Krabill’s Funeral.” Remembrances. College Mennonite Church, Goshen IN, January 9, 2009.
Krabill, Willard. Interviews by Ron Krabill, Goshen, IN. September-November 2008.
Krabill, Willard, Overview of Sexuality. VHS, Homosexuality and Christian Faith: A 13-Week Study on Homosexuality. College Mennonite Church. Goshen, IN, 1996. | <urn:uuid:9af5760e-a5c4-420f-be79-17ea021e92fa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.goshen.edu/maplescholars/2010/08/15/willard-krabill/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971334 | 3,801 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Spain? What do you mean, Spain?
In another recent article published on the Cubasí digital website, specialist Atilio Borón rightly points out that the grievance is not against Spainor the Spanish people, but with its bourgeoisie, which exploits and bleeds the people both inside and outside of Spain.
It recognizes that the feud between the Argentinean government and the Spanish company Repsol-YPF has unleashed a virulent reaction from ultra-conservative Spanish government officials. Statements by Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo, by the Deputy Prime Minister, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaria, and the Secretary of State of Spain to the European Union, Íñigo Méndez de Vigo, reveal that these royal officials still have not realized the outcome of the battle of Ayacucho in 1824, which finished demolishing the remains of the Spanish empire in that part of the world.
Both their staging --hardened faces full of anger, high-sounding phrases, Garcia-Margallo’s trigger-finger at the ready-- as well as the threatening content of their statements, especially the ones by Mendez de Vigo, saying that Argentina would become an international wicked pariah that would suffer awful consequences if Repsol-YPF’s interests are affected, are a timely reminder that, unfortunately, the worst traditions of Spanish colonialism are still alive and raise their ugly head whenever they feel that one of its former colonies goes astray.
The symbolic violence unleashed over recent days is part of the sordid story present in contemporary Spain, troubled by a deep economic crisis and by the phenomenal reversal experienced in the field of civil rights and civil liberties. Just a few days ago, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced his intention to monitor and local social networks, so that any call for protests or political demonstrations of any kind made published on them will be considered a criminal offense.From this initiative, the Spanish government may prosecute those who, in its dangerous delusions, as described as radical groups involved in brand-new forms of urban warfare.All this in an effort to prevent victims of brutal neo-liberal adjustment plans driven by the Popular Party may resist and fight against the injustice of a project solely and exclusively concerned to safeguard the interests of capital, not the people's welfare.Nevertheless, there are many who still naively confuse a system capable of producing these samples of despotism with democracy.
Spain is not a gang of professional looters, worthy descendants of those who committed in our lands the greatest genocide in history, protected by the evil alliance between the cross and the sword.Spainis not business interests eager to make huge profits, as they have done in Latin America and the Caribbean under the protection of their political patrons, whether they be Felipe González, José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy. Spain is not that nauseating and parasitic crown sunk in a morass of scandals that the local media tries to hide. For us, Spain is the poetry of Miguel Hernández, Rafael Alberti and Federico García Lorca, Pablo Picasso's paintings, the music of Manuel de Falla and Pablo Casals, the philosophy of Manuel Sacristán Luzón and my unforgettable teacher Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez.Spainis the extraordinary work of its Republicans exiled in Mexico: Wenceslao Roces, José Gaos and Eugenio Ímaz, among others, eminent Spanish translators of The Capital and other invaluable texts of Karl Marx and many other authors of classical thought. Spain, finally, is the indomitable heroism of the Passion Movement and the anarchists and communists who fought against Franco’s barbarism, which Rajoy, Aznar and the PP are the undisputed heirs. These lunatics, late medieval spell survivors, represent the worst of Spain today. They are but the watchdogs of the filibusters in suits and ties who sow misery inside and outside Spain.
Therefore, the struggle is against that Spain, not against the Spanish people, much less against the other noble Spain, with which we feel definitely united. | <urn:uuid:7168ea6e-259a-4d91-a3bb-449bd8b3ff94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rhc.cu/ing/specials/opinion/6561-spain-what-do-you-mean-spain.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947682 | 842 | 1.625 | 2 |
I’m not fond of the phrase “think outside the box”. It’s business jargon: it hints at a corporatisation of creativity – and very few of us are capable of being innovative on demand. It’s also become such a cliché that it’s lost meaning.
However, I think the concept of the box is useful. We’re often stuck in a cultural or social box that dictates how we behave, what we spend our money on, how happy we are, how we learn, and how we work. It’s hard to see your own boxes.
I’ll go through some of the boxes I’ve had – unnecessary limitations on what I’ve thought was possible or desirable. I’ll offer some suggestions for “unboxing” your thinking, for recognising everything that lies outside your box. You might decide you’ve got a great box already, thank-you-very-much – that’s fine. The point of this is to let you know that you do have choices; often choices which you’d never thought of before.
The Preconceptions Box
If you’d said the words “self development” to me six years ago, I’d probably have looked at you a bit funny and mentally clocked you as an overly-earnest new-agey-hippy-woo-woo type. I had a whole bunch of preconceptions about a vast area of study and practice that I really knew nothing about. My knee-jerk reaction was that’s not for me.
In my third year at university, aged twenty, I signed onto a “women’s self-development course” called Springboard. I’d known about it in the previous two years – I’d just dismissed it as not for me.
It was, in a quiet but significant way, life changing. Not just the content of the course and the people that I meant – and the introduction to books by my favourite personal development writers, Mark Forster – but because it made me realise how horribly inaccurate my preconceptions were.
Since then, I’ve realised just how much “personal development” covers – and plenty of it is stuff that I was already on the path to figuring out before I went on that course. Sure, there are plenty of woo-woo types out there – but they, too, have plenty of value to say.
Looking Outside Your Preconceptions
I’ve tackled this box first because it’s the easiest to see. Whenever you have a reaction to something which you know little or nothing about, ask yourself why you’re feeling that way. If possible:
- Find out more about the topic or activity. Read about it, chat with people who are involved.
- Have a go. Unless it’s something illegal or dangerous, there’s little to lose by giving it a go. Attend a lecture on something you know little about. Go along with your friend to her yoga class. It could be something as simple as trying out a new web browser.
The Society Box
I’ve written before about going for what you want rather than what society tells you. It’s a lot easier said than done. Here are a couple of times I’ve struggled:
My fiancé, Paul, bought me a very beautiful engagement ring last month. This isn’t just what society dictates as a suitable engagement gift, but also something I really love. Seriously, I grin every time I look at the ring. Now, in the eyes of society, an appropriate gift in response (should I chose to give one) would be a ring, or possibly a watch. While Paul doesn’t have anything against rings, he has nothing like the enthusiasm that I do for one. And he doesn’t wear a watch.
So I bought him an engagement computer.
This seemed like a weird thing to do, and while I’m no particular stranger to being considered a bit weird, it still caused me to pause. And then I thought “sod it” and bought the computer anyway.
It was completely the right thing to do: it was meaningful to both of us, it was a complete surprise to Paul, and it was something he wanted … rather than something that I’d felt I “should” buy him.
I hesitated to include this because it’s not something we’ve actually done, yet. I’ve been interested in the idea of homeschooling for years, and I’d love to homeschool our own kids (not planning on having any for a few years yet, mind…) Paul and I have talked plenty about the future and what we want from it. He’s slowly come round from seeing homeschooling as weird and impractical to seeing it as a positive idea.
Society says that education is done by sending kids to a school for seven hours a day, five days a week, to follow what is (in the UK) an increasingly restrictive national curriculum. However, the traditional view of school is just another box set by society. For some families, it’s the right box. For ours, I suspect it won’t be.
Looking Outside What Society Says
Since many of the friends I have online are American or Australian, I’m constantly surprised to find out that what seems completely “normal” to me – so normal that I’ve never really considered an alternative – is totally odd to them. And vice versa. So:
- Talk to people from other societies and cultures. Realise that things don’t have to be done the way your society does them. Ditto for reading about periods of history.
- When you feel that you should do some particular thing, question where the “should” comes from.
The Invisible Box
And finally, there are the boxes which we really can’t see. In my experience, these are often related to technological, cultural or scientific advances. It’s not just that our society “doesn’t do it that way” – it’s that no society has ever done it that way…
Let me give you another example. Five years ago, when I had my first (embarrassingly “dear diary” style) blog, it never occurred to me that blogs could ever be used to make money – from advertising, affiliate payments and so on. And two scant years ago, I had no idea that lots of mid-sized blogs pay writers, just like magazines do.
Now I make my living from blogs – both by writing paid posts as a staff blogger, and by some advertising and affiliate revenue (most of it’s not from Aliventures, in case you’re wondering!) On the back of my blogging, I published a self-study e-course on Staff Blogging, aiming to help others step outside this particular invisible box.
Looking Outside the Invisible Walls
I’m not actually too sure how to get your head around things which simply didn’t exist a few years ago (and I know that, this Christmas, I’m yet again going to struggle to explain to assorted relatives what I actually do for a living…) Here are some thoughts:
- Talk to people. Especially people who seem to have jobs, hobbies or lifestyles which look impossible to you. Find out how they do it.
- Read plenty – and not just in your field. Pick up books and magazines from different areas. Ideas spark that way…
- If you’re technologically-inclined, keep an eye on new developments that become big. You don’t need to download every new browser, or join every new social media site – but being aware of, say, RSS and Twitter can keep you ahead of the game.
Perhaps the only way out of an invisible box is to be an innovator yourself – or to accept a hand-up from people who can see the world outside the box.
If you enjoyed this post, why not grab the Aliventures RSS feed to stay on top of future updates? You can also get posts straight to your inbox – usually twice a week – by popping your email address in the box below. | <urn:uuid:504fc1cc-1426-4ca9-bc3c-1a2d384ab6aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aliventures.com/see-the-box/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962402 | 1,757 | 1.53125 | 2 |
"I'm not racist but …" starts many sentences. But how deep does this go into our psyche? On June 2 at Sydney’s Seymour Centre, Vibewire together with NSW Reconciliation Council will explore the topic with a great line up of young, creative thinkers.
The 5 x 5 minute speeches will be followed by a Q&A session – so come ready with an opinion or at least a bag full of questions. You can book tickets here.
Speaking on the night are:
Rhianna currently presents the Indigenous radio program “Speaking Out” on ABC Local Radio and is a former member of the Triple J News Team. She was born in Brisbane and grew up in Weipa before moving to Sydney. Her family is of the Zagareb tribe of Mer (Murray Island) in the eastern islands of the Torres Strait.
Also known as The LION, L-Fresh is a Hip Hop artist and youth ambassador. He has shared the stage with some of the best Aussie Hip Hop acts and international icons, including Nas, Public Enemy, Urthboy, Drapht, Pez, and Horrowshow. L-FRESH is an ambassador of The Street University where he works as a mentor and arts and recreation coordinator of Australia’s largest youth drop-in centre.
A former school teacher turned sports psychologist, The Antibogan grew up in cosmopolitan Newtown before going to high school in Cronulla where he adopted racist and sexist attitudes from bogan school friends. He spent a few years as a racist himself before coming to his senses and shaking discriminatory influences loose. He soon turned to rallying and supporting various anti-discrimination movements and while he feels more pride at his work within such humanitarian circles, he has attracted the public eye in his work exposing racists and sexists by republishing their public comments on theantibogan.wordpress.com.
Tom started at Triple J as a Hack reporter in 2007, travelling right through Australia reporting on everything from pig hunting to federal politics. Tom has reported on two federal elections, the apology to the stolen generations and has paid close attention to suicide and mental health. In 2011 Tom became the host of Triple J’s Hack program.
Samih is a youth advocate, performance artist and author. In 2010, Samah was the Australian Youth Representative to the United Nations. Samah was the first Australian to be selected to complete a fellowship in minority rights with the UN office of the High Commissioner. She published a book called The Future by Us as well as studying Masters in Human Rights Law and Policy.
Be sure to come along – it’s bound to be fascinating! | <urn:uuid:909d6c59-46be-45aa-abd1-6fec71746525> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://servantofchaos.com/2011/05/im-not-racist-but.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971344 | 546 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Life span: Born: November 24, 1785, in Orange Country, Virginia
Died: July 9, 1850, in the White House, Washington, D.C.
Presidential term: March 4, 1849 - July 9, 1850
Accomplishments: Taylor's term in office was relatively brief, little more than 16 months, and was dominated by the issue of slavery and the debates leading up to the Compromise of 1850.
Considered honest but politically unsophisticated, Taylor had no noteworthy accomplishments in office. Though he was a southerner and a slave owner, he did not advocate for the spread of slavery into territories acquired from Mexico after the Mexican War.
Perhaps because of his many years spent serving in the military, Taylor believed in a strong union, which disappointed southern supporters. In a sense, he set a tone of compromise between North and South.
Supported by: Taylor was supported by the Whig Party in his run for president in 1848, but he'd had no previous political career. He had served in the U.S. Army for four decades, having been commissioned as a officer during the administration of Thomas Jefferson.
The Whigs nominated Taylor largely because he had become a national hero during the Mexican War. It was said that he was so politically inexperienced that he had never voted, and the public, and political insiders, seemed to have little idea where he stood on any major issue.
Opposed by: Having never been active in politics before being supported in his presidential run, Taylor had no natural political foes. But he was opposed in the election of 1848 by Lewis Cass of Michigan, the Democratic candidate, and Martin Van Buren, a former president running on the ticket of the short-lived Free Soil Party.
Presidential campaigns: Taylor's presidential campaign was unusual as it was, to a large degree, foisted upon him. In the early 19th century it was common for candidates to pretend not to be campaigning for the presidency, as the belief was that the office should seek the man, the man shouldn't seek the office.
In Taylor's case that was legitimately true. Members of Congress came up with the idea of running him for president, and he was slowly convinced to go along with the plan.
Spouse and family: Taylor married Mary Mackall Smith in 1810. They had six children. One daughter, Sarah Knox Taylor, married Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, but she tragically died of malaria at the age of 21, only three months after their wedding.
Education: Taylor's family moved from Virginia to the Kentucky frontier when he was an infant. He grew up in a log cabin, and only received a very basic education. His lack of education hampered his ambition, and he joined the military as that gave him the greatest chance for advancement.
Early career: Taylor joined the U.S. Army as a young man, and spent years in various frontier outposts. He saw service in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War, and the Second Seminole War.
Taylor's greatest military accomplishments occurred during the Mexican War. Taylor was involved in the beginning of the war, in skirmishes along the Texas border. And he led American forces into Mexico.
In February 1847 Taylor commanded American troops at the Battle of Buena Vista, which became a great victory. Taylor, who has spent decades in obscurity in the Army, was catapulted to national fame.
Later career: Having died in office, Taylor had no post-presidential career.
Nickname: "Old Rough and Ready," a nickname bestowed upon Taylor by soldiers he commanded.
Unusual facts: Taylor's term of office was scheduled to begin on March 4, 1849, which happened to fall on a Sunday. The inauguration ceremony, when Taylor took the oath of office, was held the following day. But most historians accept that Taylor's term in office actually began on March 4.
Death and funeral: On July 4, 1850, Taylor attended an Independence Day celebration in Washington, D.C. The weather was extremely hot, and Taylor was out in the sun for at least two hours, listening to various speeches. He reportedly complained of feeling dizzy in the heat.
After returning to the White House, he drank chilled milk and ate cherries. He soon fell ill, complaining of severe cramps. At the time it was believed he had contracted a variant of cholera, though today his ailment probably would have been identified as a case of gastroenteritis. He remained ill for several days, and died on July 9, 1850.
Rumors circulated that he may have been poisoned, and in 1994 the federal government allowed his body to be exhumed and examined by scientists. No evidence of poisoning or other foul play was found.
Legacy: Given Taylor's short term in office, and his curious lack of positions, it is difficult to point to any tangible legacy. However, he did set a tone of compromise between the North and South, and given the respect the public had for him, that probably helped to keep a lid on simmering sectional tensions. | <urn:uuid:0d8bfff1-9fc9-449a-a005-bbe81f552ff8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://history1800s.about.com/od/19th-Century-Presidents/ss/Zachary-Taylor-Facts-and-Bio.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990094 | 1,056 | 3.421875 | 3 |
Bill Would Close Tax Code Loophole on Roll-Your-Own Tobacco
Three U.S. senators have introduced legislation that would close loopholes in the tax code that allow tobacco manufacturers to avoid the federal cigarette tax and the roll-your-own tobacco tax.
Since pipe tobacco is taxed at a lower rate than cigarettes, some companies are offering customers the option of buying pipe tobacco, and allowing them to roll their own cigarettes to avoid paying the federal cigarette tax, CSPnet.com reports.
Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut have introduced the Tobacco Tax Equity Act, which would establish the tax rate on all tobacco products at the same per-unit level as cigarettes. The bill is designed to eliminate the current tax incentive for tobacco manufacturers to label roll-your-own tobacco as pipe tobacco in order to sell their product at a lower cost, according to the senators.
A recent report by the General Accountability Office (GAO) found the sales of pipe tobacco surged after the federal government imposed a 2,000 percent increase in taxes on roll-your-own tobacco and small cigars.
The federal excise tax on cigarettes rose 158 percent in 2009, in order to pay for an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. The government anticipated that smokers—particularly teens—might switch from cigarettes to roll-your-own tobacco and small cigars, which was then taxed at a lower rate. Therefore it raised taxes on roll-your-own tobacco from $1.10 per pound to $24.78 per pound; the tax on small cigars rose from $1.83 per pound to $50.33 per pound.
The tax on pipe tobacco rose at the same rate as the cigarette tax, increasing from $1.10 per pound to $2.83 per pound. Since those changes took effect, roll-your-own tobacco sales have decreased 74 percent, while pipe tobacco sales have increased more than nine-fold, according to the GAO report. | <urn:uuid:d488f9f7-38aa-482c-951a-45a11515166e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/legislation/bill-would-close-tax-code-loophole-on-roll-your-own-tobacco | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946966 | 415 | 1.710938 | 2 |
A myth has arisen that true conservatives are pro-war, and only “weak-kneed liberals” are anti-war.
The truth is very different, however.
For example, Ron Paul has very strong conservative credentials. Paul won the Presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year. And yet Paul has repeatedly spoken out against the war in Iraq and all other unnecessary wars. See this and this.
Paul points out that the Founding Fathers disliked foreign intervention, and those who advocate military adventurism are imperialists … not conservative Americans.
As Wikipedia notes:
Thomas Paine is generally credited with instilling the first non-interventionist ideas into the American body politic; his work Common Sense contains many arguments in favor of avoiding alliances. These ideas introduced by Paine took such a firm foothold that the Second Continental Congress struggled against forming an alliance with France and only agreed to do so when it was apparent that the American Revolutionary War could be won in no other manner.
George Washington’s farewell address is often cited as laying the foundation for a tradition of American non-interventionism:
The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
John Adams followed George Washington’s ideas about non-interventionism by avoiding a very realistic possibility of war with France.
President Thomas Jefferson extended Washington’s ideas in his March 4, 1801 inaugural address: “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” …
In 1823, President James Monroe articulated what would come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, which some have interpreted as non-interventionist in intent: “In the wars of the European powers, in matters relating to themselves, we have never taken part, nor does it comport with our policy, so to do. It is only when our rights are invaded, or seriously menaced that we resent injuries, or make preparations for our defense.”
Another reason that Paul opposes unnecessary wars is that – as I have repeatedly demonstrated - they are bad for the economy.
For example, Paul said in a 2008 speech on the House floor:
In the last several weeks, if not for months we have heard a lot of talk about the potential of Israel and/or the United States bombing Iran. Energy prices are being bid up because of this fear. It has been predicted that if bombs start dropping, that we will see energy prices double or triple.
Indeed, the fact that war is bad for the economy is a very strong rationale for conservatives to oppose unnecessary wars.
As noted conservative Thomas E. Woods Jr. – a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and New York Times bestselling author – writes in the March 2011 issue of the American Conservative:
To get a sense of the impact the U.S. military has on the American economy, we must remember the most important lesson in all of economics: to consider not merely the immediate effects of a proposed government intervention on certain groups, but also its long-term effects on society as a whole. That’s what economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801–50) insisted on in his famous essay, “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” It’s not enough to point to a farm program and say that it grants short-run assistance to the farmers. We can see its effects on farmers. But what does it do to everyone else in the long run?
Seymour Melman (1917–2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University, focused much of his energy on the economics of the military-oriented state. Melman’s work amounted to an extended analysis of the true costs not only of war but also of the military establishment itself. As he observed,
Industrial productivity, the foundation of every nation’s economic growth, is eroded by the relentlessly predatory effects of the military economy. …Traditional economic competence of every sort is being eroded by the state capitalist directorate that elevates inefficiency into a national purpose, that disables the market system, that destroys the value of the currency, and that diminishes the decision power of all institutions other than its own.
Yet these politicians and intellectuals [who warned against a cut in military spending as being bad for the economy] were focusing on the direct effects of discontinuing a particular spending stream without considering the indirect effects—all the business ventures, jobs, and wealth that those funds would create when steered away from military use and toward the service of the public as expressed in their voluntary spending patterns. The full cost of the military establishment, as with all other forms of government spending, includes all the consumer goods, services, and technological discoveries that never came into existence because the resources to provide them had been diverted by government.
Measurements of “economic growth” can be misleading if they do not differentiate between productive growth and parasitic growth. Productive growth improves people’s standard of living and/or contributes to future production. Parasitic growth merely depletes manpower and existing stocks of goods without accomplishing either of these ends.
Military spending constitutes the classic example of parasitic growth. Melman believed that military spending, up to a point, could be not only legitimate but also economically valuable. But astronomical military budgets, surpassing the combined military spending of the rest of the world, and exceeding many times over the amount of destructive power needed to annihilate every enemy city, were clearly parasitic. Melman used the term “overkill” to describe that portion of the military budget that constituted this kind of excess.
The scale of the resources siphoned off from the civilian sector becomes more vivid in light of specific examples of military programs, equipment, and personnel. To train a single combat pilot, for instance, costs between $5 million and $7 million. Over a period of two years, the average U.S. motorist uses about as much fuel as does a single F-16 training jet in less than an hour. The Abrams tank uses up 3.8 gallons of fuel in traveling one mile. Between 2 and 11 percent of the world’s use of 14 important minerals, from copper to aluminum to zinc, is consumed by the military, as is about 6 percent of the world’s consumption of petroleum. The Pentagon’s energy use in a single year could power all U.S. mass transit systems for nearly 14 years.
Still other statistics illuminate the scope of the resources consumed by the military. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, during the period from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plants, equipment, and infrastructure (capital stock) at just over $7.29 trillion. In other words, the amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock.
Then there are the damaging effects on the private sector. Since World War II, between one-third and two-thirds of all technical researchers in the United States have been working for the military at any given time. The result, Melman points out, has been “a short supply of comparable talent to serve civilian industry and civilian activities of every sort.”
Meanwhile, firms servicing Pentagon needs have grown almost indifferent to cost. They operate outside the market framework and the price system: the prices of the goods they produce are not determined by the voluntary buying and selling by property owners that comprise the market, but through a negotiation process with the Pentagon in isolation from market exchange.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Department of Defense required the military-oriented firms with which it did business to engage in “historical costing,” a method by which past prices are employed in order to estimate future costs. Superficially plausible, this approach builds into the procurement process a bias in favor of ever-higher prices since it does not scrutinize these past prices or the firm’s previously incurred costs, or make provision for the possibility that work done in the future might be carried out at a lower cost than related work done in the past.
This is not nit-picking: advancing technology has often made it possible to carry out important tasks at ever-lower costs, yet rising costs are a built-in assumption of the historical-cost method. Moreover, if some piece of military equipment—a helicopter, plane, or tank, for example—winds up costing much more than initial estimates indicated, that inflated price then becomes the baseline for the cost estimates for new projects belonging to the same genus. The Pentagon, in turn, uses the resulting cost hikes to justify higher budget proposals submitted to Congress.
Melman also found administrative overhead ratios in the defense industry to be double those for civilian firms, where such a crushing burden simply could not be absorbed. He concluded:
From the personal accounts of ‘refugees’ from military-industry firms, from former Pentagon staffers, from informants still engaged in military-industrial work, from the Pentagon’s publications, and from data disclosed in Congressional hearings, I have found consistent evidence pointing to the inference that the primary, internal, economic dynamics of military industry are cost- and subsidy-maximization.
“In one major enterprise,” Melman reported, “the product-development staffs engaged in contests for designing the most complex, Rube Goldberg-types of devices. Why bother putting brakes on such professional games as long as they can be labeled ‘research,’ charged to ‘cost growth’ and billed to the Pentagon?”
The American machine-tool industry can tell a sorry tale of its own. Once highly competitive and committed to cost-containment and innovation, the machine-tool industry suffered a sustained decline in the decades following World War II. During the wartime period, from 1939 to 1947, machine-tool prices increased by only 39 percent at a time when the average hourly earnings of American industrial workers rose by 95 percent. Since machine tools increase an economy’s productivity, making it possible to produce a greater quantity of output with a smaller input, the industry’s conscientious cost-cutting had a disproportionately positive effect on the American industrial system as a whole.
But between 1971 and 1978, machine-tool prices rose 85 percent while U.S. industrial workers’ average hourly earnings increased only 72 percent. The corresponding figures in Japan were 51 percent and 177 percent, respectively.
These problems can be accounted for in part by the American machine-tool industry’s relationship with the Defense Department. Once the Pentagon became the American machine-tool industry’s largest customer, the industry felt far less pressure to hold prices down than it had in the past.
In the short run, the American machine-tool industry’s woes affected U.S. productivity at large. Firms were now much more likely to maintain their existing stock of machines rather than to purchase additional equipment or upgrade what they already possessed. By 1968, nearly two-thirds of all metalworking machinery in American factories was at least ten years old. The aging stock of production equipment contributed to a decline in manufacturing productivity growth after 1965.
Another factor is at work as well: the more an industry caters to the Pentagon, the less it makes production decisions with the civilian economy in mind. Thus in the late 1950s the Air Force teamed up with the machine-tool industry to produce numerical-control machine-tool technology, a technique for the programmable automation of machine tools that yields fast, efficient, and accurate results. The resulting technology was so costly that private metalworking firms could not even consider using it. The machine-tool firms involved in this research thereby placed themselves in a situation in which their only real customer was the aerospace industry.
Some 20 years later, only 2 percent of all American machine tools belonged to the numerical-control line. It was Western European and Japanese firms, which operated without these incentives, that finally managed to produce numerical-control machine tools at affordable prices for smaller businesses.
Economist Robert Higgs wonders: “Why can’t the Department of Defense today defend the country for a smaller annual amount than it needed to defend the country during the Cold War, when we faced an enemy with large, modern armed forces and thousands of accurate, nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles?”
In fact, a great many military experts have begun to conclude that the enormously expensive and complicated equipment and programs that the Pentagon has been calling for would be of limited help even in fighting the Second Generation Warfare with which the American military seems most comfortable, and a positive detriment to waging the kind of Fourth Generation Warfare of which the war on terror consists. William Lind, a key theorist of Fourth Generation Warfare, says the U.S. Navy in the 21st century is “still structured to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy.”
The Department of Defense is the only federal agency not subject to audit.
It is not uncommon for the Pentagon not to know whether contractors have been paid twice, or not at all. It does not even know how many contractors it has. Meanwhile, so-called fiscal conservatives, who know nothing of this, continue to think the problem is excessively low military budgets. This, no doubt, is just the way the establishment likes it: exploit the people’s patriotism in order to keep the gravy train rolling.
Higgs suggests that the real defense budget is closer to $1 trillion.
Winslow Wheeler reaches a comparable figure. To the $518.3 billion, he adds the military-related activities assigned to the Department of Energy ($17.1 billion), the security component of the State Department budget ($38.4 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($91.3 billion), non-Department of Defense military retirement ($28.3 billion), miscellaneous defense activities spread around various agencies ($5.7 billion), and the share of the interest payments on the national debt attributable to military expenditure ($54.5 billion). When we add the roughly $155 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to Wheeler’s tabulation, we arrive at a grand total of $948.7 billion for 2009.
And we’re worried about trivialities like “earmarks,” which comprise such a small portion of spending that they barely amount to a rounding error in the federal budget?
Meanwhile, $250 billion is spent every year maintaining a global military presence that includes 865 facilities in more than 40 countries, and 190,000 troops stationed in 46 countries and territories. It is not “liberal” to find something wrong with this.
Out with the phony conservatives, the Tea Party movement says. We want the real thing. But the real thing, far from endorsing global military intervention, recoils from it. The conservative cannot endorse a policy that is at once utopian, destructive, impoverishing, counterproductive, propaganda-driven, contrary to republican values, and sure to increase the power of government, especially the executive branch.
As Patrick Henry said, “Those nations who have gone in search of grandeur, power and splendor, have always fallen a sacrifice and been the victims of their own folly. While they acquired those visionary blessings, they lost their freedom.”
Note: While many civilians believe the myth that conservatives are pro-war, the truth is that many of the most highly-decorated military men in history – including conservatives – became opposed to war after seeing what really goes on. See this, this and this.
Indeed, I have spoken with some very high-level former military and intelligence officers. They are true patriots, who dedicated their life to protecting our country. They are also very passionate about not starting unnecessary wars, because they reduce America’s national security and cause many more problems than they could possibly solve.
Those who call themselves “conservative” but advocate military adventurism are really “neoliberals” … and they are not really conservatives at all.
Obviously, I am not advocating complete disarmament. We should be ready to defend ourselves if we are attacked. But I am opposed to attacking other nations unless it is urgently and absolutely needed or engaging in endless war. See this, this and this. | <urn:uuid:77b7385f-c0d7-49da-8944-11ad2a4b5d4a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/02/true-conservatives-are-anti-war.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953662 | 3,473 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Monday, March 30, 2009
On Sunday, our reading group drove merrily up the Pacific Coast Highway to member Jane's lovely Malibu home, to discuss a most serious, weighty matter: a comparison of Silas Marner to Mansfield Park, and incidentally, George Eliot to Jane Austen. Seated around the sunny light living room, directly over the crashing waves, eating home baked treats (lemon cake, pound cake, flourless chocolate cake, brownies, caramel brownies, and more) and drinking tea from delicate heirloom Japanese cups, we first brought up the matter that was most urgently on all our minds: Why, in our youth, was Silas Marner inflicted upon high school students? I remember being completely unable to read it at sixteen, though I had read Sartre, Dostoyevsky, and Margaret Mitchell. I thought it the most awful, prosy, boring, sentimental book in the world.
Sheila and Susan
Reading it again at sixty, I found the first pages were indeed almost impenetrably written in stilts-and-bladder, convoluted prose, but once you got past that blockage, the story was readable enough and had many finenesses and beauties. The evocation of pastoral England "in the early years of this century," nineteenth that is, when Jane Austen still walked the earth, was beautiful, and reminded me of the rural quietude and superstitious legends of Mary Webb's Precious Bane, as when Eliot writes, "Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry."
Phyllis and me
Silas Marner has a kind of mythic feeling, with the golden treasure disappearing, and the golden-haired Shirley Temple of an Eppie appearing, as if by magic; its fairy tale aspect reminded me of Rumplestiltskin. Or Heidi, with the old man and the winsome blonde. The book didn't turn out to have a great deal in common with Mansfield Park, though our guest Gracia Fay of the Ventura reading group, who suggested the topic, had some comparisons; the theme of adoption is the main similarity. The sense of moral nemesis is much stronger in Silas Marner, which examines the idea that "Heaven shows the right," and that people get the fates they deserve, based on the choices they make. It's interesting that its characters, mostly simple country folk, do not even understand the words of the religion they hear in church; it is like superstition to them. It's a surprisingly moralistic book for an atheist to write, at the time when she was living in sin with George Lewes.
This discussion of course led to a comparison of Austen's life and Eliot's: the sadness of childlessness runs through Silas Marner, whereas Austen shows no trace of any longing for children in her novels. Austen was the Christian and her characters get their just deserts too, but more realistically than in Silas Marner. And although we are now old enough to appreciate some beauties in Marner, there is no question which book we love more, and can reread endlessly. Old Silas was very, very lucky to get even this second chance.
George Eliot. She went "rockpooling" in North Devon, and her scientific interests influenced Silas Marner. So she might have enjoyed a visit to Malibu
Two tiny bits I liked very much in the book: Eliot describes a small but vital thing I've never seen described in fiction before. "That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger." She has caught the exact significance of that moment when you first come home and meet your mate's eyes.
And then, of course, Eliot has won me over by her inclusion of two tortoiseshell cats. Aha, what an excellent opportunity for me to show you some more cat pictures!
Martial at Eight Months and God knows how many Pounds
"The sharp bark was the sign of an excited welcome that was awaiting them from a knowing brown terrier who, after dancing at their legs in a hysterical manner, rushed with a worrying noise at a tortoise-shell kitten under the loom, and then rushed back with a sharp bark again, as much to say, "I have done my duty by this feeble creature, you perceive," while the lady-mother of the kitten sat sunning her white bosom in the window, and looked round with a sleepy air of expecting caresses, though she was not going to take any trouble for them."
Catullus, black beauty with a white bosom
Eliot writes, "The presence of this happy animal life was not the only change which had come over the interior of the stone cottage." It signals a very great change, Silas's home coming to life, and we have seen in my own household how anmals do bring a home to new life, where three cats frolic and make aging people feel much younger.
Catullus and Martial
Boxed Set: Martial and Pindar | <urn:uuid:aa84b567-7195-4fc6-8f6e-167b758bddb1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lightbrightandsparkling.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968485 | 1,076 | 1.890625 | 2 |
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50 Books Every Young Woman Should Read
November 7th, 2010
As we grow up, we learn lessons, feel inspired and gain valuable experience that helps us make better decisions and guides the path we take through life. While our own experiences and the teachings of those around us are often the sources of these lessons, books can also provide guidance for young women and girls through riveting stories and unforgettable characters. Here are fifty books that offer young women, in high school and college, the chance to read about women they can relate to, learn about some of the challenges they’ll face in the world, and gain a better understanding of human nature, their own and that of others, as a whole.
These classic novels will make you laugh and cry, but above all will open a whole new world to readers.
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: With a strong-willed main character, struggling to define herself in Victorian society where women were often denied many of the rights we enjoy today, this book was a bit scandalous in its own time. Today, it provides young women with a love story that, while romantic, is filled with intrigue, drama and girl-power aplenty.
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: This well-known read showcases a time period when marriage was as much about economics as it was about love.
- The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck: Read this epic tale about a Chinese farm family during the reign of the country’s last emperor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that touches upon love and loss, good and evil and survival.
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: A popular feminist text despite the intent of the author, this book follows the life of sometimes-communist Anna as she writes about her life in several different notebooks, each representing a part of who she is.
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: Unhappy in her domestic life despite having a husband that dotes on her and a comfortable life, Emma Bovary seeks something bigger, better and more passionate in her life – with tragic consequences.
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: In this dystopian fable, Atwood creates a future world where women have no rights and are separated into distinct classes.
- Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: While the movie is certainly a classic worth watching, read this book to get the real take on this epic tale of love in the South.
- Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger: In this tale by award-winning author Salinger, Franny experiences a period of disenchantment with the world around her, eventually experiencing a bit of an existential breakdown. She finds aid with brotherly advice from Zooey.
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: This novel follows a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party, traveling back and forth in time and between characters to show what Mrs. Dalloway’s life is really like.
- Howards End by E.M. Forester. Published in 1910, the class struggles detailed in this novel still ring true today.
Fantasy and Sci-Fi
These stories may be based in fantasy, but the lessons they teach and the stories they tell touch upon feelings and emotions that are human and real.
- His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman: Women young and old alike will be inspired by the heroine, Lyra, as she battles evil, explores the universe and tries to unravel the secrets that could turn her world upside-down.
- Dealing With Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede: At the center of this book – the first in a series – is Princess Cimorene, a girl who runs away from her life of eyelash batting lessons and crochet to live with the dragons.
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle: Girls are so often depicted at being poor at math, but not in this novel. Meg Murray travels through space and time to save her father, growing from young girl to a woman in the process.
- Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt: This novel will force young girls to think about what is truly important to them in life, as the main character must decide whether she wants life eternal or to be with her family.
- The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander: While the main character of this story may be a dashing young pig-keeper, he wouldn’t get far without the help of the strong-willed Princess Eilonwy who keeps him out of trouble and comes to save the day more than once.
Coming of Age
Growing up isn’t easy. You can find characters going through some of the same struggles as you in these stories.
- The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd: Working through her confusing and sometimes brutal childhood, a young girl meets a group of women who help her discover who she was and who she wants to be.
- Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden: Taken from her family as a young age, Sayuri comes into her own as a woman and as a geisha in this story set in pre-WWII Japan.
- Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides: Growing up is hard enough without throwing gender confusion into the mix, but this story follows a young intersexed individual trying to figure out just who to be in a world that accepts him as neither male nor female.
- Girl: A Novel by Blake Nelson: Those in high school and just starting college will appreciate this book that offers a relatable main character readers can follow through her hopes, fears and challenges.
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: In this novel, young Scout learns about the injustice the world can offer, but also the good that resides in people if you know where to find it.
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith: Readers will fall in love with Francie Nolan, a young girl growing up in Brooklyn– a story based largely on the author’s own life.
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: Follow the orphan Pip as he attempts to break free from his past and become a true gentleman in this classic novel.
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros: In this novel, a young woman grows up in Chicago, dealing with her family and the challenges of her Latino community.
- Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende: In this tale, Eliza leaves home to find her lover, but discovers herself instead.
Young Adult and Children’s Lit
These books may have been written for children and young adults but they offer lessons that will serve you well throughout your life.
- Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Peterson: This heartbreaking read was based on a real-life friendship and has loads to teach readers of any age.
- Matilda by Roald Dahl: Parents can be hard to deal with even when you’re not a little kid anymore. This classic tale turns parenting on its head and creates a protagonist who’s simply hard to resist.
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett: When an orphaned girl finds the key to an old abandoned garden, she turns it into a private paradise, healing not only herself, but her newfound family as well.
- Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell: Readers will be inspired by the strong-will and survival skills of the young Karana, a girl living alone on an island.
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White: While this might be a children’s book, the lesson it has to teach about life, love and loss are worth reading about at any age.
- Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder: Based on her own childhood memories, these children’s novels will draw young women into what life was like for farming families in the late 19th century.
From parents to best friends, these books take a look at relationships between women and those they love.
- The Group by Mary McCarthy: This best-selling novel follows eight women as they graduate from college, get married, have children and move on with their lives, struggling to find their places in the world, reuniting at the funeral of one of the original group.
- Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid: Focusing on mother-daughter relationships, this novel shows how difficult growing up can be, especially when you feel no one really understands you.
- The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan: American-born Jing-mei has never understood the customs and ways of her mother and her friends, but after her mother’s death she learns just what struggles they have had to endure and the true power of love.
- Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel: Longing to marry her love, young Tita is devastated when he is instead betrothed to her sister, expressing her pain and passion through her cooking.
- The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards: Explore the dark family secrets bound up in this compelling novel.
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: Explore the relationships of sisters Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy as they grow up, fall in love and deal with tragedy while their father is away at war in this classic novel.
Take a break from fiction to read these true-life accounts that will help you become a stronger woman.
- A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf: In this extended essay, Woolf explores women in fiction and what they need to make a career in the field.
- Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin: You’ll be inspired by one man’s mission to bring education and care to women in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and more grateful of your own educational opportunities.
- Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn: Learn what life is like for women in many other parts of the world and what you can do to help fight for greater equality.
- Our Bodies, Ourselves by Judy Norsigian: This book, first published in 1973, will teach you everything you need to know about your changing and developing body.
- My Life in France by Julia Child: The autobiography of the famous chef Julia Child details her culinary experiences and growth as an international phenomenon.
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou: Banned in many places, this book isn’t an easy read due to the violent and very often unpleasant events that take place within it. Regardless, it is an incredibly inspirational read based on the life of Poet Laureate Maya Angelou, teaching that with hard work you really can go far.
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank: One of the most famous records of the Holocaust, this journal records the everyday life of Anne, a girl struggling with love, life and growing up under conditions hard to imagine.
- The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan: The book that defined the Second Wave of the feminist movement, The Feminine Mystique is a must-read for young girls wanting to understand women’s history and where equality can still use some improvement.
- The Story of My Life by Helen Keller: Readers will undoubtedly find the words of Keller inspiring, telling how she worked with her disabilities to become an author and an activist.
Stories, Poetry and Plays
Get inspired by these great plays and poems that are perfect reads for young women.
- Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis: This collection of interrelated short stories tells the tale of Leah Levinson, a girl growing up in the Upper West Side, and her relationships with parents and friends.
- ‘A Doll’s House’ by Henrik Ibsen: A tale of self-awakening, this short play will have you glad you live in this century.
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout: Here you’ll find a collection of stories, all linked, of ordinary people dealing with the loss of a parent, unrequited love, frustration and numerous other human emotions we can all understand and relate to.
- A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom: These stories are at once strange and familiar, taking on human frailty from a wide range of angles.
- Ariel by Sylvia Plath: Plagued by mental illness, Plath couldn’t cope with her life, but during her short time she left behind these, among many other works, that expose the rawness of human emotions. | <urn:uuid:78724d12-8590-45f9-94be-5bcf751ed77e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.associatesdegree.com/2010/11/07/50-books-every-young-woman-should-read/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94437 | 2,675 | 2.640625 | 3 |
Adult Fiction WATSON
Summary: "From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them... " So begins David Hayden's story of what happened in Montana in 1948. The events of that cataclysmic summer permanently alter twelve-year-old David's understanding of his family: his father, a small-town sheriff; his remarkably strong mother; David's uncle Frank, a war hero and respected doctor; and the Haydens' Sioux housekeeper, Marie Little Soldier, whose revelations turn the family's life upside down as she relates how Frank has been molesting his female Indian patients. As their story unravels around David, he learns that truth is not what one believes it to be, that power is abused, and that sometimes one has to choose between family loyalty and justice.
Be the first to add a comment! Share your thoughts about this title. Would you recommend it? Why or why not?
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Add a Comment | <urn:uuid:2cb8bbe6-6d64-4f12-a20f-9eb28805a101> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hclib.org/pub/bookspace/discuss/?bib=218489&theTab=Summary | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949337 | 230 | 1.757813 | 2 |
The graphic directive was: rainbow!
Our challenge was to propose a number of conventional, austere documents (classic PowerPoint documents with a lot of text) in a more fancy way.
The touch screen located in the main room of the convention, which was accessible to visitors, presented about twenty documents around an animated carousel.
The typographical animation required the programming of a (simplified) HTML interpreter ( similar to those behind your favorite internet browser ). It allowed to access each letter individually in order to animate them thanks to particle systems.
Driven by laws of physics, the letters mimics three fancy effects: vacuum, burst and liquid.
Another carousel animation, located on the main stage, was video-projected onto a giant screen and piloted by hand by the successive speakers. It was designed to present mainly images and videos in HD.
Lastly, a series of touch screens placed at the entrance of the convention, presented different interactive animations, mainly for decorative purpose.
Production: Mobidium (Paris) | <urn:uuid:362dd1db-a8b2-4856-8651-398897f0edff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.2roqs.com/Article/60_total_convention_interactive_interfaces | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953718 | 209 | 1.75 | 2 |
A new NASA-funded study has concluded that Amazon rain forests were remarkably unaffected in the face of once-in-a-century drought in 2005, neither dying nor thriving, contrary to a previously published report and claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"We found no big differences in the greenness level of these forests between drought and non-drought years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of droughts than we previously thought," said Arindam Samanta, the study's lead author from Boston University.
The comprehensive study published in the current issue of the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters used the latest version of the NASA MODIS satellite data to measure the greenness of these vast pristine forests over the past decade.
A study published in the journal Science in 2007 claimed that these forests actually thrive from drought because of more sunshine under cloud-less skies typical of drought conditions. The new study found that those results were flawed and not reproducible.
"This new study brings some clarity to our muddled understanding of how these forests, with their rich source of biodiversity, would fare in the future in the face of twin pressures from logging and changing climate," said Boston University Prof. Ranga Myneni, senior author of the new study.
The IPCC is under scrutiny for various data inaccuracies, including its claim - based on a flawed World Wildlife Fund study -- that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically and be replaced by savannas from even a slight reduction in rainfall.
"Our results certainly do not indicate such extreme sensitivity to reductions in rainfall," said Sangram Ganguly, an author on the new study, from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute affiliated with NASA Ames Research Center in California.
"The way that the WWF report calculated this 40% was totally wrong, while [the new] calculations are by far more reliable and correct," said Dr. Jose Marengo, a Brazilian National Institute for Space Research climate scientist and member of the IPCC.
Explore further: Bangladeshi, South Korean climbers die on Everest
More information: Samanta, A., S. Ganguly, H. Hashimoto, S. Devadiga, E. Vermote, Y. Knyazikhin, R. R. Nemani, and R. B. Myneni (2010), Amazon forests did not green‐up during the 2005 drought, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L05401, doi:10.1029/2009GL042154 | <urn:uuid:0d0d74d7-6e3d-49d8-9953-e242e47725be> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://phys.org/news187554246.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945174 | 519 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Visit Nancy Hunt-Bartek's site for more of her work
Collage.........a work of art made by pasting paper, metal and other materials or objects together on a surface.
For me, it happened 3 years ago. I discovered collage and paper arts and fell in love.
I normally start with an idea or focal point and proceed from there. I use paper, (some exotic and handmade) and on some pieces 3 - 4 different types of glue.
I have been known to attach just about anything to my collages. I also use paint, clip art, rubber stamps and ink on many of the collages I do. I am constantly on the lookout for new and exciting things to use in my art.
E-mail the artist at: email@example.com
Many of my pieces reflect times in my life or the lives of dear friends or music .Just about anything can make me want to create.
Each piece is unique and one of a kind. | <urn:uuid:bc543297-97ca-41b5-a028-fa69d158ba06> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.art-e-zine.co.uk/NancyHunt-Bartek.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943787 | 207 | 1.5625 | 2 |
A life-long city man, tired of the rat race, decided he was going to give up the city life, move to the country, and become a chicken farmer. He found a nice, used chicken farm, which he bought. Turns out that his next door neighbor was also a chicken farmer. The neighbor came for a visit one day and said, "Chicken farming isn't easy. Tell you what. To help you get started, I'll give you 100 chickens." The new chicken farmer was thrilled. Two weeks later the new neighbor stopped by to see how things were going. The new farmer said, "Not too good. All 100 chickens died." The neighbor said, "Oh, I can't believe that. I've never had any trouble with my chickens. I'll give you 100 more." Another two weeks went by, and the neighbor stops in again. The new farmer says, "You're not going to believe this, but the second 100 chickens died too." Astounded, the neighbor asked, "what went wrong? What did you do to them?" Well, says the new farmer, "I'm not sure whether I'm planting them too deep or not far apart enough." | <urn:uuid:718b4119-f137-4d38-8eab-bb0af18e8278> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wqbe.com/fun-stuff/jokes/chicken-farmer | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990303 | 242 | 1.742188 | 2 |
American Indian Fairy Tales, by Margaret Compton, , at sacred-texts.com
p. 27 p. 28 p. 29
In those happy days there lived on that shore of the Big Sea Water, which is directly under the hunter's star, an Indian whom all his nation trusted, for there were none like him in courage, wisdom, and prudence. From his early childhood they had looked to him to do some great deed.
He had often mastered the grizzly bear
and the strong buffalo. Once he captured a buffalo ox, so large and so strong that a dozen arrows did not kill it, and from that day he was known as Mad Buffalo.
When the magic horns were needed for medicine for the people, Mad. Buffalo went forth in the Moon of Flowers and by cunning, not by magic, cut them from the head of the Great Horned Serpent. For this the people loved him and he sat with the oldest and the wisest of the tribe.
Their greatest trouble in those days was the mysterious thunder-bird, which was often seen flying through the air. It had black and ragged wings, and as it moved swiftly overhead they darkened all the earth. On moonlight nights no harm came; but when it passed in the daytime, or when the Moon-princess was journeying to see her brother, the Sun-prince, and her shining lodge was hidden by the beautiful red, the thunder-bird did evil to all who fell under its shadow.
Great curiosity existed as to its nest, but no one had dared to follow it, nor had any hunter discovered a place where it seemed likely that it could hide. Some thought it lived in a hollow tree, others that its home was in the sandstone caverns, but it had never been seen to alight.
Click to enlarge
“Pounced upon him, and lifted him into the air.”
One day in the winter, Mad Buffalo set out in search of food for his family. He had to travel to the lodge of the beavers across the Big Sea Water and far up the river. He trapped a fat beaver, slung it over his shoulder and started for home just as the full moon showed through the tree-tops.
While crossing the lake, when he was in sight of his own wigwam, a great shadow passed before him, shutting out all light. After it had gone he looked about him for the cause. The night was clear and the moon so bright that the hunter's star could be seen but faintly, but objects about him were as plain as in the day.
At first he saw nothing, for the thunderbird was directly over his head; but as it circled he caught sight of it. It made a swift movement downwards, pounced upon him and lifted him with all he had into the air.
He felt himself rising slowly till he was far above the earth, yet not so far as to prevent him seeing what was going on in the village. He could even see his own wigwam and his children in the doorway. They saw him and were terribly frightened. Their mother failed to comfort them, for they knew by heart all the
dreadful tales that were told of the thunder-bird. They themselves had seen the beautiful birch tree which they had often climbed, torn up by the roots and lie black and dead in the forest. And the oak tree where the warriors assembled was split to its base by this terrible creature. The yellow cedar whose boughs were used for the canoe that sailed on the Big Sea Water was scorched and blighted by the thunder-bird.
Mad Buffalo's heart did not fail him. He grasped his spear firmly and waited his chance to do battle with the monster. Faster and faster they went towards the north, straight across the Big Sea Water, rising higher and higher in the air.
At last they came to a great mountain where no trees grew. The top was a solid, bare, rugged rock, while the sides were formed of sharp boulders, with here and there a small patch of coarse grass and a few stunted furze bushes. In a cleft of the highest rock overhanging the water was the nest of the thunder-bird. It was made of the tendons of human beings, woven with their scalp locks and the feathers they had worn when living.
Still Mad Buffalo was not afraid. As the bird neared its home it croaked and
muttered, and the sound was echoed and re-echoed till the noise was deafening. Worse than this, the creature tried to dash him against the rock, driving him towards it with its wings; and when these struck him his flesh stung and smarted as if touched by coals of fire.
By violently wrenching himself and balancing his spear, he managed to escape uninjured. At length with one powerful blow the bird drove him into its nest. It then flew away.
Mad Buffalo was stunned, but only for a moment. On coming to himself he heard a low crackling noise of thunder and found that he was left to the mercy of a brood of wild, hungry young thunders, for whose food he had probably been brought. They began at once to pick at his head, uttering croaks like the old bird, only not so loud; but as they were many the sound was, if possible, more dreadful.
Seeing that they were young birds, Mad Buffalo supposed they would be helpless; and when the old bird was out of sight he ventured to fight them. Raising himself as well as he could, he struck at one with his spear. Thereupon they all set upon him, beating him with their wings and blinking at him with their long, narrow,
blood-red eyes, from which darted flashes of lightning that scorched his hands and face. In spite of the pain he fought bravely; though, when they struck him with their sharp wings, it was like the prick of a poisoned arrow or the sting of a serpent.
One by one their strength failed them and they were beaten down into the nest. Mad Buffalo took hold of the largest and strongest, wrung its neck and threw it over the precipice. On seeing this the others crept close together and did not offer to touch him again.
He seized another, pulled out its heart, threw the body away and spread the skin over the edge of the nest to dry. Then filling his pipe from a pouch of wolf skin suspended from his belt, he sat down to smoke. While resting he wrung the necks of the other birds and threw them into the Big Sea Water, saving only their hearts and claws.
When he had killed them all he took four short whiffs at his pipe, pointing as he did so to the kingdoms of the four winds, and asking them for assistance. Then he got inside the dry skin, fastened it round him with the claws he had saved, put the hearts of the young thunders on
his spear and started to roll down the side of the mountain.
As he tumbled from rock to rock the feathers of the skin flashed like fire-insects. When he was about half way down he straightened himself out and, lifting the wings with his arms, found that he could fly. He moved slowly at first, but was soon used to the motion and went as fast as the great bird could have done.
He crossed the Big Sea Water and winged his way over the forest until he came to the place from which he had been taken ten days before. There he alighted, tore off the bird's skin and started homewards.
His wife and children could hardly believe that it was he; for they supposed the young thunders had long ago picked his bones. He broiled the hearts of the birds, which crackled and hissed so that they could be heard a mile from the wigwam, but the meat was juicy and tender.
The old bird was never seen again in that part of the country. Hunters who came from the Rocky Mountains say that it built a nest on the highest peak, where it raised another brood that sometimes
came down towards the earth, despoiling the forests and the grain fields. But they flew higher than formerly, and from the day that Mad Buffalo fought them they never interfered with men. Their nest henceforth was made of the bones of the, mountain goat and the hair of his beard.
Now when Indian children hear the fire crackling they say it is the hearts of the young thunders; for all their nations know of the brave deed of Mad Buffalo. | <urn:uuid:a6f5cd88-ce22-4b3c-a88e-9e084d210c15> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sacred-texts.com/nam/ait/ait07.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.992234 | 1,775 | 2.8125 | 3 |
When I teach my environmental law and food safety law students how to go about ascertaining the meaning of implementing regulations, I tell them to start with the sections of the regulations devoted to definitions and exemptions. Quite frequently the most hard-fought controversies during the rulemaking process through which the agency promulgated the regulations were over the definitions and exemptions.
That certainly seems to be true in the case of the long-awaited Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) proposed “Standards for the Growing, Harvesting, Packing, and Holding of Produce for Human Consumption,” which the Obama Administration, with much fanfare, issued on January 4. According to FDA’s analysis of the economic impact of the proposal, almost 80 percent of the country’s produce growers will not have to meet the standards because they are not covered in the definitions or are otherwise exempt.
The proposed rule, which was required by the landmark Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, would for the first time establish legally enforceable standards for produce farmers. The standards set out requirements for sanitizing tools and equipment, for ensuring that agricultural water is safe and sanitary, for using animal-based fertilizers (e.g., compost) on food crops, for reducing contamination from domesticated and wild animals, and for training field workers and ensuring that they employ sound hygiene practices.
As my forthcoming book Freedom to Harm recounts, Congress enacted the Food Safety Modernization Act in response to a confluence of crises -- involving thousands of illnesses and many deaths caused by contaminated fresh produce -- brought on by a laissez faire governmental approach to food safety. FDA now estimates that contaminated produce causes 3.1 million illnesses each year.
The new standards are not especially stringent. Responding to several serious produce-caused outbreaks in the past several years, large food retailers like Walmart have insisted that the large produce growers with which they do business comply with FDA’s “good agricultural practices” (GAP) guidelines, and they have insisted that growers hire third-party (nongovernmental) inspectors to certify compliance with the GAPs. In the case of many, perhaps most large growers, the primary impact of the proposed standards would be to update the GAPs and make them mandatory. FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Foods and Veterinary Medicine, Michael Taylor, told Food Safety News that if growers are already complying with the GAPs and are getting “serious certifications” they should not have to change many of their practices.
At the same time, the standards will require the laggards to come up to speed. It is unclear how many laggards there are out there, but we may find out when they begin to howl during the public comment process. FDA estimates that the proposed standards will reduce the human health burden attributable to contaminated produce by 65 percent. This suggests that there may be quite a few laggards out there.
To the extent that laggards exist and to the extent that they do not persuade FDA to reduce the stringency of the standards, the regulations should have a beneficial impact on food safety.
Here is where the definitions and exemptions come in. It turns out that, by FDA’s own estimates, almost 80 percent of produce growers in America are not covered by the regulations or are otherwise exempt.
To some extent, this is required by the statute –- so much of the substance of the proposed rule was known in advance. In order to gain enough votes from farm-state senators to pass the food safety bill, the sponsors had to accept an amendment offered by Senator Jon Tester (D-Mont.) that offered a qualified exemption to farms if the average value of their food sales over the past three years was less than $500,000 and if more than 50 percent of their food sales were directly to qualified end-users. Qualified end-users were defined as direct consumers of the food regardless of location, or a restaurant or retail food establishment in the same state or not more than 275 miles from the farm.
In addition, farms are not covered by the regulations if the average annual monetary value of food sold during the previous three-year period was $25,000 or less.
Finally, FDA has exempted produce that is rarely consumed raw, such as beets, brussels sprouts, potatoes, sweet corn, and sweet potatoes. A farm that only grows such commodities is exempt from the regulations. This exemption was not compelled by the statute. It represents FDA’s judgment that some kinds of produce (a long list of which is provided in the proposed regulations) will be cooked to high enough temperatures to kill dangerous microorganisms before they are eaten.
FDA estimates that 149,425 of the country’s 190,000 produce growing farms will be either uncovered or exempt. That comes to just under 79 percent of all produce growers in the country.
To what extent will these exemptions pose a threat to consumer health? It is hard to say.
Nearly all packaged “prewashed” produce is grown on large farms that will not come within the exemptions, and much unpackaged produce that consumers purchase in national retail outlets is also grown on nonexempt farms. All of this produce should be covered by the standards. But there is a definite trend even in chain grocery stores to feature at least some locally grown produce, and much of it will probably come from uncovered or exempt farms.
What this means as a practical matter is that those of us who prefer to consume locally grown food cannot assume that the produce we purchase was produced in compliance with the new FDA standards. Yet, although the small farmers who supply local farmers’ markets and grocery stores are not required to comply with the new regulations, they may voluntarily comply. They should attempt to comply with the substantive provisions of the standards, especially the sanitation, safe water, fertilizer, and animal contamination requirements, even if they cannot afford to comply with all of the recordkeeping requirements.
The message to consumers is that they should thoroughly wash all locally grown foods that they plan to eat raw and should thoroughly cook all locally grown food that is not eaten raw.
Consumers should also be careful when it comes to foods purchased from large retailers that are not ordinarily consumed raw. They should assume that potatoes, corn, and the like have not been produced in compliance with the rules, and they should cook them well before eating them and thoroughly wash their hands after handling them.
In short, the new regulations should reduce the incidence of foodborne illnesses, but they will not relieve food preparers of their responsibility to exercise caution in dealing with raw produce.
Thomas McGarity, CPR Member Scholar; Endowed Chair in Admin. Law, University of Texas School of Law. Bio.
|1 As a young entrepreneur and small farmer that grows and sells produce in a "farm state", we take pride in the cleanliness and lack of petro based chemicals on our little family operation. The regulations the FDA has set forth will help with the food borne illnesses that have been in the news lately. The restrictions on who is affected by the coming regulations are a good thing if your in my shoes. If we were to be mandated to spend all the $$$$$ to pay the inspectors that are required, pay all the lab fees required, and invest all the hours that get put into all that mess, we would simply be out of business all together. And as far as the farmers and farms that will be affected. The operations that "pre-wash and package" their produce do fall into the group that will be affected. Fact is; if your SHIPPING produce that you have washed, sorted, and packaged you're doing at least 500K average sales in 3 years, otherwise you wouldn't have to capitol to buy the equipment, pay the workers, and invest all the time it takes to grow, wash, package, and ship your produce across the country.
-- Andrew Wheeler | <urn:uuid:9fa2c930-df23-4777-b2ac-86e7ffb62f93> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.progressivereform.org/CPRBlog.cfm?idBlog=3974A052-C5BB-190B-1293D7A70F09E972 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969897 | 1,627 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Learn about Viruses in this educational video from dizzo95.
Read the full transcript »
Male Speaker: Viruses are tiny parasites that reproduce inside the cells of a host. The host body provides the materials that the virus needs to survive and replicate. In humans, viral infections cause illnesses ranging from the common cold and flu to hepatitis and aids. Infection can be caused when virus particles called virions become active inside a host. The virions which consist of nucleic acid surrounded by a coat of protein transfer their nucleic acid to adjacent cells. This creates new proteins and new virions, which can start another cycle of infection and spread throughout the host. But viral infections can often be prevented by vaccination. A vaccine consists of a dead virus which causes the body's immune system to form appropriate antibodies. Antibodies are proteins found in the blood that attach themselves to any foreign substance and neutralize it. Medical researchers are constantly seeking new vaccines to fight disease-causing viruses. | <urn:uuid:bff7c50b-eccc-4fbd-8529-e0d03f647627> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.healthline.com/hlvideo-5min/learn-about-viruses-117576020 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948587 | 199 | 4.15625 | 4 |
Cattle in the chronic pen represent a failure in the system. Can the trickle be slowed?
Every time Bo Kizziar looks at the shipment schedule for the chronic pen, he knows two things:
- Somewhere, somehow, the system failed those calves.
- Because the system failed those calves, those calves failed Hansford County Feeders.
Neither thought is particularly pleasant to contemplate. But the truth of the matter, Kizziar admits, is he doesn’t have a good way of analyzing the systems he has in place to handle and manage chronics.
Kizziar is manager of the 40,000-head feedyard near Spearman, TX. In spite of his crew’s best efforts, chronics are still a part of their management headaches, taking a much larger proportion of his employees’ time and effort than their number indicates. In fact, Kizziar estimates that about 1% of the cattle that pass through his feedyard in a year’s time will end up in the chronic pen.
That number is both very small and way too big.
“Some part of our labor pool has to do something with them every day,” he says. “We try to provide as much TLC as we can – make sure the bunks and water troughs are clean, and provide dry bedding in bad weather so they have a comfort level that can be supportive in their struggle to survive.”
In his long career as an animal caretaker, he knows he can do no less. In his long career as a businessman, one glance at the closeouts from the chronic pen tells him he must do more. A railer brings from 10¢ to 50¢/lb. and walks onto the truck packing a pretty high vet bill. So, from several perspectives, Kizziar applies significant resources to reducing his chronics.
When pen riders find a sick animal, they pull it from the home pen and send it to the hospital pens. “Our lay vet identifies them as high-risk or low-risk, and that has a lot to do with their age, how far they came, if they came from a sale barn, etc.” Kizziar says.
Cattle identified as low-risk have one treatment regimen; high-risk cattle have another. “Because of what I know about their backgrounds, I’m not going to take any chances (with high-risk cattle), and I’m going to give them the big guns up front.”
Then the calves are rotated through five hospital pens on a daily basis. When high-risk cattle come in, they get a shot of a long-duration antibiotic on day one. “Every day, the lay vet will start on the top end, the longest day cattle. At that point, he makes a decision – does this calf go back to get restarted in the hospital rotation or does he go home?”
That empties the end pen. Then the lay vet moves the next pen into the empty pen. While he’s doing that, he’s evaluating the cattle to determine if any need additional time and treatment. “All through that process, we give our lay vets the authority to say this calf isn’t going to make it,” Kizziar says. “At any point in the process, we may send him to the chronic pen.”
Typically, however, a calf will be treated at least twice and possibly three times before they head to the chronic pen, where they’re given time to meet all drug withdrawal times before being sold as realizers. And there, upon occasion, an interesting thing happens.
“There might be 10% of the cattle that go through that process and hit the railer pen, and then they’ll just take off,” he says. Did those calves lie about their health status? Probably not. It just took them a little longer than the others to respond to the TLC and drug therapy.
“Now they’re probably going to be a couple of hundred pounds behind their home pen, but they indicated enough to us that they’re going to perform adequately,” he says.
There are a number of reason an animal becomes a respiratory chronic in a feedyard. It may be that, through genetics or management on the ranch or both, the animal never developed sufficient immunity to withstand the challenges cattle invariably face when they get to a feedyard. Or it may happen at the feedyard if a sick calf should run on its way to the hospital, the hospital is too crowded or the calf isn’t given the proper drug therapy initially, according to Tom Latta, a consulting feedyard veterinarian from Spearman, TX.
Latta’s definition of a respiratory chronic is based on weight gain and response to drug therapy. For example, a calf is treated with one long-duration antibiotic, then repulled in 10 days and treated with another.
“In 10 more days, if that calf’s not responding, I’d consider him a chronic,” Latta says. “Depending on management’s philosophy, I’d say that calf, as soon as it’s clear of the medicine, is ready to go to the railer pen or maybe a pasture situation where you give him a chance on his own.”
Latta thinks feedyards are gaining ground in rehabilitating chronics. A lot of that has to do with today’s more effective drug therapies.
While Kizziar agrees with that assessment, he’d like to cut the number even more. But, as a manager who has made liberal application of the mantra, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” he’s frustrated in his inability to design a system that prevents chronics in the first place.
“We have ways of analyzing closeouts to death. We have ways of analyzing feed quality. Getting all kinds of data and feeling good about the decisions we make. But we don’t today have a way of really tracking those cattle (chronics) and getting to the end of it,” he says.
Not that he doesn’t look at the data. “We look at first-time treats, retreats, chronics. But there’s really no way to look at that and say because this happened, this happened and this happened, next time we’re going to do it differently. There should be a way of measuring that, and it should lend itself to managing those chronics. But I don’t have one in place today. And I haven’t talked to anybody who has a real good handle on it,” Kizziar says.
Sure, there are visual indicators that a calf is responding to therapy – weight gain and general appearance chief among them. But Kizziar would like to be able to manage the situation so that a calf doesn’t become a chronic in the first place. While he thinks the long-duration drug therapies now available help that, he’s looking for more.
In the meantime, Latta says cattle feeders are doing a better job overall in their health programs, given that things are different now.
“We’re treating a lot of younger cattle, and pushing cattle harder nutritionally. I think, if we factor those things in, we’re doing better,” Latta says. “I would say, compared with 10-20 years ago, our overall death and chronic loss is no worse than it was then, and is probably better.” | <urn:uuid:35d69b06-6341-43ce-8958-c592e056a463> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://beefmagazine.com/mag/truth-lies-chronic-pen-0701 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968311 | 1,611 | 1.960938 | 2 |
LETTER OF INVITATION TO MADRID PEACE CONFERENCE
October 30, 1991
The breakup of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War reshaped the basic political order of the Middle
East. In an attempt to take advantage of this change, US Secretary of State James Baker made eight trips
to the region in the eight months following the Gulf War. The Madrid Invitation, inviting Israel, Syria,
Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians to an opening conference represents the result of this shuttle
diplomacy. The invitation, an outcome of compromises by all sides, details the structure of the Madrid
The following is the complete text of the invitation to the Madrid Peace Conference on October
30, 1991, jointly issued by the U.S. and the Soviet Union:
- An opening conference having no power to impose solutions
- Bilateral talks with the Arab states bordering Israel,
- Talks with the Palestinians on 5-year interim self-rule, to be followed by talks on the permanent status
- Multilateral talks on key regional issues, like refugees.
After extensive consultations with Arab states, Israel and the Palestinians, the United States and the
Soviet Union believe that an historic opportunity exists to advance the prospects for genuine peace
throughout the region. The United States and the Soviet Union are prepared to assist the parties to achieve
a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement, through direct negotiations along two tracks, between
Israel and the Arab states, and between Israel and the Palestinians, based on United Nations Security
Council Resolutions 242 and 338. The objective of this process is real peace.
Toward that end, the president of the U.S. and the president of the USSR invite you to a peace conference,
which their countries will co-sponsor, followed immediately by direct negotiations. The conference will be
convened in Madrid on October 30, 1991.
President Bush and President Gorbachev request your acceptance of this invitation no later than 6 P.M.
Washington time, October 23, 1991, in order to ensure proper organization and preparation of the
Direct bilateral negotiations will begin four days after the opening of the conference. Those parties who
wish to attend multilateral negotiations will convene two weeks after the opening of the conference to
organize those negotiations. The co-sponsors believe that those negotiations should focus on region-wide
issues of water, refugee issues, environment, economic development, and other subjects of mutual
The co-sponsors will chair the conference which will be held at ministerial level. Governments to be
invited include Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Palestinians will be invited and attend as part of a joint
Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. Egypt will be invited to the conference as a participant. The European
Community will be a participant in the conference, alongside the United States and the Soviet Union and
will be represented by its presidency. The Gulf Cooperation Council will be invited to send its secretary-
general to the conference as an observer, and GCC member states will be invited to participate in
organizing the negotiations on multilateral issues. The United Nations will be invited to send an observer,
representing the secretary-general.
The conference will have no power to impose solutions on the parties or veto agreements reached by them.
It will have no authority to make decisions for the parties and no ability to vote on issues of results. The
conference can reconvene only with the consent of all the parties.
With respect to negotiations between Israel and Palestinians who are part of the joint Jordanian-
Palestinian delegation, negotiations will be conducted in phases, beginning with talks on interim self-
government arrangements. These talks will be conducted with the objective of reaching agreement within
one year. Once agreed, the interim self-government arrangements will last for a period of five years;
beginning the third year of the period of interim self-government arrangements, negotiations will take
place on permanent status. These permanent status negotiations, and the negotiations between Israel and
the Arab states, will take place on the basis of Resolutions 242 and 338.
It is understood that the co-sponsors are committed to making this process succeed. It is their intention to
convene the conference and negotiations with those parties who agree to attend.
The co-sponsors believe that this process offers the promise of ending decades of confrontation and
conflict and the hope of a lasting peace. Thus, the co-sponsors hope that the parties will approach these
negotiations in a spirit of good will and mutual respect. In this way, the peace process can begin to break
down the mutual suspicions and mistrust that perpetuate the conflict and allow the parties to begin to
resolve their differences. Indeed, only through such a process can real peace and reconciliation among the
Arab states, Israel and the Palestinians be achieved. And only through this process can the peoples of the
Middle East attain the peace and security they richly deserve. | <urn:uuid:722e4402-5c86-4a36-bb5f-eb7ac09a9f07> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/guide/pages/madrid%20letter%20of%20invitation.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940061 | 1,023 | 1.96875 | 2 |
The California Department of Education on Thursday released its latest round of public school rankings, from one to 10, based on how well students performed on standardized tests they took more than a year ago.
The rankings show schools how they compare with others based on an annual composite score known as the Academic Performance Index, or API, which is based on a series of state tests. The original API scores for 2011 were reported late last summer; the scores that schools received this week simply reflect the latest changes to the state formula. This allows schools to make a more valid comparison between last year's scores and the new data expected to come out at the end of the summer.
The rankings are
Another ranking system, also published Thursday by the Department of Education, compares each school to 99 similar schools based on their demographics and educational challenges. The top 10 schools in that pool receive a ranking of 10, and the bottom 10 receive a one.
In Alameda County, 21 schools earned a 10 in both categories, including Lincoln Elementary in Oakland; Jefferson Elementary in Berkeley; Dublin High; Piedmont High; and the 790-student
In Contra Costa County, eight schools earned that double-10 distinction. Happy Valley Elementary in Lafayette, Sycamore Valley Elementary in San Ramon and Madera Elementary in El Cerrito were among them.
Leitch Principal Mary Liu Lee hadn't even seen the ratings by midafternoon Thursday; she'd spent the day visiting her teachers as they packed up their classrooms for the summer.
"It just fills you with pride," she said. "The kids, they really work hard and the teachers, too."
She added: "I'm going to write an email right now."
On the flip side, 15 schools in Contra Costa County and 33 in Alameda County fell in the bottom 10 percent in both categories -- the statewide rankings and when compared to similar schools. In Alameda County, 24 of them are Oakland schools, seven are in Hayward and two are in San Lorenzo.
Normally, schools receive these rankings, along with tweaked composite test scores, earlier in the spring, before or during state testing season. This time, many schools were out for the summer by the time the information was published.
State education department data analysts had extra work to do this year in adjusting the API scores, said Jenny Singh, administrator of academic accountability for the department. A new state regulation defines when students are "continuously enrolled" in a public school -- and therefore, when their scores should count in that school's results. Another establishes what to do with the scores of students who transfer midyear to alternative schools.
Before, local districts made those determinations themselves, Singh said. Now, it will be consistent from district to district.
The 2011 Base API report is posted on the California Department of Education's website: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/ap/apireports.asp. | <urn:uuid:fb776844-7500-422c-9a41-2d8a7d3fcc06> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.contracostatimes.com/lafayette/ci_20857378/california-department-education-releases-new-public-school-rankings | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970868 | 598 | 1.914063 | 2 |
Trina Grillo Retreat
15th Annual Trina Grill Public
Interest & Social Justice Law Retreat
“Social Justice: Innovation, Creativity,
On March 22 and 23, 2013,
the University of Washington School of Law will host the Trina Grillo Retreat,
an annual event that is co-sponsored by a consortium of twelve western law
schools, including USF, and the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT).
The Retreat provides a
unique opportunity for public interest and social justice-oriented law
students, faculty members, career counselors, administrators, activist lawyers,
and other interested persons to exchange viewpoints, explore current issues of
legal and social justice, discuss opportunities to engage in public-interest
projects or careers, and exchange information and share experiences with each
other. Details on the retreat including, schedule, and availability of funding
for attendance will be posted sometime in early February 2013.
Trina Grillo served as a source of inspiration to many law
students, professors, and public interest and social justice lawyers, and the
retreat held in her honor each year serves as a forum for practitioners,
students, and academics to discuss today's challenges to social justice
The Retreat embodies the
aspirations of Trina’s work against injustice in its many forms and toward
diversity and equality. Trina spent most of her life in Oakland, California.
The daughter of an Italian mother and a Black Cuban American father, she
started her teaching career in 1977 at UC Hastings and taught later at USF Law,
in the subject areas of constitutional law, torts, and mediation, while also
directing the academic support program. Her published writings encompass themes
of women, women of color, multiracialism, mediation, and inequality.
Find more information about Trina Grillo here. | <urn:uuid:75b9cd29-fe33-4bb7-8073-8a40b315ef96> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usfca.edu/law/trina_about/retreat/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941219 | 390 | 1.640625 | 2 |
National Pig Day was started in 1972 by Sisters Ellen Stanley and Mary Lynne Rave. According to Rave, the reason for the holiday is "to accord the pig its rightful, though generally unrecognized, place as one of man's most intellectual and domesticated animals."
How to Celebrate
If you are a teacher, talk to your class about pigs. If you own a deli, offer free bacon to your customers. You can also watch episodes of The Muppet Show with Miss Piggy and "Pigs in Space" or watch Looney Tunes cartoons with Porky Pig. If you have more time, watch Wilbur in Charlotte's Web or Babe in Babe. The Children's Zoo in Central Park, New York City, has been known to celebrate this day with "snort offs" during their annual National Pig Day Celebrations.
To honor this day we are featuring the 1976 Piggly Wiggly Draft Style Root Beer can. Piggly Wiggly is a supermarket chain that has been around for around 100 years. The stores are in the Southern and Midwestern United States. The name comes from the sight of seeing pigs struggling to get under a fence and the pig itself reminds me of Porky Pig in a paper hat.
Happy National Pig Day (3/1)!
Photo used by permission of CanMuseum.com | <urn:uuid:7389b35f-d670-44aa-b3aa-cfd03ff5d48c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bevreview.com/2013/03/01/can-holiday-national-pig-day-march-1/ | 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 | 0.95559 | 278 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Background on the United Kingdom’s Time Zone
Timeanddate.com gives a brief overview of the United Kingdom’s (UK) time zone and daylight saving time (DST).
The UK is on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) when it does not observe daylight saving time (DST). There is no offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) during the non-daylight saving period. The UK switches from GMT to British Summer Time (BST), which is UTC+1, when it starts its daylight saving schedule.
Daylight Saving Schedule
The UK observes daylight saving time (DST) as part of the European Union’s (EU) daylight saving schedule, which starts on the last Sunday of March each year when the clocks move one hour ahead from 1am (or 01:00) to 2am (02:00) local time. The clocks then move one hour back from 2am (02:00) to 1am (01:00) local time when DST ends on the last Sunday of October each year. Daylight saving time is commonly known as “summer time” or “British Summer Time” in the UK.
A Brief History of Time in the United Kingdom
Many sources state that that Great Britain was the first country to use standard time (uniform time for places in roughly the same longitude). It was the railways, and not the post office, that enforced clocks’ uniformity throughout Great Britain. There was a demand to use “British Time” throughout the country. Dr William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828) was credited with the original idea, which was popularized by Abraham Follett Osler (1808–1903). Railroad companies drew up their timetables and set their station clocks in accordance with Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
The first railway to adopt London time was the Great Western Railway in November 1840. Other railways followed suit, and by 1847 most (but not all) railways used London time. In 1847 the Railway Clearing House, an industry standards body, recommended that GMT be adopted at all stations as soon as the General Post Office permitted it. On December 1, 1847, the London and North Western Railway, as well as the Caledonian Railway, adopted London time in consequence of instructions from the General Post Office. It is presumed that many other railways followed suit, as they were listed as keeping GMT.
Many public clocks in Great Britain were set to GMT by the mid 19th century and by 1862, the great clock at Westminster – known today as Big Ben – was installed. Greenwich sent hourly time signals, with return signals twice daily. The clock was not controlled from Greenwich though. The last major holdout with regard to standardized time in Great Britain was the legal system, which stuck to local time for many years, leading to oddities such as polls opening at 08:13 (8.13am) and closing at 16:13 (4.13pm) during some election periods.
The legal system finally switched to GMT when the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act took effect. It received the Royal Assent on August 2, 1880. Thus, the standardized time that prevailed was finally enshrined in statute in 1880. Across the Atlantic from Great Britain some years later, standard time was introduced to the United States by the railroads in 1883.
Brief Daylight Saving History
In 1907, an English builder named William Willett campaigned to advance clocks at the beginning of the spring and summer months and to return to GMT in a similar manner in the autumn. He published a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight, outlining plans to encourage people out of bed earlier in summer by changing the time on the nation’s clocks. He spent the rest of his life fighting to get acceptance of his time-shifting scheme. However, Willett died of influenza before DST was implemented as law and put into practice.
The 1908 Daylight Saving Bill was the first attempt in the UK to move clocks forward one hour in summer. The idea was to provide more daylight hours after work for the training of the Territorial Army and for recreation, to reduce shunting accidents on the railways and to reduce expenditure on lighting. The House of Commons rejected the Bill.
During World War I in 1916, Germany introduced daylight saving in the summer, and countries including Austria, Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, Portugal, and Sweden followed suit. To save energy and help the war effort, the Summer Time Act 1916 advanced the clocks in the UK for one hour from 21 May until 1 October. The system proved to be popular so daylight saving time, or summer time, has always been adopted in the UK. However, there were periods, especially during World War II, when the start and end dates were altered or more substantial clock shifts were made. DST was known as “British Double Summer Time” in the UK in the summer months, and then “British Summer Time” in the winter months during World War II. “British Double Summer Time” also had different variations, including “Double Summer Time” and Double British Summer Time”.
From February 1968 to November 1971 the UK kept daylight saving time throughout the year mainly for commercial reasons, especially regarding time conformity with other European countries. Although some said it resulted in fewer road traffic accidents, others said that it was a disadvantage for children leaving homes in the dark mornings to attend school. The experiment was abandoned in 1972 because of its unpopularity, particularly in the north. The UK has since kept GMT in during the non-daylight saving period and BST when it observes daylight saving time.
DST All Year Round?
Many groups have called for the United Kingdom’s summer time schedule to be extended for the entire year, particularly in recent times. Some people believe that a “Single Double Summer Time” (SDST), synonymous with UTC+1 in the winter and UTC+2 in the summer, would mean less road accidents, more leisure time, and a boost to tourism and energy efficiency.
British MP Tim Yeo has campaigned for the UK to observe longer hours of sunlight in the afternoons throughout the year. He unveiled his Private Members Bill in October 2008 to tackle fuel poverty and energy consumption with the UK Energy Efficiency (Daylight) Act 2009. Mr Yeo invited other UK parliamentary members to support the bill as he believed that it would provide a practical solution to set up a panel to monitor climate change’s effects.
In 2010, the UK government considered the possibility of switching to SDST for a three-year trial period to help improve the tourism industry.
Push to Move Jersey to Central European Time
There has also been a push to change the time zone in Jersey, a British Crown dependency off the coast of France, to Central European Time (CET) during the winter months. However, there are no plans to change the time zone to CET.
Note: References to autumn, spring, summer and winter in this article relate to the seasons in the northern hemisphere. Also note that any mention of Great Britain in this article relates to what is now part of the present-day United Kingdom. Information courtesy to sources such as D. Howse, author of Greenwich Time and the Longitude, M. Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, and the UK’s National Maritime Museum.
- Time Zone News
- Daylight Saving Time
- List of countries that observe Daylight Saving Time in 2013
- Time Zone Abbreviations
- The World Clock – Current time all over the world
- Personal World Clock
- Meeting Planner
- Time Zone Converter
- Event Time Announcer/Fixed Time – Show local times worldwide for your event. | <urn:uuid:b3688a3d-81d9-44bc-8421-bd7e8ea22e4f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.timeanddate.com/time/uk/time-zone-background.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960247 | 1,603 | 3.75 | 4 |
|Mitosis Lab||SUPER VLB|
In telophase, the elongation of cells that began in anaphase continues. Two new nucleoli and nuclear envelopes form and the chromatin fibers from each chromosome uncoil inside them. Finally, the mitotic spindles disappear and mitosis is finished.
Cytokinesis is not a part of mitosis, yet is needed for the replication of the cell and typically happens during telophase. In animal cells, the cytoplasm develops a cleavage furrow running along the cell. At the furrow are microfilaments made up of the protein actin which helps it contract. The furrow continues to contract and deepen the furrow untill eventually the parent cell is pinched in two. The process is different in plant cells, however, because they contain a cell wall. First, membrane-enclosed vesicles containing cell wall materiel collect in the middle of the parent cell. Then, the vesicles fuse, forming a cell plate. The cell plate grows outward with the addition of more vesicles untill it fuses with the plasma membrane, where the parent cell splits into two daughter cells.
Sidwell Main | Science Home | Biology Home | Super VLB
Questions and comments should be sent to firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:21b427b7-4644-4710-8e7f-420dd3d97e5f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://classic.sidwell.edu/us/science/vlb/mitosis/telophase.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913303 | 279 | 3.6875 | 4 |
January 19, 2009 marked the bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth. Born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts, Poe had an older brother and younger sister. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and his mother died a year later of consumption. Only three years old, Poe moved in with the John Allan family as a foster child, but never adopted.
Although his early life was a struggle, he started writing poetry at an early age. He published his first work of poetry in 1827 at his own expense and with little notice. After his brother’s death in 1831, he seriously attempted to live by his writing. Although financially challenged, he not only continued with his poetry, but also began writing fiction. He sold a few stories and wrote his only drama during this time. In 1833, a Baltimore paper awarded Poe a prize for his short story MS. Found in a Bottle.
His work started drawing attention and in 1835, he became an assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richland, Virginia, a position he held for the next 18 months. During his tenure, its circulation dramatically increased. Privately, in 1835 he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia.
In 1841, in serial form he published The Murders in the Rue Morgue introducing the first fictional detective, Auguste C. Dupin. He followed with two more Dupin stories in The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842-43) and The Purloined Letter (1844-45). The Mystery of Marie Roget was a fictional account based on a real life situation.
Using forensic detail, his detective stories were forerunners of the Sherlock Holmes style of detection and analysis. He created the famous locked room mystery style, credited as the father of the modern detective story. After the three Dupin stories, he moved on to study the criminal mind and began writing psychological thrillers. He published The Raven and Other Poems in 1845. The Raven became an instant hit with the public.
While living in New York, his wife died of TB in 1847. After her death, he began drinking heavily and continued a downward spiral until his death. Poe died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 40 on October 7, 1849 in Baltimore.
During his career, the prolific writer was a well-respected literary critic and essayist contributing to a number of publications as he also continued writing fiction, mostly in the gothic, horror, crime, and detective genres. The Mystery Writers of America named their award for excellence, the Edgar award, after Poe. His science fiction stories influenced such writers as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
Throughout his adult life, Edgar Allan Poe created numerous works that gained him a popularity he never realized during his lifetime. Although he struggled financially, he challenged and enhanced the literary world until his premature death. | <urn:uuid:cd03b4ad-6bb8-4d57-aa5c-d8ffa82c6f56> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bellaonline.com/ArticlesP/art14620.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987599 | 593 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Per the AFP Newswire
, London's Wellcome Collection
has just acquired a new sculpture by Luke Jerram
, which depicts the H1N1 virus (or "swine flu") in microbiological detail rendered in hand-blown glass—Jerram has done similar work with smallpox, HIV, E. coli and SARS. The piece will travel to Tokyo's Mori Art Museum
to be included in an exhibition entitled "Medicine and Art" before returning to London.
No word yet on whether or not the piece will come to the States, but as you'll remember from how quickly the virus moves, it seems likely. And it wouldn't be the first time an exquisite object representing a potent symbol of irrational terror made waves. Remember this thing? (CultureMonster) | <urn:uuid:a9e7e627-231d-40e2-b65c-5e2fc44a4af5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2009/09/21/swine-flu-now-just-a-beautiful-glass-model | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945387 | 162 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Ray Kurzweil's people sent me a copy of his book The Singularity is Near quite a while ago when it first came out. I kept meaning to write about it, but several things kept interfering. One of the things was the book itself.
I'm of two minds about Kurzweil and the worldview he represents. As many will know, he's about as much of a technological optimist as it's possible to be, and I have a lot of that outlook myself. But I wonder - does it extend to my own field of research? More generally, and more disturbingly, am I only optimistic about the areas whose details I don't know very well?
These questions came up again when I read a recent op-ed by Kurzweil in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It's a good summary of his thinking, and it includes this paragraph:
"The new paradigm is to understand and reprogram our biology. The completion of the human genome (our genetic code) project three years ago is now allowing us to do that. This process is also exponential: The amount of genetic data we are able to sequence (decode) has doubled every 10 months, while the price for decoding each gene base pair drops by half in the same time frame (from $10 per base pair in 1990 to less than a penny today). For example, it took us 15 years to sequence HIV, yet we sequenced the SARS virus in only 31 days, and can now sequence a virus in just a few days."
That, to me, is a mixture of accurate information, reasonable optimism . . .and unreasonable assertions. Yes, we're sequencing things faster than ever before, and part of that increase comes through computational advances, which are a ferocious driver of everything they concern. But it's a very long leap from that to saying that such sequencing is allowing us to "reprogram our biology". Reading the DNA letters quickly does not, unfortunately, grant us an equally speedy understanding of what they mean. And we shouldn't forget that sequences are only a part of biological understanding, a realization that the genomics boom of the late 1990s drove home very forcefully and expensively.
Then we come to this:
"Being able to decode the human genome allows us to develop detailed models of how major diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, progress, and gives us the tools to reprogram those processes away from disease. For example, a technique called RNA interference allows us to turn unhealthy genes off. New forms of gene therapy are also allowing us to add healthy new genes. And we can turn on and off enzymes, the workhorses of biology. Pfizer Inc.'s cholesterol-lowering drug Torcetrapib, for example, turns off one specific enzyme that allows atherosclerosis, the cause of almost all heart attacks, to progress. Phase II FDA trials showed it was effective in preventing heart disease, so Pfizer is spending a record $1 billion on the phase III trials. And that's just one example of thousands of this "rational drug design" approach now under way."
Oh, dear. Let's take these in order. First, being able to decode the human genome does not allow us to develop detailed models of how major diseases progress. It allows us to begin to think about doing that, and to be, for the most part, mistaken again and again. Many diseases have a genetic component, or two, or a thousand, but we don't understand them yet, nor their incredibly tangled relationships with development and environment. You'd think we'd know the genetic components of diabetes or schizophrenia, but we don't, and it's not for lack of trying. And as for the diseases for which the genetic component is less important, the sequencing of the human genome has been a non-event.
And yes, there is a highly interesting technique called RNA interference which can turn "unhealthy genes" off. It works quite well (although not invariably) in a glass tube or a plastic dish. A plastic dish, that is, in which you have carefully cultered cells in which you have carefully determined the presence of the gene of interest. And for many interesting conditions, you first need to find your gene, for which see above. Moving out of the cell culture labs, it should be noted that RNAi has significant hurdles to overcome before it can do anything in human beings at all, and may (like its forerunner, antisense DNA) still be destroying venture capital twenty years from now. Readers of this site once voted it the currently hyped technology most likely to prove embarrassing.
As for new forms of gene therapy allowing us to add healthy new genes, well, that's another hope that I'd like to see fulfilled. But there have been a number of disturbing and fatal complications along the way, from which the whole gene therapy field is still trying to recover. For Kurzweil to leave that sentence in the present tense, in the sense of this-is-happening-right-now, is putting it rather hopefully.
And yes, we can turn off enzymes. Some of them. This has nothing to do with gene sequencing or RNA interference, though, or any other particularly new technologies - enzymes as drug targets go back decades, and enzyme inhibitors as drugs go back centuries. Of course, you need to find your enzyme and make sure that it's relevant to the disease, and find a compound that inhibits it without inhibiting fourteen dozen other things, but that's how I earn my living.
And yes, Pfizer hopes to make all kinds of money off torcetrapib, but I'm not aware that they used a "rational drug design" strategy. In the industry, we tend to use that term, when we can use it with straight faces, to mean drug design that's strongly influenced by X-ray crystal structures and computational modeling, but I don't think that this was the case for torcetrapib. Kurzweil seems to be using the phrase to mean "drugs targeted against a specific protein", but that's been the dominant industry mode since the days of bell-bottoms. And if there are thousands of programs comparable in size torcetrapib, they must be taking place on other planets, because there's not enough drug development money here on Earth for them.
Finally, the end of the paragraph. Where does all this lead? Later in Kurzweil's article, he says:
"So what does the future hold? By 2019, we will largely overcome the major diseases that kill 95 percent of us in the developed world, and we will be dramatically slowing and reversing the dozen or so processes that underlie aging."
And here, I think, is where I can clearly differentiate my thinking from his. As opposed to a pessimist's viewpoint, I agree that we can overcome the major diseases. I really do expect to put cancer, heart disease, the major infections, and the degenerative disorders in their place. But do I expect to do it by 20-flipping-19? No. I do not. I should not like to be forced to put a date on when I think we'll have taken care of the diseases that are responsible for 95% of the mortality in the industrialized world. But I am willing to bet against it happening by 2019, and I will seriously entertain offers from anyone willing to take the other side of that bet.
Why am I so gloomily confident? For us to have largely overcome those conditions by 2019, odds are excellent that these new therapies will have to have been discovered no later than 2014 or so, just to have a chance of being sure that they work. That gives us seven years. It isn't going to happen.
So I'm back to wondering: am I a technological optimist at all? I must be, because I still think that science is the way out of many of our problems. But am I only optimistic about things of which I'm ignorant? That's probably part of my problem, yes, painful though it is to admit. Am I willing to be as optimistic as Ray Kurzweil? Not at all. . . | <urn:uuid:7c8d0c97-4c02-4feb-9224-7210c421c9f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2006/08/09/ray_kurzweils_future.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968685 | 1,674 | 2.296875 | 2 |
The millenary session of the Hungarian Parliament in 1896 passed a law whereby art collections previously held in different institutions were to be unified and placed in the newly-established Museum of Fine Arts.
On the basis of a competitive tender, Albert Schickedanz and Fülöp Herzog were commissioned to design and construct the building, which opened in 1906. The gallery displaying original paintings was placed in the first floor halls of the neo-classical building; however, only plaster casts were available to illustrate a complete history of European sculpture. It was for these life-size copy sculptures that the Doric, Ionic, Romanesque, Renaissance and Baroque halls on the ground floor were designed, imitating the styles of individual periods of art history. However, as the number of original works increased, so the plaster sculptures were forced out of the building (the only one remaining, a copy of the group in the pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, can be seen on the tympanum above the Museum’s main entrance), and the ground floor galleries are now also used to display original works of art. On the ground floor are the exhibitions of the Classical Antiquities and of 19th century paintings and sculptures; the Renaissance hall, where in addition to Renaissance frescoes and fountains items from the Sculpture Collection may be seen; the Prints and Drawings Gallery with temporary exhibitions; and the Marble and Baroque halls. Due to the continuous renovation work on the building, individual permanent exhibitions of the Old Masters’ Gallery may temporarily be moved.
Find and book your accommodation in Budapest with the Budapest Hotel Service! Choose from our selection of hotels, pensions, hostels, apartments and other cheap accommodation in Budapest Hungary. Budapest hotel reservation with instant confirmation at discount internet rates! | <urn:uuid:934437e5-d84f-423d-b281-306a759cc09d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.budapest.com/city_guide/culture/museums/museum_of_fine_arts.en.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955368 | 369 | 2.109375 | 2 |
Compiled and edited by Charles J. Kappler. Washington : Government Printing Office, 1904.
|Cession of lands.|
|Home provided for said tribe.|
|Payment of $350,000 by United States.|
|To chiefs, for preparation for removal.|
|To mixed bloods.|
|Expenses of removal.|
|Subsistence after removal.|
|Manual-labor school, mill, etc., in new country.|
|Person to direct mill.|
|Blacksmith shop, iron, etc.|
|Individual improvements on ceded land.|
|Balance in ten annual installments.|
|Sum invested in stocks under treaty of 1836, how applied.|
|Exploration of new country.|
|Deficit in goods delivered in 1837 to be made up.|
|To remain on ceded lands for two years.|
|Robert Grignon to preempt certain land.|
|Treaty to be binding as soon as ratified by the President and Senate.|
Articles of a treaty made and concluded at Lake Pow-aw-hay-kon-nay, in the State of Wisconsin, on the eighteenth day of October, one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight, between the United States of America, by William Medill, a commissioner duly appointed for that purpose, and the Menomonee tribe of Indians, by the chiefs, headmen, and warriors of said tribe.
It is stipulated and solemnly agreed that the peace and friendship now so happily subsisting between the Government and people of the United States and the Menomonee Indians shall be perpetual.
The said Menomonee tribe of Indians agree to cede, and do hereby cede, sell, and relinquish to the United States all their lands in the State of Wisconsin, wherever situated.
In consideration of the foregoing cession, the United States agree to give, and do hereby give, to said Indians for a home, to be held as Indians' lands are held, all that country or tract of land ceded to the said United States by the Chippewa Indians of the Mississippi and Lake Superior, in the treaty of August 2, 1847, and the Pillager band of Chippewa Indians, in the treaty of August 21, 1847, which may not be assigned to be assigned to the Winnebago Indians, under the treaty with that tribe of October 13, 1846, and which is guarantied to contain not less than six hundred thousand acres.
In further and full consideration of said cession, the United States agree to pay the sum of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, at the several times, in the manner, and for the purposes following, viz:
To the chiefs, as soon after the same shall be appropriated by Congress as may be convenient, to enable them to arrange and settle the affairs of their tribe preparatory to their removal to the country set apart for and given to them as above, thirty thousand dollars.
To such person of mixed blood, and in such proportion to each as the chiefs in council, and a commissioner to be appointed by the President, shall designate and determine, and as soon after the appropriation thereof as may be found practicable and expedient, forty thousand dollars.
To such manner and at such times as the President shall prescribe, in consideration of their removing themselves, which they agree to do, without further cost or expense to the United States, twenty thousand dollars.
In such manner and at such times as the President shall prescribe, in consideration of their subsisting themselves the first year after their removal, which they agree to do, without further cost or expense on the part of the United States, twenty thousand dollars.
To be laid out and applied, under the direction of the President, in the establishment of manual-labor school, the erection of a grist and saw mill, and other necessary improvements in their new country, fifteen thousand dollars.
To be laid out and applied, under the direction of the President, in procuring a suitable person, to attend and carry on the said grist and saw mill for a period of fifteen years, nine thousand dollars.
To be laid out and applied, under the direction of the President, in continuing and keeping up a blacksmith's shop, and providing the usual quantity of iron and steel for the use and benefit of said tribe, for a period of twelve years, commencing with the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven, and when all provision for blacksmiths' shops under the treaty of 1836 shall cease, eleven thousand dollars.
To be set apart, applied, and distributed under the direction of the President, in payment of individual improvements of the tribe upon the lands above ceded to the United States, five thousand dollars.
And the balance, amounting to the sum of two hundred thousand dollars, to be paid over to the tribe, as Indian annuities are required to be paid, in ten equal annual instalments, commencing with the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven, and when their annuities or annual instalments under the treaty of 1836 shall have ceased.
It is stipulated and agreed, that the sum now invested in stocks, under the Senate's amendment to the treaty of 1836, with the interest due thereon at this time, shall be and remain invested, under the direction of the President, and that the interest hereafter arising therefrom shall be disposed of as follows: that is to say, so much thereof as may be necessary to the support and maintenance of the said manual-labor school, and other means of education, and the balance be annually paid over in money as other annuities, or applied for the benefit and improvement of said tribe, as the President, on consultation with the chiefs, may, from time to time, determine.
To enable the said Indians to explore and examine their new country, and as an inducement to an early removal thereto, it is agreed that the United States will pay the necessary expenses of a suitable delegation, to be selected for that purpose, under the direction of the President.
It is alleged that there were less goods delivered to the said Indians at the annuity payment of 1837 than were due and required to be paid and delivered to them under the stipulations of their treaties
with the United States then in force; and it is therefore agreed that the subject shall be properly investigated, and that full indemnity shall be made to them for any loss which they may be shown to have sustained.
It is agreed that the said Indians shall be permitted, if they desire to do so, to remain on the lands hereby ceded for and during the period of two years from the date hereof, and until the President shall notify them that the same are wanted.
It is stipulated that Robert Grignon, who has erected a saw-mill upon the Little Wolf River, at his own expense, for the benefit and at the request of said Indians, shall have the right of a preemptor to the lands upon which such improvements are situated, not exceeding in quantity on both sides of said river one hundred and sixty acres.
This treaty to be binding on the contracting parties as soon as it is ratified by the President and Senate of the United States.
In testimony whereof, the said William Medill, Commissioner as aforesaid, and the chiefs, headmen, and warriors of the said Menomonee tribe of Indians, have hereunto set their hands and seals, at the place and on the day and year aforesaid.
Signed and sealed in the presence of us—
Albert G. Ellis, Sub-Agent,
Chas. A. Grignon, U. S. Interpreter,
F. J. Bonduel, Missionary Priest among the Menomonee Indians.
M. L. Martin,
P. B. Grignon,
A. G. Grignon,
John B. Jacobs.
(To each of the names of the Indians is affixed his mark.)
John B. Dube,
John G. Kittson,
Louis G. Porhir,
O. W. F. Bruce. | <urn:uuid:9399343c-7c2f-4248-bdd4-bb2a74a782dd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://digital.library.okstate.edu/Kappler/Vol2/treaties/men0572.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948776 | 1,718 | 2.828125 | 3 |
What is universal design?
Universal design is the process of creating products that are accessible to people with a wide range of abilities, disabilities, and other characteristics. Universally designed products accommodate individual preferences and abilities; communicate necessary information effectively (regardless of ambient conditions or the user's sensory abilities); and can be approached, reached, manipulated, and used regardless of the individual's body size, posture, or mobility. Application of universal design principles minimizes the need for assistive technology, results in products compatible with assistive technology, and makes products more usable by everyone, not just people with disabilities.
Typically, products are designed to be most suitable for the average user. In contrast, products that are designed according to principles of universal design are designed to be usable by everyone, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design (Connell et al., The Principles of Universal Design).
Universal design typically results in product features that benefit a variety of users, not just people with disabilities. For example, sidewalk curb cuts, designed to make sidewalks and streets accessible to those using wheelchairs, are today often used by kids on skateboards, parents with baby strollers, and delivery staff with rolling carts. Similarly, a door that automatically opens when someone approaches it is more accessible to everyone, including small children, workers whose arms are full, and people using walkers or wheelchairs.
At the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University, a group of architects, product designers, engineers, and environmental design researchers established the following set of principles of universal design to provide guidance in the design of environments, communications, and products (Connell et al., 1997). They can be applied to academic environments, communications, and products.
- Equitable Use. The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities. For example, a website that is designed so that it is accessible to everyone, including people who are blind, employs this principle.
- Flexibility in Use. The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities. An example is a museum that allows a visitor to choose to read or listen to the description of the contents of a display case.
- Simple and Intuitive Use. Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user's experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level. Science lab equipment with control buttons that are clear and intuitive is a good example of an application of this principle.
- Perceptible Information. The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user's sensory abilities. An example of this principle being employed is when television programming projected in noisy public areas like academic conference exhibits includes captions.
- Tolerance for Error. The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions. An example of a product applying this principle is an educational software program that provides guidance when the user makes an inappropriate selection.
- Low Physical Effort. The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with a minimum of fatigue. Doors that are easy to open by people with a wide variety of physical characteristics demonstrate the application of this principle.
- Size and Space for Approach and Use. Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of the user's body size, posture, or mobility. A flexible science lab work area designed for use by students with a wide variety of physical characteristics and abilities is an example of employing this principle.
For more information on universal design, explore The Center for Universal Design in Education. Additional examples of universal design can be found in the DO-IT publications Applications of Universal Design and Universal Design of Instruction: Definition, Principles, and Examples. For more information about universal design as it applies to the web, consult the Knowledge Base article How does accessible web design benefit all web users?
Last update or review: January 22, 2013 | <urn:uuid:1b148157-aba7-4cab-84c1-56385bf127fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.washington.edu/doit/Board/articles?127 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923615 | 792 | 4.15625 | 4 |
Sone Stanley Ngole Ajang; Chiek Khan Derek; Njoya Mbaimoun Nji Bertrand , pp. 51. MAM/Sektionen för Management, 2010.
Corporate Social Responsibility has been a very topical issue in contemporary times, but an in-depth understanding of this salient concept is quite questionable to many including actors in corporate spheres. This we could attribute to ignorance or limited research work to propagate what corporate social responsibility means and the benefits it may bring forth if properly adhered to by corporations.
This paper thus has as fundamental focus to clarify and enhance the
understanding of corporate social responsibility as well as the extent to which corporations adhere to the ever increasing demands emanating from stakeholders (consumers, governments, employees, environmental activists etc) for socially responsibility. The extent to which corporate social responsibility is a valid criterion to judge the actions of corporations is also of special interest in this research work. This paper adopts a theoretical and an empirical approach to provide a better understanding of corporate social responsibility, while a broad based exploratory case study approach is used to investigate the activities of some selected multinationals across the globe .We used three management responsibility categories technique to bridge our findings to our conclusions that the management style of multinationals examined fall under the immoral category associated highly with socially irresponsible companies which typically do not consider stakeholder interests. The paper unravels the devastative effects of their activities on consumers, the environment, employees, and local communities whose interest and well being they should enhance from the corporate social responsibility perspective. The paper concludes with some limitations encountered in this study and suggestions for further research. | <urn:uuid:7517e7b5-ee83-45c8-8944-61b07d91ce0f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bth.se/fou/cuppsats.nsf/bbb56322b274389dc1256608004f052b/87306a42915419cac12576cc00570a6a!OpenDocument | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938024 | 330 | 2.03125 | 2 |
The following are clipped from a longer article from the Discovery
I am somewhat skeptical of some of the writer's claims.
Reviewing Monkey Trial, a PBS documentary.
By Benjamin Wiker, fellow at the Discovery Institute
February 16-17, 2002
"Sunday, February 17 at 9:00 PBS viewers will be treated to an
historical account of the famous Scopes Trial called Monkey
Trial. ... it is unlikely that PBS will cover the entire dark side of
this "epic event of the twentieth century." From their advance
advertisements, it seems that, for the most part, viewers will
receive the standard black and white account of the Scopes Trial,
with William Jennings Bryan and the townsfolk leading the cause
for foolish faith and the forces of darkness, and John Scopes and
Clarence Darrow leading the cause for sweet reason and the
There is an overlooked source of darkness at the trial that is well
worth bringing into the light, the very high-school biology
textbook at issue in the trial, George William Hunter's A Civic
Biology. ... Simply put, the textbook which John Scopes was using
offensively racist and blatantly eugenic, and the racism and
eugenics were both part and parcel of Hunter's presentation of
Darwin's theory of evolution.
... The eugenic moral was clear. "Hundreds of families such as
those [Jukes] described above exist today, spreading disease,
immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to
society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or
plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families
have become parasitic on society. .. They take
from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true
This is what Scopes was teaching his students down at Dayton. So
much for the forces of reason and light.
(note from JWB -- I understand that Scopes actually never taught a
biology class -- he simply agreed to be the test case).
Wiker goes on to write: "While many
read (or at least, have heard of) Darwin's Origin of Species, few
know of his Descent of Man, where he applies the principles of
evolution directly to human beings. And guess what? Darwin
was a racist and a proponent of eugenics, and both were rooted
squarely in his account of evolution. ... ."
- Mr. Wiker lectures in science and theology at Franciscan
University and is the author of the upcoming Moral Darwinism:
How We Became Hedonists.
I clip only about 10% of the article, which was sent to me by a fellow
ASAer who apparently very much approves of it. The article in its
entirely is, I understand, on the website of the Discovery Institute, an
organization I once had high hopes for.
John Burgeson (Burgy)
(science/theology, quantum mechanics, baseball, ethics,
humor, cars, God's intervention into natural causation, etc.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 18 2002 - 15:32:56 EST | <urn:uuid:582d7396-f178-48ea-b696-aa933305f3c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www2.asa3.org/archive/asa/200202/0453.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95354 | 674 | 2.234375 | 2 |
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Boycott the Elections! - Leaflet of the Communist Party of America, 1920
It is the duty of every class-conscious worker in America to boycott the coming elections. A worker’s vote cast for any of the parties or their candidates standing for election — is a vote for reaction or reform! Whether it be the Republican Party and Harding or the Democratic Party and Cox — whether it be the Farm Labor Party and Christensen, the Socialist Party and Debs, or the Socialist Labor and Cox — a worker’s vote cast for any of these parties or their candidates IS A VOTE TO PERPETUATE THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM BASED UPON WAGE SLAVERY and the ROBBERY OF YOUR CLASS. IT IS A VOTE TO STRENGTHEN THE CAPITALIST GOVERNMENT — BY MEANS OF WHICH THE WORKING CLASS IS KEPT IN SUBJECTION BY LIES, FRAUD, DECEPTION, FORCE, AND VIOLENCE.
Do you workers want to perpetuate your own class slavery? Do you want to maintain and strengthen the capitalist government which has shown by its every act that it is nothing but the tool of the capitalist class and acts against the working class every time?
Then cast your vote in the coming elections! If you believe in capitalist wars in which the workers are called upon to lay down their lives for the profit of the master class — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in the high cost of living — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in being LOCKED OUT BY the BOSS — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in being clubbed and shot by the police and soldiers of the capitalist government — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in lynching — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in deportation of radical workers — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in NATIONWIDE RAIDS UPON REVOLUTIONARY WORKING CLASS ORGANIZATION — vote in the coming elections!
If you believe in DESTROYING SOVIET RUSSIA — vote in the coming elections!
If you believe in supporting REACTIONARY POLAND against the free workers and peasants’ government of Russia — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in sending arms, ammunition, and supplies to the enemies of Soviet Russia — vote in the coming elections!
If you believe in perpetuating prostitution, crime, child labor, and the thousand-and-one economic evils from which the masses in this country are suffering — vote in the coming elections!
A vote cast in the coming elections for any political party now in the field — is a vote in favor of the capitalist class and against the working class! The Republican and Democratic parties stand openly for the capitalist class — whose economic interests they represent. The Farm Labor Party stands for Government Ownership and Reform — which leads to State Capitalism — strengthens the capitalist system and keeps the working class chained in wage-slavery. The Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party pretend they are for the abolition of capitalism and the emancipation of the workers from wage-slavery, but actually, by adopting wrong tactics support the lies and deception of capitalist “democracy” and help to fasten these lies upon the workers — thus aiding the capitalist class in preventing the workers from taking independent class action for their own emancipation. These reform parties fool the workers by telling them that the capitalist system can be abolished PEACEFULLY. This is a lie! AN OUTRAGEOUS, DAMNABLE LIE! The capitalist system cannot be abolished peacefully — whether by the ballot box or any other method.
The present capitalist government is nothing but the concealed dictatorship of the capitalist class. Its army, navy, courts, police, bureaucracy, schools, press, church, etc. are the instruments through which the capitalist class perpetuate the lies of capitalist “democracy” and club and shoot you into submission when you wake up and attempt to resist their domination!
Every intelligent worker knows that so long as the capitalist class owns and controls the organs of publicity, of teaching and moulding the minds of the workers — the workers cannot free themselves.
Every intelligent worker also knows that no capitalist class ever gave up its power without a violent struggle. Look across at Europe and see how the ruling classes are striving by every possible means to keep the workers down! See how the German capitalist class combines with “yellow” Socialist to crush every uprising of the German workers! See how the Hungarian capitalist class, with the assistance of the “yellow” Socialist, destroys the workers organization, throws them into jails, places them against the wall to face firing squads, shoots, hangs, and slays without mercy!
See how the French capitalist class tried to destroy the workers organizations! How they suppress the revolts of their soldiers who are called upon to fight in Russia, Siberia, and Africa and who refuse — see how they shoot the workers down in strikes or demonstrations! Look at bloody England! One hundred thousand troops, fully armed, are sent into Ireland to suppress the Irish revolt. Thousands of soldiers are busy shooting defenseless Indian natives whose only crime is that they desire freedom from the rule of Britain. In Arabia, Turkey, wherever English colonies are rising up against the merciless rule of England — the English capitalist class uses FORCE to crush them!
And when the English workers themselves, who are beginning to think, act, make up their minds to destroy the capitalist government, the English capitalist class will use its troops and machine guns against them no less readily than it uses them against the natives of the colonies.
In Japan, Italy, Finland, everywhere the same thing occurs. Do you American workers believe that the American capitalist class is more tenderhearted than the European capitalist class?
Forget it! The American capitalist class is the richest, most powerful and reactionary class in the world. Just look at the history of the class struggle in the United States. At every step in the struggle of the workers to better their conditions the capitalist class and its government met them with persecution, repression, and oppression unequaled in all history. Homestead — Ludlow — Calumet — West Virginia — Paterson — Lawrence — McKees Rock — Seattle — Butte — these are only a few of the tragic milestones that mark the struggle of the American working class for BREAD — JUST BREAD! Or take the Longshoremen Strike — the Coal Strike — the Steel Strike — with its injunction, martial law, raids, deportations, and arrests — does this look as if the American capitalist class will ever give up its power without a bitter and violent struggle?
FORGET THIS FOOLISH AND CRIMINAL IDEA OF A PEACEFUL CHANGE! AWAY WITH THESE REFORM PARTIES THAT PREACH SUCH RIDICULOUS IDEAS TO THE WORKERS!
IT IS TIME THAT YOU AMERICAN WORKERS WAKE UP TO THE REAL FACTS!
THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS OF RUSSIA ARE SHOWING THE WAY! THE EUROPEAN WORKERS ARE LEARNING FAST FROM SOVIET RUSSIA AND WILL SOON THROW THE WHOLE GANG OF ROBBERS WITH THEIR “YELLOW” Socialist apologists and their capitalist governments into the garbage-heap!
Learn from your Russian and European brothers! The Communist Party of America — the only revolutionary working class political party — is the only party that stands for the emancipation for the working class from wage slavery! The Communist Party advocates mass action of the armed workers in an armed insurrection and civil war as the ONLY means of conquering political power for the workers, destroying the capitalist government, and establishing a Workers’ Government — A Soviet Government — the dictatorship of the Proletariat — as the ONLY MEANS OF ABOLISHING the capitalist system and emancipating the working class from WAGE SLAVERY. In order to bring this message before the masses of the American working class the Communist Party will utilize every weapon at its disposal for propaganda and agitation. It accepts participation in election campaigns and parliamentary activity as one of these weapons — but for revolutionary propaganda and agitation only. The Communist Party, however, will abstain from parliamentary activity whenever conditions make such a course necessary.
The Communist Party will have to boycott the coming elections, for reasons which are familiar to every informed worker. The Communist Party has been outlawed by the capitalist government and declared illegal in capitalist courts. Its leaders are all under indictment or in jail. Thousands of its members are held for deportation or trial. Under such conditions the Communist Party could not participate in the coming election and carry its revolutionary propaganda and agitation directly to the workers at shop meetings and hall meetings or debates with the “yellow” Socialists before the workers and show them up as a bunch of vote-seeking reformers.
The Communist Party will have to carry on its propaganda through its underground leaflets, literature, and press until the workers of America become class-conscious and compel the capitalist government to keep its hands off it. Therefore, because the Communist Party is the only revolutionary political working class party — and because this party has boycotted the coming elections — WE, YOUR FELLOW WORKERS AND COMRADES of the COMMUNIST PARTY OF AMERICA CALL UPON YOU THE WORKERS OF AMERICA to boycott THE COMING ELECTIONS!
- The Communist Party of America. | <urn:uuid:0de14e0d-11af-406e-942d-e89b525f07f7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.okworkersmonthly.blogspot.com/2012/11/boycott-elections-leaflet-of-communist.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926478 | 1,938 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Driving to the crime scene is the time to begin to think of the different types of processing thta may be required. This section will speak about some of the basic crime scene procedures we may face, and with the responsibility of the first responders at the scene.
Processing a crime scene begins the moment you begin your response. As you respond to the scene you should be thinking about the type of crime scene you have, is it a rape, a murder or a break-in. The type of scene we have will help determine the type of equipment needed to do the job: will weather conditions cause us to alter our approach or cause us to collect the evidence out of the normal order of basic crime scene processing?
There are bacially five steps I follow when I have the time, and weather conditions in my favor, to process a crime scene. Once on scene I find it beneficial to talk to the first responding officer about what he observed on his approach. This is the first step: interviewing. We should always make it our policy to ask the first officer on scene questions that will aid us in our ability to process the scene. What did he see? Did he move anything? What time did he arrive?
It is also helpful to have the officer seal off the scene as soon as possible to preserve the intregrity of the scene; obviously the safely and concern for the injured remains first priority. Remember-the crime scene tape does not define the size of the scene. It can always become larger or smaller depending on the evidence located. It is always best to start large, we can always down size to fit our scene.
In regards to the interview, and when available, I like to speak to the victim to get additional information that will help me determine what will or will not need our attention. Were any containers moved, or other items disturbed that may need to be processed? Become comfortable with asking the necessary questions that will help you with processing of the scene. At a crime scene I like to think like the criminal and try to image where I would put my hands (or feet) if I were the one breaking into a residence or business. By processing these areas you may become surprised by the results.
Examine the scene is the second step in processing the scene. Look at your scene- what do we need to collect or consider as evidence. When I speak of examining the scene this refers to an initial walk through with our hands in our pockets. We are only looking at this stage and determining a route in and out of our scene. What do we see? What don't we see? Sometimes it is the lack of evidence that becomes more important then the evidence we see that will help explain our scene.
Next we want to Photograph the scene. I normally use a digital camera to photograph my scenes, but which ever camera you use be sure to photograph your scene from three different perspectives, long range, mid range and closeup (with and without scale). Photograph your scene and your items of evidence in-situ.
We want to do a rough sketch of our scene before we begin the actual duties of processing. This sketch depicts the scene and the items of evidence we are going to collect. Be sure to put north pointing up and, along with our case number, date. address and initials, do not forget to include "not to scale" on our drawing.
Now we are ready to process the scene. Here we use, at our disposal, any and all types of equipment to aid us in the recovery of physical evidence at the crime scene. Be careful and take your time. Here is our area of expertise that can make or break our case by how well be do our jobs.
Once we complete our assignment, I find it good practice to do a final walk through of the scene, usually with a fresh set of eyes to help me determine if we have done all we can do. Remember-once we release the scene -any evidence that was not observed, nor collected, is of no value to our investigation. It may be of benefit to hold on to the scene until all the information is obtained, as an example, the autopsy report may help us focus on an area to search for additional evidence. Each scene will dictate whether to release or not.
Let's look at some of the ways we will process the scene, and the different types of evidence we may find within. We will start with fingerprinting, although this is the last task we want to preform on scene.
Basic fingerprinting techniques involves different mediums. One such medium is black powder and nylon brush. This approach to fingerprint processing is probably the most common, but other mediums are just as effective, and are dependent on the type of substrate, or surface you have.
For example, on most smooth surfaces where black powder is used, clear lifting tape and krome-coat fingerprint card is the best way to lift and preserve this print. I find that the krome coat card and volcanic dark black powder gives the best contrast on most surfaces encountered at a crime scene. Other substrates may require photography as the best way to preserve a print, although I would recomment taking photographs of the prints before any lifting is attempted. Another medium that works well on rough woods or styrofoam surfaces is mikrosil casting material.
While there are many mediums we can choose from to do our job, the point here is: be sure you recognize the type of surface you have to work with and decide which lifting medium will be the best to do the job.
Before we use any medium (powder, chemical, cyanoacrylate ester fuming) to process our evidence. it is always a good idea to follow the safey guidelines or policies of your agency. These guidelines are for our protection, and can keep us from making a serious or fatal mistake. When using chemicals, it is advisable to dip your items in a chemical wash to avoid splashing or inhaling sprayed fumes. Always wear PPE equipment and respirator when dealing with harmful chemicals read the warning labels before beginning.
Smooth surfaces (glass or smooth painted surfaces) black powder and tape are a good choice.
Paper products usually require the use of certain chemicals, such as ninhyrdrin or indane dione, for best results. This type of processing should be preformed back at your lab, and under good ventilation and controlled conditions. Another approach to paper processing is the use of magnetic powder, but I would use caution before making this choice.
On smooth cardboard surfaces I find that magnetic powder does a good job.
Rough wood surfaces, the medium and the lifting method will need to be evaluated. On unpainted wood, especially smooth surfaces, ninhrdrin is a good choice. On rough wood, black powder, then mikrosil may be the best method available.
Styrofoam surfaces (cups, plates) magnetic powder and white mikrosil is a good combination here.
Wet surfaces- I use SPR spray. This will develop a print in wet conditions, then traditional lifting procedures will collect the print.
On certain items that require processing, such as tin products or bottles, the use of cyacnoacrylate ester fuming first will help preserve the print in place. Once the item is removed from the fuming chamber, black or magnetic powder can be used to develop the print, along with various chemicals.
Once you fume your items, there are several chemical agents that will help develop the prints better. A good chemical to use after cyanoacrylate ester fuming is Rhodamine 6g. Place R6G in a dish and place your item in the chemical wash. I find that slightly aggitating the item in the wash will help develop the prints better. Once this process is completed, either allow the item to air dry in a drying cabinet or gently remove wet drops by blotting the item using paper towels. To develop these prints you need to use the alternate light source and orange googles. Photography is always the best method to lift any developing prints. This procedure works great on plastic products like plastic baggies or plastic wrap.
Copyright 2007. Mel R. Bishop All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:c426e257-ca6b-4148-8e02-5c5f11f61d25> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forensic-topics.com/crime_scene_processing_ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939221 | 1,688 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Penn State engineers have developed a new model for high-speed broadband transmissions over U.S. overhead electric power lines and estimate that, at full data rate handling capacity, the lines can provide bit rates that far exceed DSL or cable over similar spans. Dr. Mohsen Kavehrad, the W. L. Weiss professor of electrical engineering and director of the Center for Information and Communications Technology Research, led the investigation. He says, "Although broadband power line (BPL) service trials are now underway on a limited basis in some locations in the U.S., these trials run at DSL- comparable rates of 2 or 3 megabits per second.
"We've run a computer simulation with our new power line model and found that, under ideal conditions, the maximum achievable bit rate was close to a gigabit per second per kilometer on an overhead medium voltage unshielded U.S. electric power line that has been properly conditioned through impedance matching. The gigabit can be shared by a half dozen homes in a neighborhood to provide rates in the hundreds of megabits per second range, much higher than DSL and even cable."
Kavehrad adds, "If you condition those power lines properly, they're an omni-present national treasure waiting to be tapped for broadband Internet service delivery, especially in rural areas where cable or DSL are unavailable."
The researchers say they are the first to evaluate data rate handling capacity for overhead medium voltage unshielded U. S. electric power lines and will outline their findings at the IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference in Las Vegas, Nev., Jan. 5. Their paper is titled, "Transmission Channel Model and Capacity of Overhead Multi-conductor Medium-Voltage Power-lines for Broadband Communications." The authors are Pouyan Amirshahi, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering, and Kavehrad.
In their paper, the authors note that the junctions and branches in the U.S. overhead electrical grid cause broadband signals to reflect and produce multipath-like effects on these lines. This causes degradation in power-line broadband transmission performance and decreases transmission capacity.
Kavehrad explains, "The signal can bounce back and forth in the lines if there is no proper impedance matching. The bouncing takes energy away from the signal and the loss is reflected in the ultimate capacity.
"In service, performance will depend on how close the power company chooses to place the repeaters," he adds.
The researchers are continuing their studies. Kavehrad predicts that the engineering issues to make BPL a technical alternative to DSL and cable will be solved. Whether it will be an economical alternative remains to be seen since there are interference issues that have to be overcome.
Source: Eurekalert & othersLast reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 21 Feb 2009
Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.
Men will always be mad, and those that think they can cure them are the maddest of them all. | <urn:uuid:7937a511-76ac-4f67-99f0-0f7523580b13> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://psychcentral.com/news/archives/2005-01/ps-pld010505.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916604 | 623 | 2.71875 | 3 |
Religion holds a central place in the life of most Filipinos, including Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, Protestants, and animists. It is central not as an abstract belief system, but rather as a host of experiences, rituals, ceremonies, and adjurations that provide continuity in life, cohesion in the community, and moral purpose for existence. Religious associations are part of the system of kinship ties, patronclient bonds, and other linkages outside the nuclear family.
Christianity and Islam have been superimposed on ancient traditions and acculturated. The unique religious blends that have resulted, when combined with the strong personal faith of Filipinos, have given rise to numerous and diverse revivalist movements. Generally characterized by millenarian goals, antimodern bias, supernaturalism, and authoritarianism in the person of a charismatic messiah figure, these movements have attracted thousands of Filipinos, especially in areas like Mindanao, which have been subjected to extreme pressure of change over a short period of time. Many have been swept up in these movements, out of a renewed sense of fraternity and community. Like the highly visible examples of flagellation and reenacted crucifixion in the Philippines, these movements may seem to have little in common with organized Christianity or Islam. But in the intensely personalistic Philippine religious context, they have not been aberrations so much as extreme examples of how religion retains its central role in society.
The religious composition of the Philippines remained predominantly Catholic in the late 1980s. In 1989 approximately 82 percent of the population was Roman Catholic; Muslims accounted for only 5 percent. The remaining population was mostly affiliated with other Christian churches, although there were also a small number of Buddhists, Daoists (or Taoists), and tribal animists. Christians were to be found throughout the archipelago. Muslims remained largely in the south and were less integrated than other religious minorities into the mainstream of Philippine culture. Although most Chinese were members of Christian churches, a minority of Chinese worshipped in Daoist or in Buddhist temples, the most spectacular of which was an elaborate Daoist temple on the outskirts of Cebu. | <urn:uuid:2d456ee7-24f4-4ac4-8380-68bbce7e246c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bansa.org/culture/religious/?disable_ads=yes | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966118 | 435 | 3.171875 | 3 |
We used Microsoft Word to make a webpage. We got the pictures from Safari Clipart. We made the webpage for 3rd & 4th graders. The 3rd & 4th graders might want to be in the Navy after reading our webpages.
My partner and I made a webpage with Microsoft Word. Our project was on the ocean. We made this project so little kids could learn about the ocean. You would learn about eels, dolphins, starfish, and other ocean animals!
We got all of our information and pictures from Worldbook Online.
Our Allies in the Revolution
I used Mircrosoft Word to create the web site. The web site is about our allies in the revolutionary war. I chose this topic because I have an interest in military history.
My TechYES project was to create a website on paintballing and how people play and interact with it. A word processed document about Paintballing will be created and visitors to the website will be able to download this document.
Project with Beverly Farms
Students in my class at Hoover will be going to the nearby elementary school, Beverly Farms. About 8 of us will be working with 2nd graders in Ms. Koningsburg's class. We will each pair up with one of the students and will be illustrating a sotry that they create. As the class is working on web design, we will probably post the illustrations to the web using anything that interests us.
A quick guide, with many links, that explains the why and how of writing an Ebook.
Free webased web hosting and design software. * Simple, free, no coding required * Photos, videos, web stores, domains and more
An overview of how to use Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) to host websites on your PC.
Want to see more resources? Click here! | <urn:uuid:f9346a50-d26d-45a3-a946-eab43c4722a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.techyes.net/projects/galaxy/web_publishing?page2=3&page=10 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.916388 | 381 | 2.71875 | 3 |
There's nothing like taking a good snoop around someone else's garden. They do all the weeding and watering, primping and pruning, sweating and possibly swearing. All you need to do is pick up your camera, pen and notebook, lay down some cash for your garden-snooping ticket and you're all set. And that's what we're doing -- checking out local garden walks and bringing back ideas that you can apply in your own garden.
Here, in Part 1, we look at five ideas from suburban gardens. Next week, we'll feature five ideas from Chicago's garden walks. (For a list of all the summer garden walks, see: chicagotribune.com/gardenwalks)
"It's all about getting ideas," says Rose Zubik, garden walk organizer for the Palos Heights Women's Club. "If you go on a walk with an open mind and use your imagination, you can come away with ideas for new plant combinations, garden art and structures for your own yard."
- - -
Go with the flow
What we admired: We found several great ideas in a sneak peek of Susan Martin's acre-plus garden in Orland Park. There was the repetition of chartreuse-leaved plants. There were tiny white lights on the arbor and there was Gus, the rooster made from recycled metal. Then there was this winding "dry" creek bed lined with pebbles. Because the property is rolling, Martin needed a way to direct water away from the house. Her husband dug out the area, installed a drain tile and covered it with small stones.
DIY: A dry creek is an attractive look even if there's no need to redirect water. Lay your hose on the ground to mark the area. Remove the soil down to about 4 inches and fill with pea gravel, sand or ground limestone. Top it with decorative pebbles, sit down and sip some lemonade.
Pair o' pots
A fashionable pick: We liked the artful placement of two empty urns (including the broken one) against a shed in Judy Carlsen's 2 1/2 acre country garden in Frankfort. "I like blending things in the garden, whether they're old or new," Carlsen says.
DIY: The key here to an eye-catching arrangement is to group similar pots, urns, baskets, statues, obelisks, gazing balls or other pieces of garden art together. Create a unified design by combining items of similar shapes, materials or colors.
Go see for yourself: Visit Carlsen's garden and nine others on the Will County Master Gardeners walk from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. July 18 and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. July 19. Cost: $12 in advance, $15 day of walk. Call: 815-727-9296, or visit web.extension.uiuc.edu/will.
Walk this way
The opportunity: The side yards that hug many houses often appear unused and uninspiring. Cindy and Brian Dempsey found a great way to transform that space into something attractive and practical. Their garden was featured on the Palos Heights garden walk June 21.
The look: Arbors on both sides of the house serve as doorways. "I wanted a walkway that tied the front and the back yards together," Cindy Dempsey says. "The arbor serves as a welcoming point, joining the two gardens." Two climbing hydrangeas cover the arbor, which is flanked with containers filled with red fountain grass, salvia, ivy and sweet potato vines.
DIY: Get the look with a wood or metal arbor that matches the style of your house. If you're using more than one, keep the look unified throughout the garden by using the same materials or color. Annual vines, such as canary vine, offer a new look each year. Don't feel like buying an arbor? Tall narrow shrubs such as arborvitae can serve as an entryway too.
What we loved: One other idea from Susan Martin's garden was her clever use of old wagon wheels and gears as an artsy fence. It made us want to head straight to the antiques shops.
DIY: Look for old wheels at flea markets and antiques shops. Bury the largest about one-third in the ground. Add smaller wheels alongside, partially burying them or tying them together with heavy wire to hold them in place. Support the structure from behind with pieces of rebar (available at hardware stores) stuck firmly into the ground. (Handling rusty garden art? Make sure your tetanus shot is up to date.)
Go see for yourself: Check out Martin's garden and five others on the Open Lands of Orland Park garden walk, Sunday, June 29 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Cost: $12 in advance, $15 day of event; tickets include bus transportation. Call: 708-403-6145, or visit orland-park.il.us .
Celebration of succulents
Scintillating scene: Jam-packed with sedums, this gorgeous cement trough is one of the many fun elements that Craig Bergmann Landscape Design created for the lovely Litowitz Garden in Glencoe. The variety of colors and textures makes for an eye-catching, one-of-a-kind container that needs little watering or maintenance. (This garden is featured on the Garden Conservancy's Open Days walk from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. July 27. For ticket information, call 888-842-2442, or visit opendaysprogram.org)
DIY: Purchase a similar trough or long, shallow container with drainage holes. Fill it with soil-less potting mix (available at the garden centers) and choose a variety of sedums, especially low-growing varieties that will trail over the edges. Keep the container watered until the plants are established and then water when the soil feels dry. Place it in a spot with full sun or light afternoon shade.
Ideas in bloom: the sequel
Check our garden page next week for more great take-home ideas -- this time from garden walks in the city.
IN THE WEB EDITION: Post a garden event -- or find one in your neighborhood -- at chicagotribune.com/homeforums. | <urn:uuid:77063254-e213-4659-8e3c-c1c0d10d51ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2008-06-22/news/0806190272_1_garden-art-ideas-walks | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940582 | 1,331 | 1.5625 | 2 |
The Healthy Farms Healthy People Coalition hosted a web forum on Thursday August 2, exploring the price of food, as it affects health of consumers and the economic viability of farmers. We had a great panel of agriculture economists and leaders working to increase demand for and supply of fruits and vegetables including:
- Andrea Carlson, U.S. Department of Agriculture
- Chad Hellwinckel, University of Tennessee
- Jennifer Obadia, Boston Collaborative for Food and Fitness & Tufts University
- Michael O’Gorman, Farmer Veteran Coalition
- Paula Daniels, Los Angeles Mayor’s Office & LA Food Policy Council
The forum was organized by Coalition Steering Committee member ChangeLab Solutions and moderated by Christine Fry.
This forum was part of a series of Healthy Farms Healthy People educational web forums bringing together Coalition members and partners for a cross-sectoral analysis of issues at the intersection of agriculture and public health. Stay tuned for details on our next forum. | <urn:uuid:33cbf0ed-c6c9-4ce9-ae4a-96589131681f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hfhpcoalition.org/2012/08/03/is-the-price-right-web-forum-recording/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926057 | 196 | 1.632813 | 2 |
First Colonial High School
VIRGINIA BEACH – Some Virginia Beach students watched a powerful program against bullying and disrespect.
Rachel’s Challenge was inspired by the gift left behind by Rachel Scott, the first student killed in the Columbine High School massacre.
Weeks before she was killed, Scott had written inspirational poems that called on teens to make the world a better place, to reject prejudice and hate and start a chain reaction of kindness.
Listening to the call to action was emotional for many of the students at First Colonial High School.
“We have a friend who died less than a month ago. It connects with us,” said Jared Gomez, a senior at First Colonial.
16-year-old Tatiana Mooney says the challenge made her realize, "You have to seize the moment and make it all you can. All the people you interact with, all the people you love, you have to express those things to them."
At FC, student leaders will work with teachers to develop programs that capture Rachel’s message – that even the smallest gesture can be big.
"Like Rachel, they're going to change their school, change their community and ultimately change the world," said Toi Arnold with Rachel’s Challenge. | <urn:uuid:4f7cd8ee-5af3-49b2-9049-1d048fa69364> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wvec.com/community/rachels-challenge/spotlight/First-Colonial-HS-students-take-Rachels-Challenge-130644768.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972629 | 262 | 2.4375 | 2 |
How To Groom and Feed a Horse for a Longer, Fuller Tail
Horse Nutrition and Grooming
Wednesday 23 December 2009
Having a beautiful long and flowing tail is very important for some disciplines. The thinner and more like human hair it is the better. This is not easy to achieve however so this article should help you with some horse grooming and nutritional tips on how to achieve a full and long horse tail.
Horse Care – Getting a Long and Full Tail
1. Nutrition – your horse will need the correct nutrition in order to grow and maintain the perfect tail. Make sure your horse is getting the correct levels of Omega-6 fatty acids, Biotin, Methionine, Zinc, Lysine and Folic Acid.
2. Brushing – take care when brushing your horse’s tail. It takes seven years for a horse’s hair to fully grow so you can pull them out much faster than they can grow back. If you start by gently brushing the tail from the bottom making sure you hold just above where you are brushing you will avoid pulling out any hairs. Some people choose not to use brushes and detangle the hair by hand. This takes much longer but will reduce the risks of pulling out hairs.
3. Washing – keep the horse’s tail clean, wash and condition it regularly. Try and find a shampoo that has a neutral pH and detangles and reduces scurf.
How to - Care 04.01.2010
Groom a Show Horse Properly while at Home
How to - Care 22.12.2009
How to Groom an Arabian for a Class A Show
How to - Care 24.12.2009
Groom a Horse for an English Show
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When buying a major investment it always helps to get a second opinion. This is never more so the case than when you purchase a used vehicle. | <urn:uuid:959aa952-6f9e-46e0-9a5c-3a28adde920e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.horsemart.co.uk/horse_advice/how_to_groom_and_feed_a_horse_for_a_longer_fuller_tail/147?accfsp=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917379 | 399 | 2.328125 | 2 |
EAT / MODERATE / AVOID: The Science-Backed Diet
It’s no secret or surprise the food pyramid we grew up with is a sham. But taking a look at it now after spending my spare time the last few years reading about diet science, experimenting with my own diet, and helping others lose weight, it’s shocking just how wrong it is. The pyramid many of us grew up with (pictured above, see here for a history of USDA Food Guides) grains at the widest part, telling you to eat 6-11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, etc per day, 3-6 more servings per day than vegetables. Ugh. Wheat Belly, anyone?
The stripey MyPyramid.gov thing, launched in 2005, was slightly more tolerable. They stopped recommending an imbalance of grains, cautioned against fruit juice, acknowledged some people might not need dairy, and encouraged a balance of proteins. Their encouragement of a low-fat diet can be excused — the science showing low-fat as the least successful diet approach is relatively new (from a 2012 study, “the low-fat diet that has been the primary approach for more than a generation is actually the worst for most outcomes, with the worst effects on insulin resistance, triglycerides and HDL, or good cholesterol.”).
The new “MyPlate” approach doesn’t change much, though the iconography is definitely more practical, helping people visualize that a plate of pasta with no vegetable is not a meal.
I listen to triathlete, fitness and nutrition blogger/podcaster Ben Greenfield regularly. I dig his style. He’s no-nonsense and not at all evangelical. He’s always very clear if what he’s saying is coming from a study or from personal experience. He leans heavily on science but given his level of personal fitness (he wins some of the triathlons he enters) you’re in good shape following many of his personal recommendations as well. I definitely recommend signing up for Ben’s newsletter and listening to his podcasts.
A few of his listeners/readers asked him to create his own food pyramid. He resisted, saying the idea of a “food pyramid” itself was flawed (apparently the USDA agrees, as they’ve finally trashed it). But as a podcast listener you could hear the lightbulb go off. What to eat and not to eat is a complicated (and changing) set, and the real answer is “moderation” of many things, a feat we humans are pretty bad at. Ben saw if he could create a specific and practical eating how-to guide it would be tremendously helpful to a huge number of people (aka popular).
His first attempt, the “Super Human Food Pyramid”, a PDF list of foods to EAT, MODERATE, and AVOID, is complicated but useful. In this post on BenGreenfieldFitness.com he briefly explains why the food pyramid is wrong and MyPlate isn’t much better. It’s not obvious, but if you read to the bottom and click the “Pay With A Tweet or Facebook” button you can download a killer PDF with specifics on his diet. Do it. Print it out. Hang it inside the pantry door or on the fridge. We have it hanging on the kitchen wall at the Topspin office.
Now that Whole Life Challenge is over until April, I’m going to try my best to follow Ben’s pyramid and have developed a “Whole Life Challenge”-esque scoring system (using Google Forms for now) to give myself some accountability against eating this way and check my ability to stick to it over time. If it works I’ll try to develop something to share with y’all (a mobile app would be killer).
I’m also adding a new feature to this site: I’m going to regularly dedicate a post to a food in each category, aiming to develop a database of foods to EAT, MODERATE, and AVOID. For each I’ll try to answer the question of WHY? and for the EAT and MODERATE foods I’ll throw in a couple of my favorite recipes to enjoy them with. I hope you find it fun, useful, thought-provoking or something along those lines. Feedback is welcome, of course. Bring it. | <urn:uuid:94454ad0-bb86-41e7-b5ed-1ac4d024dd50> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fistfulayen.com/blog/2012/11/eat-moderate-avoid-the-science-backed-diet/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949081 | 937 | 2.09375 | 2 |
NICE is a national campaign designed to improve the cyber behavior,skills,
and knowledge of every segment of the population, enabling a safer cyberspace.
National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers and Studies (NICCS) - DHS has launched the NICCS portal. The portal offers the ability to explore cybersecurity career paths, explore degree programs and internship opportunities, learn about competitions, and find general information about cybersecurity education, training, and awareness.
The National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education Strategic Plan is available. The plan outlines the goals of NICE as well as the objectives and strategies NICE will implement to achieve its goals. The partner agencies that comprise NICE are hard at work to address the Nation’s cybersecurity education needs. Together, in partnership with our public and private stakeholders, NICE will make a difference.
The "National Cybersecurity Workforce Framework " is available, click the text in bold to go to the Framework page for more information. Later this year, an updated version of the framework will be published and framework rollout efforts will be described.
The Smartphone Security Checker tool is designed to help the many smartphone owners who aren't protected against mobile security threats. To use this tool, choose your mobile operating system below and then follow the 10 customized steps to secure your mobile device. More about the Smartphone Security Checker.
Also available, a general smartphone security checklist (PDF).
The CSI Cyber online self-assessment tool was developed to serve as an open-source tool for teachers, students, law enforcement officials, business professionals, and digital forensic enthusiasts to reflect their current level of knowledge in Cyber Investigations.
FISSEA - The Federal Information Systems Security Educators' Association (FISSEA), founded in 1987, is an organization run by and for information systems security professionals to assist federal agencies in meeting their information systems security awareness, training, education, and certification responsibilities. Please join the “FISSEA Community of Interest” on GovLoop, to pose questions and receive feedback from colleagues.
Keep a Clean Machine - Keeping your Internet-connected devices free from malware and infections makes the Internet safer for you and more secure for everyone.
Cybersecurity Framework Workshop, April 3, 2013, Webcast | <urn:uuid:9c8fdee4-4c15-434b-b010-5d482b8defc0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://csrc.nist.gov/nice/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.90414 | 458 | 2.484375 | 2 |
Early C7 sword from Sutton Hoo ship burial. Image © Trustees of the British Museum
Inspired by Jon Jarrett, who is now enthusiastically blogging large numbers of long-past seminars, I thought I should weigh in and give readers a brief account of some seminars from the IHR Earlier Medieval Seminar summer term programme. The first one of these I went to was by Sue Brunning of UCL and the British Museum on "'Precious iron', 'friend in war': swords with character in Anglo-Saxon England", which took the vague clichés I had been aware of about the emotional importance of swords to early medieval warriors and placed them on a far better evidential basis. She was talking about the concept of artefact biography and stressing how important the life history of an object was: thinking not just its manufacture, but about its ownership, circulation, repair, modification and end.
Sue's work draws on images, texts and material objects, though there's something of a mismatch between the sources: most of the archaeological evidence comes from the earlier Anglo-Saxon period (fifth to seventh century), when furnished burials are common, and most of the textual evidence comes from the later period. In this paper, Sue was specifically talking about swords as having "character", both in the sense of individual features that made them distinctive, and in the sense of having a reputation (as implied by someone behaving "out of character"). There's good evidence of individual swords having distinctive visual appearances: Anglo-Saxon wills, such as that of Athelstan, the son of Ethelred the Unready refer to several different swords by their appearances (e.g. "notched swords", damaged and unrepaired). Descriptions of hilt ornaments appear in poems such as Beowulf as well as in wills. Swords could be individually recognisable, especially since all components could be replaced or augmented individually (Customisable swords with "go sharper" stripes?) Meanwhile archaeological studies of wear on sword hilts shows asymmetrical patterns, suggesting that the (two-edged) sword was always put back in the scabbard the same way round. Many pommels have different faces, with a plain face that is more worn, implying that the patterned face is shown off more, on display to the viewer.
Although named swords are common in poetry, they don't appear in prose or official documents and the archaeological evidence is ambiguous: it's not clear whether the runes found on some swords are names of the sword or its owner. Possibly names were more informally given, and might be changed: Sue suggested the parallel of owners naming cars today. What we can see, however, is swords with histories. They appear in poems such as Waldere, but also in official documents: Duke Hugo gives King Athelstan Constantine's sword, which would be 600 years old, and Athelstan's will refers to a sword of Offa that would be 200 years old. Old swords were not considered redundant. Some swords show severe signs of wear, and have been repaired and modified, with fittings changed or ornaments and inscriptions added to a previously undecorated sword. At this point, I must admit that I did start thinking about the old joke from a Stanley Holloway monologue.
‘Ere’s the axe – that’s the genuine axe, Sir,
That’s given Royal necks some ‘ard whacks.
Tho’ it’s ‘ad a new ‘andle and perhaps a new head
But it’s a real old original axe.
Sue also mentioned ring swords, with a ring attached to the hilt – these could be added and subtracted: metallurgical analysis can sometimes show where a fitting hole for a ring has been put and later removed. Sue suggested that sword rings possibly represented oaths sworn to a lord and might be a visual representation of a warrior's career, something that reflected on the character or reputation of the wielder. We perhaps need to think of swords and men as being in partnership, sharing a reputation. And these were long-term relationships. There are burials in Kent where the sword is enfolded in the body or arms. No other weapon is touched like this in these graves, suggesting a relationship that extended even beyond death. Swords did not just have an economic value, but a symbolic character.
As you will gather, Sue's talk was an excellent one, and implicitly made a good argument for interdisciplinary study, something that has recently been called into question. There is a strand of military history that tends to downplay literary sources on warfare, see them as fanciful, far removed from the practical logic of combat. But Sue's paper, moving between different types of sources, shows common elements to Anglo-Saxon warrior culture, where weapons are more than simply means of attack and defence. If a modern day solider can still write a book called Love My Rifle More than You, and say of a modern-day mass-produced weapon: "I love my M4...Gun in your hands and you're in a special place", how much more potent a character must a handmade "battle-beam" have had? | <urn:uuid:40749751-9f87-425d-a217-0de0026aacbd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2012/09/20/love-my-sword-more-than-you-14843268/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971587 | 1,071 | 2.46875 | 2 |
This briefing provides an overview of the fisheries sector and the key issues likely to come before the Minister of Fisheries over the next three years. It details the contribution of the Ministry of Fisheries to the Government's role in the fisheries sector, and its marine biosecurity responsibilities.
The Minister of Fisheries, along with the Ministry of Fisheries (Mfish), is accountable for the sustainable utilisation and cost-effective administration of New Zealand's fisheries resources in accordance with domestic and international legal obligations.
Fisheries management in New Zealand deals with a resource that is ecologically, socially, culturally and economically important to the country as a whole; acknowledges the customary use and management rights of tangata whenua; reflects the fact that, as an island nation and signatory to the United Nations Law of the Sea Conventions, we have international obligations relating to fisheries in New Zealand waters and in the high seas; and deals with the underlying tensions between groups interested in fishing and those groups concerned primarily with conservation of resources.
Fisheries management relates to the relationship New Zealanders have with the ocean and their environment, and their aspirations for the future of that environment. The fisheries sector is characterised by conflict between various participants who have competing values and objectives. The contentious nature of the issues is demonstrated by the level of litigation with over 20 cases, mostly by way of judicial reviews, currently on the books. The sector has also been at the forefront of innovation and change, with considerable ongoing legislative amendment.
The operating environment for the Minister of Fisheries and Mfish can be very difficult. Our fisheries and their management are under ongoing public scrutiny. Five particular factors impact on the operating environment:
! lack of consensus on the long-term direction of fisheries management ! conflict between recreational, customary and commercial fishers over access to fisheries ! those in the sector having firm views on fisheries management and not being reluctant to make those views known, including through the courts and the political system ! lack of public awareness and understanding of fisheries management and the management framework, resulting in ill-informed debate and lower than desired public support ! Mfish and stakeholder capability, capacity and information to make the best use out of existing legal frameworks.
On the other hand the sector has a very well developed legal and strategic framework against which complex issues in the sector can be managed.
The Minister is central to the way in which fisheries management issues are addressed and reconciled and is in a position to provide leadership and direction within the fisheries sector.
Domestically, the Fisheries portfolio has links with the Agriculture, Biosecurity, Conservation, Economic Development, Environment, Food Safety, Māori Affairs,
New Zealand Defence Forces, Police and Treaty Settlements portfolios. The portfolio also has an international focus resulting in links with the Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Trade Negotiations portfolios. | <urn:uuid:853177f5-504d-4704-9ccb-a4ad1a9d947a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fish.govt.nz/en-nz/Publications/Ministerial+Briefings/Ministerial+Briefing+04/Overview/default.htm?wbc_purpose=Basic&WBCMODE=Pr%25252523MainContentAnchor | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946206 | 573 | 2.4375 | 2 |
GUEST OPINION: Don’t allow a youthful indiscretion ruin your future
A criminal record can have a devastating impact on a young person’s future. Harmless high school pranks, minor brushes with the law and following the crowd without standing up and saying “no” can result in a teenager being labeled a criminal or juvenile delinquent with a criminal record for the rest of his or her life. Defacing mailboxes, starting a fire in a restroom, hanging with friends who are drinking or participating in underage drinking, smoking marijuana, shoplifting or destroying another person’s personal property may all start out as a dare or innocent teenage fun, yet each can have serious long-term consequences.
The impact of a criminal record is serious. Poor choices can permanently scar a young person’s future. High school students filling out college applications, for example, will find that a record can prohibit them from attending the university of their choice. Many college applications ask the question “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” The answer may negatively factor into the admission decision-making process.
A young adult with a criminal history can be ineligible for federal and state financial aid. Even if accepted into the college of their choice, they may be shocked to learn that their record prohibits them from obtaining licensure in a field of their choice, thus making their college degree virtually worthless. Examples include licensing requirements for attorneys, doctors, social workers, physical therapists, nurses, building trades, EMS personnel, cosmetologists, educators and personal trainers, to name a few.
For teens thinking about going into the military, federal law requires all applicants to disclose any criminal history, including expunged juvenile records. A criminal record can make it difficult to travel abroad. In fourteen states, a felony conviction can prevent one from voting.
One of the biggest impacts on adults with a record is their inability to secure gainful employment. Potential employers are reluctant to hire anyone with a criminal record and have every right to do a criminal background check. Without the ability to obtain meaningful employment, an adult with a record will find it difficult to support him or herself, find housing, apply for credit or obtain memberships to professional organizations.
There is a misconception that all teenage offenses committed under the age of 18 are sealed and not a matter of public record. In the past, juvenile files were sealed, but with a change in the law several years ago, nearly all juvenile cases are public record, and anyone can learn about an individual’s past criminal history.
The younger years are an exciting time of physical, mental, emotional and social growth and development. Parents, educators, counselors, coaches and mentors need to reinforce to youths the importance of the choices they make. It is imperative that teens realize the poor choices they make in their middle school and high school years can lead to serious legal consequences haunting them the rest of their lives.
Rudy Nichols is a circuit court judge for Oakland County.
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Join Jonathan Schechter as he shares thoughts on our natural world in Oakland County and beyond. | <urn:uuid:4ad2da2f-7aaa-4baa-a02a-d94da4e8d33a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theoaklandpress.com/articles/2013/02/17/opinion/doc511d3e629eb31147822929.txt?viewmode=fullstory | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00043-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935848 | 912 | 2.125 | 2 |
|Natural Bridge State Park features the only marble dam in North America.|
Mount Greylock, Massachusetts' highest peak at 3,487 feet, resonated with early American literature's most esteemed authors. Herman Melville, who wrote Moby Dick in Greylock's shadow, compared his fabulous white whale to it. Henry David Thoreau described his arrival at the summit's lookout tower as a kind of ascension to an otherworldly paradise: "As the light increased, I discovered around me an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower and shut out every vestige of the earth, while I was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on my carved plank, in cloudland."
Today Thoreau would have to share his view with the giant radio tower sticking out of the top of the mountain, and the tranquility he experienced might be marred a bit by the rumble of automobile engines making their way up the summit road. Still, on a clear day you can see the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains, the Catskills, and Mount Monadnock from Greylock's heightsin short, a panorama of the northeast's great ranges encompassing five states in all. The hike up is rugged, but the rewards are nothing less than inspiring.
Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary
Pleasant Valley is one of two wildlife sanctuaries managed by the Massachusetts Audobon Society in the Berkshires, places where Berkshires wildlife can live and thrive. Located near Lenox, this unspoiled environment encompasses over a thousand acres of forests, meadows, and wetlands. One of the major attractions is the abundance of beaver lodges and dams built throughout the sanctuary. The spring salamander migration is another major draw, along with several miles of hiking trails adjacent Yokun Brook. Maps and more information are available at the Pleasant Valley Nature Center.
Natural Bridge State Park
The park is named after a naturally occuring marble arch, hewn by retreating glaciers during the last ice age, that now spans a burbling brook. For 137 years, the land that now comprises the park was a marble quarry. Park visitors can tour the quarry and see the only marble dam in North America. Excellent hiking, fishing, and cross-country skiing also draw people to the park. Natural Bridge State Park lies off Rte. 8, just south of the Vermont border.
Monroe State Forest
Rising through the Monroe's mixed forest of hemlock and birch, the Spruce Hill Trail climbs to the summit of Spruce Mountain at 2,730 feet. But don't stop there. On the other side of the peak a little way down you'll find the Raycroft, built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. From here, you can take in an amazing vista from the side of an otherwise inaccessibly steep hill. Gazing out over the Deerfield River Valley, you're struck by the grand show these seemingly modest mountains can put on.
Monroe is definitely one of the wilder places in the state, with little by way of developed campgrounds or visitor areas. Hikers on the forest's trails should be ready for backcountry camping if they plan to spend the night. If you bring your rod, you can try for trout in Dunbar Brook. To reach Monroe State Forest, head west from the town of Florida on Rte. 2 and turn right on Tilda Hill Road.
Details mentioned in this article were accurate at the time of publication | <urn:uuid:b7072535-aa3a-4a26-b740-c0d14adf05a0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://away.com/hiking-guide/travel-ta-dalton-massachusetts-hiking-scenic-drives-sidwcmdev_054420.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948906 | 736 | 2.375 | 2 |
Recommended Sightseeing Spots in Nishi Awa, Shikoku
The communities of the Iya Valley - also known as Japan's Eden - are one of the three most secluded areas of the country, as they are surrounded by steep mountains and valleys. Here, you can enjoy mixing with the locals and witnessing the mountain villages and ways of life that have become so rare in modern Japan.
This 45 m-long suspension bridge (one of Japan's Three Strange Bridges) is made out of Hardy Kiwi vines, which grow wild in the secluded mountains of Iya. The way the bridge sways when you cross it makes for a thrilling walk! After sunset the bridge is illuminated, giving it a magical air.
The narrow valleys of Oboke and Koboke were formed by the raging rapids of the Yoshino River carving into the crystalline schist rock. The word "boke", found in both valleys' names, mean "dangerous to walk along", with "O" meaning big and "Ko" meaning small, suggesting that the valleys' tough terrain is dangerous whether taken in large or small steps. One highlight of Oboke is seeing the huge and strangely-shaped rocks that line the precipitous cliffs along its 5 km length. Whitewater rafting down these powerful rapids is highly recommended!
Chiiori is the name of a 300-year-old thatch-roofed farmhouse that was purchased in 1973 by Alex Kerr, a researcher in oriental culture. The interior of the house, with its era fireplace, high ceilings and black luster floors, carries a feeling of history. You can also enjoy the sight of the Nishi Awa landscape from the house's veranda.
This neighborhood of merchants' houses prospered during the middle Edo Era. "Udatsu" is the name given to the firewalls made on the boundaries between neighboring houses, and was a symbol of prosperity. The remaining townscape with its Udatsu speaks of the affluence of the day, and allows modern visitors to enjoy the sight of historical buildings that overflow with emotion. | <urn:uuid:21818cb0-1162-4853-ae3b-8c83471f3026> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://japan-articles.japanican.com/en/articles/201003nishiawa.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967746 | 431 | 1.859375 | 2 |
The University of Pennsylvania has wrapped up its grand experiment in curricular reform.
Penn won praise for scientifically testing potential changes in its general education requirements and offerings, by comparing students' experiences with an alternative curriculum against another set of students' experiences in the original curriculum. After putting four classes of students through the test, the university has carefully analyzed the results and concluded, as Dean of the College Dennis DeTurck puts it, "that whether they were in the pilot or not did not seem to make a whole lot of differences" in their academic choices.
If that makes it sound like the experiment was a waste of time, far from it. Penn officials learned a great deal about what their students (and professors) want (and don't want) in a curriculum, and how entrenched some aspects of the university's academic culture are. So as Penn's faculty considers another set of changes to the curriculum this spring, it will have comparative data to help guide its decisions -- as opposed to the typical hypothetical-laden approach to curricular reform.
So how did Penn's system work, and what exactly did it reveal?
Because of some dissatisfaction with the existing general education curriculum, Penn decided that for the classes of 2004 to 2008, it would put 200 entering students a year into a pilot curriculum that had four required courses instead of 10, more electives, more intensive advising, and a required major "research experience." They would be compared against a somewhat smaller cohort each year taking the traditional curriculum.
The hope, at least among some observers, was that the changes would encourage students to experiment more, perhaps nudging more students into science and math (and maybe a few fewer in history and premed), involve undergraduates more in research, and increase students' overall satisfaction with their intellectual experience at Penn.
This fall, as it reviewed the results, Penn officials found many more similarities than differences between students in the two curricula. Course choices were generally the same; there were "no consistent significant differences" in, for example, the proportions of students earning double majors or studying abroad, according to the final report of the committee evaluating the pilot curriculum.
And importantly, officials hoping that imposing fewer requirements and allowing more electives would lead more students into science courses found the opposite. Students in the pilot project took very few science courses. "We learned humanities students won't take science and math courses unless they have to," says DeTurck. "If we really think math and science are important, we're going to have to require people to take them."
The requirement of a major research product in the pilot curriculum produced some interesting results. Nervousness that students wouldn't have good ideas for research projects and that professors wouldn't have time to work with the students quickly faded, and "people realized there was much more capacity among the faculty, and students realized, 'Yes, we can do this, and it's really interesting and good,' " says DeTurck. Even students not in the pilot program ended up doing more research projects once they found out such opportunities were available, he notes.
The bottom line, according to the report of the evaluation committee, was that "despite substantial differences between the requirements of the Pilot Curriculum and the Regular Curriculum, and despite our extensive evaluation of multiple sources of information on outcomes, we have found little difference in outcomes for Pilot vs. non-Pilot students. The only consistent, significant differences reflected direct effects of requirements: more of the Pilot students participated in research, and more of them took very low numbers of science and math courses."
DeTurck says that the experiment has driven home to university officials that "Penn has a culture, and that there is an entrenched notion of what Penn students do," that introducing more freedom and opportunity into the system alone won't change.
That finding is likely to influence the faculty as it crafts another round of curricular proposals this spring, shaped heavily by the grand experiment of the last five years. | <urn:uuid:7f4553ed-12f1-45f3-a53b-82be283e7106> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.insidehighered.com/print/news/2005/01/20/penn?width=775&height=500&iframe=true | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977579 | 807 | 1.992188 | 2 |
A review of behavioural and physiological responses of sheep to stressors to identify potential behavioural signs of distress
Author: Cockram, M.S.
Source: Animal Welfare, Volume 13, Number 3, August 2004 , pp. 283-291(9)
Publisher: Universities Federation for Animal Welfare
Abstract:This paper discusses the potential for using observations of behaviour to recognise distress in sheep. The term distress is used to describe situations in which an animal is likely to be suffering, and is indicating this by overt behavioural signs. Literature on the behavioural responses of sheep to procedures that induce a physiological stress response is reviewed. This approach is based on human analogy and the assumption that physiological changes can be used to differentiate between stimuli that induce an emotional response in sheep and those that do not. The degree to which the behaviour of sheep in certain situations represents, at least in part, an expression of emotional behaviour, or whether it can be fully explained as a functional response to a specific situation, is a fundamental and unresolved question in ethological and psychological studies. Therefore, the validity of compiling a list of objective common behavioural indicators of distress in sheep will be contentious. However, it is important to be able to recognise and deal with suffering, and the use of behavioural methods for the identification of distress in sheep is a practical welfare issue. There is a need for further research to identify indicators of distress in sheep, but in the meantime it would be reasonable to make the judgement that, in some circumstances, sheep that are found to be vocalising, panting, and/or showing markedly increased locomotory activity could be experiencing distress.
Document Type: Research article
Publication date: 2004-08-01 | <urn:uuid:be9a2b97-07eb-4a14-9f2f-a68e529d2d86> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ufaw/aw/2004/00000013/00000003/art00003 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941376 | 341 | 3.109375 | 3 |
Ethics of dementia research
A biomarker, sometimes called a biological marker, is a substance within the body which can be used by researchers as an indicator of normal or abnormal biological processes (which might further indicate the presence or absence of disease or medical problems). Such biomarkers are therefore sometimes objectively measured and evaluated during scientific studies.
Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)
This is a clear, colourless liquid that circulates throughout the central nervous system. It lies between the brain and the skull and therefore also acts as a kind of shock absorber or cushion, protecting the brain and spinal cord (which are the main parts of the central nervous system) from damage (e.g. in the event of a blow or fall). Another function of CSF is to deliver nutrients and wash away waste materials.
A cohort is a group of people who all experienced a certain period of time together during a particular time span. This does not mean that they necessarily knew each other but simply that they lived through that time. A cohort might therefore be people born between particular dates, people aged between 40 and 50, people who lived through the second world war or people who worked in coal mines between the age of 20 and 40.
The control group in a clinical trial is the group of participants which does not receive the experimental drug. This does not necessarily mean that they receive nothing or a dummy pill (placebo) as they might receive the standard treatment for their condition. In experimental studies, the control group is not exposed to the experimental intervention. For example, in a study to measure the effects of exercise on memory recall, the control group would not do the exercise but the other group (the experimental group) would.
Double blind placebo controlled
The participant in a clinical trial, his/her relatives and the researchers are all unaware of which participants are receiving the treatment, the placebo or another intervention.
In the context of dementia research, a gatekeeper is the term used to describe a person who is in a position to facilitate or block researchers’ access to people with dementia who might be willing to take part in a study. An example of a gatekeeper would be the manager of a care home or day care centre.
The hypothesis is the specific question to which researchers want to find an answer. Hypotheses tend to be phrased in specific ways which include a prediction that there will be a relationship between two or more variables and even what the nature of the relationship will be. This is accompanied by a null hypothesis which basically states that this will not be the case. Statistical analysis establishes which of the two hypotheses is most likely.
Longitudinal studies are studies which involve the same group of people on more than one occasion (usually several times and often over a fairly long period of time).
The placebo is an inactive intervention. In clinical trials, this may, for example, be a tablet or an injection which looks just like the one taken by other participants who are not in the placebo group but it does not contain the active ingredient.
The term pharmacokinetics comes from two Greek words which mean drug and “to do with motion”. As a science or study, it is about how drugs move through the body covering, for example, how they are absorbed, at what rate and how they are eliminated from the body.
Pharmacodynmics is the study of the effects of drugs. The term describes the biological and physiological effect that a drug has on the body, the mechanisms of the drug action and the relationship between the concentration of the drug and its effect.
“Pharmacogenomics” combines two terms: pharmacology (the science of drugs) and genomics (the study of genes and their functions). It is about how a person’s genes affect the way their body responds to drugs. The aim is to eventually develop drugs which are tailored to each person’s genetic make-up.
Polypharmacy literally means “many drugs” and is the term used to refer to the situation whereby elderly people, in particular, consume a relatively large number of prescription or over-the-counter drugs (i.e. medication, tablets, liquids, medical patches etc.). The number and combination of these drugs may, in some cases, be harmful.
A protocol, in the context of research, is a plan which is drawn up by the researchers and contains all the details of what they will do during a particular study and how they will do it. This typically covers the design of the study, the criteria for the choice of participants, step-by-step details of how the intervention (or review or observation etc.) will be carried out and how the data will be analysed.
Randomised controlled trial
In a randomised controlled trial, people are assigned to different groups (e.g. to the experimental drug group or the placebo group) in a random manner. The principle is similar to tossing a coin but usually this is done with the aid of a computer programme which generates random numbers which can then be used to determine which group each person is assigned to. The main purpose of randomisation is to avoid possible selection bias. It may also be perceived as being fair.
Retrospective studies collect data in the present and linked to the past. For example, a retrospective study might involve asking people about their smoking, drug taking or drinking habits at various stages of their lives.
A sample is a subset of the population. In some studies, particularly quantitative studies, the sample is representative of the population, which means that it shares the same characteristics of the population. This is not always the case or even necessary, particularly, in qualitative studies where selection may be based on other criteria such as theoretical concerns or the desire to obtain a wide range of different responses (e.g. attitudes or perceptions).
Statistical analysis is a way of analysing data which permits researchers to state with varying degrees of certainty whether there is a relationship between different variables. Statistical analysis can never prove that a hypothesis is true. It can only provide sufficient evidence to support or refute it.
Variables are the characteristics or attributes that the researchers are interested in and which typically “vary” in two or more categories (e.g. male/female; mild/moderate/severe or on a continuum of score e.g. satisfaction score rated on a scale of 1-5).
Last Updated: jeudi 29 mars 2012 | <urn:uuid:16cc77e7-1bb6-45a0-9bda-9617c9f4fe8d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alzheimer-europe.org/FR%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%D0%B0%EF%BF%BD%D0%B0%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%D0%B0%EF%BF%BD%D0%B0/Ethics/Ethical-issues-in-practice/Ethics-of-dementia-research/Glossary | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944024 | 1,314 | 3.546875 | 4 |
The first thing to understand is that Month + Day + DayOfWeek does not mean anything to the Calendar. The Calendar will calculate the true value of the date based on
YEAR + MONTH + DATE
YEAR + MONTH + WEEK_OF_MONTH + DAY_OF_WEEK
(Or some other combos like year + day of year etc.) So Date + DayOfWeek doesn't inherently mean much to it.
The second thing to understand is when you set on a Java Calendar it doesn't actually recompute the absolute time or update related fields until an operation that forces computation occurs.
After your first set, the calendar is in a conflicted state. The month and day say that it's July 12th, but the 'week of month' and 'day of week' still say that it's today, whatever today is. You then call set day of week to friday. So now year month and day say July 12th, but the 'week of month' and 'day of week' fields say it's Friday of 'this' week.
The rules of the calendar say that the most recently set field "wins" when there's a conflict, so the week of month and day of week combining to say Friday of this week are what's used to calculate the other fields.
Inserting a get in the middle 'fixes' it because it forces the entire internal state of the calendar to get recomputed to Tuesday July 12th before setting to Friday, so there are no internal conflicts. The 'week of month' got set to the week that contains July 12th by the recalculation prior to you setting day of week to Friday.
Edit: Sorry to make changes after two days, noticed this open in an old browser tab and thought I would expand for the hopeful help of future googlers:
The reason it worked for Jon in the comments is he lives in London. His computer thinks weeks start on Mondays. So when asked for Friday of 'this' week, it still responded July 15th when asked on Sunday July 17th. I bring this up because differing first days of the week in different Locales are just yet another way that trying to use the WEEK_OF fields in a calendar goes haywire. | <urn:uuid:33ec145a-2654-4f3a-a757-61d8e558e759> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6722542/java-calendar-date-is-unpredictable-after-setting-day-of-week | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96566 | 464 | 2.21875 | 2 |
This was comedian Harold Lloyd's last silent film, and one of his most charming. Lloyd's character here is called Harold Speedy Swift, an upbeat young man whose fatal attraction for baseball always causes him to lose his jobs. After his latest firing, he impulsively spends a day at Coney Island with his sweetheart, Jane Dillon (Ann Christy). Ann's grandfather, Pop Dillon (Bert Woodruff), meanwhile, has a dilemma -- he runs the last horse-drawn trolley in New York City, and the railway magnates desperately want his route. Since Pop won't sell it to them, they plan to get it by underhanded means. Pop must make his rounds at least once every 24 hours, so the magnates hire thugs to stop him. Speedy hears about this plan and, being gainfully unemployed, takes over the route to protect the old man. But the magnates then steal the trolley, and the climax of the film involves Speedy's dash to find the trolley and get it back to its route before the 24 hours are up. He makes it just in time and then forces the magnates to buy the route for a cool 100,000 dollars. This picture was shot on location in a Manhattan that now looks almost quaint for all its concrete and steel. Baseball legend Babe Ruth had a cameo role, playing himself as a very harassed fare when Speedy is working as a cabbie. Their wild ride ends at the old Yankee Stadium. Other historically interesting sites include Coney Island's Luna Park, and Columbus Circle and Wall Street as they were in 1928. In the film's climax, the trolley has a spectacular crash at the Brooklyn Bridge -- this accident was not planned, but was left in the film anyhow. At the time of this picture's release, Lloyd was a top box-office draw, a bigger moneymaker than Charlie Chaplin (whose releases during the '20s was infrequent) and Buster Keaton (whose quirky comedy wouldn't be fully appreciated for several decades). While Lloyd made some fairly amusing sound films, he never again matched the quality of his silent work.~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide
Rated No Rating . | <urn:uuid:2f316fa3-7aa6-4b29-b04b-e45e5e3363ab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thenewstribune.com/movies/movie/3241.html?date=02/03/13&movie=3241 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98111 | 445 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Fraud worth more than €500m has been uncovered during an investigation of more than 900,000 social welfare payments made so far this year.
The Department of Social Protection says major savings have been achieved following a series of probes into payments including jobseeker’s benefit.
The department is seeking companies to help officials collect evidence including electronic financial transfers and prepare books of evidence outlining allegations made against individuals.
A total of 90 staff work in the department’s Special Investigations Unit which tackles fraud, while officials who process payments made to 1.4 million people every week are also trained to detect cases where fraud may be occurring.
A spokeswoman said that more than 900,000 payments were reviewed this year. In some cases, detailed checks were carried out which included checking financial transactions and consulting databases, including those held by the Revenue Commissioners.
Among the payments checked were those made to lone parents, where officials checked if a person in receipt of the money was living alone, and jobseeker’s allowance, where it was suspected the recipient may have taken up employment.
Ireland has made more progress in fixing its economy than other nations in the euro-area periphery, according to Fitch Ratings.
“Country-specific” considerations drove the agency’s decision to revise its outlook for the Irish credit rating upwards earlier this week, Fitch said in a statement.
“The revision of the outlook on Ireland’s BBB+ sovereign rating to stable reflects country-specific considerations, rather than signalling a change in fortune for the eurozone periphery as a whole,” the agency said.
The revision is Fitch’s first positive rating action on a stressed euro-area country since the start of the crisis.
Fianna Fail have moved eight points clear of Sinn Fein, while Micheal Martin is the most popular leader in the country, according to a poll in Sunday Times.
Mr Martin’s satisfaction ratings of 42 per cent are ahead of Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny on 41 per cent, and Gerry Adamson 40 per cent.
The poll shows signs of a recovery in Fianna Fail‘s fortunes. Mr Martin is now the most popular leader in the country and his party has increased its support by 6 per cent since last September.
Fine Gael are still the most popular party in the country on 30 per cent, down one point in the past two months. But Fianna Fail are in second place on 22 per cent, and well ahead ofSinn Fein in third place on 14 per cent (down 4 per cent) and ahead of Labour at 12 per cent, (down two points). Independents are unchanged on 19 per cent and the Greens are up one to 3 per cent.
A ghost estate in Ballymote is on the market for just €240,000 – less than the cost of a single house in the development only a few years ago.
Only one of the 14 houses in the unfinished Downs Estate is occupied. The houses initially went on sale in 2007 with hefty price tags of €250,000 and €245,000. But only one was ever sold in what was described as “a prestigious development in a magical location”.
Now 13 of the estate’s 14 houses are up for grabs with an asking price of €240,000. Three of the houses are fully complete, three more plastered internally, while seven are at what’s called “shell stage”.
The only occupied house is the best maintained. The householder declined to comment on the sale of the estate. Auctioneers Sherry FitzGerald are selling the estate on instruction from receivers Kavanagh Fennell. Selling agent Ken Draper said: “It’s priced to allow an incoming builder/developer to complete the units and have some margin.”
Michael O’Leary has had enough of people checking out the accounts of the firm behind his private taxi service.
The airline chief has made the company unlimited, in a move that frees it from the obligation of having to file publicly available accounts every year with the Companies Office.
Mr O’Leary uses his personal taxi for trips between his home in Mullingar and Dublin Airport, where Ryanair has its head office. It lets him skip traffic snarls in the city by using bus lanes at any time of the day.
Taxis, bicycles and on-call emergency vehicles are the only other forms of transport allowed to use bus lanes when they are in force. Mr O’Leary acquired a taxi licence in 2003, sparking outrage in some quarters.
The report on state involvement in the slave-like conditions in the Magdalene laundries is expected to be published soon.
The review group, chaired by Senator Martin McAleese, was set up by the Government to establish the facts of state involvement with the Magdalene laundries, to clarify any state interaction, and to produce a narrative detailing such interaction.
An initial progress report was published on October 25.
Special rapporteur on children’s rights Geoffrey Shannon used the publication of his annual report in July to claim that reports from women forced into the laundries showed their treatment “constituted slavery”.
The UN Committee Against Torture called on the Government in 2011 to set up an inquiry into the treatment of thousands of women and girls in the laundries.
The Irish tourism industry got a much needed boost in the autumn as visitor numbers rose almost 4pc. There was a particularly strong surge in visitors from north America with numbers up 20pc, mainly driven by the Notre Dame Navy American football match in Dublin.
However the number of visitors from Britain which remains Ireland’s most important market were down by 21,000 in the period September to November 2012.
Total visitor numbers to Ireland for the first 11 months of 2012 fell by
1,100 to 6.057m compared to the same period of 2011, newCentral Statistics Office figures show.
The new head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) hopes to retire to Ireland when his term is completed, his family have revealed.
John Brennan, whose family come from Co Roscommon, was this week nominated by US President Barack Obama to lead the CIA. The former counter-terrorism adviser paid an unplanned visit to these shores last November when he visited his Irish relations.
“He has visited Roscommon over the years and always calls in to see us when he’s here,” said his first cousin Patrick Diffley, who lives in Lecarrow, Co Roscommon.
The new CIA chief is the son of Owen Brennan, from Kilteevan, Co Roscommon, who emigrated to America in the mid-1940s. Accepting Mr Obama‘s nomination on Monday, Mr Brennan, a 25-year veteran of the CIA, said it would be the “honour of my life” to serve as CIA director.
Mink farms have been given a reprieve after Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney reversed a Fianna Fail/Green decision to ban the practice by the end of this year.
Citing a review commissioned by his department last year, the minister said the industry – which is worth €11m a year – will continue but under strict new standards. Five fur farmers will have their 12-month licences extended for another year.
FINANCE Minister Michael Noonan got a last minute piece of good news ahead of the Budget after the latest NCB Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index suggested that the economy continued to expand in November.
The report suggests the economy saw growth for the ninth successive month in November after the seasonally-adjusted index came in at 52.4 compared to 52.1 the previous month. | <urn:uuid:3a5a7a02-ab88-4513-b12f-4d2eb5643490> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://theirishgazette.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967552 | 1,599 | 1.507813 | 2 |
FTPing with FetchFetch can be downloaded here.
To get started, launch Fetch. Go under the File menu and choose "New Connection". The following window will appear:
Type in the host name or IP, your username and password, and the directory you want to go to (or leave blank to go to your home directory). Click OK to connect.
Once connected, you'll see a window showing the current directory, and files in that directory:
To upload a file, click on "Put File". You'll get a file browser window like so:
Browse your folders until you find the file you want. Remember you can click on the name of the folder (in the above case that's the "cgiclass" button with the folder icon next to it) to back up a directory. Once you've found the file, be sure it's selected and press "Open".
You'll get a "Save file on hostname as:" window like so:
If you want to rename the file, you can do so here. (Unix filenames should not have spaces or non-alphanumeric characters in them, so be sure to rename the file appropriately.) You can also specify the file format; HTML and CGI programs should be sent as Text, and GIF/JPEG images should be sent as Raw Data.
If you're uploading a CGI program for the first time, you'll also need to set the file permissions for it. Select the file, like so:
Now under the "Remote" menu, select "Set Permissions". You'll get the following screen:
The permissions should be set as shown - owner has read/write/execute, and group/everyone has read/execute only.
<< Back to Connection Page | <urn:uuid:d7b728ff-e80e-4f59-8f56-effade04d057> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cgi101.com/learn/connect/fetch.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9342 | 366 | 1.804688 | 2 |
"Smokey Joe" (The Little Railroad At "Rocky Nook" in North Hampton)
By Dorothy D. Holman & John M. Holman, Contributing Writers
NORTH HAMPTON, NH -- It was just a little thing. It stood no higher than a man's hip, and yet to children living within a radius of a hundred miles, and to vacationers, or those touring New England, it was the thrill that comes once in a lifetime.
The little miniature steam train that chugged its way around a thousand feet of track in a pine grove along Route One in North Hampton, New Hampshire, was the cynosure of all young eyes and of some grown-up ones as well, through the summer vacation months back in the 1940's and early 1950's.
The owner and engineer (fireman, too) was the late Peter Lamie, who operated "Smokey Joe" (his name for it) for over eleven years for the enjoyment of children, and grown-ups, too.
The engine was an exact replica of a real steam engine, built to a three inch scale, of iron trimmed with brass. It resembled to the letter, our regular locomotives from the cow-catcher in front to the coal tender attached, and yes, even to the coal shovel, too. For the information of those who know engines, it was a Model 4-4-0, of which there were but five in this country during the 1940's.
As with the regular engines, it was equipped with a bell, safety gauge and whistle, and burned a coal and coke combination, sending up black smoke as it idled at the station.
The bell was not an ordinary bell. It was a Swiss cow bell made of brass, bearing on one side the inscription "Saignelegier" and the date "1878", and on the other side, the words "Chantel Fondeur." It rang out sharply as Engineer Pete called out, "ALL ABOARD!", and the little engine with two cars attached, left the station, and slowly gathered speed for the long run twice around the track. The double ride was especially pleasing to the children, since it gave them a chance to wave to Mom and Dad as they passed them on their second trip around, as well as a photo opportunity.
The engine, Pete said, carried 100 pounds of steam, could develop up to nine horsepower and could do 25 miles an hour, although for safety reasons, he seldom went over nine or ten.
Engineer Pete tried to copy the real thing as closely as possible in the operation of his Lillipution railroad. The children bought their tickets from the ticket agent, the late Mrs. Helen Schrock, who was seated in the tiny station "ROCKY NOOK", a small building beside the track. When she was unable to be on duty, Pete took on the dual role of station agent and engineer.
After buying their tickets, the children would climb aboard, (each car seated ten) the tickets were collected and punched, just as on real trains, and they were on their way. Peter was a very cautious driver and kept a watchful eye on his youthful riders, realizing what precious freight he carried.
The fifteen-inch gauge tracks were laid on regular railroad ties with real spikes. A short distance from the station, a sign warned you of a railroad crossing, and just before entering the tunnel (a wooden passage-way used to store the train during the winter months), the little engine would give off a shrill whistle, which never failed to thrill the young passengers.
NYC; guest of the Holman's c. 1940's
The tracks were laid in a circle through a grove of tall pines (now "LAFAYETTE CROSSING" on Lafayette Road), an inviting spot for a picnic, with tables and benches scattered about. Many families made a day of it with a picnic lunch at noon and occasional rides on the train throughout the day. One didn't need to bring a lunch however.
At the "Rocky Nook" station, home-cooked food, coffee, tonic, milk, sandwiches and hot dogs could be purchased while waiting for a seat on the train. Sandwiches cost ten cents and fifteen cents depending on the choices, while hot dogs were fifteen cents with the "works". Coffee or milk were seven cents.
Edna and Ernest White operated the little lunch "take-out" with the assistance of their daughter, Alice (White) Dalton. Mrs. White also made the home-made bread for the sandwiches, and her doughnuts were the best around, selling for a nickel each and worth every penny.
Souvenir post cards of the train could be purchased to send back home, and stamps were available and a mail box was on hand for the convenience of the tourist. Photos of the train for the post cards were taken by Peter's son, Howard Lamie, a well known photographer in the Seacoast area.
You could pick out the future mechanics every time. It was the little boy who lingered beside the engine after the ride, looking it all over, even stooping to peer into the fire box when the engineer fired up. Nothing escaped him. You knew he was thinking how he was going to be an engineer when he grew up and drive a real engine.
People came from miles around and in all types of vehicles, from trucks and cars of uncertain vintage to shiny new models, and from every state in the Union as well as from England, France, Canada, Panama and from many other parts unknown. The majority of the riders were children, from babes in arms through all stages of childhood, but adults rode too, sometimes to see that Junior stayed on, but more often than not, they "just went along for the ride."
"It's amazing", Engineer Pete used to say, "how many children there are under twelve, but I never argue with them even when they look twenty". (Tickets for those twelve or under were cheaper [twelve cents] while adults were seventeen cents.)
.... Tickets, please!"
Before Mr. Lamie passed away, we spoke with him concerning his years with "SMOKEY JOE", and he recalled the final year of operation of the train. A gentleman approached him in the spring offering to buy the railroad, "lock, stock and barrel", and agreed to take it away the day after Labor Day, providing the train would go under its own steam at least twenty feet from the station.
The summer went by without mishap, and Labor Day came and the gentleman returned to close the deal, as he had agreed to do. Pete fired up the boiler, got a good head of steam on, and started around the loop. After proceeding a short distance, the train stopped in its tracks and for some undisclosed reason, but it had crossed the twenty foot mark and the deal was closed! "Smokey Joe" had made its last run at "Rocky Nook", going to a new owner and new-found friends and children.
All is gone now, tall pines, station, track and train, but there are those who remember with nostalgia, those happy days when "Smokey Joe" puffed along the track with Engineer Pete Lamie at the throttle.
Title: RailroadData.Com Railroad Links Directory and Search Engine
Description: A searchable, categorized directory of railroad websites. Featuring links to over 5,000 railroad websites, RailroadData.com is one of most popular railroad resources on the web. Features include a search engine, lists of new and popular sites, site ratings and more.
Description: Railroadforums.com is a free online bulletin board and photo gallery for railroaders, railfans, model railroaders and anyone else who is interested in railroads. We cover a wide variety of topics, from the latest developments in today's railroading to the early days of railroading.] | <urn:uuid:3055ea36-09aa-47b6-b059-7b3c78d183a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton/history/othertowns/smokeyjoe.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00059-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980702 | 1,646 | 1.945313 | 2 |
First of all, about the higher dimensions: You, as a
three-dimensional being, can look down on a two-dimensional world, like
a drawing on a piece of paper. A creature living in the “flatland” of
the paper could also look around and see the same drawing, but only
from the side, as a collection of lines lined up end to end. (There’s a
famous novel called Flatland about life in a 2-D world—a worthwhile and
surprisingly entertaining read.) If you put a coffee cup down on a
piece of paper, the Flatland creature would see only the circle of the
base, not the whole structure, and even that circle would look like a
line since it could be seen only from the side.
In much the same way, it is possible to imagine shapes in higher
dimensions, but we 3-D creatures can see only 3-D objects that
represent small slivers of complete four-dimensional objects. For
instance, the 4-D version of the cube, called a tesseract or a
hypercube, can look like two cubes with interconnecting lines to
us—that is, one 3-D intersection, just as a circle is one intersection
of a cup within a 2-D world.
As it happens, there are six analogues of Platonic solids in the
fourth dimension. They have 5, 8, 16, 24, 120, and 600 “sides”
(although in the fourth dimension each side is 3-D, so the sides are
called cells). You might think that this fact is of little more than
academic interest, but actually these 4-D shapes are incredibly
important. They represent some of the most fundamental symmetries in
The concept of symmetry is so simple that it is actually difficult
to capture. Symmetry is the order that exists when different things are
related in consistent ways. The image in a mirror has symmetry because
it is identical except for having the left and right directions
flopped. A starfish has rotational symmetry in that you can give it
one-fifth of a turn and it looks the same as before. Theoretical
physicists spend much of their time contemplating other, more
complicated symmetries that help explain the patterns seen in nature.
The common thread among symmetries is that they are all governed by
Many a fine mathematician has had the same initial reaction when
hearing about the 11-cell shape: Impossible. Well, it’s not.
Which brings me back to the Platonic solids, whose regularity of
shape is a rigorous form of symmetry. The idea of an 11-sided Platonic
shape with a prime number of sides initially sounds wrong. The essence
of symmetry is that one part mirrors the other, so you ought to be able
to break a symmetrical object into similar pieces, the very thing a
prime number refuses to do. (Before you ask: The 5-cell shape—also
called a simplex—is too simple even to think about breaking apart. It
is the simplest possible 4-D polytope. The simplest Platonic solid in
three dimensions is the tetrahedron, the three-sided pyramid, which has
four points. To move it into four dimensions, you need to add a point
to take up room in the extra dimension, hence five points.)
Many a fine mathematician has had the same initial reaction when
hearing about the 11-cell shape: Impossible. Well, it’s not impossible,
it’s true. To dispose of one obvious objection, yes, it’s proved we
already know all six of the 4-D regular polytopes—but the 11-cell
evaded attention by having an unusual form. It is therefore designated
an “abstract” polytope, as if the fourth dimension weren’t abstract
enough. What makes the 11-cell abstract is that if the cells were
separated, they could not serve as conventional 3-D objects, because
they have some odd qualities, such as the fact that their sides can
pierce or coincide with each other.
To untangle the mystery of the 11-cell, I called on my friend Carlo
Séquin, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Carlo
is another sufferer of Plato’s disease. His office is filled with
amazing sculptures of strange shapes, including various 3-D projections
of 4-D objects. Many of these have never been realized in physical form
before. Carlo often has to create his own programs to direct robots to
build these shapes or to guide lasers to form them out of chemical
After convincing himself that the 11-cell is real, Carlo caught my
obsession with seeing it. I contacted every mathematician I could find
who had worked with the 11-cell, including Branko Grünbaum at the
University of Washington, who turned out to have discovered it in the
1970s, before Coxeter described it more thoroughly. Amazingly, it
seemed no one had ever tried to create a picture of the thing.
Carlo and I set to work, first visualizing a single cell. Each
“side” of an 11-cell is a shape called a hemicosahedron (a.k.a. a
hemi-icosahedron). You can visualize it as half an icosahedron that is
folded into an octahedron with some missing outer faces, plus some
extra internally coinciding and interpenetrating extra faces. (Words
don’t really suffice here.) A hemicosahedron has 10 cells. Glue more
hemicosahedrons on each of these and you get 11 cells total.
Amazingly, in 4-D space these forms connect to each other in a
perfectly regular symmetry. Furthermore, the form is self-dual, meaning
that if you draw lines between the centers of every facet in the
11-cell, you get another 11-cell. If you do that to a cube, you get an
octahedron. So, in an important sense, the 11-cell is more elegantly
symmetrical than a cube.
On these pages, I am thrilled to present to you the first published
picture of the wondrous 11-cell. There are 11 colors in this image, one
for each of the hemicosahedron cells. Now that we can see it, I would
like to give the 11-cell a nickname. I suggest hendecatope, meaning
“11-related place” in Greek.
Adding a final twist to the story, Dimitri Leemans of the Free
University of Brussels and Egon Schulte of Northeastern University
showed last year that there can be only two shapes like the 11-cell.
The other is a 57-cell shape (discovered by none other than Coxeter),
but 57 is not prime. So the 11-cell is truly the only one of its kind.
Of what use is all this? Maybe nature will have found some use for
the symmetries of the hendecatope. In theoretical physics? Perhaps
something in the life cycle of a living cell? Sooner or later, as
Freeman Dyson suggested, the 11-cell might turn out to be important.
Beyond that, though, is the certainty that somewhere up there in the
sky, some form of life that might be otherwise incomprehensible has had
the same thought on the same magic occasion.
I dedicate this piece to Rich Newton, a former dean at UC Berkeley,
who died last January. He brought me into my new position at the
university, which enabled me to work with Carlo, making this whole
chain of ideas possible. | <urn:uuid:93afaf7a-dd5f-469f-88ad-e306e4a4dba0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://discovermagazine.com/2007/apr/jarons-world-shapes-in-other-dimensions | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953322 | 1,674 | 2.96875 | 3 |
1876-1947, American writer, teacher, journalist, poet, short story writer and critic
Her literary career lasted nearly fifty years. She wrote extensively about the life of pioneers on the Great Plains.
When she was 9 years old, her family migrated westward from Virginia to Nebraska which served as the setting of later novels.
In 1906 she moved to New York City, where she took a position as managing editor of the McClure's magazine. In 1908 she became friends with Sarah Orne Jewett.
She celebrated the frontier in O Pioneers! 1913 and My Ántonia 1918, and showed the artist's need for freedom from inhibiting influences in The Song of the Lark 1915.
Cather later turned to the North American past for Death Comes for the Archbishop 1927. This book earned her a spot on the Modern Library's 100 Best Books: Fiction for the 20th Century.
She also wrote short stories and several essays on fiction. Her own clear, charming, and stately style is among the finest in 20th century. Won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize.
Her works include:
McMichael, George, "Anthology of American Literature", Macmillan Publishing, NY, 1974
Last Updated 01.22.04 | <urn:uuid:a99e544f-1c03-4068-b912-bfdc3ad3fdb8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://everything2.com/title/Willa+Cather | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972951 | 256 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Mar 15 2008
Most all web developers, most certainly those who work with Firefox, are familiar with Firebug. This tools nevers ceases to amaze me, the ability to change information (for example style attributes) on a webpage as your are viewing the page, is amazingly useful. Version 3.x of Safari now includes the option to enable a Firebug like debugging tool called Web Inspector…
You won’t find access to Web Inspector in your default installation of Safari. However, making the necessary configuration changes is as easy as running the following command from a Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true
If you prefer, you can use the Property List Editor to set the WebKitDeveloperExtras property in the Safari property file, which is located here: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safai.plist (use Finder to locate the file and double click to open). You’ll need to restart Safari after making the changes to enable Web Inspector.
To open the Web Inspector, right click and choose Inspect Element as shown in the figure below:
With Web Inspector running, you have access to a goodly amount of information. Take a look at the screenshot below which shows content from the Google homepage.
While poking around on Web Inspector, I clicked on icon in the lower left corner (the little arrow-in-a-box) and a popup menu appeared showing options for Network and Console. I selected Network and information about document and image transfers appeared (see the figure below). The Console option in this same menu resulted in a blank page appearing, so it seems I still have some exploring to do to figure what this option is all about. If you click on the icon just to the right of the arrow-in-a-box, the Web Inspector will be shown in a split window view versus a popup window.
I haven’t found an option for editing “on-the-fly” as in Firebug, however, Web Inspector is a good start for a built in tool and I have no doubt it will continue to evolve…. | <urn:uuid:1083620b-a10a-4651-8c12-21809cb70b7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://macdevelopertips.com/category/safari | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901955 | 441 | 1.734375 | 2 |
If you’ve ever had a migraine headache, you don’t need me to tell you it hurts. Doctors report that about twenty million people suffer from serious headaches, and ten percent of these have intractable pain–meaning it doesn’t go away. But here’s a surprise: the problem isn’t always a migraine. Sometimes very similar symptoms are caused by damage to a nerve of the face, which results in the nerve itself sending nonstop “ouch” signals.
What can be done?
A new treatment being tried out by a few doctors, including Dr. Robert Levy, a neurosurgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, involves zapping with electricity certain nerves that innervate the face. It’s like a marathon in which thousands of runners are crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. Someone sends up a firework nearby and for a moment all the distracted runners stop and stare. By hitting the nerves with a mild electrical jolt, you can “distract” the signal-carriers–that is, the pain signals stop crossing the nerves for as long as the electrical charge is on.
So how to do that? Levy and others have inserted a little battery under patients’ collarbones, connected it to a wire that runs under the scalp, and stuck the end directly into the misfiring nerve. Odd as it may sound at first, it works. Patients report that when the device is turned on they are pain-free, sometimes for the first time in years. This kind of nerve stimulation is still in its early days, but the results so far look very promising. For chronic headache sufferers, a little wire can make for blessed peace of mind…not pain of head. | <urn:uuid:904f2021-16e2-435c-8776-30e983a57f27> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/migraine-or-face-pain/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954123 | 356 | 2.46875 | 2 |
It turns out Lew had $56,000 invested in a Citigroup venture capital fund based in . . . wait for it . . . the Cayman Islands. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), a member of the Finance Committee before which Lew will soon appear, declared, “The irony is thick,” pointing out that “President Obama has been almost obsessively critical of offshore investments.”
Grassley is right. Just last week, during a “60 Minutes” interview before the Super Bowl, Obama declared, “When you look at some of these deductions that certain folks are able to take advantage of, the average person can’t take advantage of them. The average person doesn’t have access to Cayman Island accounts.”
It’s a recurring theme for the president. In a 2009 speech, Obama focused his ire on “a building in the Cayman Islands that had over 12,000 businesses claim this building as their headquarters” — a building called Ugland House. Obama said, “And I’ve said before, either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam. And I think the American people know which it is: The kind of tax scam that we need to end.”
Well, guess who was involved in the “largest tax scam” in the world? Jack Lew. According to the New York Times, Lew’s Cayman Islands fund was based in “the notorious Ugland House, a building whose mailboxes are home to nearly 19,000 corporate entities, many of them tax shelters.”
Someone else who was deeply concerned about Ugland House is the man who will consider Lew’s nomination, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.). In a 2008 hearing, Baucus said of Ugland House, “Many of those tenants are feasting at America’s taxpayers’ expense.” Now he must decide whether to confirm one of those tenants as our next secretary of the Treasury.
Lew’s defenders point out that his investment was “only” $56,000. Well, $56,000 may be a small amount in Washington and on Wall Street, but it is more than the annual income of the typical American family. They say that he sold his Cayman holdings for a loss three years ago. But Lew divested himself and sold his investment for a loss only when confirmed as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Before that, even as a senior State Department official, he had no problem parking his money offshore.
Democrats point out that Republican Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson also had investments in the Cayman Islands and that Republicans did not view this as disqualifying. But the ethics of investing in the Cayman islands is not the issue here. The issue is Obama’s hypocrisy.
Obama excoriated his opponent in last year’s election as being unfit for office for having such investments. So by Obama’s own standard, shouldn’t Lew be considered unfit for office as well? Obama specifically called the investment Lew held the world’s biggest “tax scam.” Should the man responsible for U.S. tax policy be someone the president says was involved in a “tax scam”? Someone the Democratic Senate Finance Committee chairman says was “feasting at America’s taxpayers’ expense”?
A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, pointed out that Lew broke no laws and “paid all of his taxes and reported all of the income, gains and losses from the investment on his tax returns.” But last year Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said that while Romney had not technically broken any laws by keeping his money in offshore tax havens, “is not technically breaking the law a high-enough standard for someone who wants to be president of the United States?” Well, is not technically breaking the law a high-enough standard for someone who wants to be secretary of the Treasury?
Investing in the Cayman Islands does not make Lew unfit to be Treasury secretary. But it does make him unfit to be Obama’s Treasury secretary.
Read more from Marc Thiessen’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. | <urn:uuid:52f9245d-0a3d-4738-959b-74197c2ba1a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-hypocrisy-on-jack-lew-and-his-cayman-investment/2013/02/11/4382c754-73e9-11e2-95e4-6148e45d7adb_story.html?wprss=rss_rightleaning | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976641 | 898 | 1.585938 | 2 |
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John William Waterhouse Art Prints and Posters
Victorian romantic painter and rampant nymphet-maniac John William Waterhouse was born in Rome where he had the dual misfortune to be conceived by artists and nicknamed 'Nino'. As a result, he too became tragically and incurably artistic and was obliged to spend his working life locked away in a St John's Wood studio, passing the time turning out more than 300 richly-coloured and sensuously-executed oils, initially influenced by the likes of Lord Leighton, but later by literary themes.
The middle period of John's career is reckoned to be his finest and in 1891, aged 42, no doubt suffering some sort of 'fin de siecle' mid-life crisis, he painted his classic 'Hylas and the Nymphs' (a.k.a 'What, all seven of you at once?') in which some bloke wanders out to his garden pond to find that its resident frogs have metamorphoses into nude teenage girls (happens all the time in St. John's Wood). Another product of John's hormone-induced artistic frenzy is the mega famous and quite magnificent Lady of Shallot (a.k.a. 'Coming... ready or not!'), in which we see a wistful young thing carelessly allowing her inordinately long gown (complete with carpet extension piece) to trail in the local boating lake as she enjoys a game of water-borne hide and seek.
Although John's work is full of models who look like they did day shifts for the Pre-Raphaelites, there is some confusion amongst art boffs as to exactly where he's coming from: his pictures display many of the features of formal Classicism the PRs so despised, whilst taking his subject matter from the poetry and mythology that was pre-requisite PR bedtime reading. So, John William Waterhouse: Pre-Raphaelite, Classicist, or simply School of Mucky Raincoat? the mass debate goes on.Copyright Michael Cox | <urn:uuid:2c6b30a4-9bf4-4d13-bb85-4da99108101a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.easyart.com/art-prints/artists/John-William-Waterhouse-2594.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972471 | 429 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Northern Ag Network
posted on May 30, 2012 08:53 :: 522 Views
The following is a press release from the Office of Governor Matt Mead:
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Governor Matt Mead is asking Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, to work with Wyoming to remove the grizzly bear from the Endangered Species List sooner than currently anticipated. Delisting by the federal government appears to be at least two years away because an evaluation of data related to white bark pine is starting and is slated to take two years.
“The situation is severe and costly,” Governor Mead wrote in a recent letter to Secretary Salazar. Governor Mead noted grizzly bears caused four human deaths over the past two years.
Wyoming does not have jurisdiction over the grizzly bears yet the state pays for the management of the bears. “Wyoming’s investment in recovery over the past 28 years exceeds $35 million. The average annual cost to Wyoming for grizzly management approaches $2 million.”
Governor Mead thanked the Secretary for his work on wolves and sage-grouse and said he hoped the two could continue their cooperative relationship. Governor Mead is specifically asking that they work together now to expedite the analysis related to white bark pine and how it may relate to grizzly bear populations. “Two years is too long and the cost is too great,” Governor Mead wrote.
Source: Office of Governor Matt Mead
Posted by Haylie Shipp | <urn:uuid:20cd26d3-093e-4ef2-a7d4-e3f7f0f6aed0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.northernag.net/AGNews/tabid/171/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/7021/Wyoming-Governor-Frustrated-Over-Grizzly-Bear.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964121 | 308 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Ideally, it would be best if one was already supplementing with their ideal dosage. Next is to commence supplementation as soon as possible after the injury. Even after weeks or months omega 3 supplementation may be effective in minimizing the damage and helpful in reducing a post concussion syndrome.
One should also consider supplementing with polyphenols which protects the omega-3’s from oxidation within the body. This is especially beneficial for those who need to supplement with high dose fish oil, greater than 5g/d of EPA & DHA. Supplementing with only omega 3’s is okay, however, combining one’s omega 3 supplementation with polyphenols is ideal. Dr. Sears comments on polyphenols at these links: http://blog.zonehealth.com/2011/02/...yphenols/. http://www.zonediet.com/blog/2011/0...rk-better/ http://www.zonediet.com/blog/tag/polyphenols/ http://www.zonediet.com/blog/tag/polyphenols/
page/2/ http://www.zonediet.com/blog/2011/0...phinidins/ http://www.zonediet.com/blog/2011/0...rol-story/ http://www.zonediet.com/polyphenols
To determine one’s optimal omega 3 dosage the AA/EPA test is most effective. Info at http://drsears.com/ArticlePreview/t...ault.aspx.
The test, a $150 value, will be offered complimentary for Zone Lab customers who have purchased 6 bottles of OmegaRx since January 1, 2012.
Regulations allow us to provide you and your physicians information regarding dosing for individuals with neurological conditions. You may find the following resources helpful.
Attached book scan from Dr. Sears’ “The OmegaRx Zone.” . http://drsears.com/SearchResults/ta...ain+injury http://www.zonediet.com/blog/2011/0...in-trauma/
Previous ad copy;
A new groundbreaking research study (attached) shows that OmegaRx® may be a “wonder drug” for the treatment of brain trauma. I was one of the co-authors of this study, which was published in the August issue of the prestigious Journal of Neurosurgery. This study demonstrated the remarkable ability of OmegaRx® to reduce brain damage induced by a concussion. It was shown that brain damage could be reduced by more than 98% if OmegaRx® was taken on a daily basis for 30 days after the injury. Brain trauma occurs more than 2 million times a year requiring more than 200,000 hospitalizations with more than 50,000 deaths per year. The causes range from car accidents to football concussions to simply falling off a bicycle. There is no known drug to treat these brain injuries, but now with adequate levels of omega-3 fatty acids, a new therapeutic approach is possible. More importantly, if OmegaRx® can treat brain trauma, then taking OmegaRx® on a daily basis will be the best way to prevent brain damage should accidental brain trauma be induced by events that occur in every-day life.
Contentfor informational purposes and is not a substitute for the advice provided by your own physician or other medical professional. | <urn:uuid:13a574eb-aefd-499c-a495-8e488776459d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.zonediet.com/forums/aft/61701 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925962 | 708 | 1.664063 | 2 |
How to Help Kids Feel Safe
Learn what to do to minimize stress and maintain a sense of normalcy after a tragedy.
Quick Talking Tips
- Find out what your child knows about the news.
- Listen to what your child tells you.
- Ask a follow-up question.
- Shield children under age eight from disturbing news.
- Avoid repeated TV viewings of the same news event.
- Monitor older children's exposure to the news.
- Develop an ongoing dialogue with your child about what's happening in the world.
Develop strategies for discussing today's headlines – from mass shootings, natural disasters and war. Learn how to calm kids' fears, stimulate their minds, and encourage them to think about their place in today's world.
Discover how to talk with your child about the news, respond to her questions, and encourage her to think about what it means.
Learn how kids, from preschoolers to preteens, comprehend the news. Plus get tips on how much news to let each age see and how to discuss it.
Find out how children's art and play reflects the news. Learn what to do if that play is filled with violent imagery.
Need to talk but your child won't? Get the conversation rolling with tips on talking about violence, war, the meaning of holidays, and more. | <urn:uuid:7f5e835d-5b6b-4053-a722-6d3ce8f852f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pbs.org/parents/talkingwithkids/news/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929542 | 274 | 3.8125 | 4 |
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Shell Chemical, located on the Motiva Enterprises campus in Norco, has been experiencing elevated flares, shooting flames and leaking thick black smoke into the air above St. Charles Parish. According to a report submitted to the U.S. Coast Guard National Response Center, the plant is releasing unknown amounts of hydrogen sulfide, butadiene and benzene, a known carcinogen. | <urn:uuid:cddea6f1-13f1-4340-bc7e-c54a3ee5918b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://videos.nola.com/times-picayune/2012/12/shell_chemical_equipment_failu.html | 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 | 0.927067 | 136 | 1.523438 | 2 |
We are often told that, if our lives are to matter, we must be selfless, always putting others first. It’s good advice, but being selfless in a healthy manner is possible only when a person knows him/herself.
Be selfish. Take some time to think about yourself; figure out who you are. Only then can you be a person capable of putting others first.
In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius gave his son Laertes good advice:
This above all: to thine own self be true, | <urn:uuid:a22cab0a-76e9-41c9-8bec-f57214c5b70e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hclocal.com/opinion/columns-editorials?page=4&mini=calendar-date%2F2013-03 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943841 | 117 | 1.984375 | 2 |
October 1, 2008
Kansas Department of Agriculture
(785) 296-2653 phone
State food safety inspection duties now under one roof
TOPEKA - When provisions of Senate Bill 584 became law Oct. 1, all food safety and lodging inspection duties became the responsibility of a single agency -- the Kansas Department of Agriculture.
Previously, food safety was a responsibility shared by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Environment. When the Legislature passed Senate Bill 584 earlier this year, it moved food safety and lodging inspection jurisdiction from the health department to the Department of Agriculture.
"Being responsible for food safety all along the food production, processing, transport, preparation and retail continuum is a responsibility we don't take lightly," said Adrian Polansky, secretary of the Department of Agriculture. "We eagerly accept our new duties and view this change as an opportunity to reaffirm and expand on our commitment to ensuring safe food for all consumers."
The provisions of Senate Bill 584 required that 38 positions transfer to the Department of Agriculture from the Department of Health and Environment on Oct. 1. Employees who fill those positions moved Sept. 22, a little ahead of schedule, to coincide with a natural break in the pay cycle.
Before the transfer, inspectors were cross-trained to conduct inspections typically carried out by the Department of Agriculture. The Department of Agriculture also arranged for several of the transferring employees to work from home, eliminating the need for them to drive to district offices to do paperwork. Cross-trained employees were assigned smaller territories in line with their expanded inspection duties.
Having food safety duties under one roof also makes it possible to record food safety inspection data in a single database using a common platform. The Department of Agriculture also expanded its food safety database to accept lodging inspection results.
Inspectors transferring to the Department of Agriculture were given tablet computers loaded with software to allow them to electronically record results while they are conducting an inspection. This eliminates the need for paper records and separate data entry.
Seizing on the transition as an opportunity to standardize how all food safety inspection data are recorded, the Department of Agriculture also provided the software to county health departments that conduct inspections under contracts with the department. The counties are Douglas, Geary, Johnson, Lyon, Reno, Riley, Saline and Sedgwick.
Electronic food safety inspection reports are available to the public from the Kansas Department of Agriculture website at www.ksda.gov/food_safety/. Kansas Department of Health and Environment restaurant inspections dated before Oct. 1, 2008, will continue to be available from the heath department's website at www.ksfoodsafety.org through January 2010.
What isn't changed by the transfer is how foodborne illnesses are reported. Anyone who suspects he or she has contracted an illness from a food source should contact their personal physician or their local health department. Foodborne illness clusters are investigated by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment's office of epidemiology.
"Our inspectors will work hand-in-hand with the state epidemiologist's office to help trace, contain and eliminate sources of contaminated food," Polansky said.
Polansky encouraged consumers with general food safety concerns to report them to the Department of Agriculture online at http://ksda.gov/food_safety/open_records/ or by calling (785) 296-5600 or (785) 296-7430.
The Department of Agriculture's new food safety and lodging responsibilities expand on their existing areas of jurisdiction.
In 2004, Governor Kathleen Sebelius issued Executive Reorganization Order 32, which was followed by Senate Bill 296, transferring certain food safety functions to the Department of Agriculture from the Department of Health Environment. Among the transferred functions were inspections of retail food stores, food service establishments in retail food stores, food processing plants, vending machines and ice cream trucks. Six full-time positions transferred with those duties.
Before 2004, the Department of Agriculture was responsible for food safety involving eggs, milk and dairy products from the farm to consumer, and meat and poultry from state-licensed facilities. | <urn:uuid:31e6bbfe-3546-41e0-81be-b186a30a071c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ksda.gov/news/id/177 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954481 | 827 | 1.789063 | 2 |
As one of the people most interested in these features (and one of the probable implementers), allow me to chime in here. Any password system implemented in OpenACS should provide for the automatic blocking of authentication attempts from one IP whenever too many failures have occurred. This protects the system from dictionary attacks on poorly chosen passwords. It seems to me that this feature should be applied to any authentication end-point, without regard to the underlying authority. Without this, the end-point could be used as a privileged proxy for launching dictionary-based attacks on a website. I think this point should clearly illustrate the need to implement some of the authentication features outside the authority and some inside the authority.
The last point should probably be systematically applied to the list of authentication features. Here is the current list of features we want to make sure OpenACS has/acquires:
- auto-block of IP (with auto-unblock after period of time) after too many password failures in too-short a period of time
- successful login re-sets timer?
- this feature should always be enabled but the number of failed logins, the time period over which they must occur to incur blocking, and the length of the blocking should be configurable
- watch out for web-crawlers? Worst case scenario: this feature prevents a site from being indexed. This should not be an issue as long as the login form is actually a
<form> with a real
>button< for submission. Most crawlers won't submit
<form>s under those circumstances.
- upon successful login, notify user of:
… thus helping users to become aware that their accounts are under constant attack by hackers and hopefully detect a successful attack on their account.
- last successful login attempt (date/IP/referer/user-agent)
- # of failed login attempts since last successful login
- password strength checking (might annoy users, hence the mitigations above)
- password aging & history (for preventing re-use)
- minimum password age (before user can change)
- maximum password age (sets next password-expiration date, see below)
- password-expiration date
- expiration requires change immediately upon next login
- auto-account disable after extended disuse
- add a grace-period parameter/feature so enabling this feature does not immediately lock-out any users
- This way, admins can spam everyone when the feature is enabled, telling them to login soon to prevent the account from being locked.
- maximum number of concurrent sessions with same account (limits damage if credentials are stolen or shared inappropriately)
- maximum session length (whether idle or not)?
They are listed in order of priority (most important first). I think the only feature listed above that might be currently provided is the last one. I'm not certain because it may be more of an idle timeout rather than an absolute maximum on session length. Its not a very important feature. | <urn:uuid:ede3178c-f25c-4330-8dc8-b7c4a1b206d2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=3963132 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917246 | 612 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Changes may be coming for a state program aimed at keeping kids at risk of delinquency out of the corrections system. Governor Bobby Jindal proposed tighter more “common sense” regulations for the Families in Need of Service Program, or FINS, at a press conference Friday morning.
The governor built off of a legislative commission’s study of FINS that found children were being moved through the system without enough attention.
Children are referred to FINS for being ungovernable, for bullying or substance use, among other reasons. There’s worry that kids referred to FINS for non-criminal offenses are propelled into the delinquent system, and then more likely to enter the state’s prisons – the opposite of the program’s goal. | <urn:uuid:a5fa59d9-592b-4b64-8911-dc100f669e89> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wrkf.org/term/corrections | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940335 | 154 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Achatina (Achatina) achatina (Linné, 1758)
Tiger Snail, Giant Ghana Snail
Achatina achatina are the largest land snails in the world and are a widely sought after species, due to their size, distinct markings and lack of availability. They are more difficult to breed than other African snails.
Tigers are found within the dense forest floors in the forest zone of Ghana and also in the humid riparian forest floors. They are believed to have a 3 year breeding cycle which is longer than other snails. This, coupled with deforestation and snail-picking for consumption has caused the numbers to dramatically fall over the last 10-15 years. Unfortunately, they are considered by many people from Ghana and other places in West Africa to be the most prized snail for eating, followed by Archachatina marginata and then Achatina fulica.
Reports by local people suggest that at one time, they were in abundance and could be picked from anywhere, including people's gardens. The people were indiscriminate and ate snails of any size. Nowadays they are becoming a much rarer sight however and Tigers caught in recent times are, on average, much larger than in the past, suggesting that they are breeding less, the babies are not surviving and/or the breeding population is vastly reduced.
Efforts are underway to encourage the locals villagers to eat Achatina fulica as there is a growing abundance of these versatile snails, spread accidently from East Africa. Achatina fulica are nutritionally the same as Achatina achatina.
Ghana has the BIA Bio-Sphere Reserve to study their local flora and fauna in a protected area. Achatina achatina are one of the species found within it. It has been noted however that for reasons unknown, snails found within the area are smaller than their slightly wilder counterparts.
Unfortunately the BIA Bio-Sphere Reserve don't seem to have a website although you can search google for information regarding this by clicking here.
For more general information regarding Bio-Sphere reserves click here.
Average adult shell length is 18cm, with an average diameter of 9cm. In exceptional cases the shell can grow to be 30cm long but this is very unlikely, especially in captivity. Large ones may achieve a shell length of 22cm.
Up to 10 years, usually 5-7.
In the wild, although many do attain longer life-spans than in captivity it must be noted that a large percentage of Tiger snails die after laying eggs through exhaustion due to malnutrition. This is rarely seen in captivity where a plentiful supply of food is readily available and conditions allow the snail to eat all year round.
It must also be noted that, in the wild, snails go into periods of dormancy regularly and are likely to attain a longer lifespan a result. In terms of active hours, a captive snail living for 3 years may perhaps be the equivalent of a 5 year old wild specimen.
The shell is conical in shape and fairly pointed.
"The shell of Achatina achatina differs from that of Achatina fulica in that it possesses some spiral sculpture, particularly close to the suture, crossing the axial growth lines, resulting in a somewhat reticulated surface. The columella and parietal wall is always a vinaceous red color [editor's note: not strictly true] though the columella is still truncated like A. fulica. A full grown A. achatina usually has no more than seven to eight whorls." (Taken from: http://www.ceris.purdue.edu/napis/pests/gas/manual/ident.pdf )
Other types of snails are often mistaken for Tiger snails. Perhaps the most distinctive feature is the dark rough flesh with a raised V shape on the tail. Archachatina marginata also have a V shape but they are easy to distinguish from Tigers by their much blunter shell. The newborn babies are easy to mistake for Achatina fulica but begin to become more distinctive after they are a few weeks old. It is worth mentioning that by this time juvenile Tiger snails also have the V shape.
Shell large and bulky when full-grown, 150-200 mm. long and up to 100 mm. wide. Columella and parietal wall vinaceous red.
|achatina||Boldly marked with dark chestnut-brown zig-zag streaks. Outer lip blueish-white.|
|roseolabiata||Chestnut-brown zig-zag markings as above. Outer lip with a broad violaceous-red inner margin.|
|depravata||Uniformly fulvous-yellow, without darker streaks. Outer lip, blueish-white.|
Shell much smaller and relatively narrower when full-grown, 150 mm. or less in length and 85 mm. or less in width.
|elegans||Markings of shell and colour of columella, parietal wall and outer lip as in typical form. Ovate in outline, the spire much narrower than the base.|
|monochromatica||Uniformly fulvous-yellow, without darker streaks. Columella and parietal wall vineaceous-red. Outer lip blusih-white.|
|togënsis||Boldly marked with chestnut-brown zig-zag streaks. Columella, parietal wall and outer-lip blueish-white|
|bayoli||Boldly marked with rather narrow, widely spaced, straight, vertical dark brown streaks, which are sometimes incomplete or broken into spots. Outline more fusiform than in other races, the spire scarcely narrower than the base.|
Taken from "Studies in the Achatininae (Bequaert)"
Tiger snails prefer warm conditions of 25-30°C with a rH of 80-95%. More information to follow. Tigers are not the easiest species to keep and this may be due to the very steady conditions they are used to in the wild. Ghana/Cameroon have a practically constant 12/12 photoperiod that only extends to 13/11 for about three months. The temperature difference between night and day is only 2-4°C.
If you are having problems with inactivity it may be wise to mimic wild conditions as close as possible.
For more information regarding environmental conditions from their native country click here.
Achatina achatina attain sexual maturity within 21 to 24 months (Hodasi 1979, Ghose 1959, Lange 1950) and sometimes as long as 3 years. This period is halved if snails are raised under intensive feeding control in a captive environment.
According to Hodasi (1979), studies of A. achatina under laboratory conditions indicate that the species breeds from April to July, which coincides with the major rainy season and the longest days of the year. They are reportedly less abundant during this season than in the minor rainy season which occurs from September to November. This phenomenon could be a function of the complexity of the snails' reproductive ecology, growth characteristics and annual physiological rhythms.
It would seem then, that although the small rise in temperature and the minimal increase in day length no doubt play a part in determining seasonal changes, the biggest factor in triggering breeding is an increase in humidity. Eggs laid at the optimum time will hatch just in time for the major rainy season, giving the baby snails the best conditions for fast growth. It must be noted that the snails have less than 4 months to develop before the next dry season.
Reproduction is sometimes by self-fertilization and oviposition occurs in the second and third years and sometimes up to five years after the first oviposition year.
Hodasi (1982) showed that natural photoperiodism favours maximum egg production output in giant snails.
30-300 eggs per clutch. Broadly oval, dirty yellowish. 8 to 8.7mm long, 6.5 to 7mm wide in nominate species. Slightly smaller (7 by 5.5 to 6mm) in subsp. elegans.
Dependent on temperature they take 10 to 31 days to develop and hatch. In normal, stable conditions the hatching viability appears to be 90+%.
Even in the rain forest of Liberia, which is one of the most humid areas of West Africa, the snail buries for aestivation during the drier months.
It is exclusively vegetarian, showing a predilection for decaying vegetable matter and is often even coprophagus (feeds on excrement). | <urn:uuid:4cc25315-6c37-4784-a440-8dfefeb110ee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.petsnails.co.uk/species/achatina-achatina.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951163 | 1,811 | 3.28125 | 3 |
You are here
A lawsuit over the canceled screening of a creationist film took a twist recently with the filing of a cross-complaint that charges the plaintiff with breach of contract, violation of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and fraud.
The annual Evolution Symposium at the National Association of Biology Teachers conference will be webcast live from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. (Central) on November 5, 2010. Entitled "Molecular Insights into Classic Examples of Evolution," the symposium features four exciting speakers whose research in molecular evolution is revolutionizing our understanding of familiar and compelling examples of evolution.
A new survey on American knowledge about religion included two questions relevant to evolution education.
The latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach — the new journal aspiring to promote accurate understanding and comprehensive teaching of evolutionary theory for a wide audience — is now published.
The chorus of support for the teaching of evolution continues, with three statements from the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, the Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester, and the Minnesota Science Museum. | <urn:uuid:8ddcdc35-09ff-40b0-a013-2b05fe5d5605> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ncse.com/general?page=11 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00063-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.913114 | 226 | 1.59375 | 2 |
When a customer calls Weebly.com in search of support, the voice on the other end isn’t coming from a call center or company headquarters, but rather a living room in anywhere U.S.A., where a mother or father is home taking care of his or her children.
Weebly.com co-founder and COO Dan Veltri has hired 17 stay-at-home parents to provide customer support for his company, which allows people to create Web sites for their small businesses.
“I noticed that there were all sorts of qualified stay-at-home moms who are highly-skilled and come from great backgrounds,” said Veltri, “and they work from home out of convenience.”
Veltri is one of a few entrepreneurs who approached hiring from outside the box, giving individuals with offbeat or non-industry related work experience a chance at employment.
While hiring outside the box does require a change in the approach to the hiring process, it can help entrepreneurs bring qualified candidates with a different perspective into their organization.
“This is about an attitude change, said Abhi Narvekar, co-founder of The FerVID Group, a recruitment agency specializing in the oil and gas sector. “Lots of candidates have expertise and know a process in and out because they have applied it in another industry.”
Before even reviewing resumes, Lois Melbourne, CEO of Aquire, recommended entrepreneurs look at what aspects of an open position lend themselves to transferable skills.
“We encourage managers to access what skills they have available to teach and what level of tolerance they have to teach them,” said Melbourne.
Elle Kaplan employed that technique when she recruited for her firm, Lexion Capital Management, where she has hired people who don’t have college degrees. “We have a lot of operational roles in my firm and there is no reason that I can’t give someone a chance who seems really smart and tenacious,” said the company founder and CEO. “A much bigger predictor of success is not a degree, but willingness to learn and can do attitude.”
The interview gives business owners an opportunity to see how a candidate can apply past skills to a new position.
“We always emphasize being able to assess candidates’ willingness to adapt. Even if they don’t have experience in a particular industry, are they able to apply their industry experience in a way that will solve the problem,” said Suki Shah, co-founder and CEO of video-based social recruiting platform GetHired.com.
Shah also recommended group interviewing for small team environments.
“When employees are part of the process they feel a sense of ownership and they can help make the transition a lot easier for the new employee who they have hired,” he said.
Bringing on a new employee with an unconventional background can be unnerving to current employees. Narvekar, of The FerVID Group, recommended the new employee be assigned a “buddy” or mentor.
“Present the new hire in a way as ‘this person compliments our team, but he or she will need help to understand our products and process for getting the work done,’’’ said Narvekar. | <urn:uuid:6f4af14a-e145-4c4d-9c0e-75b899e30273> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://smallbusiness.foxbusiness.com/entrepreneurs/2012/04/09/tips-for-hiring-outside-box/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960158 | 690 | 1.632813 | 2 |
As we turn the page on 2011 and turn our eyes to 2012, I wanted to reflect on some of the remarkable things we accomplished together this past year.
In 2011, we added many thousands of people to our Global Solver Community. We distributed more than $2m in Challenge awards. And we welcomed Popular Science and EDF as strategic partners, resulting in a wealth of new Challenges for Solvers to tackle and an expanded pool of diverse minds for our Seekers to tap into. We elevated Novel Molecule Compound (NMC) Challenges, providing higher award amounts and introducing fingerprinting technology, which resulted in greater uptake in Solver engagement and renewed confidence from our Seekers, ultimately leading to a doubling of NMC Challenges posted and solved as compared to 2010.
But we did something much more important. We accomplished the goal we set for ourselves when we embarked on this journey together – and I don’t say this lightly – we changed the world. Together we brought solutions to light that would never have been uncovered any other way. Below are a few of the Challenges that were awarded in 2011 that I’m particularly proud of.
Prize4Life – this was our “walk on the moon” Challenge. The big, audacious goal that we weren’t sure was even achievable, but was so important that it carried a $1m award. First launched in 2006, the Prize4Life Challenge sought a biomarker for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease – a rare disease with such a rapid rate of advancement that there was literally no way to measure its progression. In 2011, Solver Seward Rutkove was awarded the full $1m for his biomarker, which used a method called electrical impedance myography (EIM) to measure the flow of a small electrical current through muscle tissue. This biomarker has the potential to reduce the cost of Phase II clinical trials by more than 50%, and by correlating closely with disease progression, to remove one of the primary obstacles to industry investment in potential ALS therapies.
EDF Nitrate Capture System – PhD candidate Patrick Fuller submitted an innovative solution for the capture of toxic nitrates – and won the award on his first Challenge. This solution could mitigate the 50-80% of fertilizer applied to commercial crops in the U.S. that is not absorbed by plants and is instead lost to water and air, causing dangerous environmental and health impacts in a growing number of watersheds around the country.
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Games for Health – anyone who has cared for a chronically sick child knows the challenges that adolescence brings. The increasing need for independence and social interaction makes following a prescribed health regimen difficult. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital came up with a unique approach to inspire teenagers and pre-teens to take care of themselves – a video game. The solution to this Challenge has the potential to dramatically improve health care outcomes for sick kids. We’ll have more news on this solution in the coming weeks.
Humanitarian Air Drop – The Challenges posted by the Air Force Research Labs have truly captured the attention of our Solvers and of the media. Of the seven posted so far, the humanitarian air drop Challenge hits closest to home for me. The notion that distribution of aid to the most vulnerable communities, often in the middle of a war zone, could actually cause harm to people needing that aid, is difficult to accept. Two Solvers, one from Indonesia and one from Peru, solved the Challenge, one of them referencing a well-known mechanism for moving coal from a mine shaft. This is a perfect example of diversity and the uniquely prepared mind at work, as my colleague and InnoCentive Co-Founder Alph Bingham might say.
These Challenges represent just a few of the highlights of 2011. The year 2012 is positioned to be even more impactful – we’ll be awarding new delivery options for the polio vaccine, better sanitation for billions of people in developing countries, and viable disposal options for environmentally toxic electronics. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be posting new Challenges that promise to be just as interesting, fulfilling, and earth shattering as those we saw in 2011.
Thank you for your continued participation in the InnoCentive Solver Community. | <urn:uuid:22921fdd-7e5e-4fe3-8f29-b9a289e5d5ab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.innocentive.com/blog/tag/solvers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956777 | 874 | 1.5 | 2 |
Questions About This Book?
- The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any CDs, lab manuals, study guides, etc.
- The Rental copy of this book is not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. You may receive a brand new copy, but typically, only the book itself.
Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books, including Art and Anger, Spanglish, On Borrowed Words, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, and Becoming Amreicans, have been translated into a dozen languages.
Table of Contents
“This ambitious anthology from critic and translator Stavans (Dictionary Days) attempts to introduce North American readers to the great strengths and the variety of Latin American modernity in verse. Beginning with the Cuban poet and patriot Jose Martí (1853–1895), Stavans's selection runs from the lushly formal nationalisms of a century ago (the Peruvian José Santos Chocano: "I sing American, in its wild and autochthonous state... When I feel Incan, I honor that king,/ the Sun"), through the world-renowned intellect of Jorge Luis Borges, the expansive passions of Pablo Neruda, and the tender bleakness of the great Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade, to a wealth of less famous, more recent poets. The volcanic odes of the Mexican Gloria Gevirtz ("The cages enclosing the perfumes, the limitless delights/ the voluptuousness of being born again and again") continue Neruda's visionary tradition, while the compressed bite of the Guatemalan Mayaquiche Humberto Ak'abal brings in another. While Stavans translates many poems himself, many more are reprinted from extant versions by famous names: Mark Strand, Elizabeth Bishop, Eliot Weinberger, Ursula K. Le Guin. Presented in facing-page format, Stavans's anthology inclines to the accessible; specialists may be frustrated by a few points, but Stavans aims, instead, to bring a whole tree of poems and traditions to U.S. readers who do not know it well.” —Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“A great introduction in English to the vast diversity of 20th-century Latin American verse, often as innovative as the Latin American novel.” —Lawrence Olszewski, Library Journal
“I feel like a punching bag after reading this anthology; repeatedly walloped by the force of the original poems and again by the translations. I had never read Mexican poets Enrique Gonzalez Martinez or Amado Nervo but for me they are now linked with the vibrant translations written by Samuel Beckett. I used to think Afro-Cuban author Nicolas Guillen's "Negro Bembon" and "Tu no sabe ingle" were all about what gets lost in translation from Cuban Spanish to American English. No more. Cuban American novelist Achy Obejas has written a daring interpretation that sounds just right in English. But it is Ursula K. Le Guin who has written the best translation of the bunch. For best, I mean effective plus beautiful. Le Guin's translation of a dreamy Gabriela Mistral poem is so good that it's almost as if the American and Chilean writers sat down to write the same work from scratch in two languages at the same time. "The Sleep-Wave" and "La Ola Del SueNo" read as if they were destined to be twinned.” —Luis Clemens, NPR
“Handsomely printed and designed, the collection has been astutely edited by Ilan Stavans, the prolific author and Amherst College professor who has done as much as anyone alive to bridge the hemisphere's linguistic gaps, and it boasts an all-star lineup of translators. In addition to Stavans they include W.S. Merwin, Richard Wilbur, Lysander Kemp, James Merrill, Robert Bly, Samuel Beckett and Ursula K. Le Guin. Many of the English-language versions that appear here, alongside the originals, are as good as we're likely to get for some time, perhaps ever. Most significantly, this hefty volume shows the ethno-linguistic breadth of what we lump under the monolithic term "Latin American" poetry. Like Walt Whitman's poetic Self, the bards of Latin America "contain multitudes." This volume includes works originally written not only in Spanish and Portuguese, but also in French, slangy Caribbean patois . . . and indigenous tongues, such as the Nahuatl of Mexican poet Natalio Hernández Xocoyotzin and the Mapuche of the Chilean Elicura Chihuailaf . . . Poetry in Latin America is still serious business and, as this fine collection reminds us, valued sustenance.” —Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times
“Anthologies like this one are desperately necessary ... This anthology is alluring, seductive. It gives us a glimpse of a poetic tradition that, through translation, has bled across borders to soak into our own ... This anthology surpasses expectation. It is a book that will quickly become indispensable for studying poetry in Latin America in the twentieth century, and will certainly entice its students and readers to dive in to explore its riches.” —Erica Mena, The Quarterly Conversation
“A cornucopia of pleasures, some that come with a sapient sting, FSG’s new bilingual anthology of Latin American poetry provides something for everyone in its great variety and generous, ecumenical selection ... the sweep and extravagance of mellifluous, unending lines ... create a daring trance seldom indulged in by English-language writers ... The varying styles of the translators ripple along pleasantly, as we enjoy the works that W.S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Richard Wilbur, Stavans himself, and many others ... have produced over the years.” —Lynne Lawner, The Brooklyn Rail
“From introspection to protest, spirituality to eroticism, poets illuminate first cultures, colonialism, tyranny, war, liberation, and love over the course of the cataclysmic twentieth century, praising the beauty of the land and lamenting the elusiveness of justice.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist, (starred review)
“The most important and exciting anthology to come out this year.” —David Shook, Molosseus
“The reader dips into a dizzying array of styles, politics and obsessions originally expressed in various languages—Spanish, Portuguese, Quechua and Mazatec . . . For readers who can read the originals, the translations can open new meaning and subtlety . . . there is little to disagree with in the choices—of poets and their poems.” —Felipe Nieves, The Cleveland Plain Dealer | <urn:uuid:9e8e1018-cce1-4521-8e2c-75745af01c1e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ecampus.com/fsg-book-twentiethcentury-latin-american/bk/9780374533182 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931096 | 1,475 | 1.75 | 2 |
Finding Fearless Projects
Youth L.E.A.D. (YL) is the first food justice organization founded in South Florida. YL educates, empowers, and employs low-income teens of color to adopt better eating habits while working to increase access to healthy foods and green spaces in their communities. Since its inception in 2010, YL has trained more than 200 teens, employed over 25 training graduates, and educated over 4,600 people. Founder and Director Erin Healy holds a Masters of Public Health from Tulane and has been named one of “20 Emerging Leaders under 40” by the Miami Herald.
University of Illinois Ph.D. candidate Rajesh Karmani led the creation of Zero Percent to reflect his audacious goal of reducing the world’s current 40% food waste rate to 0%. The Zero Percent mobile app helps restaurants post donations and last-minute discounts on surplus food, helping to increase revenue opportunities for these businesses and alleviating the number of American households dependent on food assistance programs. Zero Percent has saved more than 5,000 pounds of food from being thrown away in Urbana, IL, where the program is being piloted.
Swipes for the Homeless
Swipes for the Homeless is a grassroots, student-run movement working with universities to collect students’ leftover meal credits (aka swipes) for homeless communities. Millennial Thach Nguyen, strives to think big and abolish hunger while increasing awareness through student empowerment and education. Since its inception, Swipes has collected more than 35,000 pounds of food for the homeless with a goal to decrease the number and size of the homeless population in each region they serve.
End Sexual Exploitation
Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE) founder Rachel Durchslag believes that young men must be part of the solution to end sexual exploitation. CAASE seeks to educate young men on the harms of prostitution and to enlist them as allies in the movement to end violence against women and girls. Since its inception, CAASE has launched the country's first prevention curriculum for high school aged boys and provides a legal clinic for survivors of sexual exploitation, serving more than 200 clients.
New American Leaders
The New American Leaders Project (NALP) is challenging the status quo by ensuring that immigrants are truly a part of American democracy – not just in voting booths, but on ballots. With education and training programs in key states, NALP helps immigrants represent their communities and emerge as civic leaders. Founder Sayu Bhojwani served as NYC’s Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs post 9/11.
WE DO Campaign
The WE DO campaign, led by the Reverend Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, proudly stands with LGBT couples as they ascend the steps of courthouses across the southern United States and request -- and are denied -- marriage licenses in their hometowns across the South. Knowing that they will be denied, they take these actions in order to bring attention to this critical civil rights issue and advocate for full federal equality. To address current realities in the South, the Campaign for Southern Equality also provides free legal clinics and support services to help LGBT people know their rights and protect themselves under current laws.
City Hall Fellows
Creating the next generation of enlightened leaders for local government, San Francisco-based City Hall Fellows aims to expand to five cities in five years. Inspiring talented and motivated Millennials to get involved in public service is at the heart of the program. Formerly the Executive Director of the CA 4-H Youth Foundation, and an avid supporter of veteran issues, Mike Rocco is CHF’s Executive Director and leads a group of 14 Fellows in S. F.
Peak Potential Climbing
Twelve years ago, JenFu Cheng couldn’t wait to pursue his dream of starting an organization to teach rock climbing to kids with disabilities. In spite of working 36-hour shifts as a first year resident in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, and in the face of skepticism, he started Peak Potential, which has taught rock climbing to hundreds of children with disabilities, both indoors and outdoors. Peak Potential plans to expand its outdoor climbing program so that its kids can experience the beauty of nature and push themselves even higher!
So They Can Know
Shockingly, only 23% of people diagnosed with STDs notify their sex partners. So They Can Know is an online platform that enables people to notify their partners, with the goal of getting more people treated and tested, and eventually stop the spread of STDs. Founder and Executive Director Jessica Ladd is pursuing her PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins and has previously interned with the White House Office of National AIDS Policy.
Gary Oppenheimer believes that to do the impossible, you must first believe it isn’t. Gary used this motto to build AmpleHarvest.org, helping America’s 40 million gardeners to donate excess produce to food pantries. He uses AmpleHarvest.org to move information to help diminish hunger, educate individuals and encourage growers to share excess food with pantries in desperate need of fresh produce. Helping to alleviate costs and working with the environment, Gary’s goal is “No Food Left Behind.”
When 2008 Zimmerman Fellowship Freedom Award recipient Aashika Damodar slipped and injured her ankle one night, she decided to design a height adjustable high heel. But it didn’t stop with shoes – the Breaking Heels fashion line was created to help fund advocacy and prevention efforts for victims of human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) through scholarships and mentorship programs. Aashika has been recognized for her work on anti-slavery prevention and advocacy.
Taking the Bull by the Horns
Passionate about protecting the natural assets of her western Montana community, Karen Knudsen decided to take an unconventional path to solving water quality problems caused by cattle ranching. She wanted to learn by doing, and took a big leap by purchasing a 2,300-acre cattle ranch complete with 300 cows. Developing a “show” rather than “tell” approach, and by partnering with members of the community, Karen and her team of ranchers, scientists & conservationists have created an innovative model for conserving water and cleaning up pollution.
Lori Markowitz is the Founder of Youth Ambassadors, a group of students working to address truancy and the high school dropout rate. Recently the Youth Ambassadors launched Introduction to Teaching, designed to develop compassionate, and skilled mentors to improve student attendance and encourage students to consider a career in education. Youth Ambassadors aims to arm students with the necessary tools necessary to become leaders and role models among their peers, producing strong and empowered community leaders.
Health for America
From humble beginnings, Madhura Bhat has blazed a remarkable academic and professional path. A visionary leader, she has now taken on the audacious challenge of using America’s greatest strength—entrepreneurship—to combat one of its greatest challenges– health. By pairing college graduates with a community leader, a medical champion, and private sector, Health for America seeks to leverage entrepreneurial approaches to building transformative public health solutions, while molding the next generation of leaders.
Marquis Cabrera, a foster care alumni, put his career – which included roles at The White House and City Year – on hold to establish Foster Skills, which puts on soft and hard skills programs, connects youth to resources, and raises awareness about the issues facing foster children. Foster Skills implements a unique model that leverages the human capital of university students, innovative technologies and entrepreneurial spirit to provide foster youth with a modicum of hope for a bright future.
Arts for Incarcerated Women
Motivated by a belief in the power of art to transform communities, Leslie Neal founded ArtSpring to help incarcerated women develop self-growth and life skills through arts programming and community interaction. ArtSpring offers theatre, dance, creative writing, and music classes to women in the Florida Department of Corrections. Nearly 375 inmates take part in ArtSpring annually, and studies have shown that the recidivism rate is significantly reduced for those who participated in the program for a year or more.
Portland Junior Scientists
At age 16, school funding cuts and a deep passion for science motivated Meghana Rao to create Portland Junior Scientists. PJS is a student-run volunteer organization connecting high school students with underprivileged and at-risk kids to explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics with hands-on experimentation and discussion. Meghana’s main goal is to inspire students in underfunded schools lacking a deep science & math curriculum to pursue careers in science.
Youth Music Exchange
An internationally recognized innovator in education, Michael Bitz created this program to cut across the “engagement gap” in classrooms by going beyond traditional teaching methods. By transforming classrooms into recording studios; allowing students to write, record, and distribute their own music; and empowering students to turn blank pieces of paper into business plans, the project is reinforcing academic learning, social development, and career skills—all of which young people need to succeed.
DC Social Innovation Project
DC is full of people who want to solve pressing problems, but don’t have the support to get started. The DC Social Innovation Project—led by young lawyer Darius Graham—helps social enterprises that tackle big challenges. Whether a mobile health clinic or a new technology platform that connects teachers, students, and parents to track academic progress, the Social Innovation project provides grantees with funding, legal services, and expert advice to help change DC for the better.
WI Pill & Drug Disposal
Frustrated with the growing prescription and over-the-counter drug abuse endemic, at the age of 14, Jordyn Schara decided to take action. She created the WI Prescription Pill & Drug Disposal to focus on getting these drugs off the street and out of the groundwater, which would reduce both abuse and the negative environmental impact. Since founding her 24/7 drug collection program for her community, Schara has collected more than 900,000 pounds of drugs in over 22 states. | <urn:uuid:adc9e259-6380-4551-96c0-ca3c3f99f65c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://befearless.casefoundation.org/finding-fearless/projects/new-american-leaders/sayu-bhojwani | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945862 | 2,084 | 2.078125 | 2 |
The geographical map of Latvia
A republic in northeastern Europe, bounded on the north by Estonia and the Gulf of Riga, an inlet of the Baltic Sea, on the east by Russia, on the south by Belarus and Lithuania, and on the west by the Baltic Sea. The area of Latvia is about 63,700 sq km (24,600 sq mi). The population of the republic in 1993 was 2,606,200. Riga, the capital and largest city, is also the country's chief port. | <urn:uuid:f12e81af-6763-4779-8f3c-56b05eacfbb8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/europe/latvian/map.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947552 | 105 | 3.078125 | 3 |
150th Anniversary of the London Underground
On 9 January 1863 the world’s first underground train pulled out of Paddington station to make the first passenger journey - 3½-miles under the streets of London from Paddington to Farringdon and into the record books.
The original Underground line was built and financed by the Metropolitan Railway, a private company which had been formed in 1854 to undertake the project to link the mainline stations at Paddington, Euston and King’s Cross with the City centre business district to the east.
Travelling on the new railway was a novelty that thousands of Londoners were eager to experience and on the first day of public service – long queues formed at every station. The line was a huge success with 26,000 passengers using the railway each day in the first six months.
With thanks to our sponsors: Cubic Transportation Systems, Siemens, CBS Outdoor, Canary Wharf Group, Costain and Invensys. | <urn:uuid:062e73c4-1f7f-4eb0-be56-e4655e7f08ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whats-on/tube150 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958946 | 203 | 2.984375 | 3 |
A federal appellate court will decide this year whether French anti-discrimination law can restrict freedom of speech on U.S.-based websites that are accessible in France. A Paris court ruled in 2000 that the Yahoo! website violated French law because its users offered for sale certain Nazi artifacts. However, to force compliance with the order, French plaintiffs must seek enforcement from a U.S. court. In response, Yahoo! sought a declaratory ruling and a federal district court held that enforcing the French order would violate the First Amendment. The matter is now on appeal.
The Yahoo! case presents the question of whether the Internet should be governed by myriad local censorship laws from around the world. U.S. courts have held uniformly that the Internet should receive the highest degree of First Amendment protection. They have been influenced profoundly by the medium’s global reach and have invalidated most restrictions so as not to interrupt the “never-ending worldwide conversation” that the Internet makes possible. A contrary result in the Yahoo! case would embrace a very different philosophy—that Internet speakers must “show their papers” at each nation’s borders to ensure that their speech is acceptable to local authorities.
Other nations may treat their citizens as fragile children if they wish, or worse, as enemies of the state. But U.S. courts should not permit the seeds of foreign censorship to be planted on U.S. soil by finding that such restrictions are enforceable here. | <urn:uuid:66b791a3-e2d3-4f0e-bd93-799891cc457f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cato.org/publications/briefing-paper/caught-seamless-web-does-internets-global-reach-justify-less-freedom-speech | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953421 | 299 | 2.046875 | 2 |
Dalton, John (1726-1811) (DNB00)
|←Dalton, John (1709-1763)||Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 13
Dalton, John (1726-1811)
|Dalton, John (1766-1844)→|
DALTON, JOHN (1726–1811), captain H.E.I.C. service, defender of Trichinopoly 1752–3, was the only child of Captain James Dalton, 6th foot (now Warwickshire regiment), by a Limerick lady named Smith. He was great-great-grandson of Colonel John Dalton, of Caley Hall, near Otley, a royalist officer of an old Yorkshire family, desperately wounded in the civil wars. Captain James Dalton fell in the West Indies in 1742, probably in one of the minor descents on Cuba after the British failure before Carthagena. He had previously obtained for his son, then a boy of fifteen, a second lieutenancy in the 8th marines, lately raised by Colonel Sir Thomas Hanmer. Young Dalton embarked with a small detachment of that corps in the Preston, 50 guns, commanded by the sixth Earl of Northesk, which sailed from Spithead in May 1744; and after serving off Madagascar and Batavia, arrived in Balasore roads in September 1745, and was afterwards employed on the Coromandel coast. When the marine regiments were disbanded in 1748, Dalton was appointed first lieutenant of one of the independent marine companies formed on shore at Madras by order of Admiral Boscawen. The year after he transferred his services to the East India Company, and became captain of a company of European grenadiers, and made the campaigns of the next three years against the French under Dupleix and their native allies. In June 1752 he was appointed by Major Stringer Lawrence commandant of Trichinopoly, which place he defended with great skill and bravery against treachery within and overwhelming numbers of assailants without for several months, until the little garrison, the European portion of which had been reduced to a mere handful by repeated sorties, was finally relieved in the autumn of 1753. Dalton resigned his appointment on the ground of ill-health 1 March 1754, and received the thanks of the governor in council for his services. He returned to England in 1754, at the age of twenty-eight, having ‘amassed a fortune of 10,000l. and a fair share of military fame.’ His name appears in the ‘Army List’ for 1755 as a first lieutenant on half-pay of the reduced twelve marine companies formed by order of Admiral Boscawen, but he seems to have commuted his half-pay. He married at Ripon, on 7 March 1756, the second daughter of Sir John Wray, bart., of Glentworth, Lincolnshire, and Sleningford, Yorkshire. After his wife's death in 1787 Dalton resided at Sleningford, which he had purchased from her brother. He died 11 July 1811. Of his three sons, (1) Thomas, captain in the 11th dragoons, succeeded to Norcliffe estates in 1807, and took the name Norcliffe; (2) John, colonel of the 4th light dragoons, inherited Wray estates; (3) James, rector of Croft, Yorkshire, was an eminent botanist (collections now in York Museum). He also had three daughters.
[A Life of Captain John Dalton, H.E.I.C.S. (London, 1885), has been compiled from that officer's journal and other private and public sources by Charles Dalton, F.R.G.S., who disputes the account given by Orme, the author of History of the Military Transactions in Indoostan, originally published in 1763. See also later editions of Orme's work, and also, under corresponding dates, the manuscript Marine Order Books among the Admiralty papers in the Public Record Office, and Colonel Raikes's Hist. 102nd Royal Madras Fusiliers, formerly the H.E.I.C. 1st Madras Europeans, and now 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers.] | <urn:uuid:355ac4af-490f-4879-8e64-d46c48ab1416> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dalton,_John_(1726-1811)_(DNB00) | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977345 | 901 | 2.203125 | 2 |