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Aggressive truck and car drivers can cause deadly accidents. Not leaving enough room between a car and a big rig, darting in and out of lanes, speeding, and distracted driving are the main causes of serious auto accidents. The Florida Highway Patrol is increasing their enforcement of aggressive drivers and recently launched a campaign to issue more tickets throughout the state. The FHP also has a educational component where they will raise awareness about how to drive safely while sharing the road with commercial vehicles.
Some drivers do not realize how big a tractor-trailer’s blind spots can be and unfortunately one-third of all accidents happen in these “No-Zones” where a big rig driver cannot see another vehicle in their mirrors, notes the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. So avoid cutting in front of a big rig and causing a deadly situation where the driver cannot break fast enough.
Driver error – whether it is the car or tractor-trailer driver – causes 88 percent of the accidents, the FHP reports. The Ticketing Aggressive Cars and Trucks (TACT) enforcement periods will happen in late February, April, and May throughout the state. Victims of auto accidents due to an aggressive driver need to get legal counsel to help them recover from serious injuries, medical costs, lost wages, and other concerns. To learn more about the Tampa auto accident law firm Joyce & Reyes, visit our Practice Areas. | <urn:uuid:3721e1ed-74b5-4892-8bb5-3dfda49e6ae9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.joyceandreyespa.com/2012/01/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943724 | 285 | 1.851563 | 2 |
New River Wetlands Project
since 2001 (partial list follows at end page)
The New River has long been considered one of the most polluted waterways in the United States. Originating in Mexico, and flowing through the Imperial Valley, it winds its way north about 67 river miles from the border to the Salton Sea. The river carries agricultural runoff, sewage, and industrial runoff from both sides of the border. Most of the sewage and industrial runoff is treated. Proposed regulations will set total maximum daily loads (TMDL) of silt and nutrients that are allowable in agricultural runoff and in the rivers. Nutrient loads flowing in from the river are thought to be a major contributor to the worsening health of the Salton Sea ecosystem.
Leon Lesicka, of Desert Wildlife Unlimited, currently heads The Citizen’s Congressional Task Force on the New River, which was formed in 1997 with the help of Congressman Duncan Hunter, to improve the quality of the river water and wildlife habitat. Working with the Imperial Irrigation District and Bureau of Reclamation, along with numerous other agencies, they have brought the pilot project well into its second year. Initial construction began in late Spring of 2000 and vegetation was planted by mid summer.
The New River is mostly bordered by non-native invasive species such as tamarisk and phragmites, and provides little value to wildlife. This new project is already adding tremendous habitat for wildlife as well as doing a remarkable job of cleaning the waters of the river through the use of nature itself. The initial pilot project consists of two sites. The Imperial site is 68 acres and 1.5 miles long. The Brawley site is 7 acres in size. The Imperial site receives its water from the Rice Drain and is entirely agricultural runoff. The Brawley site pumps water directly from the New River. The water first flows into the large settling ponds to settle out the heavier silts and from there flows into a series of smaller ponds planted with native bulrushes and sedges. The vegetation and ponds are laid out so the water must wind its way in a zigzag pattern the length of the site. Initial testing of water in and out of the systems has shown a decrease of as much as 97% in total suspended solids and an increase of up to 83% in dissolved oxygen. If proven successful, the wetlands will be expanded to cover most of the river bottom areas of the New and Alamo rivers with about 37 new sites being considered already.
Detwiler and I are conducting the avian and wildlife surveys for the
project. We began our surveys in March of this year, doing five visits
to each site, per quarter. To date we have recorded just over 100
species and confirmed successful nesting of about 15, with numerous
probable breeders. The large settling ponds attract grebes, herons,
cormorants, terns, shorebirds, waterfowl and pelicans. The bulrushes and
sedges are maturing rapidly. American Bittern has been recorded at the
Brawly site and Least Bittern at both sites. The Brawley site has a
power line passing nearby and a date grove on top of the hill which
attracts kingfishers, kingbirds, accipiters and the like. The Imperial
site has little in the way of trees but the few pockets of mesquite
along the hillside can be loaded with warblers, sparrows, towhee, etc.
Marsh Wren and Common Yellowthroat pretty much own the bulrushes
with Orange-crowned Warblers coming in big numbers during the fall.
Large flocks of blackbirds, ibis and egrets abound. Although they have
not been using the wetlands directly, Prairie and Peregrine Falcon have
been seen near the Imperial site recently. The fields just to the
South of Wienert Road hold some of the highest concentrations of
wintering Mountain Plover in the Imperial Valley.
will prove to be a regular stop on any birding trip to the Salton Sea.
Dragonflies. Nine species and counting!
site is located west of Forester Road and on the south bank of the New
River. Coming from San Diego, go north on Forester Road from I-8. You
will go past Worthington Road and turn west on Wienert Road, which only
goes west. At about two miles a large deep drain canal will join you on
the left--this is the Rice Drain and it supplies the project. A little
further on the Rice Drain passes under Wienert and heads northwest. Turn
right on the first bank, there is a small sign hanging from a chain that
says “Granite”. Follow
the drain down into the site.
To reach the
Brawley site from the Imperial site, take Wienert back to Forester and
go north. Turn east on Keystone Road, which only goes to the right.
Keystone runs into Hwy 86, where you will turn left (go north) toward Brawley.
Turn left (west) on Legion Road, which is the first signal light a mile south of
Brawley. Follow Legion Road to the end of the pavement and continue
along the chain link fence on your left. You will pass through an open
gate and will come to an orange painted standpipe. The road down into
the wetlands is immediately on your right. You can get to an overlook of
the site if you continue to the date grove. | <urn:uuid:e96e3f9d-d665-4714-9eae-bbef31e8a44c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.southwestbirders.com/new%20river%202001.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942255 | 1,153 | 3.03125 | 3 |
Mathematician and astronomer, b. at Alcacer-do-Sol, 1492; d. at Coimbra, 1577
Nunez (Noxius), Pedro, mathematician and astronomer, b. at Alcacer-do-Sol, 1492; d. at Coimbra, 1577. He studied ancient languages, philosophy, and medicine at Lisbon and mathematics at Salamanca. In 1519 he went as inspector-general of customs to Goa, India, returning to become in 1529 royal cosmographer. After lecturing for three years at Lisbon, a professorship of higher mathematics was established for him at the University of Coimbra, which he held from 1544 to 1562. His utterances on science plunged him into discussions with foreign savants, particularly the French mathematician, Oronce Fine. Having been tutor in the reigning family, he was enabled to spend his last years in ease.
To mathematics, astronomy, and navigation, Nunez made important contributions. He devised a method for obtaining the highest common divisor of two algebraic expressions. In his "De crepusculis" he announced a new and accurate solution of the astronomical problem of minimum twilight and suggested an instrument for the measurement of angles. The nonius, never in common use, consisted essentially of forty-six concentric circles divided into quadrants by two diameters at right angles to each other, each quadrantal arc being divided into equal parts, the number of parts diminishing from ninety for the outermost arc to forty-five for the innermost. If one side of any angle is made to coincide with one of the radii, the vertex of the angle falling at the center of the circles, the other side of the angle will fall on or near some point of division of one of the arcs. If then a is the number of parts intercepted and n is the whole number of parts in the relevant arc, the magnitude of the angle will be 90 x a/n degrees. In "De arte navigandi" he announced his discovery and analysis of the curve of double curvature called the rumbus, better known as loxodrome, which is the line traced by a ship cutting the meridians at a constant angle. His collected works were published under the title "Petri Nonii Opera" (Basle, 1592). Among them are: "Tratado da sphera com a theorica do sol e da lua e o primeiro livro da geographia de Claudio Ptolomeo Alexandrino" (Lisbon, 1537); "De crepusculis liber unus" (Lisbon, 1542); "De arte atque ratione navigandi" (Coimbra, 1546); "De erratis Orontii Finei" (Coimbra, 1546); "Annotatio in extrema verba capitis de climatibis" (Cologne, 1566); "Livro de algebra emarithrnetica e geometria" (Antwerp, 1567); "Annotagoes a Mechanica de Aristoteles e as theoricas dos planetas de Purbachio com a arte de Navegar" (Coimbra, 1578).
PAUL H. LINEHAN | <urn:uuid:f0a39e34-31dd-4ed9-8477-e34940de5699> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Pedro_Nunez | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.90571 | 691 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Delaware:
Section 1. Section 1, Chapter 288, Volume 56, Laws of Delaware, is amended to read as follows:
Section 1. Section 2301, Subsection (a), Chapter 23, Title 6, Delaware Code, is amended by striking all of said subsection (a) and inserting in lieu thereof a new subsection (a) to read as follows:
(a) The legal rate of interest for the loan or use of money, in all cases where no express contract has been made for a less rate, shall be 6 per cent per annum, except that any borrower may agree to pay, and any lender may charge and collect from such borrower, interest at any rate agreed upon in writing in excess of 6 per cent per annum but not in excess of 8 per cent per annum on the unpaid principal balance.
Section 2. Section 3, Chapter 288, Volume 56, Laws of Delaware, is amended by striking said section in its entirety.
Section 3. Section 4, Chapter 288, Volume 56, Laws of Delaware, is renumbered "Section 3". | <urn:uuid:1058baa1-5f66-4877-ab7f-ed86be765892> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://delcode.delaware.gov/sessionlaws/ga125/chp078.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9311 | 232 | 1.601563 | 2 |
St Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland and the national feast day of St Patrick is celebrated in Ireland and worldwide on March 17th, reputed to be the date of Patrick's death.
Although St Patrick was not born in Ireland, he became an integral part of the country's heritage through his service in Ireland in the 5th century. Historically, much of the factual information about him has become interspersed with tales and legends, making it a little difficult to differentiate between the two sometimes!
History of St Patrick
Patrick was born in Britain, near the end of the fourth century, in either Scotland or Wales, depending on different versions of the story.
He was captured as a boy and taken to Ireland where he spent six years in slavery, herding sheep. According to his writing, God spoke to him in a dream, telling him it was time to leave Ireland. He escaped and returned to Britain, where he began religious training, which lasted more than fifteen years. He then returned to Ireland in his 30s as a missionary and introduced Christianity to the Celtic pagans in the country.
Already familiar with the Irish language and culture, Patrick incorporated traditional ritual into his lessons of Christianity to reinforce his message to the Irish people. Legend has it that he used bonfires to celebrate Easter since the Irish were used to honoring their gods with fire, and that he used the native shamrock as a symbol of the Holy Trinity when preaching.
St Patrick is credited with driving the snakes out of Ireland, although evidence suggests post-glacial Ireland never had any snakes in the first place!
St Patrick's Day Celebrations
Celebrated as both a liturgical and non-liturgical holiday in many corners of the globe, for many people it is really a celebration of Ireland itself.
Almost every small town and village in Ireland celebrates March 17th with parades, music, marching bands and festival floats. Dublin and the other Irish cities have parades that attract thousands of people from every corner of the globe.
For examples of St Patrick's Day parades in a small Irish town visit the Claremorris photo gallery.
Approximately 34 million Americans claim Irish ancestry and St Patrick's Day was first celebrated in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1737. The biggest St Patrick's Day parade is normally held in New York, while the largest celebration in the southern hemisphere is in Sydney, Australia.
Wearing green, eating green food and even drinking green beer is synonymous with March 17th and the age old tradition of 'drowning the shamrock' is a sentiment recognised worldwide. This custom is believed to have its origins in the practice of putting the shamrock, that had been worn on a lapel or hat, into the last drink of the evening ... whether that came about by accident or design is not quite clear!
There are countless shrines in many parts of the world in honour of St Patrick and every year on St Patrick's Day these shrines give Irish ex-pats the opportunity to celebrate their religion, culture and heritage, as they would be able to celebrate them at home in Ireland.
One such shrine is the Shrine of St Patrick in Missouri, USA, dedicated March 17, 1957. It is fashioned after St Patrick's Memorial Church of the Four Masters in Donegal, and its windows were designed from the Book of Kells.
Croagh Patrick, near Westport in County Mayo, is often referred to as Ireland's 'holy mountain'. An annual pilgrimage takes place here every year on the last Sunday in July, when thousands of pilgrims make the onerous ascent of this steep mountain.
Read this brilliant account of a Croagh Patrick climb written by Jim Burns, Quincy, IL, USA. | <urn:uuid:943d2e4a-97bc-4ce7-aa27-ea9079045a17> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mayo-ireland.ie/st-patrick.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977507 | 756 | 3.25 | 3 |
United Nations, Dec 3 (IANS) The UN Security Council has passed a resolution permitting member countries to enter the territorial waters of Somalia to fight piracy.
The US-sponsored resolution, passed unanimously by the Security Council Tuesday, is valid for 12 months. It welcomes the recent initiatives taken by countries like India, Canada, France, Russia, Britain and the US to counter piracy off Somali coast.
The Security Council resolution is expected to come as a big help to countries like India that are fighting Somali pirates. Under international laws, naval ships are free to patrol international waters.
Indian naval vassals and those from the other countries were constrained so far to enter the territorial waters of Somalia, a situation the pirates have taken full advantage of.
'The resolution is the beginning for setting a comprehensive approach for dealing with piracy in that region,' Rosemary DiCarlo, the US ambassador and alternate representative for Special Political Affairs, told reporters at the UN headquarters here.
The resolution also makes very clear the support for the European Union mission that is about to be launched and welcomes the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) initiative to escort World Food Programme (WFP) shipments until the EU mission is up and running.
Chinese Ambassador Zhang Yesui said piracy had become rampant and posed grave threats to international humanitarian assistance and navigational security, with dire consequences for the global economy and the lives of people in Somalia.
Expressing concern over the increasing sophistication and strength of the pirates, Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin said his country was considering sending more naval forces to add strength to the international fleet in the region.
Combating piracy requires greater focus and the appropriate jurisdiction for bringing the culprits to justice, he said.
Italian ambassador Aldo Mantovani said the resolution had made fight against piracy stronger, more coordinated and more effective.
In its resolution, the Security Council called for 'seizure and disposition of boats, vessels, arms and other related equipment' used or suspected of being used for piracy.
The 15-member council expressed concern over the threat piracy poses to the prompt, safe and effective delivery of humanitarian aid to Somalia, to international navigation and the safety of commercial maritime routes.
6 months ago | <urn:uuid:10e6747e-a497-49fa-b5e1-0ce38b33fc84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://spoonfeedin.blogspot.com/2008/12/world-countries-can-enter-somali-waters.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925568 | 450 | 2.109375 | 2 |
The Nicollet Island/East Bank neighborhood comprises Nicollet Island on the Mississippi River just east of downtown and the portion of the eastern riverbank located between Central Avenue and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad line.
The neighborhood is at the geographical and historical center of Minneapolis. The island is named for Joseph Nicollet, a scientist, geographer and mathematician born in Savoy, France. He led three expeditions through Minnesota, and authored the influential book "Map of the Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi." (Source: City of Minneapolis Neighborhood Profiles) | <urn:uuid:f0a5716a-0cb8-46d1-b15c-dce461b9c103> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.journalmpls.com/neighborhoods/nicollet-islandeast-bank | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947776 | 114 | 2.40625 | 2 |
January 9, 2012
Stories this photo appears in:
If we are starving, we are more likely to eat anything we can find without any concern for our wellbeing, but when we are full and content, we are more selective about when and what we eat.
Recently I took my vehicle in for a routine service check. In the last couple of weeks, I had noticed a squealing kind of noise coming from the front end of my vehicle.
Growing up, there were times when I didn’t always like something my mom would cook for dinner.
Have you ever found yourself in a struggle with someone because they seem to push back every time you tried to tell them something about themselves or tell them what they needed to do?
To learn from a mistake effectively transforms it from mistake to life lesson.
I write often about change and transition and the usefulness of embracing these as opportunities for personal growth. Very often we have an oppositional relationship to change and transition where we are kicking and screaming, pushing back and resisting.
Recently while having a discussion about letting go of past mistakes, I suggested that “letting go” is often confused with “forgetting” or “pretending mistakes did not happen” and simply moving on with life.
I am currently navigating some difficult terrain as I am facing transition in my life. It makes sense that in order to get where you need to be, you have to leave where it is you are currently.
When we are moving from one place to another in our lives, we are often faced with change. In fact, we cannot get to the next place without experiencing change.
I was reminded of something recently that I felt was worth sharing and it was simply to be mindful of the value I assign to other people’s opinions and perceptions of me — positive or critical.
As we reflect on the many important contributions to our world made by African Americans from times past and present, let us draw inspiration, courage and strength, but also curiosity. Let us be curious about what enabled them to persevere and to succeed. Let us be curious about what we have in common with people of such innovation and creativity, passion and intellect, bravery and determination.
How do you take care of yourself? I pose this question so that we may take a moment to truly reflect on what is being asked.
The human body has processes by which it excretes or removes waste it has produced. These processes occur largely via the excretory and digestive systems of our bodies.
Virginia Satir, a pioneer in the field of Family Therapy, once wrote that “conflict is an avenue for hope.” This is nutritious food for thought that can enrich relationships between people whether they are family members, couples, friends, or even colleagues in the workplace.
If you have spent the past years of your life behind a brick wall in an effort to protect yourself by keeping all of the bad things at bay, you obviously have good reasons for doing so.
The start of a new year has often been a time that we look forward to in hopes of starting anew in various areas of our lives. We create lists of resolutions, some realistic, some not, and we are filled with a renewed resolve to make changes for the better.
My mother’s mother passed away recently and during the time of the funeral, so many members of her side of the family gathered together. I met some first and second cousins for the first time and saw many others, including aunts and uncles, for the first time in ages.
Watching my nephew grow remains the highlight of my life. Yep, he is still learning and still growing. In what seems like an overnight process, I have watched him grow and grow right out of diapers, clothes and shoes on into bigger and bigger sizes in each. He is 6 years old now.
In the last column, I briefly described the major processes of the excretory and digestive systems by which the human body rids itself of waste products and toxins.
I am typically the kind of person who, in a group of my colleagues deciding where to go for lunch, would defer the decision to others based on what they wanted.
I remember earlier on having some particular things I wanted to accomplish in my life, but I would get to a place where I would feel stuck and unable to be productive. It was quite the mystery and tough for me too because initially, I would start off super excited and motivated. My mind would be flooded with all the steps it would require to get me to where I wanted to go.
Find this story and other news, sports and features items at www.albanyherald.com.
There is this commercial where a mother tells her son that he cannot leave the dinner table before he finishes the plate of vegetables (broccoli) in front of him.
What if we each did something different, the thing that was least expected and not part of the usual pattern of response?
Sometimes when things are going badly for us, our thinking can become distorted and we think that things will never improve. Sometimes we believe that things are always going badly in our lives.
Acceptance is not about giving up, but about acknowledging that which you cannot change. Acceptance is not letting go of hope.
I am a work in progress in certain areas of my life. Perhaps you can identify with that for a particular area in your own life.
It is a new beginning. Keep going until you cross the finish line.
Find this story and other news, sports and features items at www.albanyherald.com.
Sometimes, it becomes necessary in our lives that we step back from some things.
Change is the only constant in life. This true, albeit paradoxical assertion reminds us that sometimes things will not go according to plan. We can all think of a thing or 20 that have not gone as intended.
What is it that you are really afraid of? Is it that you won’t be good enough or fast enough? Is it that you are limited in what you know or what you can do?
Times are still trying and money is still tight, but things are getting better. We all still have difficult days dealing with all that we have on our plates.
On a recent ride home down a dark back road, the kind where you have to use your bright lights, I noticed an interesting phenomenon.
When we face difficulties in our lives that confront us with change, we don’t always take too kindly to that, and understandably so.
I was watching a news program recently and there was a story about one state’s improved emergency preparedness and management efforts in the event of a hurricane.
Graduates, Do not pawn your values. You might find that it wasn’t worth the trade you made. Stay true to who you are at your core.
Do you like me? Check yes, no, or maybe.”
In times of intense emotion and passion around potentially divisive issues, we are better served as individuals and as a community when we can suspend our judgment and criticism of one another and attempt, instead, to make sense of one another’s perspective.
So often too many of us spend our lives being an iron that makes grilled cheese sandwiches. I know, just stay with me.
I believe it was Albert Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Shhh. If I had a voice I would tell you that you cannot afford to stay silent. I would ask you to please help me.
In continuous dedication to all the beautiful girls, young ladies, and young women in our communities ...
Dear Dad, I am writing to let you know that I am a man now. This may come as a surprise to you, but I have some things I need to say.
Have you ever had a boss who never had anything to say about the good work you did, but also never hesitated to come down on you on when you made a mistake or had an off day?
Benjamin Franklin said “remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
Thank you. The phrase to show courtesy. The words to convey gratitude. The lyrics of appreciation.
The future belongs to those who prepare for it today. — Malcolm X
Recently I listened to Craig Valentine, an award winning speaker and trainer, give a talk and he said something that struck me as profoundly interesting.
Moping doesn’t mobilize. This thought occurred to me recently when I temporarily succumbed to a moment of frustration over the demands on my time.
If you have lived for a good number of years, you might have, at one time or another, thought, “if I knew then what I know now, I would not have taken some of the paths I did.”
We shall overcome, but we’re not there yet. A change has come, but it has only begun.
It can be hard to look at ourselves when things are not going the way we want them to in our lives. It is much easier to look outside ourselves at everyone else around us. | <urn:uuid:ca947668-8624-4e16-87eb-57f9f283ac94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.albanyherald.com/photos/2012/jan/09/34243/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974468 | 1,912 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Programme Leader: Graham Moore
National wheat pre-breeding research
Programme Leader: Graham Moore
A research project funded by BBSRC and coordinated by the John Innes Centre aims to bridge the gap between publicly-funded plant science and private breeding companies. The research is in its second year, and from 2014 will become an Institute Strategic Programme.
The world is facing a potential crisis in terms of food security due to population expansion, dietary changes, declining stocks of fossil fuels, and a failure of conventional wheat breeding methods to sustain yield gains.
Over the next 50 years, more wheat needs to grown than has been produced in the 10,000 years since agriculture began.
In the UK 18 million hectares, or around three-quarters of UK land, is used for agriculture. But up to six times that is actually needed to supply all the resources we require and to absorb all the waste we generate. We make up the shortfall by paying for it using wealth created from our service sector. This is not sustainable.
In the US, advances in biotechnology will help double maize yields by 2030. The aim is to achieve this on 30 per cent less land, using less water and less energy.
The UK needs a similar vision to improve major crops such as wheat, ensuring the UK makes a major contribution to global food security. We aim to address that need by collaborating with wheat researchers at other institutes and universities on a collaborative pre-breeding programme.
The wheat story so far
A chance hybridization 10,000 years ago enabled humans to start harvesting and domesticating wheat, eventually leading to the elite lines of modern bread wheat currently in use.
Today it is the UK’s largest crop. Worldwide, more land is used to grow wheat than any other crop. It has overtaken rice to become the second most produced cereal after maize.
Domestication increased yields, but recently those increases have slowed. This is partly because domestication has eroded wheat diversity. The possibilities for improvement are reaching their limit. Experimental crosses will allow new and useful genetic variation to be identified from wheat parents. Some varieties may show poor agronomic performance but contain lost genes and traits valued for improving performance and for adapting crops to UK and global agriculture.
We aim to rejuvenate wheat diversity, prioritising valuable traits from wild wheat, a worldwide collection of locally-adapted primitive varieties (or ‘landraces’), ‘synthetic’ bread wheat, and other grasses. We will incorporate this diversity into elite UK varieties; ensuring breeders can quickly apply it to make improvements in the field.
Sources of diversity
Three sources of diversity will be used. Untapped genetic variation in existing UK and worldwide land races will be identified, most importantly from the AE Watkins landrace collection in the BBSRC small grain cereals collection held at JIC. Scientists will also recreate the original cross that produced the first bread wheat to capture diversity from modern wheat’s ancestors. The resulting varieties are known as synthetic wheat. Wild and cultivated relatives will provide further diversity.
Tomorrow’s wheat - widening the gene pool
In this multi-site research programme, publicly-funded scientists will collaborate on producing new lines of bread wheat with improved resistance to diseases and insects, greater tolerance to drought, salt and heat, and enhanced yield. Breeders will be able to take them on for further selection to produce elite varieties for release.
Breeders have already identified key agronomic traits of most interest to them, and academics will also pursue target traits, for example linked to environmental benefits.
The research will broaden the gene pool, or ‘germplasm’, for wheat. All the information, such as the genetic markers required for precision breeding, will be stored in a central database. The seed will be stored at JIC’s Germplasm Resource Unit. All the information and seed will be free of patents and made freely available to breeders and researchers worldwide.
The genes that control important traits will be identified and then mapped on the wheat genome, making it easier for breeders to select them in marker assisted breeding. The research will ensure that the greatest possible diversity is used.
Some of the first traits explored will be resistance to aphids, bulb fly and Take-All.
To improve yield, traits that improve biomass will be identified. These traits include the efficiency with which a plant photosynthesises, the way a leaf ages, and how that effects the growth of the stem and the grain, and leaf architecture.
Varieties with enhanced nitrogen and phosphate use will be developed to reduce the amount of fertiliser needed on crops.
Capturing and exploiting diversity
The parental material used in the initial pre-breeding crosses will be genotyped, revealing the genetic differences between varieties. This will help ensure that maximum diversity is exploited.
Using the most advanced sequencing techniques we will generate very high density maps of markers linked to target genes. So-called second and third generation sequencing will enable us to provide breeding companies with markers for “precision” breeding, and academia with markers for fine dissection of key traits.
Throughout the three years of the current project, and looking ahead to the formal research programme, all partners will work together to collect genotyping and phenotypic data in a database. This database will show the links between genes and traits.
Training the next generation
Wheat is a particularly complex cereal to study. Some varieties have two sets of chromosomes (diploid), some have four (tetraploid) and others six (hexaploid). The wheat genome is 30 times larger than that of rice and five times larger than the human genome.
The UK currently has the skill base to deliver the challenging research needed, but many wheat researchers are due to retire in the next five to ten years. The resources created by the pre-breeding programme will help young researchers initiate their own wheat research projects. The pooling of expertise will make it easier to train the next generation of scientists in skills needed for population development, phenotyping and genotyping. | <urn:uuid:19b22e2c-6143-405c-b3b7-b51c7b794a3c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jic.ac.uk/corporate/research/wheat-improvement.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917797 | 1,249 | 2.703125 | 3 |
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Case Reports in Infectious Diseases
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 267028, 3 pages
A Case of Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection in an HIV-Positive Adult
1Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06510, USA
2Department of Microbiology, Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore 575001, India
Received 12 June 2012; Accepted 13 August 2012
Academic Editors: C. L. Gibert, K. Lindan, and E. M. Stringer
Copyright © 2012 Aakriti Gupta et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is commonly known to cause an influenza-like illness. However, it can also cause more severe disease in young children and older adults comprising of organ transplant patients with immunocompromised status. Till date, only four cases of RSV infections have been reported in HIV-positive adults. We describe here a case of HIV-positive female with relatively preserved immune function who presented with RSV infection requiring ventilation and showed improvement after prompt treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin.
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a common virus widely known to cause acute respiratory tract illness in people of all ages. Young immunocompetent children are more frequently infected, and reinfection is common. However, it has come to be recognized as a serious adult pathogen in recent times. Epidemiological studies indicate that RSV is second to influenza as a cause of serious viral respiratory disease in adults .
Immunocompromised adults may have RSV in varying degrees of severity and outcomes ranging from full recovery to progressive respiratory failure and death. Most case studies involving RSV infection in such patients include hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) or lung transplant patients . Only four cases have been reported in HIV-positive individuals [3–6].
We describe here a case of 55 y/o HIV-positive female with respiratory failure on mechanical ventilation detected to have RSV infection.
2. Case History
We describe a case of an HIV-positive 55-year-old female who presented with worsening shortness of breath, cough and fevers for one-week duration associated with right-sided pleuritic chest pain. Her antiretroviral therapy regimen consisted of Tenofovir/Emtricitabine, Ritonavir, and Darunavir daily. Her CD4 count on admission was 408/mm3 with undetectable viral load.
Patient was febrile to a maximum temperature of 102 F, hypotensive with systolic blood pressure recorded in the range of 80–90 mm Hg, and hypoxic with oxygen saturation of 90% on room air. On auscultation, she had bilateral crackles anteriorly. Chest X-ray demonstrated right-sided pleural effusion with bibasilar opacities. On admission, patient had acute renal failure with a creatinine of 4.3.
In the emergency department, patient received ceftriaxone and azithromycin as empiric coverage for community-acquired pneumonia, intravenous fluids, and bronchodilators. Her respiratory status declined overnight with worsening hypoxia requiring intubation and mechanical ventilation. Repeat chest X-ray showed evidence of worsening pleural effusions that were now bilateral. Vancomycin was added to her antibiotic regimen and azithromycin was discontinued. Upon intubation, thick-bloody, yellow-green sputum was suctioned from the airways. A bronchoalveolar lavage was performed to obtain specimens for pathology and culture.
Bacterial, fungal, viral (Influenza A and B), pneumocystis, and mycobacterial cultures remained negative over the next few days. On hospital day 3, RSV Ag was detected by ELISA in the bronchoalveolar lavage specimen collected under direct visualization. Her renal failure precluded the use of aerosolized ribavirin. Also, limited drug availability and inadequate experience of the staff personnel with its usage precluded its use. However, we administered intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) 35 g/day for four days as recommended. Meanwhile, we continued treatment with vancomycin and ceftriaxone.
After 4 doses of IVIG and the above antibiotics, her oxygenation and respiratory symptoms started improving by hospital day 7. Her oxygen saturation rose to 100% on FiO2 of 40%, and renal function improved with creatinine decreasing to 1.4. She also regained her mental status to the extent that she would respond to some commands, though not fully.
Her clinical status markedly improved, and she was finally extubated. A follow-up bronchial alveolar lavage for the detection of RSV was ordered, and results were negative.
RSV has been clearly recognized as a pathogen afflicting all age groups and both immunocompetent and immunocompromised people.
Among the immunocompromised adults, most experience in treating serious RSV infections has been reported with HSCT or lung transplant recipients . Information regarding RSV infection in HIV/AIDS patients and its management that exists in current literature is rather limited. To our knowledge, only four cases of HIV-positive patients with RSV infection have been reported in literature (Table 1) [3–6]. Given the lack of evidence-based data, we have to depend on a few case reports to guide the management of these patients. Hence, recognition and treatment of RSV in the immunocompromised patients, HIV-positive in particular, remains a challenge.
Detection of RSV in clinical specimens such as nasal washes or bronchoalveolar lavages can be made by various diagnostic methods including viral culture, detection of viral antigens, and detection of viral RNA. Rapid diagnosis of RSV can be made by direct antigen testing on clinical specimens (i.e., direct immunofluorescence staining), with a sensitivity of 93% and a specificity of 97%, and by real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assays for detection of RSV RNA with a higher sensitivity and specificity [7, 8]. RSV usually manifests as an upper respiratory tract infection but may progress rapidly to lower respiratory tract infection (LRI). Studies in the HSCT population demonstrate increased morbidity and mortality with LRI .
Our patient had a CD4 count of 409/mm3 on admission; hence her immune function was relatively preserved at presentation. This is in contrast to previous cases reported in literature with severe immunocompromise (Table 1). Interestingly, a substantially high number of immunocompetent adults are being identified to have RSV infection. In a four-year prospective study consisting of 608 healthy elderly patients, 540 high-risk adults, and 1388 hospitalized patients, RSV was identified in 102 patients in the prospective cohorts and in 142 hospitalized patients . Among the healthy elderly cohort with RSV infection, 11% of the patients had findings on chest X-ray, and 76% of patients had functional impairment for more than one day.
Commonly advocated therapies for RSV include aerosolized ribavirin and immunoglobulin products (intravenous immunoglobulin, RSV hyperimmune globulin, or the RSV-specific monoclonal antibody palivizumab). Some studies have suggested that dual therapy with aerosolized ribavirin and an intravenous immunoglobulin product should be the standard of care until controlled trials are available. The crucial factor, however, in the management of RSV infections is the promptness in institution of therapy. Mortality rates have been shown to be significantly higher when therapy is delayed .
In our patient, institution of IVIG was initiated promptly when RSV antigen was detected. She received four doses and gradually showed improvement in her respiratory status thus emphasising the importance of early detection and prompt institution of antiviral therapy.
A. Gupta and P. Mody contributed equally to the paper.
Conflict of Interests
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests.
- M. R. Griffin, C. S. Coffey, K. M. Neuzil, E. F. Mitchel, P. F. Wright, and K. M. Edwards, “Winter viruses: influenza- and respiratory syncytial virus-related morbidity in chronic lung disease,” Archives of Internal Medicine, vol. 162, no. 11, pp. 1229–1236, 2002.
- E. E. Walsh, “Respiratory syncytial virus infection in adults,” Seminars in Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 423–432, 2011.
- E. Voigt, R. L. Tillmann, J. C. Schewe, E. Molitor, and O. Schildgen, “ARDS in an HIV-positive patient associated to respiratory syncytial virus,” European Journal of Medical Research, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 131–132, 2008.
- B. A. Cunha, U. Syed, and J. E. Hage, “Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) in a hospitalized adult with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) mimicking influenza A and Pneumocystis (carinii) jiroveci pneumonia (PCP),” Heart Lung, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 76–82, 2012.
- D. Murphy and R. C. Rose III, “Respiratory syncytial virus pneumonia in a human immunodeficiency virus-infected man,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 261, no. 8, p. 1147, 1989.
- S. Sriskandan and S. Shaunak, “Respiratory syncytial virus infection in an adult with AIDS,” Clinical Infectious Diseases, vol. 17, no. 6, p. 1065, 1993.
- J. Kuypers, A. P. Campbell, A. Cent, L. Corey, and M. Boeckh, “Comparison of conventional and molecular detection of respiratory viruses in hematopoietic cell transplant recipients,” Transplant Infectious Disease, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 298–303, 2009.
- J. Kuypers, N. Wright, J. Ferrenberg et al., “Comparison of real-time PCR assays with fluorescent-antibody assays for diagnosis of respiratory virus infections in children,” Journal of Clinical Microbiology, vol. 44, no. 7, pp. 2382–2388, 2006.
- W. G. Nichols, T. Gooley, and M. Boeckh, “Community-acquired respiratory syncytial virus and parainfluenza virus infections after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation: The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center experience,” Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation, vol. 7, pp. 11S–15S, 2001.
- A. R. Falsey, P. A. Hennessey, M. A. Formica, C. Cox, and E. E. Walsh, “Respiratory syncytial virus infection in elderly and high-risk adults,” The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 352, no. 17, pp. 1749–1759, 2005.
- E. Whimbey, R. E. Champlin, R. B. Couch, et al., “Community respiratory virus infections in bone marrow transplant recipients: The M.D. Anderson Cancer Center experience,” Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 778–782, 1996. | <urn:uuid:0cfc1a29-0fe5-459d-8db5-4b6e683fcff5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hindawi.com/crim/id/2012/267028/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.903936 | 2,653 | 2 | 2 |
Monday trash delayed due to holiday.
Martin Luther King Day is a holiday that often leaves residents confused as to what's open or closed, and what city services are impacted. Trash pickup, for instance, can make Philadelphia citizens scratch their heads. However, according to the Department of Street's website, it's not so complicated. For the Jan 21 Martin Luther King holiday, trash and recycling will not be collected Monday. Instead, everyone gets pushed back one day. So Monday folks get picked up on Tuesday, Tuesday on Wednesday and so on. Visit the website for any questions.
Government offices won't be open.
A variety of different things will be closed today because of Martin Luther King Day. City offices will be closed. Because of that, trash and recycling pickup will be pushed back one day throughout the week. Libraries throughout Philadelphia—including the Chestnut Hill and Lovett library branch—won't be open. Post offices across the country will be closed. That includes the Mt. Airy post office on Germantown Avenue and the Chestnut Hill office on Cirttenden. There also won't be as much child traffic as normal—schools won't be open either. Banks throughout the area—and across the country—will mostly be closed. | <urn:uuid:fe45c5b2-d22b-414b-a637-039879aa6db8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chestnuthill.patch.com/topics/Holiday+2013 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963599 | 255 | 1.867188 | 2 |
One of South Africa’s 30 wonder women
By Department of Human Resource Management
Posted on 26 September 2012
Prof Shirley Zinn, an extraordinary professor in the Department of Human Resource Management, has been designated as one of South Africa’s 30 wonder women by the Wits Business School Journal.
The Wits Business School Journal celebrated it’s 30th edition by naming 30 influential women in the media, banking, political and mining industry. Apart from being on the Wits top 30 list, Prof Zinn also received other prestigious awards, including a Topco media award for Top Woman in Business and Government and Top Executive in Corporate South Africa.
Prof Zinn obtained a doctorate in education from Harvard, as well as degrees and diplomas in education and psychology. She began her career as a teacher in the Western Cape and went on to lecturing at the University of the Western Cape. She moved into training at Southern Life and from there gained impressive experience in human resources.
Prof Zinn is renowned as one of South Africa’s top human resources experts for being head of human resources at Standard Bank South Africa and the deputy global head of human resources for the Standard Bank Group since 2010. In addition to the role she played in human resources, she is also responsible for Group corporate social investment, as well as the transformation portfolio. Her experience and expertise were also acknowledged in 2005 when she was general manager of human resources at the South African Revenue Service. | <urn:uuid:558c6d37-1171-4ecb-a555-773513d3713a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://web.up.ac.za/default.asp?ipkCategoryID=1159&articleID=13542 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973726 | 298 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Land, biodiversity, water and air are integral parts of Australia's environment and are inextricably linked. For example, changes in the health of inland waters, such as reduced river flow, can affect biodiversity, while changes in land use can affect inland waters and biodiversity. Not only do Australia's plants, animals and ecosystems sustain life, but they are also key contributors to economic growth as inputs to production.
The Land and biodiversity section outlines the unique biodiversity in Australia and the pressures placed on it, including the loss of habitat caused by land clearing and the adverse impact on native species by weeds and pests. It also examines measures for the conservation of biodiversity including the management of threatened species and the establishment of protected areas.
Water is fundamental to the survival of people and organisms and is a valuable resource for much of our economy, especially agriculture. Australia's rainfall varies considerably year-to-year, season-to-season and region-to-region and water shortages and drought conditions experienced throughout much of Australia in recent years have exacerbated the pressure on water supplies. The Water section in this chapter provides information about water availability, storage and use.
The Air section examines both greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and air quality. Greenhouse gases are a natural part of the atmosphere and maintain the Earth's surface temperature at levels able to support life by trapping warmth from the Sun. However, human activities, especially burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) increase concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The enhanced greenhouse effect from greenhouse gas emissions has been implicated in climate change. The major contributors to GHG emissions and Australia's progress towards meeting its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol are discussed in this section. The discussion on air quality also looks at air pollutants such as carbon monoxide, ozone (photochemical smog) and particulate matter, all of which can have deleterious effects on the health of humans and other organisms.
The chapter contains an article on Australia's most important food-producing region, the Murray-Darling Basin.
This page last updated 21 January 2013 | <urn:uuid:05216ddc-5be9-44a3-baea-21a26d604fc1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/1301.0Chapter3012009%E2%80%9310 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00073-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932136 | 418 | 3.828125 | 4 |
Sees Herself in Her Students
A Pacific Oaks student in the human development and teacher credentialing programs creates an activity to engage students and lands a publishing contract.
Dr. Michele Nealon-Woods
“Students need more than just technical tools; they need to be guided in understanding how their own belief systems and their level of psychological self-awareness influence their current and future competencies.” -Michele Nealon-Woods, National President, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology
Tool Belts, Anger, and Sunflowers
Pacific Oaks Children’s School instructor Victor Soto is teaching four-year-olds skills to help them navigate the seesaws of the real world as well as those on the playground.
Giving Babies the Respect They Deserve
Author and PO alumna and teacher Ruth Anne Hammond is encouraging childcare professionals, students, and parents to let babies run the show.
Trains Teachers and Leaders to Change the World
Sarah Therberge believes “useful, relevant, and meaningful learning will rock your world.” A PO class she took 15 years ago continues to impact her today. | <urn:uuid:fa7a9048-b132-461d-8338-a65ceb6dd654> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tcsedsystem.edu/Media_Room | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933973 | 235 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Officials with Entergy New Orleans and Entergy Louisiana, the sister utilities that service most of our metro area, keep insisting that they are doing their best to restore power. But that's of little comfort to more than 96,100 households and businesses in metro New Orleans that still lacked power Monday afternoon, more than four days after Isaac's winds died down.
That so many customers are still without power in a major metropolitan area this long after the storm is hard to accept. That's why the New Orleans City Council and the Louisiana Public Service Commission do well in launching reviews of the companies' performance.
This is more than customers being inconvenienced and frustrated. The Jefferson Parish coroner's office Monday said a 90-year-old Marrero man died of heat-related causes in a home that lacked electricity. High temperatures are expected to continue over the next few days.
Entergy said that it had restored power to 84 percent of systemwide customers by Monday morning. But the percentages were lower in New Orleans and Jefferson Parish, the two metro parishes with the most outages. Quoting company officials, Jefferson Parish President John Young told WWL radio that by the end of Monday Entergy Louisiana expected to have restored power to 75 percent of customers in Jefferson. That would still leave one out of every four customers in the dark heading into day six of restoration efforts. In New Orleans, almost 20,000 customers were still waiting for power as of Monday afternoon.
To many people across the region, Entergy's response has seemed to lack a sense of urgency.
To be fair, the long duration of Isaac's winds packed a wallop for our above-ground electric grid. Entergy said the storm damaged an estimated 6,200 poles and 2,000 transformers, and placed trees on 5,500 line spans. Crews had to ride the storm outside the disaster area to prevent personal injuries and equipment damage, and then had to drive in on Thursday. In addition, high water prevented restoration work from starting last week in some areas, such as Plaquemines Parish.
But only a thorough review of Entergy's planning and execution can determine how the firm's subsidiaries can do better for the next disaster. Already, utility officials have acknowledged that they made logistical errors in deploying some repair crews, getting work orders to linemen and coordinating the stages of restoration, such as ensuring trees are removed and lines are repaired first. The company, after initially indicating it had prepared enough crews, called in additional workers to repair downed lines.
As they review Entergy's performance, company officials and regulators should start from the common position that there is always room for improvement in disaster response. Indeed, Entergy officials have been quick to point out that measures implemented after Hurricane Gustav in 2008 helped the company better prepare for this storm.
It's important now that Entergy learns some lessons from Isaac, so the firm will be ready to do better when the next disaster hits. | <urn:uuid:02e0ba16-f1e8-42c9-ab94-f4957a792eb6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2012/09/entergys_performance_after_hur.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967315 | 596 | 1.578125 | 2 |
full name / name of organization:
United States Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (USACLALS)
4th International Conference Oct. 27-29 2006
Santa Clara University, California (SF Bay area)
Fissures and Sutures:
Sources of Division and Mutual Aid in Postcolonial Reflections on History and Literature
(The US chapter of this international organization takes as its special mandate the incorporation of US ethnic literatures into the larger domain of postcolonial literatures)
100 years ago, in 1906:
a 7.8 hit San Francisco (and an 8.6 earthquake hit Quito); Mt. Vesuvius erupted and devastated Naples; race riots broke out in Atlanta; Japanese students were taught in racially segregated schools in San Francisco; Theodore Roosevelt took the first official trip outside the U.S. by a sitting President; the first intercollegiate fraternity for African American students was founded; Reginald Fessenden made the first radio broadcast; the world's first feature film (The Story of the Kelly Gang) was released; immunization against tuberculosis was developed; Richard Oldham proposed that the earth has a molten interior; the Second Geneva Convention was held; the All-India Muslim League was founded.
50 years ago, in 1956:
Pakistan became the first Islamic republic; Nasser became President of Egypt and nationalized the Suez Canal; the submarine telephone cable across the Atlantic was opened; Dr. B.R.Ambedkar, the Indian Untouchable leader, converted to Buddhism along with 385,000 followers; Fidel Castro and Che Guevara departed Mexico and landed in Cuba; Warsaw Pact troops invaded Hungary and the Hungarian Revolution began; Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula; Britain got its first female judge; Japan joined the United Nations.
We invite papers of 15-20 minute presentation time relating to the general conference theme, or to other aspects of postcolonial literature and theory (including US ethnic literatures). Among questions and topics of likely relevance are the following:
* Natural and man-made disasters and their impact on communities: partitions, border disputes, chemical pollution, tsunamis
* Religion and its influence in uniting or dividing peoples
* Gender-related issues of justice in local and global compacts
* Identity politics and class conflict over time
* Technology and globalization and their effects in history and in nation-building (or nation-dissolving)
There will also be opportunities for readings by poets and novelists on these and other themes.
Among probable speakers at this time are Bill Ashcroft, Pal Ahluwalia, and R. Radhakrishnan. We are in discussions with others, as well.
Send 200-word abstracts electronically by March 1 to: jhawley_at_scu.edu
John C. Hawley, Dept. of English, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino, Santa Clara CA 95053; or FAX: John Hawley, English dept.: (408) 554 4837
From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
Full Information at
or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu
Received on Sun Nov 27 2005 - 16:43:34 EST | <urn:uuid:31d1ad6f-3f4e-4034-ac63-7c2a0734b5d5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/10425 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00070-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.907132 | 668 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Bidding will begin this week for words and brand names such as ".sport," ".NYC" and ".bank" to join ".com" as online monikers.
Up to 1,000 domain name suffixes - the ".com" in an Internet address - could be added each year in the most sweeping change to the domain name system since its creation in the 1980s.
To some, the system will lead to ".cash." To others, it will mean ".confusion."
The idea is to let Las Vegas hotels, casinos and other attractions congregate around ".Vegas," or a company such as Canon Inc. to draw customers to "cameras.Canon" or "printers.Canon." The new system will also make Chinese, Japanese and Swahili versions of ".com" possible.
Some companies and entrepreneurs have already expressed interest in applying for a suffix and possibly earning millions of dollars a year from people and groups wanting a website that ends in that name.
Others are skeptical, though. They worry that an expansion will mean more addresses available to scams that use similar-sounding names such as "Amazom" rather than "Amazon" to trick people into giving passwords and credit card information. Others worry that new suffixes could create additional platforms for hate groups or lead to addresses ending in obscenities.
The oversight agency for Internet addresses, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, spent years crafting guidelines meant to curtail nefarious activities. Still, critics say ICANN is rushing to expand the naming system without putting enough safeguards in place.
"You don't want a ship to have holes... and ask everybody to come on board," said Dan Jaffe, the chief lobbyist at the Association of National Advertisers, which represents 400 companies and 10,000 brand names. "You should close the holes, then run a pilot project to see if the systems you put in place are actually effective."
There's also a question of how useful the new names will be, at least among English speakers. Alternatives to ".com" introduced over the past decade have had mixed success. These days, Internet users are more likely to type "new Muppet movie" into their browser's search box than to know the official site is at "Disney.go.com/muppets."
ICANN will start taking bids for new suffixes on Thursday at 12:01 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time (Wednesday at 7:01 p.m. EST).
That doesn't mean people will be able to type in "Caribbean.vacation" or "iPad.Apple" right away. Initial bidding will stay open until April. After that, ICANN will accept challenges for trademark conflicts and other reasons. Auctions would be held should multiple bidders seek the same suffix. It could take months more for winning bidders to set up.
The new names won't appear in general use until at least spring of 2013. Applicants facing challenges may have to wait until 2014.
Names will be restricted to the richest companies and groups, as it will cost $185,000 to apply and at least $25,000 a year to maintain one. A 10-year commitment is required. The fees do not include operational costs, such as computers and staff. By comparison, a personal address with a common suffix such as ".com" usually costs less than $10 a year.
Despite the startup costs, suffixes could be lucrative to the winning bidders. A company called ICM Registry receives some $60 a year for every ".xxx" registered, for instance. It's not just pornography sites interested. Colleges and universities have been buying names such as "KUgirls.xxx" to make sure others can't.
Although companies such as Apple Inc. and Canon aren't likely to make any suffixes they get available to the general public, other entrepreneurs have been eyeing ".web" and others. They won't be the only ones cashing in. Companies have formed specifically to sell names on behalf of those entrepreneurs, and ICANN gets a cut.
In recent weeks, members of Congress, the Federal Trade Commission and the Commerce Department have raised concerns.
"A rapid, exponential expansion ... has the potential to magnify both the abuse of the domain name system and the corresponding challenges we encounter in tracking down Internet fraudsters," FTC commissioners said in a letter to ICANN.
ICANN plans to proceed with its schedule. ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said many adjustments have been made to address objections raised over the years. Although Jaffe said several other concerns were ignored, Beckstrom said he has heard nothing new in the recent critiques.
"There are parties that would like to see other protections, or want to see this or that," Beckstrom said. "These discussions are going to go on for a long time."
Beckstrom said many businesses and groups outside the U.S. have been clamoring for more choices, and ICANN didn't want them to wait longer.
From a technical standpoint, domain names tell computers on the Internet where to find a website or send an email message. Without them, people would have to remember clunky numerals such as "220.127.116.11," which is the underlying Internet Protocol address for "ap.org."
The monikers have grown to mean much more, however. Amazon.com Inc. has built its brand on its website address, while bloggers take pride in running sites with their own domain names.
Theo Hnarakis, CEO of the domain name registration company Melbourne IT, said his organization already has prepared more than 100 suffix applications for financial services, airlines, gambling sites and others. He declined to name any clients.
Although suffixes added over the past decade haven't been as popular as ".com," nearly all of the most desirable ".com" addresses have been taken. New businesses are often stuck with difficult-to-remember names such as "TheFloristInsideThePeanutShop.com." The expansion would allow "Peanut.florist."
Customers might be able to find that florist through Google or Bing, but Hnarakis said merchants often have to buy ads to lure them. And an Internet search might lead customers to a rival - such as the Cheaper Florist Outside The Peanut Shop.
The demand for new suffixes appears greater outside the U.S. That's because many of the ".com" names had been grabbed by Americans who got on the Internet first. In addition, suffixes had been largely limited to the 26 letters of the English alphabet until now.
ICANN has already allowed two major expansions of the addressing system. In 2000, it approved seven new domains, including ".info" and ".biz." It began accepting new bids again in 2004. It added seven from that round, including ".xxx" last year. It also cleared others on an ad hoc basis, including ".eu" for the European Union and ".ps" for the Palestinian territories.
Under the new system, the application process will be streamlined.
Expanding the pool of suffixes was one of ICANN's chief tasks when the U.S. government ceded oversight of domain names to the organization in 1998. But progress was slow because of objections and concerns from government groups, businesses interests and others. ICANN is finally ready to implement the system, despite calls for further delays.
"This is a change, and whenever there's a change, there is anxiety," Beckstrom said. "We're doing our best to administer a fair and equitable system that the global community has designed."
Q&A on plans to expand the Internet address system
Here are some questions and answers regarding plans to expand the Internet address system:
Q. What are domain names?
A. Think of them as shortcuts for navigating the Internet. Just as it's easier to find the Empire State Building at 350 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan rather than through its GPS coordinates, it's easier to type in "ap.org" rather than remember "18.104.22.168." Google and other search engines have reduced the need for domain names. But these search engines are essentially catalogs of the Internet, and they depend on the domain name to take you to what you're looking for. Also, domain names aren't used only for websites. The part after the "at" symbol in email addresses is the domain name.
Q. How many domain names are out there?
A. There are millions of domain names including "bbc.co.uk" and "Microsoft.com." If you're just thinking of the suffix, formally known as the top-level domain name, there are currently 312. The most popular is ".com," with about 100 million names registered. Anybody willing to pay $10 or less a year can get one. Others are restricted to certain groups, including ".aero" for the aviation industry and ".edu" for U.S. colleges and universities. The bulk of the suffixes are two-letter designations for countries and territories, such as ".fr" for France and ".aq" for Antarctica. Some countries also have suffixes in their native languages, so websites in China can use the Chinese equivalent of China rather than ".cn."
Q. Is the list static?
A. Suffixes come and go. The European Union gained ".eu," while Midway Islands and other U.S. minor outlying islands lost ".um." Following East Timor's independence, ".tp" became ".tl." A handful of others got added over the years, including ".biz" for businesses and ".xxx" for porn sites. On Thursday, bidding will begin for up to 1,000 more suffixes each year.
Q. Who decides these things?
A. An organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is in charge of domain name policies. The U.S. government, which funded much of the Internet's early development, delegated the task to that group in 1998. ICANN is a nonprofit organization with headquarters in California and has board members from around the world, though the Commerce Department retains limited oversight of the group.
Q. How do I get my own suffix?
A. Begin by submitting an application - and paying a fee of $185,000. You'll need to make a 10-year commitment, during which you're liable for annual fees of at least $25,000. The money will pay for ICANN's costs setting up the system, reviewing applications and making sure parties do what they have promised once the suffix is operational. Some of the money will be set aside for potential lawsuits from unsuccessful applicants and others.
Q. I love Apple. When can I get my own website address ending in Apple?
A. Like many companies, Apple Inc. hasn't said whether it will seek ".Apple." It's also possible that an apple-growers group or the Beatles' management company, Apple Corps, will make a bid. It will be up to the company or organization winning the bid to decide whether a suffix is open to general use. It's doubtful Apple Inc. would let the public claim ".Apple" names if it gets the suffix, but entrepreneurs will likely propose other suffixes, such as ".web" and ".nyc," specifically for broader use.
Explore further: Internet in 'coma' as Iran election looms | <urn:uuid:7594c304-10c1-43e1-9a6e-ad6f9243b41e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://phys.org/news/2012-01-internet-expansion.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959929 | 2,344 | 2.0625 | 2 |
for someone who is really close to me, with a little bit coincidence.
“Leos born on August 8 can seem unemotional or even distant but are simply self-disciplined and in control of themselves. Although they are often forced to climb the hard road to success, they actually wouldn’t have it any other way. An eagerness to feel as if they have earned every opportunity they receive is in their character.
Friends and Lovers
Friendship is an important part of life for August 8 natives, but it doesn’t keep them from speaking their minds about issues that could be a source of controversy between them and their pals. In love, they are strongly marriage-minded. Once they fall in love, they want to settle down and make a home.
Children and Family
August 8 natives usually display their strong leadership abilities while still children. Unfortunately, they may seek to impress their attitudes on their own children, who may be much more light-hearted.
August 8 people have a sensible approach to keeping fit, especially if they’re at genetic risk for an illness or disease. They should make weight-bearing exercise and aerobic workout part of their daily routine.
Career and Finances
August 8 natives have a take-charge attitude and do well in careers where they are responsible for motivating others. They are conservative about money matters. They rarely make any serious mistakes concerning their financial position.
Dreams and Goals
August 8 individuals achieve success one step at a time. They don’t look for shortcuts, believing that hard work and good planning are what make dreams come true. They’re likely to achieve their dreams, though they seldom go beyond them.” | <urn:uuid:4fed0530-1650-4824-95a9-ffeeea997a91> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ongakuhito.tumblr.com/tagged/leo | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97828 | 352 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Sir.—I am compiling a "Biting Insect Summary" and would appreciate any case reports of unusual allergic reactions, especially systemic (sneezing, wheezing, and urticaria), to bites of insects; ie, mosquitoes, fleas, gnats, kissing bugs, bedbugs, chiggers, black flies, horseflies, sandflies, deerflies, and the like.
Include in your reports the type of reactions (immediate and delayed symptoms), treatment, the age, sex, and race of your patient, the site of the bite(s), the season of the year, and any other associated allergies.
If skin tests and hyposensitization were instituted, I would like the report of both. Please note that it is the biting (not stinging) insect in which I am interested.
If you have found any insect repellent, local treatment, or insecticides of value, I would also appreciate this information.
Please send this information to the address below. | <urn:uuid:fa661f6b-4e0c-4fde-9d54-5a541d35ce5e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=506560 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940681 | 208 | 1.703125 | 2 |
The tuatara Sphenodon punctatus is one of the real treasures of the zoology museum. Tuataras (from the Maori word for peaks on the back) are only found in New Zealand and are seriously endangered.
Tuatara Sphenodon punctatus
Photograph: Martyn L Gorman
Tuataras may be grey, olive, or brickish red in color. They range in adult length from about 40 cm (female) to 60 cm (large male), with the male generally reaching larger proportions. They lack external ears, have a diapsid skull (two openings on either side), and posses a "parietal eye" on the top of their head. This "third-eye," contains a retina and is functionally similar to a normal eye, though the function has not been clearly recognized and a scale grows over it in adult tuataras. The male tuatara displays a striking crest down the back of the neck, and another down the middle of the back. The female has a less developed version of this. Unlike all other living toothed reptiles, the tuatara's teeth are fused to the jaw bone (acrodont tooth structure). The tuatara has a very slow metabolism and is a very long-lived species. It's not uncommon for an individual to live for over 100 years.
Despite their appearance, tuataras are not lizards, they are the last remaining member of an ancient group of reptiles known as the Sphenodontia which was well represented by many species during the age of the dinosaurs, some 200 million years ago. All the species in the group, apart from the tuatara, declined and eventually became extinct about 60 million years ago.
Originally the tuatara was thought to be a lizard but in 1867, Dr Albert Gunther, the curator at the British Museum in London examined a bottled tuatara specimen and linked it to the land-based group of reptiles called Rhynchocephalia, a group thought to have been extinct for millions of years (Rhynchocephalia is now known as Sphenodontia). In 1989 Dr Charles Daugherty, of Victoria University in Wellington, discovered that there were two species of tuatara, Sphenodon punctatus and Sphenodon guntheri.
The two recognized species of tuatara are found on some 30 small, relatively inaccessible, islands off the coast of New Zealand. The species were once widely distributed throughout New Zealand, but became extinct on the mainland before the arrival of European settlers.
Our specimen probably dates from the early 1900s; is now Illegal to export tuataras from New Zealand. In 1895, New Zealand awarded the tuatara strict legal protection. It is currently considered a CITES (Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species) Appendix I species. This is the most restricted classification for a species. | <urn:uuid:d4e77875-dd22-4423-829a-427951aacf07> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/nathist.museum/treasures/tuatara.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958851 | 597 | 3.703125 | 4 |
|SEO for videos - when transcriptons repeat some content|
| 4:53 pm on Jul 18, 2011 (gmt 0)|
I have some existing pages (years old) that I would like to add some videos to.
The idea is that the video will present the same general information as the page, just in a different format. It will likely be watered-down, as compared to the page's text. It will probably refer to the page's text as a source of "more detailed information."
My question is this:
Usually you see a transcription of a video's spoken content low on the page that contains the video.
In my case, a significant amount of the video content will likely be sentences taken directly from the page.
If I put a transcription of the video on this same page, there will be a lot of "repeated" content.
Will this look strange or irregular to the search engines and should be avoided?
I realize that video transcriptions are mainly just for the search engines, so they know what the video/page topic is about, and in my case the page already has content.
But I would hate to make a clear, concise video (whose spoken script could easily be spun off by a competitor) without having the transcription somewhere in print on my site (for the search engines) so my page would be seen as the source for the script if others placed a transcript of their "lifted" video on their site.
Is placing the transcription on the page a needed/good/bad idea?
| 7:14 pm on Jul 18, 2011 (gmt 0)|
I think it would be ok if the text repeats what is in the video.
But the transcription shouldn't repeat text that is already in the text on the page.
I don't know if having a video that is basically an explanation of the text found on a page is really all that useful for your visitors though.
| 9:21 pm on Jul 18, 2011 (gmt 0)|
My opinion of the web is simply nobody reads anything. They may skim, but read, no.
A video, one that uses arrows and descriptive labels to animate the page's static images or actual animations of the process being described on the page, I think people will value that, especially the non-readers.
While I know 2/3rd's of the people viewing YouTube are just watching cat videos, YouTube is the second most popular search engine for some reason.
10 - 15 years ago people use to think if they found it on the web it must have some value and they read it, nowadays (especially with new generations of web surfers who grew up playing on-screen twitch games) I'd suggest it takes more than text to keep someone on page for a relatively generic topic.
| 9:29 pm on Jul 18, 2011 (gmt 0)|
|My opinion of the web is simply nobody reads anything. They may skim, but read, no. |
Well, you might be right...
I have a couple of pages with only text on them and they have an average time on site of over 4 minutes.
I don't think the New York times has a lot of videos for their articles (although CNN does have lots of videos and then just text transcriptions, but that is because CNN is primarily a television show that has lots and lots of clips).
anyway, I would just kindly suggest that as long as the text is not repetitive of the OTHER TEXT already on the page, I don't think it could hurt, could it? | <urn:uuid:c87b98f2-653d-42f6-a759-b591cb23cc9d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4340876.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95247 | 740 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Salt tolerance for my plants? (fighting ich)
Does anyone know how much salt I can add without destroying my plants? I have the temp close to 82, and have approximately 1.5 teaspoons per gallon. (give or take a half tsp, since the math threw me for a loop during a waterchange) I read that for ich, apply 1-3 tsp per gallon. I'm going to add more to make it about 2.5 (to give me some flexibility) if it won't harm my snails, shrimp, and plants. The only fish in the tank are livebearers- so they can definately tolerate the salt. (endlers have even been found in a brackish lagoon- The lagoon gets seperated from the oceon often, and gradually becomes freshwater... but obviously the salt won't hurt them.) I've also stopped using my dechlorinator, because I've found it reacts violently with salt!!! Makes sense, sodium CHLORIDE + dechlorinator = sodium infused water + chlorine GAS. (I added the dechlor to some water, waited an hour, added salt to the water, and the water went cloudy white with "smoke" comming off the water. Smelled like chlorine to me... burned my nose. ( I think a while back that caused a mass die off in my tank that I think I posted about. oddly, when it happened, oxygenation made it worse. I turned the pump off, began a water change, but before I even added the new water it quickly began clearing up.) All this was several months ago, and it took me this long to figure out what caused it.. Gah, I just noticed- I always type really long posts. :p
Well, you certainly don't want chlorine in your water so personally I think dechlorination would come before salt.
What if you let new water sit a few days before adding salt to it?
Also, I shoulda replied to your other thread about Ich but my original reply wasn't going anywhere and made no sense. :X
If you have 7 guppies, 20 guppy fry, 2 platies, and 2 black mollies (regular mollies are rather large fish), in a 10g tank, that might be your problem with ich. Too many fish in a small space and stressful for the fish probably.
You might have said in your other topic, but how did you get ich? New fish? Did it just randomly come about?
To answer your question on salt tolerance. I have no experience with it. I read plants can survive a bit with salt as long as it is removed before they actually die I think. But I don't know I'd wait for a better reply.
well a molly died, and the fry are all under a couple cm long. It probably is overstocked tho... Stupid livebearers....
Salt is detrimental to freshwater fish and plants in varying degrees. To understand why, we must understand what salt does in water.
Salt makes the water more dense than the same water without salt. The aquarium contains water. The bodies of fish and plant leaves also contain water [just as we do--we are, what is it, 90-some percent water?]. The water in the aquarium and the water in the fish/plant is separated by a semi-permeable layer which is the cell. Water can pass through this cell. When either body of water is more dense, the other less-dense body of water will pass through the membrane to equalize the water on both sides.
Water is constantly passing through the cells of fish by osmosis in an attempt to equate the water inside the fish (which is more dense) with the water in the aquarium. Put another way, the aquarium water is diluting the fish's body water until they are equal. Freshwater fish regularly excrete this water through respiration and urination. This is the issue behind pH differences as well as salt and other substances. It increases the fish's work--the kidney is used in the case of salt--which also increases the fish's stress in order to maintain their internal stability. Also, the fish tends to produce more mucus especially in the gills; the reason now seems to be due to the irritant property of salt--the fish is trying to get away from it.
But as you asked specifically about plants: when salt is added to the aquarium water, the water inside the plant cells is less dense so it escapes through the cells. The result is that the plant literally dries out, and will wilt. I've so far been unable to find a measurement of how much salt will be detrimental to plants; all authorities I have found do note that some species are more sensitive than others, and all recommend no salt in planted aquaria.
I have an interesting measurement for fish. Dr. Stanley Weitzman, who is Emeritus Research Scientist at the Department of Ichthyology of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and an acknowledged authority on characoid fishes, writes that 100 ppm of salt is the maximum for characins, and there are several species that show considerable stress leading to death at 60 ppm. 100 ppm is equal to .38 of one gram of salt per gallon of water. One level teaspoon holds six grams of salt. You mention 1 to 3 teaspoons per gallon. If you have characins in this tank, that would be 6 to 18 grams per gallon, which is at minimum 15 times the amount they tolerate. Livebearers have a higher tolerance (mollies exist in brackish water) so the salt may be safe for them.
Now perhaps you know why I never recommend salt.
Well my fish are all livebearers, and, (although I hate to admit it) the fish are more important than the plants. Perhaps... the salt is unneccesary and I just just give the molly dips in mild potassium permegranite and salt solution. Seemed to work (today her fins aren't clamped anymore, the spots are almost entirely gone, and she 'seems' happier, I just felt like I needed to treat the whole tank to keep it from spreading.
Yes, in your tank it is the plants and snails that would/could be harmed by salt, I don't know the measurement limits as I mentioned.
Some aquarists advocate simply raising the temp for ich. A member here mentioned that a while back, and I have come across it elsewhere. I think quite high, but won't mention a number in case I'm not correct. A "search" might find the post.
When I feel the need to treat ich, I always use Aquari-Sol. It is copper-based, but less than most ich remedies, and it is said to be safe for sensitive fish (catfish, characins) for which other remedies recommend at half-strength. I always feel the copper will have significantly less of an effect on these fish than salt, plus it doesn't hurt the plants at such minimal amounts, nor my snails. Plants can detoxify heavy metals like copper anyway. Aquari-Sol has never failed me for ich or velvet.
I have battled Ich twice. Both times I kept the temperature exactly the same. In my opinion, raising the temperature to the peak of what is tolerable for the fish only adds to the stress of the Ich they are battling. I treated the whole tank (very successfully!!) with RidIch at half strength. Both times I lost no fish and the Ich was irraticated.
Hmm. Well the salts in the tank (3rd day) I'll keep the levels the same and keep an eye on it. I actually lowered the temp a bit since it seemed to be stressing the fish.
I would remove what shrimp you can, they can not get the parasite ich. If left on their own in a tank or filtered bucket for a week or two with lots of water changes they should be fine. I personally prefer to move fish to a tank or Rubbermaid bin, I move the media with them and add a heater. They get treated in their for up to a month just using a copper med(Cu(SO4)2) is what I perfer. No salt, no temp increases. I loose very few fish to ich, and personally if a fish gets sick I would rather it be parasites than anything else. Those have always been the easiest to treat.
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On the brightest of spring days, on the most pleasant of streets, among the most innocent of strangers, after the longest of lulls for Israelis in their seemingly endless conflict, a Palestinian suicide bomber exploded in a hail of shrapnel on Wednesday.
These were some of the victims: a father and son riding the bus together; a 12-year-old Druse girl; a 14-year-old American Christian; a 13-year-old boy, Yuval Mendelevich, who had just said to his father, ''I love you.''
''Then the line went dead,'' his father, Yossi Mendelevich, told Israeli Army radio today.
Then came Mr. Mendelevich's race to the scene of the destruction of the No. 37 bus in Haifa, the search among the wounded and the black plastic body bags, the trips to the hospitals. And then the trip home with a certificate of death.
In all, the bomber killed 15 people, most of them -- at least 8 -- students under the age of 18.
In the section of a Haifa cemetery reserved for victims of terrorism -- they have such sections here -- funeral after funeral was held today. Rain turned to sun and back to rain as one grave was filled while the next was dug. During a pause in one service, mourners could hear the hammering of nails into a coffin.
Jews are traditionally buried in shrouds, but an exception is made for the fragmented remains of the victims of suicide bombings.
It had been two months since the last suicide bombing killed Israelis. But during that time dozens of Palestinians, including the innocent, were killed in Israeli raids.
Some Israelis said today that the military missions had briefly interrupted a familiar pattern, without hope of ending it. ''This is a circular, regular pattern, of action and reaction, revenge for a reaction, and revenge for revenge,'' wrote Roni Shaked in the newspaper Yediot Ahronot.
Passengers on the No. 37 bus were going home or to see friends. Elizabetta Katzman, 16, was going to look for costumes for a show she was putting on, her family said.
Two soldiers were among the dead, Barry Oved, 21, who was on his way to see his grandparents, and Eliahu Lacham, 22. Meital Katav, 20, had just gotten out of the army, and she had decided to take a job at a gas station. At her funeral today, her older sister, Galit, read words Meital wrote a few days ago, ''If we deny our feelings we will never know true happiness.''
Daniel Harush, 16, dreamed of being a pilot. He was a student in an army boarding school, and his family's desire that he receive a military funeral touched off a furor today. Under recent changes in army rules, cadets are not entitled to such services, and the matter went all the way up to Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz.
Daniel received a funeral with ''military elements,'' the Israeli press reported tonight -- an honor guard, but no salute by fired guns.
Daniel was on his way home from picking up a form to take a driver's test.
The American who died, Abigail Litle, was born in Lebanon, N.H., and arrived in Israel as a baby when her father came here to study. He later took a job with the Baptist Church.
Abigail, who was on her way to see a friend, was involved in a school program seeking to foster understanding between Arab and Jewish students.
Such understanding seems a long way off. Today, more innocents died on the Palestinian side when an explosion tore through a crowd in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip while Israeli forces withdrew after a search for militants.
Palestinian survivors said an Israeli tank had fired a shell into the crowd, killing eight, including at least three children, and wounding more than 100. Israel said a Palestinian bomb was responsible. Three other Palestinians died during the search itself.
Yet Haifa is the rare city in Israel where if true understanding is elusive, the hope of achieving it endures -- naïvely so, in the eyes of some Israelis.
After seeing the carnage and hearing the screams from her apartment overlooking the bus, Alma Silikov, 85, said she would like to seat Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, in her living room.
''I'd make a big strong pot of coffee,'' she said. ''I'd lock the door and I wouldn't let them out until they reach an agreement.'' | <urn:uuid:97339c0a-eefc-445f-8c15-f48891bbe028> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/07/world/israelis-bury-haifa-bombing-victims.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982507 | 951 | 1.585938 | 2 |
D. Hayes Agnew (1818 -1892) was the first John Rhea Barton Professor of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania from 1878 to 1889.
The Agnew Society is the oldest student run medical student society in the country, founded in 1888 as a surgical interest group.
Today, the goal of the Agnew Surgical Society is to serve as a link between surgical faculty and medical students, and to promote medical student interest in surgical careers. Throughout the year, the society sponsors a shadowing program for preclinical students, lectures by Penn Faculty, as well as a research fellowship program for MS1 students during the summer following the first year. In the spring, the Agnew Lecture is given at Surgical Grand Rounds. The Agnew speaker is chosen from a short list of surgical icons who are felt to represent the past, present and future of surgery in America. The society also sponsors a dinner preceding the lecture, at which students have the opportunity to interact with Surgical Faculty in a social setting.
Though the focus of the group has traditionally been on General Surgery and its subspecialties, students interested in all surgical fields are encouraged to participate. | <urn:uuid:8fadf367-80de-416d-8fa3-f368ded48f24> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/surgery/Education/medical_students/Agnew/Agnew_home.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970497 | 237 | 2.09375 | 2 |
While eco-friendly initiatives gained some local traction this year, the national environmental picture was relatively bleak in 2010 — and stands to get even more depressing next year.
Let's start with the good news. Maine received national recognition for its WEATHERIZATION efforts — insulating and retrofitting the state's ancient housing and building stock — this year. Over the course of 2009 and 2010, the state got $41.9 million from the Recovery Act to weatherize low-income housing and to offer rebates to homeowners who invest in efficiency improvements, such as insulation and weather-stripping or energy-efficient heating and cooling systems. By the end of April 2010, Maine had weatherized 30 percent of its targeted homes — close to 3000 — with the help of stimulus money and the state's weatherization program. The Maine State Housing Authority also pioneered a way to sell carbon-emission credits generated from weatherization efforts. MaineHousing's first-in-the-nation system would measure the carbon savings from weatherization, sell those credits on the emissions market, and then use the revenues for further weatherization efforts.
Portlanders continued to focus on LOCAL FOOD AND SUSTAINABLE FARMING in 2010, from start to finish. A dozen local farmers came together, with the help of the Maine Department of Agriculture and Organic Valley, to launch a local, organic feed company that processes bulk organic grain for dairy farmers in Maine. At the other end of the food-production line, the Crown O'Maine Organic Cooperative is set to start preserving and processing produce at a plant in Van Buren — hopefully giving excess fruits and veggies a longer shelf life.
We found out this month that Maine will get $3 million in federal stimulus money to help fund the $38 million Amtrak extension from Portland to Brunswick. That was good news for GREEN-TRANSPORTATION advocates, who launched the Maine Alliance for Sustainable Transportation this year and focused on implementing the recommendations of the Peninsula Transit Plan, increasing public-transit options in Greater Portland, and getting more people to ride the bus. While the last goal remains elusive, MAST was thrilled when the Portland City Council approved, in June, the fee-in-lieu-of-parking program, which allows developers to get around off-street parking requirements. Money from that program will be funneled into a newly created Sustainable Transportation Fund.
But on the national level, we faltered. The BP OIL SPILL was a devastating reminder of our dependence on oil, and how dangerous that fossil fuel can be. No new offshore drilling regulations came of the spill. And even as the oil flowed, a comprehensive ENERGY AND CLIMATE-CHANGE BILL, which would have set limits on pollution (while allowing polluters to buy and sell emission credits, i.e. cap-and-trade) and encouraged alternative-energy production, died in Congress. The bill included major compromises (including loan funding for nuclear programs and, at one point, expanded oil drilling access), but it would have been a huge step forward in addressing global warming. It failed for three reasons: 1) opponents did a good job of suggesting that making polluters pay would kill jobs; 2) the Obama administration showed only lukewarm (and by some accounts, not even that) support; 3) backroom politics between senators John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and the rest of the US Senate (including Maine senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, neither of whom supported the bill).
"As 2010 comes to a close, US environmentalists are engaged in their most profound bout of soul-searching in more than a decade," writes Juliet Eilperin in her December 21 Washington Post piece, "Environmentalists Plan to Redirect Strategies." She reports that in the face of a less-hospitable Congress, national environmental organizations will focus their energy on STATE AND GRASSROOTS EFFORTS IN 2011. Hey, it seems to be working in Maine.
Deirdre Fulton can be reached email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:c50c3a68-b25a-4890-83b4-f66dc4fa964e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/113203-year-in-greenview/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948644 | 847 | 2.140625 | 2 |
A rendering of streetscape plans for Buena Vista Township. Image via MLive.com.
Smart Growth America will meet with residents and leaders of Buena Vista, MI next week to help identify new strategies that could attract business investments and stabilize neighborhoods in the township.
Buena Vista Township residents are invited to join the workshop’s first day for a public presentation on March 5, 2013 from 6-8 PM at the Buena Vista Community Center, 1940 South Outer Drive, Saginaw, Michigan.
“This technical assistance workshop will allow the experts at Smart Growth America to help Buena Vista in furthering our economic development goals, such as local economic realignment, business attraction and rightsizing our infrastructure,” said Township Supervisor Dwayne Parker. “We couldn’t be more honored to have their assistance.”
“This is yet another feather in Buena Vista’s cap, and shows that the Township Board of Trustees’ and Downtown Development Authority’s commitment to community planning and economic development is positioning our Township for continued success,” Interim Township Manager Dexter Mitchell added.
“Smart Growth America is committed to providing the tools and training to help community leaders keep their cities and towns livable, sustainable and vital places,” said Roger Millar, Director of Smart Growth America’s Leadership Institute. “Buena Vista is currently leading a 14-month economic development planning process, and the township is eager to adopt new strategies that could strengthen and add to the community’s assets. This workshop will help town leaders be better prepared to develop policies and tools to bring long-term success and business growth.
In November 2012, Buena Vista Township was one of 22 communities selected by Smart Growth America to participate in the free technical assistance program. Stretching from Maine to Washington State, these communities represent major cities, suburban centers, and rural towns alike.
The program, made possible through a five-year Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Sustainable Communities, seeks to develop local planning solutions that help communities grow in ways that benefit families and businesses, while protecting the environment and preserving a sense of place. Three other nonprofit organizations—Forterra, Global Green USA and Project for Public Spaces—also received competitively awarded grants under this program to help communities get the kinds of development they want. | <urn:uuid:582346be-fe88-4163-8362-1ef8c7667de1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/2013/02/28/buena-vista-charter-township-looks-to-address-long-term-fiscal-and-economic-goals-during-smart-growth-strategy-workshop/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921495 | 494 | 1.59375 | 2 |
A site with a south facing view to a canal on the Grote Rietland
of IJburg provided a unique opportunity for a family to live in
a free-standing villa within 20 minutes of central Amsterdam.
The family of four, a film score composer and a business
film scenario writer with 2 teenage children required a house
that provided opportunities in living together but also independently.
The section of the house clearly describes the programme with
children on the lowered level, parents on the upper, and the ground
floor acting as the communal, family and social area (and also bufferzone).
Similar to a typical Amsterdam canal house the ground
floor is raised increasing privacy from the street. The raised ground
floor allows clear views to the canal at the rear and accommodates
the basement below. This visual connection to the canal
is maintained at all times - through the open stairs to the upper
level and the absence of any doors dividing the ground floor
area. The smaller living area of the ground floor steps down to
the kitchen/dining area opening both horizontally and vertically
in scale. The lower space opens to the outside terrace continuing
the procession to the garden and canal.
The childrens lower level (complete with kitchenette and
bathroom) is accessed from the street via external stairs and
becomes an independent zone from the main house. The
dividing wall between the bedrooms is nonload bearing and
in the eventuality of the children leaving the family home the
basement could be used and rented as a separate studio
In the upper level the parents functions of study, bathing
and sleeping are ordered from street to canal side. From
the bathroom views across the canal are possible, and the
bedroom and bathroom unite as one space with a continous
The house is transparent from the street to the canal with the
main front and back facades of full height glazing. All walls
perpendicular to the street are solid timber clad surfaces. A
clear demarcation of the house‘s internal levels are revealed
in the facade with white bands. Horizontally laid western red
cedar boards further striate the volume. The entrance facade
consists of a large full height glass door and an art piece
by Amsterdam artist Yvonne Kroese. The lasercut steel panel
features creatures found on and around IJburg and houses the
letter box and other entrance hardware.
Location: Amsterdam, NL | <urn:uuid:a25962f7-1a9a-4a5a-9547-3b5026af93ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://archinect.com/people/project/2709644/ijburg-house/2713249 | 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 | 0.901081 | 511 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Star of the nationally syndicated television show "Judge Hatchett" and Child Advocate
She's strong, savvy and resolute. She's intuitive, concerned and compassionate. She's a realist, an innovator and a leader. She's Judge Glenda A. Hatchett, and she knows the difference between achieving success and making a difference.
A visionary who knows how to get results, Judge Hatchett is renowned in the legal community for her groundbreaking courtroom style. Best known for her revolutionary "interventions," she is widely respected for her work with today's youth, which not only sets her apart from other judges, but also establishes her as a leader in the justice system nationwide.
Judge Hatchett is also the author of the national bestseller, Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say (Harper Collins, 2003), based on her extensive professional experiences as a jurist and her own personal experience as a mother of two boys.
The Judge also serves as national spokesperson for CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates), a non-profit volunteer organization that trains volunteers to represent abused and neglected children and help them navigate the court system.
In May 2005, Judge Hatchett received a special honor at the Mayor of New York City's residence,
When asked about her numerous accolades and awards, Judge Hatchett will always point out that her most important accomplishment is her ability to have a positive impact on the lives of troubled youth and their families. As evidenced by her popular, award-winning, nationally syndicated television series Judge Hatchett – which begins its seventh season on September 4, 2006 – Judge Hatchett defines a whole new courtroom television approach, and continues to urge viewers to become mentors to at-risk youth in their communities.
"I never really expected to be a lawyer. I went to law school to expand my options, and while I was there, I discovered a passion for litigation. After my clerkship, I started litigating at Delta Air Lines, and I truly believed I would remain there for the balance of my career. I couldn't have been more wrong!"
After graduating from Emory University School of Law and completing a coveted clerkship in the U.S. Federal Courts, Judge Hatchett took a position at Delta Air Lines, where she would remain for almost 10 years. As the company's highest-ranking African-American woman, Judge Hatchett served dual roles in both the legal and public relations departments. As manager of public relations, she supervised global crisis management, and handled media relations for all of Europe, Asia and 50
Judge Hatchett made the difficult decision to leave Delta in order to accept an appointment as chief presiding judge of the Fulton County, Georgia Juvenile Court. "If anyone had told me that I'd be a judge someday, I'd have said they were crazy! However, certain people I respect in the community asked me to consider the judgeship." Upon accepting the position, Judge Hatchett became
Interventions / Mentoring
The compassionate mother of two quickly fell in love with her judicial role, and worked tirelessly during her eight-year tenure to make a difference in the lives of young people. The innovative judge soon garnered national attention for her "creative sentencing," which can still be seen today in the form of "interventions" on her television program, Judge Hatchett.
The concept of interventions was groundbreaking. Judge Hatchett worked in conjunction with community organizations and businesses including the Boys and Girls Clubs and Urban League to design a program where troubled youth would be exposed to successful executives and community leaders who would inspire them to make changes in their lives. Sentences often included sending troubled youth to one of the participating organizations in an effort to teach them how to take positive steps toward their futures.
After her first year on the bench, the local chapter of the National Bar Association recognized Judge Hatchett for her pioneering leadership in revolutionizing the Fulton County Juvenile Court system, selecting her as Outstanding Jurist of the Year.
Judge Hatchett was also honored with the Roscoe Pound Award, the highest award for Outstanding Work in Criminal Justice from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. The Spelman College Board of Trustees selected Judge Hatchett to receive the Outstanding Community Service Award, and she was also honored with the NAACP's Thurgood Marshall Award. In 1990, Judge Hatchett helped found the Truancy Intervention Project, which enlists the help of legal volunteers to provide early, positive intervention with children reported as truants.
Judge Hatchett won a Prism Award (2003) for Best Unscripted Non-Fiction Series or Special for Television for the "Carrie's Out of Rehab" episode, a poignant look at addiction and recovery.
Judge Glenda Hatchett serves on the board of directors for the NFL's Atlanta Falcons and the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), a Fortune 500 company that is the nation’s leading provider of healthcare services. She was named Woman of the Year by the national organization 100 Black Men of America, and one of the 10 Women of Distinction by the Girl Scouts of America.
Judge Hatchett did her undergraduate work at
Fee Information: Booking Fees to hire speakers and celebrities are determined based on a number factors and often change without notice. Some factors include: speakers schedule, length of presentation, location of event, market conditions, availability and interest. Fee Ranges listed on this website are intended to serve only as a guideline. For the most current celebrity fees or to check availability, please contact a booking agent.
Please Note: All American Speakers Bureau acts only as an entertainment broker/producer for corporate functions, private engagements and special events. All American Speakers Bureau does not claim or represent itself as the exclusive booking agency, business manager, publicist, speakers bureau or management for Judge Glenda Hatchett or any artists or celebrities on this website.
All American Speakers is a "buyers agent" and exclusively represents talent buyers looking to secure celebrities and speakers for personal appearances, speaking engagements, corporate entertainment, private events, public relations campaigns, promotions, commercials and product endorsements.
Profiles listed on this website are provided as a resource to our clients, which are meeting and event planners and other buyers of talent in order to provide them with the widest variety and selection of available talent. For more information on how we work and what makes us unique, please read about the All American Speakers Bureau Advantage.
Due to the volume of emails and calls we receive, we can no longer respond to inquiries related to any of the following:
Related Tags: Find More Information on booking Judge Glenda Hatchett for appearances, speaking engagements, endorsements/spokesperson, appearance fees, booking agency contact info, biography of Judge Glenda Hatchett, Contact an artist booking talent agent find a speakers bureau that can book Judge Glenda Hatchett, speaker booking agency for Judge Glenda Hatchett, list of similar speakers and celebrities for hire, what is the cost to book a top 10 motivational speaker, musician, comedian or famous athlete. | <urn:uuid:36ba36a2-79db-431d-9780-cdadc07e929f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.allamericanspeakers.com/speakers/Judge-Glenda-Hatchett/3459 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964074 | 1,461 | 1.710938 | 2 |
GCN LAB IMPRESSIONS
Gmail adds own version of 'Star Trek' Universal Translator
In the official Gmail blog, Jeff Chin, product manager of Google Translate, has announced that Automated Message Translation was being added to Gmail. This feature had been kicking around in Google Labs for almost three years, so the team at Google decided it was high time to graduate it to a regular feature.
This could be a huge boon for federal agencies that use Google Apps for Government, as it will allow them to, mostly flawlessly, translate communications from people who speak almost any language, and allow them to respond in kind. It's a little like the Universal Translator from "Star Trek."
So, here is what the average Gmail user will experience once they have the feature fully in place.
Say English is your native language, and you’ve told Google that in your preferences. If you receive an e-mail in another language, say Japanese, Google Translate will show a bar above it that says what language it is, and a “Translate Message” link. Clicking on that will convert the message into your native tongue.
If you are fluent in Japanese and can read it just fine, thank you very much, then just click on “Turn off for: Japanese” and it will leave those e-mails alone. If you did have it translated, then that link will change to “Always Translate: Japanese.” If you click that, then it will translate all messages in Japanese to English automatically, but the bar will still be there, so you know it was translated.
Google currently is able to translate 58 different languages (sorry, no Vulcan or Romulan), and, of course, it keeps working to add more. Seven other language translators are in an “alpha” stage of development. The company draws on its power of having indexed the hundreds of millions of documents that make up the Internet to look for patterns and try to find the best translation it can.
Of course, there generally is no better way to get the original meaning of a message than to read it in the language it was written — even Google calls its pattern-seeking statistical translations “intelligent guesses.” But since most of us aren’t fluent in every language on the planet, or even a good chunk of them, Automated Message Translation might be the next best thing for getting the gist of an article or message.
And if you want to express yourself accurately in another language, the best way to accomplish that is still to find a human who speaks that language, preferably natively (remember the old book translator’s rule: Only translate into your native language). You don’t want your messages to read like those unintentionally hilarious instruction manuals that sometimes arrive with products made overseas.
I suspect that will be the case for some time to come, but this is a huge step in enabling everyone around the world to communicate with each other, a dream that has been in the works for a very long time. | <urn:uuid:83d29a64-8a9f-446e-914c-6a8dcdaf6f26> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gcn.com/articles/2012/05/02/google-adds-automatic-translation-to-gmail.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942936 | 630 | 2.125 | 2 |
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SOURCE Random House / Princeton Review Books
- 69% Report High Stress
- 89% Say Financial Aid "Very Necessary"
- Stanford is #1 "Dream College" Among Students & Parents / #2 is Harvard
NEW YORK, March 21, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Some call it "the other March madness." It's nail-biting season now through April as college acceptance / rejection and financial aid letters land in family mailboxes.
According to The Princeton Review's 2013 "College Hopes & Worries Survey" – an annual poll of college applicants and parents of applicants – stress levels are high and worries about college costs are higher than ever. Eighty-nine percent of survey respondents this year say financial aid will be "very" necessary to pay for college and within that cohort 66% say "extremely" necessary (a 5% increase over 2012). Nonetheless, 100% of the respondents believe college will be "worth it" and 51% see a "potentially better job / higher income" as the main benefit of the diploma.
The college applicants and parents most named as their "dream college" – the school they wish they (or their child) could attend were cost and acceptance not issues – was Stanford. Harvard was the 2nd most named.
The Princeton Review, one of the nation's best known education services companies, has conducted its "College Hopes & Worries Survey" since 2003. Findings for the 2013 survey are based on responses from 14,125 people. Seventy percent (9,955) were teens applying to colleges: 30% (4,170) were parents of applicants. Respondents hailed from all 50 states and DC, plus several countries abroad. The 15-question survey ran in The Princeton Review book, The Best 377 Colleges: 2013 Edition (Random House, August 2012), and it was accessible on www.PrincetonReview.com from September 2012 through March 5.
Top 10 "Dream Colleges"
Answering the survey's only fill-in-the-blank question, "What 'dream college' do you wish you or your child could attend if acceptance or cost weren't issues?" respondents wrote in more than 500 institution names.
The colleges students most named as their "dream college" were:
The colleges parents most named as their "dream college" for their children were:
In students' and parents' responses to questions with multiple answer choices, findings show these perspectives among respondents overall:
Other survey findings report on: number of colleges respondents were applying to, the toughest part of their application experiences, if the economy was affecting their school choices (and how). The Princeton Review also asked respondents their advice for 2014 applicants and parents. The most repeated exhortation among parents and students alike: "Start early." One parent wrote, "College is not a prize to be won but a match to be made." A teen wrote, "Enjoy applying to colleges. You (hopefully) only get to do it once."
A survey report (all questions, answer choices, and findings) plus a sampler of respondents' advice is at www.princetonreview.com/college-hopes-worries.aspx
The Princeton Review is also known for its annual college rankings in 62 categories (www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings.aspx) it reports in August in its book, The Best 377 Colleges, and its many other categories of school rankings and lists accessible at www.princetonreview.com
The Princeton Review is not affiliated with Princeton University and it is not a magazine.
About The Princeton Review
Founded in 1981, The Princeton Review (www.PrincetonReview.com) is a privately held education services company headquartered in Framingham, MA. The Company has long been a leader in helping students achieve their education and career goals through its test preparation services, tutoring and admissions resources, online courses, and more than 150 print and digital books published by Random House, Inc. The Princeton Review delivers its programs via a network of more than 5,000 teachers and tutors in the U.S.A., Canada, and international franchises. The Company also partners with schools and guidance counselors worldwide to provide students with college readiness, test preparation and career planning services.
©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. | <urn:uuid:630932e0-e83f-4c2f-90bc-b24def834aa0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wtvm.com/story/21754005/the-princeton-reviews-2013-college-hopes-worries-survey-reports-on-14125-students-parents-top-10-dream-colleges-and-application-views | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958198 | 938 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Want to spend a beautiful fall day driving one of the cars from our collection? Now you can! http://t.co/tEGT1NaSc4
Cars with two heads, two engines or three wheels. Cars that fold in half and even run by propeller. A 100 ton amphibious vehicle? This is not your typical car museum!
Lane Motor Museum features 150 unique cars and motorcycles and is home to the largest European collection in the U.S. The vehicles date from the 1920s all the way up to modern day and feature a varied collection of microcars, amphibious vehicles, military vehicles, alternative fuel vehicles, prototypes, one-of-a-kind vehicles and motorcycles. A great exhibit that the whole family can enjoy!
At Lane Motor Museum visitors are introduced to a broad variety of vehicles from Europe, Asia, and North and South America. Engineering, politics, geography, and economics are a few of the factors which have shaped vehicles throughout history. This is a working museum with the goal being to maintain all vehicles in running order. | <urn:uuid:0a8b40fc-5493-4976-997a-9d0b0fa60572> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lanemotormuseum.org/visit-lane-motor-museum | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950137 | 218 | 1.796875 | 2 |
I know another “lose weight and gain muscle” article... You’re probably not even reading this right now, so I can write anything green elephants wearings hats and you wouldn’t even know. This may not be news to you but sometimes tips can be refreshingly meaningful and motivating. Make no mistake, we love people of all sizes but for the sake of long term health staying fit is important!
It is not always easy to lose weight, especially for those men and women that do not have any direction and tend to fall victim to a number of quick fixes. Weight loss supplements and miracle diets work short term but you’re almost assured to rebound (sounds like the right word when taking about weight) and cause some unknown damage to your body. When trying to lose weight and get lean muscle, there are a number of steps to follow to ensure long lasting results. Of course, eating well (no, not 100 calorie snack packs) is crucial because what you put in your body, is what you get out, in more ways than one. Also, good work out habits are pretty much required, otherwise you’ll be thin and flabby.
Step One. The first thing people should do is create a good, nutritious menu with foods that are good for the body. A person’s diet needs to consist of sources of quality protein, fats, and carbohydrates. These foods will provide energy and assist with recovery after exercising. Stay away from foods that have high amounts of saturated fats, sugars, and sodium. Individuals should also stay away from “white carbohydrates.” Processed sugars, flours, breads, pasta, etc. = worth thing ever? Yes, it probably is and its addictive because its sugar. We want you to indulge once in a while but make it a special treat. Raw foods are crucial as they provide nutrient dense (lots of nutrients for the calories) and provide enzymes which help break down other foods. To get going, its important to eat fiber, 35 grams per day sounds about right.
Step Two. Peeps need to cut their calorie intake. To lose weight, people need to generate a caloric deficit. To lose only one pound a week, individuals must burn 3,500 calories. To lose a pound each week with diet alone, reduce caloric intake by 500 calories per day. That’s actually pretty simple to do, if eating healthy foods. Trying to eat well and gain weight, there should be an article just on that... ok, next time.
Step Three. Make a diet plan, most people don’t and won’t and I get that. I’ve never tried to lose weight but having to do both seems like a pain. I should make a diet plan for trying to GAIN weight but I rather just eat a lot. But there’s no question if I did and I followed one, I would see results much quicker.
Step Four. Try to avoid high caloric beverages, such as sweetened teas, wine, beer, and soda. Empty calories make feel nothing but bad. I understand the occasional drink drink but if you’re just looking to hydrate, why take in wasted calories? Replace liquids with water and drink as much water as possible throughout the day. This will keep you hydrated and belly full, so you’ll eat less.. Try to aim for seven or eight full eight ounce glasses of water per day. Drinking out of water bottles help for me.
Step Five. Eat frequent small meals. Eating a small meal once every few hours during the day will increase metabolism and keep the body satiated. It will also provide the muscles in the body with a continual supply of necessary nutrients. Individuals should start their day with a healthy breakfast and then eat another small meal every two or three hours. Individuals should get in about six meals per day. The meals should be a healthy balance of complex carbohydrates that have a high fiber content and protein. If an individual is relegated to only three meals, breakfast should be the largest and dinner should be the smallest.
Step Six. When doing weight training, go for high reps with moderate weights. If a person lifts heavy weights, they are likely to build bulky muscles. For long, lean muscles, individuals should increase their reps using lighter weights. It is good to aim for three to four sets of 15 reps. When doing weights, do not forget to do exercises that target the entire body, such as shoulder and chest presses, triceps extensions, back rows, biceps curls, and lunges.
Step Seven. Do not forget to do cardiovascular exercises as they will greatly assist in burning calories. Any type of cardio activity, including running, jumping rope, elliptical training, or biking will burn calories and help the body develop lean muscles. Cardio exercises should be done for 30 minutes at a time.
Step Eight. Recover! Drink a good nutrient and protein rich shake and rest your body. Let the high quality amino acids fill those torn muscles and begin to repair and rebuild. Feel the purity of clean, vegan and raw protein powders. | <urn:uuid:f2afe519-0faf-429f-a490-eafd417a99ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sproutliving.com/blog/how-to-lose-weight-and-get-lean-muscle.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955451 | 1,050 | 1.828125 | 2 |
It sounds like the question you are asking in asking "how do I compose pieces like sonatas?" is "how do I compose?"
I agree with glenn in his Kurt Vonnegut vignette. The analogy he made is that writing composition is similar to music composition from the standpoint of you (the composer) starting with a blank page. And if brevity is the soul of wit, Kurt Vonnegut gave the greatest lecture of his life in saying that the best and fastest way to being a great writer is simply to practice writing, without further ado. I am in college now and if some of my teachers were more brief I would appreciate it
Sara gives some good advice on form.
Techneut talks about being schooled in music theory. So more on that topic:
I am interested in composing and e-mailed the composition professor at my university asking him if I could take his course (this was when I was a sophomore). He wrote back and told me I needed theory classes first.
The upshot of the e-mail was this- once you understand what a IV dominant and subdominant chord are, it is much simpler to approach what sequence of notes either melodic or melodic stacked to be harmonic can be justified to be heard in a piece of music over other note sequence options. So in short, you need an education in music theory before you approach composition, if you really serious about your interest in composition.
One last thing, I was reading Classical Music for Dummies by David Pogue last summer. He writes about the traits of a good composer. One thing he said that sticks with me is this. All good composers have something meaningful to say. Hope this helps! | <urn:uuid:a626027c-5cef-4fb6-998a-cad7a8e28984> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pianosociety.com/new/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=43315 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97274 | 353 | 2.6875 | 3 |
A Quote by Simone Weil on citizenship, conflict, country, economics, interest, and war
What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
Source: The Need for Roots (1949)
Contributed by: Zaady | <urn:uuid:57299b89-d8b0-43a9-88df-b99b5aefee63> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/simone-weil/33199 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950625 | 83 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Gross: Big Investors Avoiding Bank Debt for Now
Pimco bond chief Bill Gross said he and other big investors are avoiding buying bank debt until the Treasury Department takes steps to shore up the financial system.
"We're sort of full," Gross said in a CNBC interview. "To be fair and not to talk out of school, we have clients, we have contacts around the world and basically they're sitting on their hands as well. They're full as well and we're waiting for something to happen. What that means basically is we need a balance sheet, we need somebody else's balance sheet. That means buying power."
Gross said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson needs to inject $400 billion to $500 billion into the financial system. That would serve as a backstop for banks that are having capital problems due to the continuing collapse of the mortgage market and housing foreclosures.
Watch the video of Bill Gross and CNBC's Jim Cramer discuss the markets.
Accordingly, he said essentially the only debt he would take on is that from government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy mortgages on the secondary markets from the banks that issue them.
"We're trying to anticipate what government officials and policy makers will do, and if we're wrong, we're wrong, but you have to buy what they're going to be buying hopefully over the next several months," Gross said. "And that's to buy Fannie and Freddie mortgages which are triple-A, which are guaranteed, which are security-backed and that's the area that will benefit the most if something happens."
But Gross was skeptical over what will happen considering the current political climate.
"The Treasury is hindered," Gross said. "It's hindered by the upcoming election, it's hindered by the turnover in the administration in January, February, and again by the Republican orthodoxy that says leave things alone." | <urn:uuid:c883cada-5bc5-425c-8c50-9d3105b47dad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnbc.com/id/26544336 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981507 | 389 | 1.703125 | 2 |
There hasn't been very much good news for island libraries recently. As part of cost-cutting efforts, Gov. Eddie Calvo consolidated the Guam Public Library System under the Department of Chamorro Affairs, plans were made to slash library staff, and village libraries were shuttered and turned over to mayors.
But one librarian has been working to modernize and improve services, showing that school libraries can be much more than they have been, including a resource for communities.
Sudi Napalan is a pioneer in creating a web-based catalog for a government library -- at Simon Sanchez High School in Yigo. The catalog is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
All of the library's 1,007 hard-copy books have been digitally catalogued. The library also has about 8,000 digital books, and Napalan is working to get those catalogued digitally, with the assistance of students in the library science class.
Most of the digital books were purchased thanks to a grant from Macy's Foundation. Napalan also obtained digital versions of classic literature for free from Amazon.com and is looking to get more non-fiction books from FollettShelf.
Students can reserve hard-copy books to check out, and also can check out digital titles by bringing their Kindle, iPad, iPhone or other digital device to the school's library.
Simon Sanchez High also is making its library accessible to the community after repeated inquiries from parents.
"Since there are no public libraries in the north, we welcome the public to browse through our collection," Napalan said. "They will need to adhere to the school policies during their visit to the library."
Kudos to Napalan for her innovation in improving her library and making it more accessible to the public. We urge other public school librarians to work toward doing the same for the students and others in their communities. | <urn:uuid:cfc59d76-1ee6-464e-99d4-fff59b461ca2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guampdn.com/article/20120424/OPINION01/204240322/Kudos-Sanchez-High-librarian-shows-how-improve-expand-service?odyssey=nav%7Chead | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970931 | 383 | 2.09375 | 2 |
Also wellknown “Gyan-Bhandar”(the centre of Jain books and literature).
His born name was Ghevarchand Jain; as a young man, Ghevarchand was initiated as a monk at a Jain temple of Mohankheda (Dhar-Madhya Pradesh-India) and he took the name Muni Jayananda Vijay by Acharya Shrimad Vijya Vidhhachandra surishwarji, the fifth successor or following Acharya of Acharya Rajendrasuri.
He is trained in religious discourse, philosophy, logic and grammar. He walked more than 1,00,000 km across Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujrat for prominent work of Jainism. He appealed to the masses by delivering his discourses in simple dialects of the people, the common spoken languages of the masses — Malwi, Gujarati, Marwari, etc. He inspired the Jain monks to study profoundly the Jain scriptures. He himself is devoted to the deep study of Jain works.
He was bitterly opposed to the storage of Jain works in isolated places; he eagerly desired to bring them to light for the propagation of Jainism. He himself wrote, collected, and edited certain important Jain works. | <urn:uuid:12a50f23-c372-4a2e-8b0c-7f71a34be88e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Muni_Jayanandvijay | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968536 | 270 | 2.828125 | 3 |
On the previous post, Stubborn comments:
I completely agree, but since it would take an incredibly larger amount of effort on the dev's part to generate a) what should be a privilege, b) what the requirements for gaining access to the privilege are c) what should cause the privilege to be revoked, and d) actually monitor those systems, there's no way they'll actually do it.
Throwing gigantic rules blankets over the whole population is so, so much easier.I don't agree. Sure, having one simple rule for the entire population might be easier. But that rule doesn't stay simple for long. It gets hedged about with exceptions and special cases. And that makes the whole system more brittle and prone to unexpected error.
From a programmatic standpoint, privileges or permissions are not that hard to implement. It is simply a different way of looking at the problem.
In fact, it is a very common technique in operating systems or business software. Can you read, change or delete a file on your computer? Rather than trying to apply a single rules heuristic, it's just handled by the permissions on that file. The OS doesn't really care how you got those permissions, but only that you either have permission or you don't.
Business software and operating systems have a mental conception of users that fit into different groups, which is why privileges feel natural to them. It is only gaming software that tries to pretend that all its users are the same.
As well, permissions don't have to be calculated in real time. The game generates logs, and those logs can be parsed at a later date by bots looking for patterns. Indeed, if you come up with a new and better pattern recognition bot, you can rerun it on old records. A simple example might be a bot that looks for people who swear in public channels. All chat logs are saved, so a bot can traverse those records at its leisure, spit out results, and those results can set chat permissions which apply in the future.
But you yourself just laid out a number of what you consider the perfect cases for it being a privilege that cannot be strictly programmed in; else you get systems like we already have!
Example: If you designed a new game that had a vote-kick system, what would your programmatic patterns of abuse be? The guy kicks a lot of people? How does the program know that it's not legit?
Example: If a person is needing a lot on gear that's actually wearable by them and offered to him by the game, how do you know he's not just making a legitimate use of the game system?
Here's the thing. I believe that abusers of rules exhibit very different patterns of behavior than regular users. Take vote-kick for example. I almost never vote-kick anyone, and I pretty much only run LFR/LFD at this point. I just don't see that anyone can possibly justify a high vote-kick rate in dungeons. I think the problem more likely lies with the vote-kicker.
Same with Need/Greed. Alright, maybe in your first instance run, you have a higher than average amount of need rolls. But if you keep that up, that's a clear sign that you are behaving badly.
These patterns should be identifiable. Obviously, you do need some history, to let the Law of Large Numbers start to kick in. But if you were presented with a player's history, I think it would not be hard for you to determine if a player is exploiting the rules or not. And if you can see the pattern, then a bot can be built or trained to see the same pattern.
Take a player in a battleground. If you look at the players's history, and see one battleground with zero damage or healing, well, maybe he was defending a node which never got attacked. But you start seeing more and more of them, the odds that this player afks or is a bot increases dramatically. | <urn:uuid:b3d71318-ee52-4632-906a-c0afaa5e08e4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com/2013/03/privileges-part-2.html?showComment=1362733153870 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965363 | 814 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Drug overdose fatalities in New York City tripled between 1990 and 2006, a new study reports, and most of the increase came from the growing abuse of prescription pain medicines.
By 2006, the rate of prescription analgesic overdose fatality among white men was twice as high as that among Latinos and almost three times as high as the rate among blacks. Rates of heroin fatalities in 2006 were about the same as in 1990, while methadone deaths peaked in 1991 and 2006.
Pain medicines were the only types of overdose to increase steadily over the period, and by 2006 they accounted for 15.6 percent of all fatalities, up from 3.9 percent in 1990. The increase was attributable entirely to deaths among white and Latino men.
“Traditionally, we’ve understood the abuse of prescription opioids to be a rural problem, but we actually see that this is an increasing problem in urban areas as well,” said the lead author, Magdalena Cerdá, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia. “Opioid abuse in urban areas deserves attention, too.”
The authors, writing online in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, also found geographical differences in drug abuse. There were lower rates of poverty in neighborhoods with high rates of analgesic overdose fatalities, and methadone overdoses were concentrated in low-income areas. | <urn:uuid:40e6871b-e8d8-4ecf-99e4-4bb1a5212282> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/rise-in-drug-overdose-deaths/?ref=todayspaper | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968263 | 277 | 2.28125 | 2 |
Each week, we usually gather up four or five projects in progress to feature in a single column. Now it's going to be a daily feature, so we can give the spotlight to a single project each day.
Is this a movie you'd want to see? Tell us in the comments.
"Within Every Woman"
Tweetable Logline: Behind every statistic there is an individual… Within Every Woman there is a story.
Elevator Pitch: What began as a documentary about the former “Comfort Women” (a term used to describe over 200,000 girls kidnapped or coerced into Military Sexual Slavery during World War Two in Asia) developed into a personal story about the complex layers of healing. Told through the lives of 3 Grandmothers, each survivors of the largest institutionalized rape system in world history, the film explores the role society plays in perpetuating the shame that silences victims of sexual violence.
Executive Producers: Joseph Wong, Flora Chong, Judy Cho
Producer: Christopher Kang
Director and Co-producer: Tiffany Hsiung
Associate Producer: Rayisa Kondracki,
Director of Community Outreach: Lucy Zhao
Editor: Gloria Tong, Ricardo Acosta
Cinematography: Tiffany Hsiung, Kwoi Gin, Alex Tong, Mark Valino
Crew: Uni Park, U Chung, Sunny Yao, Jude Lee
About the production:
"I never expected to make a film about military sexual violence. But in the summer of 2009 I was invited to document a Study Tour by Toronto Alpha (Association of Learning and Preserving history of WW2 in Asia) and I met Grandma Ha in Shanghai. After hearing her describe her experiences as a sex slave for the Japanese Imperial army first hand, I knew I had to tell this story. I was so shocked and frustrated that I had never heard this part of my own culture’s history before. This frustration grew as I came to realize Grandma Ha easily could have been my own grandmother. And it was this realization that solidified my need to share the grandmothers’ unheard stories with the world. Not only because they are in the last years of their lives and need help to ensure their stories are remembered, but because these stories can inspire so many other women that have experienced a form of sexual violence to speak out. The grandmothers remind us that it is never to late." -- Tiffany Hsiung
The film is currently in production.
For more information and to support the film:
Be sure to check out our curated Kickstarter page for more information on projects we think you should check out. | <urn:uuid:038989a4-336b-4cf2-882e-669e2e49ec97> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.indiewire.com/article/indiewires_project_of_the_day_korean_wwii_comfort_women_documentary_within_ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95142 | 541 | 1.625 | 2 |
General information about benefits for carers
The government provides a variety of benefits for both you and the person you care for and you should not be reluctant to claim them.
As a carer, you may be entitled to some benefits, whether you do paid work or not. The welfare benefits system is complicated and if you plan to claim benefits it is important to speak to an advice service first as your claim for benefits may affect the benefits for the person you care for.
Benefits you may be entitled to include:
- carer’s allowance
- carer’s premium
- income support
- housing benefit and council tax benefit.
- working tax credit and child tax credit.
For more information, see the directgov website or contact your local JobCentre Plus or Citizen’s Advice Bureau; details are at the end of this booklet. If you are unsure of your entitlements and you feel that you require assistance in accessing the benefits system, you can ask the customer advisors at Wiltshire Council for a benefits check: call 0300 456 0111.
Find out more
- Age UK – Benefits information, advice and fact sheets
- Bereavement making a will, inheritance tax and government asssistance such as Funeral Payments and Bereavement Payments from·DirectGov
- Benefit Enquiry Line 0800 88 22 00
- Carers UK benefit advice for carers
- Department of Work and Pensions website
- Enduring Power of Attorney to help others to manage their financial affairs and property when they are unable to undertake this themselves·DirectGov
- Princess Royal Trust for Carers benefits advice
- State pensions for carers and parents·Department of Work and Pensions website
- Tackling financial exclusion
Last updated: 28 March 2013 | <urn:uuid:7fe3196c-59b8-467a-9b85-a7abf8eca42d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wiltshire.gov.uk/healthandsocialcare/carers/benefitsforcarers.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924085 | 368 | 1.632813 | 2 |
A Personalized Unique Baby Gift – Porcelain Limoges Boxes
What is a Limoges box? When inquiring I found many people did not know what a Limoges box was. I am going to not only tell you what it is but the story and history behind it. Before the interesting history lesson I would like to tell you that if you want to give a personalized unique baby gift, this is one of the most different and beautiful gifts I can think of.
History of Porcelain Limoges Boxes
Kaolin (in Chinese meaning white clay) the primary substance for making porcelain could be obtained only by importing it from China. In 1768 Kaolin was finally discovered around the city of Limoges, in France, and the beginning of Limoges porcelain was born. Limoges, a small town was one of the oldest in the French kingdom. The most prestigious artists (painters) became interested in this fabulous substance. They created tableware articles such as plates, platters and pitchers as well as fancy objects such as vases, bonbonieres, and the snuff box or Tabatiere in French. The snuff box became an immediate success. With porcelain there was no limit to the artists’ imagination or creativity. Miniature boxes resembling flowers, musical instruments, or even pets could be created. By owning a Tabatiere a person was identified as distinguished, trendy and affluent.
The French Revolution led to the practice of smoking tobacco with a pipe instead of snuffing it. Because of this the production of the fashionable snuff boxes came to a standstill.
French Enamel Silver Limoges Box Signed By A. Ronhomme
Porcelain Snuff Limoges Boxes
When unable to locate old snuff boxes due to two centuries of revolutions and wars in Europe, entailing substantial destruction, some of the Limoges producers were prompted to pursue the re-birth of the Tabatiere. If original boxes did survive, they carried a very high value. Manufacturers worked very hard, the production was re-started and the artisans succeeded in resurrecting their heritage. Thus the Limoges boxes still thrive.
Now that you know the history of these beautiful pieces of art you can also appreciate them. They are truly keepsakes that anyone receiving one would be extremely delighted.
Collectible Limoges Boxes
Limoges Boxes have become collector items. There are now thousands to choose from and no two are exactly alike. Most are quite small and have very intricate art work. They make exceptional newborn baby gifts. You can put babys’ initials on the outside top of the lid and the date of birth and weight and height on the inside of the lid. Often there is a picture as you look down into the bottom. You can get one for a girl or boy. This unique baby gift item is a perfect gift for grandparents as well. The boxes are small but just the right size for a lock of babys’ hair and for all the little baby teeth.
So when you are looking for that unique baby shower gift, just remember the saying, “Good things come in small packages,” and consider giving Limoges Boxes. | <urn:uuid:862a1dca-1d14-4bb6-9625-e3ea6304cadc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.uptownlimoges.com/tag/french-kingdom/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951129 | 672 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Saladin (sălˈədĭn) [key], Arabic Salah ad-Din, 1137?–1193, Muslim warrior and Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, the great opponent of the Crusaders, b. Mesopotamia, of Kurdish descent. He lived for 10 years in Damascus at the court of Nur ad-Din, where he distinguished himself by his interest in Sunni theology. He accompanied his uncle, Shirkuh (or Shirkoh), a lieutenant of Nur ad-Din, on campaigns (1164, 1167, 1168) against the Fatimid rulers of Egypt. Shirkuh became vizier there and on his death (1169) was succeeded by Saladin. Saladin later caused the name of the Shiite Fatimid caliph to be dropped from the Friday prayer, thus deposing him.
After the death of Nur ad-Din, who was planning to campaign against his too powerful subordinate, Saladin proclaimed himself sultan of Egypt, thus beginning the Ayyubid dynasty. He spread his conquests westward on the northern shores of Africa as far as Qabis and also conquered Yemen. He took over Damascus after Nur ad-Din's death and undertook to subdue all of Syria and Palestine. He had already come into conflict with the Crusaders (see Crusades), and he put the rulers of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (see Jerusalem, Latin Kingdom of) on the steadily weakening defensive. He was unsuccessful in his efforts to conquer the Assassins in their mountain strongholds, but he took Mosul, Aleppo, and wide areas from rival Muslim rulers and became the principal warrior of Islam.
Gathering a large force of Muslims of various groups—but all called Saracens by the Christians—he set out to attack the Christians. Raymond of Tripoli was at first his ally, but then joined the other Crusaders, and the great battle of Hattin (near Tiberias) in 1187 found Christians matched against Muslims. Saladin won brilliantly, capturing Guy of Lusignan and Reginald of Châtillon. The city of Jerusalem also fell to him. The Third Crusade was gathered (1189) and came to the Holy Land to try to recover Jerusalem. Thus it was that Richard I of England and Saladin met in the conflict that was to be celebrated in later chivalric romance. The reputation that Saladin had among the Christians for generosity and chivalry does not seem to have been a legend, and there seems no doubt that Saladin admired Richard as a worthy opponent. The Crusaders, however, failed in their purpose and succeeded only in capturing Akko. In 1192, Saladin came to agreement with the Crusaders upon the Peace of Ramla, which left the Latin Kingdom only a strip along the coast from Tyre to Yafo. The Christians were never to recover from their defeat.
See biographies by A. R. H. Gibb (1973), M. C. Lyons and D. E. Jackson (1982), S. Lane-Poole (1985), G. Regan (1988), and A.-M. Eddé (2011); J. Reston, Jr., Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade (2001).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
More on Saladin from Infoplease:
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Egyptian History: Biographies | <urn:uuid:4866fcd2-7568-4988-bc04-b293a732d315> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/people/saladin.html | 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 | 0.967042 | 727 | 3.390625 | 3 |
June 20, 2008
Pg. 1 Public Access to Solemn Site Balanced Against Security Needs
By Nick Miroff, Washington Post Staff Writer
When the nation's first major 9/11 memorial is dedicated on the grounds of the Pentagon's western side this September, it will change the iconic building into something it was not intended to be: a tourist destination.
Since the day the symbol of the country's military might was attacked nearly seven years ago, a great deal of effort has gone into further limiting public access to the site. It has been wrapped in barricades, elaborate security systems and signs prohibiting photography.
But just as the grief and sympathy that came after the Sept. 11 attacks eroded whatever psychological barrier existed between the public and the Pentagon, the memorial attempts to make that relationship a lasting physical reality. The Pentagon Memorial will allow the camera-wielding public free access 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Visitors will find a parklike open space that is intricately beautiful, meticulously crafted and almost entirely at odds with the monolith that serves as its backdrop.
By almost any measure, it is not a good location for a major attraction. The area is tangled with traffic during commuter hours. The public will be barred from parking near the site. And wayward tourists might find themselves in awkward encounters with officers of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA), the hyper-vigilant security service that polices the Pentagon Reservation.
In short, said PFPA Director Steven E. Calvery, the Pentagon "was not designed to be a welcoming and nice place to visit, like the Mall."
But unlike the Washington region's other monuments and tourist attractions, the location for the Pentagon Memorial was not originally selected by a board of directors or an arts commission. It was picked by the five terrorists who hijacked a Boeing 757 on Sept. 11, 2001, and plowed it into the building at 530 mph. The family members of the 184 victims killed in the attack, and the many others who carry the scars of that day, wanted the memorial to be at the exact site of the crash. Their wishes prevailed.
Construction of the $32 million project, financed entirely by private donations, is moving into its final stages. When the site is dedicated Sept. 11 and opened to the public the next day, visitors will see a highly aesthetic space that offers a stark contrast to the building whose 125 fallen workers it honors, along with the 59 victims on the plane.
The site is intended to elicit thoughtful reflection and contemplation, encouraging visitors to explore, to feel the gravel crunching under their feet and to listen to the trickling water in the light-filled reflecting pools beneath each of the 184 elegant, curving benchlike memorials honoring those who died in the attack.
"This site holds a special level of intensity," said architect Keith Kaseman, who designed the memorial with his partner and spouse, Julie Beckman. "You can't get the whole picture of what happened until you come here."
Visitors could come away with more than a meditation on the past. Because the memorial is next to the building, it also might invite people to think about the Pentagon, and the Department of Defense employees and contractors who work inside. Whether it humanizes their work or raises critical questions about what they do there, the site will offer a new vantage point from which to contemplate the attack, the building or what happens behind its walls.
Beckman and Kaseman said the memorial will not tell visitors what to feel about Sept. 11, the Pentagon or anything else. "This is a place where people are invited to sit and think but one that does not tell them what to think," Kaseman said. "The 9/11 attack was an attack on free thought, so our response should be on the opposite end of the spectrum in honoring and respecting the people who died."
With permanent memorials in Lower Manhattan and Shanksville, Pa., several years from completion, security officials are bracing for 1 million to 2 million visitors a year to the Pentagon site.
"History chose that site, but the Pentagon was designed to keep people out," said Reinhold Martin, a historian of modern architecture at Columbia University who has studied the building and was a mentor to Kaseman. The memorial, he said, "takes on this problem by being open and public in a positive way."
Added Martin, "It will be interesting to see if the Pentagon can tolerate that degree of openness."
From a security standpoint, the site will require a shift in enforcement approach that tends to view the public warily and equate increased access with increased risk.
As PFPA officials said, thousands of people pass close to the building's walls each day to use the Pentagon Metro station and adjacent transit center or the bicycle path nearby. Special events such as the Marine Corps Marathon and the Army Ten-Miler are held there each year, drawing large crowds. The public is not prevented from driving into several of the Pentagon's oceanic parking lots or along the roads adjacent to the building.
But those visitors, by and large, do not come to the Pentagon as tourists. If, as planned, the Sept. 11 memorial is added to the popular Tourmobile circuit that includes nearby Arlington National Cemetery, it is likely to draw a sizable portion of that destination's 4 million annual visitors. Shuttles and tour buses taking riders to the site will drop them off near the Metro station to avoid creating backups at the memorial.
Those who want to drive to the Sept. 11 memorial will have to park at Pentagon City and walk through a pedestrian tunnel beneath Interstate 395 to reach the site, a five- to 10-minute trek. Five spaces in the Pentagon's south parking lot will be reserved for handicapped parking, but that will be the extent of visitor parking -- even on nights and weekends. Tour buses won't be able to pull up next to the site, either.
"We already have a near-gridlocked situation," said Calvery, a former Interior Department official who helped develop enhanced security plans for several major National Park Service sites after the Sept. 11 attacks. "We'd back up traffic down to Richmond," he said.
That many visitors are expected to come to the memorial at night presents another challenge for Pentagon security officials, given that the public will have round-the-clock access to the site. The memorial's architects have designed it to offer visitors an entirely different experience after sundown, when the pools of circulating water beneath each bench will illuminate their stainless steel undersides, producing a shimmering glow.
But that also means security officials cannot flood the site with bright lighting, which would ruin the intended visual effect.
"It's going to be a solemn and almost sacred place, and we realize that," Calvery said. "We're trying not to over-enforce."
Part of the security challenge, he said, is creating a visible enforcement presence that discourages threats while not making visitors uncomfortable with an overwhelming police presence. This will involve some compromise for the agency, which will change its long-standing policy against photography to allow people to take pictures of the site -- even if they want to take pictures of the building from within the memorial.
"People will want to take pictures of the crash site, obviously, and we're going to allow that," he said.
But several restrictions will remain. Signs posted outside the memorial and along the walkway to its entrance will warn visitors not to photograph the building from outside the memorial site. Security personnel will reserve the right to confiscate visitors' cameras if they suspect anything undue.
The memorial will offer no access to the building itself. A metal fence with vertical bars will separate it from the wall of the Pentagon and the roadway that skirts the building, with guard booths at either end of the fence. State-of-the-art surveillance equipment is also being deployed to the site, which Calvery declined to discuss in detail.
He also indicated that plans might change as needs arise, given that Pentagon security officials aren't accustomed to hosting tourists and can't be sure how many people will visit the memorial. The rules and protocols in place reflect a compromise hashed out over several years but will remain flexible, Calvery said.
Victims' family members are expected to visit the memorial frequently and spend time with the benches that have been engraved with the names of their lost loved ones. But what isn't clear is to what degree the country as a whole will adopt the site as an outlet for the swirling emotions that remain raw nearly seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
There has been no place to channel them, for the most part, until now. As Beckman says, "When they rebuilt the Pentagon site, they erased all evidence [of the attack] in less than a year.
"This will be the first of the three sites that were attacked to finally have a place for people to go and deal with their thoughts, anxieties, frustrations and grief." | <urn:uuid:f3a8ba4d-1ce7-4af6-bf2e-3d59da016816> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.military-quotes.com/forum/pentagons-9-11-memorial-puzzle-t64293.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00065-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967883 | 1,833 | 1.929688 | 2 |
Labor and Environmentalists Must Work Together to Build a Real Green Jobs Agenda
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No one wants to dwell on the faults of a successful campaign. Featuring mass celebrity arrests and dramatic images of thousands encircling the White House, last year’s struggle to halt the Keystone XL pipeline has come to be regarded as a model of progressive activism in the Obama era. But the Keystone campaign also holds a sobering lesson for progressives: The “blue-green alliance” between labor and environmentalists is on life support, and unless it can be revived, this fight may yet be lost—along with many other climate battles down the road.
At the height of the Keystone debate, four unions stood with the titans of the fossil fuel industry to lambaste progressive environmentalists as extremist job killers. The Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) president, Terry O’Sullivan, went so far as to describe unionists who opposed the climate-destroying pipeline as being “under the skirts of delusional environmental groups which stand in the way of creating good, much needed American jobs.”
This January, when President Obama again rejected the expedited construction of the pipeline, O’Sullivan doubled down, saying, “We’re repulsed by some of our supposed brothers and sisters lining up with job killers like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to destroy the lives of working men and women.”
It was clear who O’Sullivan was talking about: the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) and the Transport Workers Union (TWU), which had dared to stand with environmental allies against Keystone. O’Sullivan’s vicious attacks on his fellow unionists were not even acknowledged by other labor officials until LIUNA and the building trades unions began running advertisements in Midwestern swing states attacking the president. It was only then that AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka noted the tension, explaining that “unions don’t agree among ourselves.”
By that point, the industry had succeeded in casting the entire house of labor in the Keystone XL camp, with American Petroleum Institute’s Jack Gerard declaring, “We will stand shoulder to shoulder with labor unions that have backed the pipeline, including the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department.” The public perception of unified labor support for the pipeline persists—bolstering the industry’s fearmongering about the threat to the economy posed by environmentalists and their penchant for job-killing regulations, and souring labor’s relations with progressive allies in the environmental movement at a moment when unions are under broad assault and desperately need support.
Why, after decades of talk about the importance of a labor–environmental alliance, can’t the blues and the greens get it together?
* * *
Let’s leave aside, for now, the way that mainstream environmentalism has proven tone-deaf to class issues over the years. It’s equally important to understand that, from Marxists to mainstreamers, few union leaders believe any issue really matters except unions. Joe Uehlein, former secretary-treasurer of the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, and recently the founder of a new Labor Network for Sustainability (a network of 6,000 grassroots labor and sustainability activists), underscored this point. “When I was putting this new network together, I met systematically with fifteen presidents of major unions in America,” he said. “Of the fifteen I met with, not one said their union should be working on the climate issue. They just didn’t see it as their work.”
This deeply held belief is on some level understandable in a labor movement that is itself staring down extinction. But overcoming this attitude among unionists is more critical by the day, as the planet’s prognosis grows ever more dire. To move past the divisive politics of the Keystone battle, it is imperative that we find a way to build a movement that puts both economic justice and climate action at the center of its demands. | <urn:uuid:0de884b3-d472-451f-aec8-e5a58415cd48> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alternet.org/story/155108/labor_and_environmentalists_must_work_together_to_build_a_real_green_jobs_agenda?qt-best_of_the_week=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948998 | 864 | 1.671875 | 2 |
- NAME: Alfred Hitchcock
- OCCUPATION: Director, Producer, Television Personality, Screenwriter
- BIRTH DATE: August 13, 1899
- DEATH DATE: April 29, 1980
- EDUCATION: St. Ignatius College, University of London
- PLACE OF BIRTH: London, United Kingdom
- PLACE OF DEATH: Bel Air, California
- Full Name: Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock
- Nickname: The Master of Suspense
- AKA: Hitchcock
- AKA: Alfred Hitchcock
- AKA: Alfred Joseph Hitchcock
Best Known For
Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was nicknamed the "Master of Suspense" for employing a kind of psychological suspense in his films, producing a distinct viewer experience.
Sean Connery - Marnie (3:18)
Stephen Rebello, author of "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho," describes his reaction the first time he saw "Psycho" and the cultural impact of Alfred Hitchock's film.
Known as "The Master of Suspense," Alfred Hitchcock is most famous for his voyeuristic style, twist endings, and cameo appearances in his films.
While working in the art department of a film company, Alfred Hitchcock learned all about the film industry. His wife, Alma, often advised him and supported him while he created his films.
Although Alfred Hitchcock's "Marnie" would end up ruining the career of its leading lady, Tippi Hedren, it propelled Sean Connery to stardom.
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Born in London on August 13, 1899, Alfred Hitchcock worked for a short time in engineering before entering the film industry in 1920. He left for Hollywood in 1939, where his first American film, Rebecca, won an Academy Award for best picture. Hitchcock created more than 50 films, including the classics Rear Window, The 39 Steps and Psycho. Nicknamed the "Master of Suspense," Hitchcock received the AFI's Life Achievement Award in 1979. He died in 1980.
"I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle."
Born in London on August 13, 1899, Alfred Hitchcock was raised by strict, Catholic parents. He described his childhood as lonely and sheltered, partly due to his obesity. He once said that he was sent by his father to the local police station with a note asking the officer to lock him away for 10 minutes as punishment for behaving badly. He also remarked that his mother would force him to stand at the foot OF her bed for several hours as punishment (a scene alluded to in his film Psycho). This idea of being harshly treated or wrongfully accused would later be reflected in Hitchcock's films.
Hitchcock studied engineering at St. Ignatius College in London and quickly obtained a job as a draftsman and advertising designer for the cable company Henley's. It was while working at Henley's that he began to write, submitting short articles for the in-house publication. From his very first piece, he employed themes of false accusations, conflicted emotions and twist endings with impressive skill. In 1920, Hitchcock entered the film industry with a full-time position at the Famous Players-Lasky Company designing title cards for silent films. Within a few years, he was working as an assistant director.
In 1925, Hitchcock directed his first film and began making the "thrillers" for which he became known the world over. His 1929 film Blackmail is said to be the first British "talkie." In the 1930s, he directed such classic suspense films as The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps.
In 1939, Hitchcock left England for Hollywood. The first film he made there, Rebecca (1940), won an Academy Award for best picture. Some of his most famous films include Psycho, The Birds and Marnie. His works became renowned for their depictions of violence, although many of his plots merely function as decoys meant to serve as a tool for understanding complex psychological characters. His cameo appearances in his own films, as well as his interviews, film trailers and the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1962-65), made him a cultural icon.
Hitchcock directed more than 50 feature films in a career spanning six decades. He received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1979. One year later, on April 29, 1980, Hitchcock died peacefully in his sleep in Bel Air, California. He was survived by his lifetime partner, assistant director and closest collaborator, Alma Reville, also known as "Lady Hitchcock," who died in 1982.
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Their creative visions unsettle, shock and haunt us—then leave us begging for more. Meet some of the biggest horror-film directors in Hollywood; the ones who not only sent chills down our spines and thrilled us with their suspenseful work, but who also made films so good, it became fun to be a little afraid.
Eerie Filmmakers 17 people in this group
Honorary Oscar Recipients 81 people in this group
Famous Leos 523 people in this group | <urn:uuid:df512e12-4f16-47e2-8674-6674ac14ec33> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.biography.com/people/alfred-hitchcock-9340006 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975964 | 1,122 | 2.25 | 2 |
The first Amendment to the Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….” I don’t think that Rick Santorum has read the Constitution recently if ever. Last night on Hardball Chris Matthews tried to referee a shouting match between Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican Party who tried to defend Santorum’s introduction of his religious beliefs into governing policy and David Corn who tried without success to explain why the introduction of religion was wrong. All three of them missed the point. The point is that we can have no established religion in this country and while those who govern as President can have personal religious beliefs, they cannot impose them on the country.
Kathleen Parker ended her recent column titled “The Trials of Saint Santorum” this way
Everything stems from his allegiance to the Catholic Church’s teachings that every human life has equal value and dignity. The church’s objection to birth control is based on concerns that sex without consequences would lead to men reducing women “to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of (their) own desires,” as well as abuse of power by public authorities and a false sense of autonomy.
Within that framework, everything Santorum says and does makes sense, even if one doesn’t agree. When he says that he doesn’t think the government should fund prenatal testing because it leads to abortion, this is emotional Santorum, father of a disabled child and another who died hours after a premature birth. In both instances, many doctors would have recommended abortion, but Santorum believes that those lives, no matter how challenging, have intrinsic value.
Though Santorum’s views are certainly controversial, his biggest problem isn’t that he is out of step with mainstream America. His biggest problem is that he lacks prudence in picking his battles and his words. The American people are loath to elect a preacher or a prophet to lead them out of the desert of unemployment. And they are justified in worrying how such imprudence might translate in areas of far graver concern than whether Santorum doesn’t personally practice birth control.
Parker’s statement that “the American people are loath to elect a preacher of a prophet” is exactly right. And he is definitely out of step with mainstream America. Maureen Dowd was even blunter opening her column with
Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola.
That’s far too grand. He’s more like a small-town mullah.
Santorum is not merely engaged in a culture war, but “a spiritual war,” as he called it four years ago. “The Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country — the United States of America,” he told students at Ave Maria University in Florida. He added that mainline Protestantism in this country “is in shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.”
Satan strikes, a Catholic exorcist told me, when there are “soul wounds.” Santorum, who is considered “too Catholic” even by my über-Catholic brothers, clearly believes that America’s soul wounds include men and women having sex for reasons other than procreation, people involved in same-sex relationships, women using contraception or having prenatal testing, environmentalists who elevate “the Earth above man,” women working outside the home, “anachronistic” public schools, Mormonism (which he said is considered “a dangerous cult” by some Christians), and President Obama (whom he obliquely and oddly compared to Hitler and accused of having “some phony theology”).
Rick Santorum wants us to be a Christian country and beyond that a fundamentalist Catholic one. How different this is from President John F. Kennedy declaring that the Pope would not run the government. Mullah Rick needs to read the Constitution.
It is too easy to make fun of him. This is a dangerous man. We need to take him seriously. | <urn:uuid:7821d6b5-4706-49f6-bbb5-8fd160a68880> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mhasegawa.com/2012/02/23/freedom-of-religion-and-freedom-from-religion/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972098 | 864 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Wednesday 22 May 2013 -
Anne Frank's House
The most famous private diary in the world.
Anne Frank was condemned to living in secret from July 1942 until August 1944, beginning just 3 weeks after her 13th birthday, the day she received her diary in which she recorded her two-year long story. Published after the war by her father, the only member to survive the family's deportation, it would go on to be translated into 60 languages.
This house, and particularly its attic, is the pivotal point of this moving story. Besides the visit itself, the museum, which has been open since 1960, offers many educational programmes on the themes of discrimination, the Second World War andanti-Semitism.
Shops, boutiques and malls | <urn:uuid:86da80d6-87c3-4894-860e-07a38140518b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://city-break-in-amsterdam.guide-accorhotels.com/hotel-amsterdam/museum-monument-amsterdam/anne-frank-s-house-amsterdam-p-3221457 | 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 | 0.977925 | 152 | 2.890625 | 3 |
Several people wrote to tell me more about the new HP DeskWriter 550C and how it works. The DeskWriter ink cartridge contains the print head in the cartridge itself, which simplifies the double-cartridge design used by the DeskWriter 550C.
The two cartridges, one black, one color, are mounted next to each other on the same carriage mechanism, which allows you to print all four process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black - commonly abbreviated CMYK) to on any given row of dots. As we said before, this mechanism improves print quality significantly by printing "true black" rather than the three-color composite that always bordered on brown.
Both cartridges shuttle at the same time, but only one can fire at a time, so the DeskWriter 550C makes two passes over a line if it has to print both color and true black on that same line. The only caveat to this is that HP wanted to prevent the ink from bleeding, so you can't print true black right next to color (with no intervening white space). If you have a black word in a colored box, that black word will be the composite black to prevent bleeding.
Portable DeskWriter? -- Last week we didn't mention Hewlett Packard's announcement of the DeskJet Portable printer for PC-clones. It's a 4.4 pound, 300 dpi inkjet printer that, unlike the GCC WriteMove II, offers an optional $99 50-page sheet feeder. Strangely enough, HP made no mention of a DeskWriter Portable, so I called them and asked if they had any plans for one. The HP rep said that he really didn't know what was might happen, but he'd been getting a ton of calls asking the same question. So there's no telling if we'll see a DeskWriter Portable soon, but I can't imagine that it will be too long given the estimated 425,000 PowerBooks Apple now claims to have sold. If you want to help increase the demand, give HP a call and ask about this printer too.
Hewlett Packard -- 800/752-0900 | <urn:uuid:d1194bae-10ab-454b-9592-9ad8a7c77df6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nzdl.org/gsdlmod?e=d-00000-00---off-0tidbits--00-0----0-10-0---0---0direct-10---4-------0-0l--11-en-50---20-preferences---00-0-1-00-0--4----0-0-11-10-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=tidbits&cl=CL2.1&d=HASHfb76ca5b1d2adaee4e0ed4.3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93879 | 440 | 1.71875 | 2 |
MATHURA: Expressing concern over the limited reserve of conventional forms of fuel in the country, former President A P J Abdul Kalam has stressed the need to develop alternate fuel for the future.
In an interaction with the students of Hindustan College of Engineering and Technology in Mathura on Saturday night, Kalam said, "efforts should be made to tap solar energy, nuclear power and bio-fuel."
Kalam stressed on the need to expand research and development in the country.
"To be self-reliant India needs to develop more research labs in the country," he said, adding then only "a vision of a prosperous India by 2020" can be achieved.
The 'missile man' also asked students to dream big in life.
"Anybody can become great if dreams are great. The success is bound to come if dreams are great", he said.
Noting that knowledge makes a person great, he said creativity, righteousness and courage are its three vital components.
"While creativity paves the way for learning, righteousness in heart paves the way for beauty. While beauty leads to harmony, harmony leads to peace," he added.
"Courage leads to think differently, invent and explore path to counter problems. It also leads to achieve goal. Hard work, Perseverance and knowledge paves the way for achieving the aim of life," the former President said.
Appealing to the teachers to be committed to their duties, Kalam cited C V Raman, who refused to go to President House to collect an honour as he was helping his students on their thesis. | <urn:uuid:4fbf0ee4-37db-4cfb-abb6-c59513adb286> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-03-16/developmental-issues/27745122_1_kalam-stresses-missile-man-nuclear-power-and-bio-fuel | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972413 | 330 | 1.507813 | 2 |
NOx Emissions from Coal Combustion
AUTHOR: Lesley L. Sloss
DATE: March 1991
This report evaluates the extent to which coal combustion contributes to the emissions of nitrogen oxides to the atmosphere, the resulting concentrations and environmental effects.
The report addresses:
- nitrogen chemistry;
- effects of nitrogen oxides;
- emission sources and concentrations;
- transport and deposition of NOx;
- regional emissions, concentrations and legislation;
- impacts of legislation and future NOx emissions.
Although NOx arises from natural sources, the majority of emissions are due to the combustion of biomass and fossil fuels. Combustion of coal, oil, gas and related fuels in both stationary and mobile sources accounts for around 42% of total global NOx emissions. By far the largest source of NOx in most IEA countries is oil, and in particular the transport sector which alone accounts for at least 50% of the emissions arising from human activities. Power stations are likely to account for 25% of emissions due to human activities, of which only part is due to coal.
Several countries including the FRG, Japan and the USA introduced restrictions on NOx emissions a number of years ago and are already reporting a reduction in emissions in some areas. Other countries have been slow to follow. | <urn:uuid:4f6db6f4-ec38-49ce-a59d-2be3e9945aa9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.caer.uky.edu/iea/ieacr36.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93336 | 269 | 3.5 | 4 |
Video of captive UN peacekeepers
India's United Nations peacekeepers salute as a UN vehicle crosses from Syria into Israel at the Kuneitra border crossing on the Golan Heights yesterday. Photograph: Baz Ratner/Reuters
Six members of a 21-strong group of United Nations peacekeepers seized by armed Syrian rebels as they were monitoring the ceasefire between Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights yesterday have appeared in an online video.
One of the six identifies himself as a captain in the Philippine UN battalion. He said the group was caught up in bombing near the village of al-Jamla and was helped by "civilian people" who gave them "good accomadation" as well as food and water.
Earlier, the UN Security Council called for the immediate release of the peacekeepers seized by armed Syrian rebels as they were monitoring the ceasefire between Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights.The abduction by "armed elements of the Syrian opposition" occurred yesterday near al-Jamlah, at an observation post inside the so-called area of limitation separating Israel and Syria, the UN said in a statement.
The peacekeepers were taken by about 30 rebels while on a supply mission near the post, which had been evacuated over the weekend after heavy fighting in the area, the UN said.The Security Council held a closed-door meeting in New York on the incident and called for the peacekeepers' "unconditional and immediate release," Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin said in a statement afterward.
Russia holds the presidency of the 15-member council this month. The UN troops' detention marks the latest spillover of the two-year civil war in Syria between opposition groups and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.
The conflict has killed more than 70,000 people and UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said yesterday that 1 million refugees had fled to Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and other countries Churkin said the council urged all parties to cooperate with the UN observation force "in good faith to enable it to operate freely and to ensure full security of its personnel," according to a statement.
The identity of the group holding the UN troops was still unclear last night. "We don't know who is holding them," Josephine Guerrero, a spokeswoman for the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations, said in an interview.
She said the UN is working with the Syrian government to secure the soldiers' release. "Syria is responsible for the safety and security of the UN personnel," Guerrero said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based opposition group that documents the conflict, said the peacekeepers were being held by the Yarmouk Brigade rebels.
The observatory sent a video it said showed rebel forces standing in front of UN vehicles. There was no independent confirmation that the rebel faction is responsible.
The captors are demanding the withdrawal of Syrian army troops from the area around al-Jamlah, according to an e-mailed statement from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights that cited the brigade's leader, who was identified as Abu Kaled al- Faleh.
The UN mission in the Golan Heights has sent a team to assess the situation and seek a solution, according to a Eduardo del Buey, a spokesman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
The group's formal name is the UN Disengagement Observer Force, or Undof.
"The Secretary-General reminds all actors in Syria that Undof is mandated to monitor the Disengagement of Forces Agreement between Israel and Syria.
Undof's freedom of movement and safety and security must be respected by all parties," according to a statement from Ban released by his office.
The peacekeepers are part of the observer force that has helped maintain the cease-fire between Israel and Syria since 1974.
The mission has 1,011 troops, and 40 international staff, with troops from countries including Austria, Croatia, India, Philippines.
The Golan Heights peacekeeping operation was extended in December until June. Forty-three international peacekeepers and one civilian have been killed in the four-decade operation. | <urn:uuid:07cc3be1-6ed8-4c04-aeaf-b14d839ccd2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.irishtimes.com/news/video-of-captive-un-peacekeepers-1.1319784 | 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 | 0.969666 | 843 | 1.710938 | 2 |
As a state director, I’m often asked what’s needed to protect and restore local natural resources. Greater awareness? More funding? Better laws? Yes, yes and yes, but something equally important is often left out – imagination.
The Nature Conservancy is a science-based organization, so the role of “imagination” in our work may come as a surprise. Yet, without it, we not only might have dismissed inventive experiments and creative solutions currently at work on and in our lands, rivers and oceans, but also we might be without our greatest resource in the fight for nature: supporters like you.
Fifty years ago, author Rachel Carson drew on the power of imagination when she published the groundbreaking “Silent Spring” and introduced the specter of a world in which nature’s song had been silenced by DDT. Today, local artists and authors like James Prosek capture the imaginations of a new generation with vivid, lifelike renderings of the colorful fish and mysterious eels that make their homes in our fresh and salt waters. Theirs is the talent of storytelling; yours is the power of standing up and making a change.
Without imagination, our scientists never could have envisioned new, creative solutions to help protect local resources, and without supporters like you, none of those solutions would have left the drawing board. Click through a slideshow of our 2012 Year in Review to see some of the accomplishments you made possible, or read more in-depth about:
As we look back on a year of great successes, I hope you feel a sense of pride in the crucial conservation you have helped us imagine – and achieve.
Please consider making a commitment today to protecting and restoring nature in the Nutmeg State. Give a year-end gift, become a member or share one of our online stories with a friend. Together, imagine what we can achieve in 2013.
Dr. Frogard Ryan, State Director
Frogard Ryan is The Nature Conservancy's State Director in Connecticut. | <urn:uuid:3f40f29e-1123-4d8a-bd05-92bdeb88db20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/connecticut/explore/ct-year-end-2012.xml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941805 | 416 | 2.390625 | 2 |
Mastering the Matrixby Sam Chupp
Mastering the Matrixby Sam Chupp
Mastering the Matrix
By Sam Chupp'mA-trik-s&z/
Etymology: Latin, female animal used for breeding, parent plant, from matr-, mater
1 : something within or from which something else originates, develops, or takes form
I have been working on world-building and story-creation since I was
8 years old. One of the things I've learned about creating for games is
that it is important to create only that which you truly need to
create. The trick is knowing what you will need to create and what you
can leave behind. Sometimes having just a name or a tiny sliver of an
idea is enough to get you through the game session.
In this column, I intend to first talk about my Matrix method and then apply it to several possible world-building and story-creation tasks to demonstrate the strength of this method.
What is the Matrix?
The central idea of the Matrix is that everything is related. Because of this, you can take a very sketchy amount of info and, using what you do know, more easily create what you do not know.
The Matrix I'm going to discuss first is two-dimensional. Think of a gridwork of ten rows by ten columns. Along the columns we have a list of the common descriptors for each entity we're going to be describing. Down the rows is each entity. So, if we have a set of characters, for example, the columns will contain information that will be common to each and every character. Each row will be a character in and of himself.
Those of you who use spreadsheets will immediately recognize this structure. It's true that spreadsheet software makes for an excellent Matrix tool. Those of you who happen to play with databases on computers will recognize each Row as a "Record" and each Column as a "Field" in database parlance. Those of you familiar with recipe card boxes will recognize each Row as a recipe card, and each Column as an Ingredient or Instruction for that recipe.
Get Yourself a Spreadsheet or Buy Some Index Cards
In order to properly use the Matrix, you're going to need to have some way to manipulate the information easily and quickly. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to utilize a spreadsheet program. If you don't have Bill Gates' expensive one, then you can download a nice one from the people at OpenOffice.org.
But let's say you're a tactile / kinesthetic kind of person. Index cards are a great way to go, and they have the benefit of being eminently portable. You can even two-hole punch index cards and get an index card binder for them. They work pretty well, although it is a lot of handwriting to do!
Using The Matrix
You can use the Matrix to:
These columns will explore just these uses, but I'm certain you can take it and run with it well before I get around to exploring them.
Matrix One: A Fantasy Campaign
The first Matrices we're going to do is for a fantasy world campaign. I'm going to go step by step here: you advanced game masters can talk amongst yourselves or go for some Jolt Cola while I take the beginners by the hand.
Fundamental Campaign Structure
A Campaign is two parts: Milieu and Narrative. The Milieu is the hard data on the world in which the narrative takes place. The Narrative is all the story elements of the Campaign. A good fantasy Campaign will spend equal time on the Milieu and the Narrative, in my opinion.
So, the first Matrix we're going to create is a Milieu Matrix.
Start by asking yourself what commonalities would exist for each part of the world in which your game will be set. Just off the top of my head:
Of course the GM's Name for Region is not meant for player's
consumption: this is because it is just an easy identifier at this
stage. It would be impingeing on the Narrative to go ahead and name
these regions for something in the Campaign whole.
Now we're ready to start filling in our Matrix. It is a good practice
to create a common set of choices for each column, so that you can
standardize things a bit. For example, instead of having a "River" and
a "Rivers" Waterway choice, why not just settle on "Riverways" as
meaning both single and plural rivers in a region.
You can decide later to subdivide them if it is really important to
What creating common choices for each column means is that you will
have to brainstorm the possibilities for each type. Don't worry about
getting it perfect, the idea is to create something that you can later
on go back and fine-tune or correct.
So, for example, the choices for:
One test of your Matrix is that you can simulate real-world data.
example, the choices for, say Death Valley, California would be:
And Atlanta, Georgia:
Realize that these categories are by definition abstract and not
exact. You could probably break Climate down further, for example. The
point here is that we are not trying to complicate things with the
choices: we're trying to keep them within a manageable set. You'll be
surprised at how much diversity we can create by using just a few
choices for each region.
Now we're ready to start building a Matrix!
Here's the header row. Now, we have to decide what the Backbone to
the Matrix will be.
As you probably remember from AD&D 1st Edition's Dungeon
Master's Guide (or your school math class) a bell-shaped curve has a
low end, a fairly average middle section, and a high end. Watch what
happens when we apply the Bell Curve pattern to the Matrix for the
column Minerals we've chosen.
Now we have something to hang the rest of our choices on.
Here's what it looks like after a little bit of work:
I've completed one row, just about, and I filled in all of the
Minerals, Climate, and Waterways columns. I was trying to keep a
bell-curve like structure in them, although it's not easy to do always
and still make things seem "right." Despite the possibility of magical
intervention in the environment in our campaign world, we will be
better served to create "logical" regions. People have a hard enough
time suspending disbelief for the big things: I don't tend to like to
make them sweat the small stuff.
As you can see, we have both ends of the mineral spectrum
represented on the first and last region and I've decided that BOTH of
them will be very similar to each other. The only difference is going
to be Flora, Fauna, and Terrain. Let's do some more work on the Matrix:
Now we've finished. As you can tell, I've named each of our regions with a unique descriptor to tell them apart. Now I have a lovely milieu structure that I can use to build a map and use the structure to tie together the narrative elements of the campaign. | <urn:uuid:fdf7228a-c2fd-4b58-83ac-d3c0c1ff43e0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/firesparks05nov03.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941394 | 1,530 | 2.984375 | 3 |
In this tutorial we are going to see how to create an advanced Gridview screen, that will have text + image
The first thing we need to do, is create the layout we want to use for each of the items inside the GridView, in our case we want to [Read More...]
We are going to explain in 9 easy step how to move you apps from your phone to the SD card.
Why move the apps??? Remember that your phone has limited space, so to install as much apps as possible, you will need to move them to your SD card. The [Read More...]
We have an app that loads some web pages using Webview, but we want to aim the user only to specific links (or limit the user to specific links).
I want the people using this tutorial to be able lo load only Firstdroid (that is us, in case you did [Read More...]
When using the webview, something that drives me crazy, specially if you are in a place with a very slow internet connection, is not knowing what is happening with the webpage, is it loading? Is it stuck? …. AAAhhhh Nothing is happening.
Ok don’t desperate, I am going to show you [Read More...]
In this tutorial we are going to open a Web View, and load a webpage into it.
We will enable also the Multi-touch (If the ROM supports)
This tutorial is for Android 1.5 or higher
Create a Android project as seen below:
We will start by preparing the “Layout” we are going [Read More...]
We are happy to announce that we added a new movie section to our home page. We will be modifying an adapting depending on what you like, feedbacks and comments. So please check it out, and let us know what you think.
If there is something you like, or want [Read More...]
How to get the Quality of the Signal received by our phone.
This tutorial we’ll teach you how to get the signal strength you receive at any moment from your Carrier provider.
Lets start with the Tutorial:
We are going to learn how to add a listener to the telephony class, and how [Read More...]
In this tutorial we are going to learn how to use the Notification Bar:
This is very useful, and is used almost in every application that runs in the background, or that is activates by events.
In this example we will add a button that when pressed will open send a notification [Read More...]
Today we are going to learn how to use the menu button.
We are going to display two options:
Text + Icon
Open the project:
First we will open a new project called “Using Menu Button”, under the package name: “Firstdroid.Tutorial.UsingMenuButton”.
Adding Menu XML
Open a folder called “menu” (Remember to use only lowercase [Read More...]
Today we are going to see how to get our current location from the GPS.
1. Create a new Android project called UseGps, under the folder “Firstdroid.Tutorial.Gps”
2. In order to be able to access the GPS, we will have to add the permission in
the AndroidManifest.xml file:
This is how the [Read More...] | <urn:uuid:1f430bce-0bf9-418f-a038-d072a6ee7455> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.firstdroid.com/category/tutorials/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932643 | 706 | 1.90625 | 2 |
Almost 300 people are killed on this day in 1979 when an American Airlines flight crashes and explodes after losing one engine just after takeoff.
It was the beginning of Memorial Day weekend in 1979 when 277 passengers filled Flight 191 from Chicago's O'Hare Airport bound for Los Angeles. The DC-10 jet took off normally but after rising to only 400 feet, stalled and then rolled to the left. The plane quickly plunged, crashing into Ravenswood Airport, which had been abandoned and was no longer in use.
The plane, loaded with fuel, exploded on impact, killing all 277 people on board instantly. The heat from the fire was so intense that firefighters could not approach the crash for close to an hour. The crash also caused a fire at a nearby mobile-home park and killed two bystanders on the ground. A Standard Oil gas storage facility was also nearly hit.
Following this crash, all DC-10s in the United States were impounded and grounded by judicial order because there was no immediate determination as to the cause of the crash and it was feared that it could have been caused by a problem common to the jet type. Ultimately, it was found that the left pylon, which supported the turbofan engine, came loose and took out the hydraulic lines. The left wing slats then retracted and the plane could not lift off properly. The American Airlines maintenance crew was found to be at fault--they had failed to follow the proper procedures when removing the engine and pylon during repairs and maintenance. | <urn:uuid:54c4befd-f25a-45be-b6d2-aaa9af64898e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dc-10-crashes-killing-all-aboard | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981399 | 306 | 3.015625 | 3 |
I’m a food addict. We all are. Our brains are biologically driven to seek and devour high-calorie, fatty foods. The difference is that I have learned how to control those primitive parts of my brain. Anyone can this if they know how. In this article, I will share 3 steps to help you counteract those primitive parts of your brain that have you chasing high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods. But before you can update your brain’s biological software, you’ve got to understand why it developed in the first place.
Calories = Survival
The brain’s desire to binge on rich food is a genetic holdover from the days of hunter-gatherers. Given what scientists know today about our early ancestors, it makes sense that our brains are hardwired to fixate on high-calorie foods. It’s a survival mechanism. Eating as many calories as possible, whenever possible, allowed our ancestors to store excess calories as fat and survive lean times. That approach worked well for 2.4 million years, but today it’s making us sick and fat.
That’s because our brains haven’t evolved as fast as our food environment. The human brain evolved over 2.5 million years. And, with the exception of the last 10,000 years, people only ate animals they could hunt and wild-plants they could gather. Imagine if you could only eat what you caught or picked! The variety of foods hunter-gatherers ate paled in comparison to the 40,000 different food items we can buy in the average big-box grocery store today.(1)
No cinnamon buns for them!
And whereas we have easy access to food 24/7, drive-thru meals were not an option for hunter-gatherers. Not to mention that hunting and gathering was hard work. Early humans expended lots of calories acquiring their food, so they needed to eat high-calorie foods to offset the loss. The average hunter-gatherer got up to 60 percent of his calories from animal foods, such as muscle meat, fat, and organ meat, and the other 40 percent from plants.(2)
That balance between protein and carbohydrates in the diet is where the problem lies, but it’s not what you think. Carbohydrates have gotten a bad rap, but they are the single most important nutrient for long-term health and weight loss. But I’m not talking about bagels and donuts. I’m talking about plant foods that more closely resemble what our ancestors ate. Hunter-gatherers ate fruit, tubers, seeds, and nuts. These are whole foods. They are full
of fiber, vitamins, minerals and disease- and weight-busting colorful phytochemicals. They also take time to digest. Therefore, they raise blood sugar slowly, which balances metabolism and offers a steady stream of energy. Whole foods have all the right information and turn on all the right genes.
But the past 10,000 years saw the advent of both agriculture and industrialization. And, in the blink of an eye (by evolutionary standards), the human diet got turned upside down. Today, 60 percent of our calories come from things that hunter-gatherers wouldn’t even recognize as food. The bulk of those items—cereal grains, sugary drinks, refined oils and dressings—are simple carbohydrates.(3) The primitive brain sees an endless supply of easy energy. Left unchecked, our bodies pay the price. The result is a two-fronted epidemic of obesity and diabetes in our country—what I call “diabesity.”
When you eat simple carbohydrates, whether as sugar or as starch, they pass almost instantaneously from the gut into the bloodstream. Within seconds, blood sugar levels start to rise. To counter the increase in sugar, the body releases insulin. Insulin is the key that unlocks the cells and allows sugar to enter. As sugar enters the cells, the amount of sugar in the blood declines and the body restores homeostasis. An abundance of simple sugars in the diet goads the body into releasing more and more insulin. Eventually, the cellular locks get worn down from overuse. Like a key that’s lost its teeth, insulin loses its ability to easily open the cellular door. The cells become numb to the effects of insulin. As a result, the body pumps out more and more of the hormone to keep its blood sugar levels in check. Eventually, this cycle leads to a dangerous condition called insulin resistance. Insulin resistance—at the root of diabesity—causes you to gain belly fat, raises your blood pressure, messes up your cholesterol, makes you infertile, kills your sex drive, makes you depressed, tired, and demented, and even causes cancer.
3 Ways to Reprogram your Brain
Luckily there are ways to rewire the primitive parts of your brain by making good food choices. Here are 3 ways to get started.
1.) Balance blood sugar.
Blood sugar highs and lows drive primitive food cravings. If you get famished between meals, that’s a sign that your blood sugar is crashing. When blood sugar is low, you’ll eat anything. To better balance blood sugar, eat a small meal or snack that includes healthy protein, like seeds or nuts, every 3 to 4 hours.
2.) Eliminate liquid calories and artificial sweeteners.
Early humans didn’t reach for soda or fruit juices when they got thirsty. Sodas are full of chemicals and high fructose corn syrup. Processed fruit juices are awash in sugar. Try sticking with water and green tea. Green tea contains plant chemicals that are good for your health. And, last but not least, don’t succumb to the diet-drink trap. The artificial sweeteners in diet drinks fool the body into thinking it is ingesting sugar, which creates the same insulin spike as regular sugar.
3.) Eat a high-quality protein at breakfast.
Ideally, you’re eating quality protein at every meal, but, if you need to prioritize one meal, choose breakfast. Studies show that waking up to a healthy protein, such as eggs, nuts, seeds, nut butters or a protein shake help people lose weight, reduce cravings and burn calories.
Ultimately, you may not control your genes, but you do control what and how you eat. Since taking control and changing my diet, my brain no longer caves into the cravings and urgings that seduce the reptilian brain. The most powerful tool you have to transform your health is your fork! Use it well and you will thrive.
(1) “What to Eat,” Marion Nestle, p 17
(2) “Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets,” L
Cordain, et al American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2000; 71
(3) “Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets,” L
Cordain, et al American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2000; 71 | <urn:uuid:0e8b4414-5762-4844-8727-cebecf0bc17d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wellsphere.com/healthy-living-article/how-to-rewire-your-brain-to-end-food-cravings/1703855 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933083 | 1,496 | 2.234375 | 2 |
Most Popular in:
Fairer Flavors & Fragrances for All
Posted: April 29, 2008
page 2 of 2
In 2007, Treatt invested in the Earthoil group of companies, which manufactures and supplies organically-certified and fairly traded essential and pressed seed oils. The fundamental of fair trade is paying a fair price. Earthoil purchases its oils directly from source and at a fair and sustainable price. It also works closely with growers, exchanging knowledge and offering advice to aid efficient and sustainable organic growing practices. Growers benefit from the group’s global market knowledge and can therefore tailor their crop planning to meet market demand. It also offers expert advice on geographical issues, crop and soil suitability and irrigation requirements, as well as sharing best practice on processing, distilling and storage techniques. These factors ensure a fair price and a sustainable living for growers, particularly in developing regions.
A Win-win Situation
Consumers are more aware than ever of the world around them. They are concerned about the impact the foods they eat and the personal care products they use have on the environment and on others. By developing products using fairly traded fragrance and flavor ingredients, manufacturers can appease consumer conscience and create successful products ethically.
1. The next step in the ethical consumer revolution. Datamonitor, March 12, 2008 | <urn:uuid:be5b5413-2be1-46a7-9bbb-469f49c3527b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.perfumerflavorist.com/fragrance/rawmaterials/natural/18376154.html?page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948068 | 272 | 1.976563 | 2 |
A priest wearing a long surplice genuflects before a
figure who stands, holding his hat and slightly bowing his head to receive the sprinkling of holy water.
Two attendants accompany this man, who is perhaps a member of the Duc de Savoie's household.
The scene is set in a large chapel with side aisles and triforium; the choir is screened by a jubè decorated in bas-relief.
There seems to be no definite connection between Jean Colombe's illustration and David's psalm of thanksgiving: "I will praise thee, O Lord, with my whole heart... I will worship towards thy holy temple, and I will give glory to thy name for thy mercy, and for thy truth... "
small image (20KB) --- large image (183KB) --- The priest sprinkling with holy water (large) (184KB) | <urn:uuid:f9da97cf-7a74-4e43-b8ee-d9d8f20e474b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.christusrex.org/www2/berry/f84r.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955895 | 189 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Franz Anton Grimm (1710-1784), a prominent Brno architect, was charged with the construction of the chateau and conceived it in the then modern French style. In the second half of the 18th century under the Blümegens not only were the construction of the chateau and its garden completed, but also exceedingly valuable interior furnishings were acquired.
A late Baroque chateau, one of the most beautiful ones in Moravia, is situated in the town centre at the foothill of Vizovice Heights. It contains an exceptional collection of paintings created by the master builder of the Vizovice chateau and completed by the Stillfried family. The chateau premises include also a garden with a pond built concurrently with the chateau. | <urn:uuid:b9c3d83c-8d6e-4804-acef-cc0cdc94b5b5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.czechtourism.com/tourists/cultural-heritage/castles-chateaux/t-vizovice/?lang=pt-BR | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969816 | 161 | 2.015625 | 2 |
There are some of the variations i've seen: Daigneault, Daigneau, Daignault, Dagneau, Deniau, Deneau, Deneault, Deniault, Denio, Denault, Daneau, Daniau and Deno. Chances are
that the name Danyow was used by some town clerk in the USA because he was unsure how it was spelled because many early French Canadians who came could not spell.
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|© 2007 The Generations Network| | <urn:uuid:968bff70-534b-45d9-ba04-583ce29d067d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.genforum.genealogy.com/daigneault/messages/30.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.911197 | 127 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Mat 21:23 And when he was come into the temple,
the chief priests and the elders of the people came unto him as he was
teaching, and said, By what authority doest thou these things? and who
gave thee this authority?
Mat 21:24 And Jesus answered and said unto them,
I also will ask you one thing, which if ye tell me, I in like wise will
tell you by what authority I do these things.
Mat 21:25 The baptism of John, whence was it?
from heaven, or of men? And they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we
shall say, From heaven; he will say unto us, Why did ye not then believe
Mat 21:26 But if we shall say, Of men; we fear
the people; for all hold John as a prophet.
Mat 21:27 And they answered Jesus, and said, We
cannot tell. And he said unto them, Neither tell I you by what authority I
do these things.
Mat 21:28 But what think ye? A
had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to day in
Mat 21:29 He answered and said, I will not: but
afterward he repented, and went.
Mat 21:30 And he came to the second, and said
likewise. And he answered and said, I
go, sir: and
Mat 21:31 Whether of them twain did the will of
father? They say unto him, The first. Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say
unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God
Mat 21:32 For John came unto you in the way of
righteousness, and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots
believed him: and ye, when ye had seen
not afterward, that ye might believe him.
Mat 21:33 Hear another parable: There was a
certain householder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about,
and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to
husbandmen, and went into a far country:
Mat 21:34 And when the time of the fruit drew
near, he sent his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the
fruits of it.
Mat 21:35 And the husbandmen took his servants,
and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another.
Mat 21:36 Again, he sent other servants more than
the first: and they did unto them likewise.
Mat 21:37 But last of all he sent unto them his
son, saying, They will reverence my son.
Mat 21:38 But when the husbandmen saw the son,
they said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and
let us seize on his inheritance.
Mat 21:39 And they caught him, and cast
him out of the
vineyard, and slew him.
Mat 21:40 When the lord therefore of the vineyard
cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen?
Mat 21:41 They say unto him, He will miserably
destroy those wicked men, and will let out
unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons.
Mat 21:42 Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never
read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is
become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is
marvellous in our eyes?
Mat 21:43 Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom
of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the
Mat 21:44 And whosoever shall fall on this stone
shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to
Mat 21:45 And when the chief priests and
Pharisees had heard his parables, they perceived that he spake of them.
Mat 21:46 But when they sought to lay hands on
him, they feared the multitude, because they took him for a prophet.
Mat 22:1 And Jesus answered and spake unto
them again by parables, and said,
Mat 22:2 The kingdom of heaven is like unto a
certain king, which made a marriage for his son,
Mat 22:3 And sent forth his servants to call them
that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come.
Mat 22:4 Again, he sent forth other servants,
saying, Tell them which are bidden, Behold, I have prepared my dinner: my
oxen and my
killed, and all things are
ready: come unto the marriage.
Mat 22:5 But they made light of
it, and went
their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise:
Mat 22:6 And the remnant took his servants, and
spitefully, and slew them.
Mat 22:7 But when the king heard
was wroth: and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers,
and burned up their city.
Mat 22:8 Then saith he to his servants, The
wedding is ready, but they which were bidden were not worthy.
Mat 22:9 Go ye therefore into the highways, and
as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage.
Mat 22:10 So those servants went out into the
highways, and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and
good: and the wedding was furnished with guests.
Mat 22:11 And when the king came in to see the
guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment:
Mat 22:12 And he saith unto him, Friend, how
camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless.
Mat 22:13 Then said the king to the servants,
Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast
him into outer
darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Mat 22:14 For many are called, but few
Mar 11:27 And they come again to Jerusalem: and
as he was walking in the temple, there come to him the chief priests, and
the scribes, and the elders,
Mar 11:28 And say unto him, By what authority
doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority to do these
Mar 11:29 And Jesus answered and said unto them,
I will also ask of you one question, and answer me, and I will tell you by
what authority I do these things.
Mar 11:30 The baptism of John, was
heaven, or of men? answer me.
Mar 11:31 And they reasoned with themselves,
saying, If we shall say, From heaven; he will say, Why then did ye not
Mar 11:32 But if we shall say, Of men; they
feared the people: for all men
counted John, that he was a prophet indeed.
Mar 11:33 And they answered and said unto Jesus,
We cannot tell. And Jesus answering saith unto them, Neither do I tell you
by what authority I do these things.
Mar 12:1 And he began to speak unto them by
parables. A certain
man planted a vineyard, and set an hedge about
it, and digged
a place for
the winefat, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went
into a far country.
Mar 12:2 And at the season he sent to the
husbandmen a servant, that he might receive from the husbandmen of the
fruit of the vineyard.
Mar 12:3 And they caught
him, and beat
him, and sent him
Mar 12:4 And again he sent unto them another
servant; and at him they cast stones, and wounded
him in the
head, and sent him
away shamefully handled.
Mar 12:5 And again he sent another; and him they
killed, and many others; beating some, and killing some.
Mar 12:6 Having yet therefore one son, his
wellbeloved, he sent him also last unto them, saying, They will reverence
Mar 12:7 But those husbandmen said among
themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance
shall be ours.
Mar 12:8 And they took him, and killed
him, and cast
of the vineyard.
Mar 12:9 What shall therefore the lord of the
vineyard do? he will come and destroy the husbandmen, and will give the
vineyard unto others.
Mar 12:10 And have ye not read this scripture;
The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner:
Mar 12:11 This was the Lord's doing, and it is
marvellous in our eyes?
Mar 12:12 And they sought to lay hold on him, but
feared the people: for they knew that he had spoken the parable against
them: and they left him, and went their way.
Luk 20:1 And it came to pass,
that on one of
those days, as he taught the people in the temple, and preached the
gospel, the chief priests and the scribes came upon
him with the
Luk 20:2 And spake unto him, saying, Tell us, by
what authority doest thou these things? or who is he that gave thee this
Luk 20:3 And he answered and said unto them, I
will also ask you one thing; and answer me:
Luk 20:4 The baptism of John, was it from heaven,
or of men?
Luk 20:5 And they reasoned with themselves,
saying, If we shall say, From heaven; he will say, Why then believed ye
Luk 20:6 But and if we say, Of men; all the
people will stone us: for they be persuaded that John was a prophet.
Luk 20:7 And they answered, that they could not
tell whence it was.
Luk 20:8 And Jesus said unto them, Neither tell I
you by what authority I do these things.
Luk 20:9 Then began he to speak to the people
this parable; A certain man planted a vineyard, and let it forth to
husbandmen, and went into a far country for a long time.
Luk 20:10 And at the season he sent a servant to
the husbandmen, that they should give him of the fruit of the vineyard:
but the husbandmen beat him, and sent
Luk 20:11 And again he sent another servant: and
they beat him also, and entreated
him shamefully, and sent
Luk 20:12 And again he sent a third: and they
wounded him also, and cast him
Luk 20:13 Then said the lord of the vineyard,
What shall I do? I will send my beloved son: it may be they will reverence
when they see him.
Luk 20:14 But when the husbandmen saw him, they
reasoned among themselves, saying, This is the heir: come, let us kill
him, that the inheritance may be ours.
Luk 20:15 So they cast him out of the vineyard,
and killed him.
What therefore shall the lord of the vineyard do unto them?
Luk 20:16 He shall come and destroy these
husbandmen, and shall give the vineyard to others. And when they heard
they said, God forbid.
Luk 20:17 And he beheld them, and said, What is
this then that is written, The stone which the builders rejected, the same
is become the head of the corner?
Luk 20:18 Whosoever shall fall upon that stone
shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to
Luk 20:19 And the chief priests and the scribes
the same hour sought to lay hands on him; and they feared the people: for
they perceived that he had spoken this parable against them. | <urn:uuid:139d8be8-d4e6-421e-93c9-811a0b289184> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.musicbysunset.com/Events/605%20Sanhedrin%20Challenges%20Jesus.%20Answered%20by%20Parables%20Two%20Sons,%20Wicked%20Vinedressers%20and%20Marriage.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957258 | 2,643 | 1.804688 | 2 |
What Is Erionite?
Erionite is a mineral fiber that is usually found in rock formations and volcanic ash. Containing many characteristics that are similar to asbestos, it is known to be a contributor to the development of mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the linings of various organs including the lungs. The World Health Organization and International Agency for Research of Cancer, along with other well-recognized health organizations and agencies, have classified erionite as a Group 1 carcinogen, labeling it as a cancer-causing agent.
Like countless other minerals, erionite is found in multiple places in the world, with much of the recent research being focused on the United States. The affects of the exposure to erionite are still being studied, and because of the latency of the associated effects, conclusive results may not be available for years to come.
Where is it Found
Erionite is typically present in mountainous areas or in rock formations all over the world. In the United States, erionite is more prevalent in the western region, in states like North Dakota, South Dakota, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. This mineral fiber is usually found in the rocks or stones of these states, often resulting in commercial use as gravel and road development material. The presence of the mineral has also been found in other areas of North America, with two noted cases of people in Mexico having had erionite exposure.
Erionite is quite prevalent in some regions of Turkey, where a tremendous amount of research has been conducted on the exposure and effects of the mineral. More specifically, large amounts of erionite were found in four Turkish villages, including Karain, Sarihidir, Tuzkov and Boyali. These villages have received tremendous amounts of attention for their proportionally high number of mesothelioma cases and related deaths. In some cases, mesothelioma accounted for as many as 50 percent of the total deaths that occurred in the villages during a select period of time. As more attention is focused on the effects of erionite exposure, it is likely that new locations of its whereabouts may be determined.
Exposure to dangerous mineral fibers like erionite can occur in multiple ways. Similar to asbestos, erionite is sometimes used for industrial or constructional purposes, such as the building of homes and roads, which was the case in Turkey. The occupational hazard was extremely high for road and home builders in Turkey. Prolonged exposure, over the course of years, can prove to be detrimental to people's health, specifically as it relates to the development of mesothelioma.
In the United States, erionite is often used for the creation of gravel roads, as noted in North Dakota. A University of Hawaii study demonstrated that the erionite found in the gravel of the roads used in states like North Dakota, is extremely similar to the forms of erionite found in Turkey. The study explained that exposure in certain areas can be extremely worrisome simply because the mineral is most dangerous when it is stirred up in the air. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens when automobiles drive over the rock gravel and cause the dust and mineral particles to move from the ground to the air.
According to the study, which was published in the July 25, 2011 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), more than 300 miles of the road are now paved with the gravel, resulting in the continual stirring up of erionite particles in the air that exposes drivers who travel these routes on a daily basis. For citizens in the area such as students and commuters, traveling on this same path, in some cases for years and years, can result in the constant exposure that is required to make this mineral a cancer-causing agent.
Experts assume that there may be a dramatic increase in the number of mesothelioma cases that are diagnosed in areas such as North Dakota over the next 10 to 30 years, as a result of the latency that is often associated with minerals like erionite and asbestos. Many of these roads have been utilizing these gravel rocks since the late 1980s.
Similarities to Asbestos
The effects of asbestos have been noted and studied for centuries. On the other hand, research on erionite is less abundant and therefore less conclusive. One of the earlier studies and research conducted on erionite and its effects occurred in Turkey in the late 1980s. The results from this study demonstrated a clear causal association between the exposure to erionite and the formation of mesothelioma. Just like asbestos, erionite is also known for an extended latency period for mesothelioma to arise, and people are usually exposed through inhalation.
While asbestos is used in commercial and industrial settings for the purposes of building and manufacturing, erionite can sometimes be found in a similar setting. However, it is more common to find erionite in an environmental setting as it is rarely used for commercialization of products or building. Both minerals can be present in a rock form or a dust-like setting, and both are most dangerous when the fibers are able to be inhaled.
At a microscopic level, erionite and asbestos share many similarities yet they also have distinguishing characteristics. Continued research will allow experts to better determine the differences, which will hopefully provide a better guide on how erionite should be viewed and regulated.
Regulations and Laws
Studies on erionite have been performed at a much lesser degree than asbestos, partially explaining why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has yet to provide any regulation on the mineral. Although it is widely accepted as a hazardous mineral and carcinogen, little has been done in the way of legal constraints to limit the use of it, especially in the United States.
With regards to asbestos, laws and regulations about how companies and people can use it, have become better defined as the correlation between asbestos and mesothelioma have become more evident. Because of the immense similarities between erionite and asbestos, this legal trend may hold consistent with future laws regulating erionite. This could mean limited regulation until enough deaths from erionite exposure in the United States occurs. To best understand what impact erionite may have on your health, it is beneficial to use current and accurate research about erionite to guide your involvement with it, as opposed to waiting for laws and regulations to guide you. | <urn:uuid:79a80104-a5e5-4382-bed8-eeb37b680fe8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.asbestos.com/exposure/erionite/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966142 | 1,321 | 3.640625 | 4 |
The submarine force is seeking to redefine its role in the U.S. military arsenal.
The robust firepower and intelligence-gathering capabilities available on submarines,
officials said, make them valuable players in joint expeditionary operations.
It is not yet clear, however, exactly how the other services would work more
closely with the undersea force. In an attempt to improve the inter-service
dialogue, Navy submarine officers have been trying in recent months to get out
the message that they want to become less isolated and more integrated with
naval surface, ground and air forces.
“Submarine capability should be a big part of this joint expeditionary
warfare that we are all talking about,” said Adm. Frank Bowman, the director
of naval nuclear propulsion.
Bowman has been, for years, an advocate of making the submarine a centerpiece
of network centric warfare and elevating its role in the naval battle group.
He spoke during an industry conference on expeditionary warfare, in Panama City,
The submarine force, he said, is seeking input from the other services to help
the Navy figure out novel ways for the submarine to contribute to the joint
fight. It’s important for the Navy, he said, to understand what the services
Bowman is urging agencies such as the Marine Corps Combat Development Command,
the Army Training and Doctrine Command and the Air Force Air Combat Command
to contact the commander of naval submarine forces, Vice Adm. John Grossenbacher,
“and get our operational forces talking.”
Meanwhile, Grossenbacher said that some inter-service discussion already is
under way, specifically with the Air Force and the Marines, who generally work
hand-in-hand with the Navy.
At the core of the Navy’s war-fighting strategy is the overarching concept
known as Sea Power 21. The elements of Sea Power 21 are “sea-shield,”
“sea-strike” and “sea-basing,” glued together by ForceNet,
which is the networking capability to integrate the different elements of the
Sea-shield refers to the power to dominate the seas and ensure access to coastal
areas for the U.S. military services and allies. Sea-strike is about providing
long-range, sustained firepower ashore. Sea-basing means the ability to launch
operations from the sea, without having to secure a beachhead. “I would
argue, just like we did in the initial phases in Afghanistan,” said Bowman.
Another new concept that would change the traditional role of submarines is
the Expeditionary Strike Group, designed to enhance the firepower for the amphibious
ready groups. An ESG will consist of an attack submarine, up to three surface
combatants and an amphibious ready group. Navy officials expect to deploy the
first two expeditionary strike forces in 2003.
Mixed-force packages, such as the ESG, are key to making the submarine a more
prominent player, said Bowman. “I see the submarine force and submarines
as a necessary but not sufficient part, nowhere near sufficient part, of the
integrated Navy-Marine Corps team.”
However, Bowman admitted that there are more questions than answers as to how
to make the ESG concept “work in real practice,” how the strike
group can involve the submarine “to best support the ESG commander, and
how can it best support our joint forces ashore.”
Bowman said that the submariners also need to figure out how to “rapidly
and securely link embarked and pre-positioned SOF [special operations forces]
equipment with their Marine, SEAL and Army operators.”
Undersea forces potentially could help extend the range and mobility of “our
Marines and SEALs, once our sub and the Advanced Seal Delivery System [ASDS]
has delivered them to the beach.”
Bowman said that the planners need to determine which sensors and weapons on
the submarine “will best support the emerging Marine expeditionary doctrine
and mesh as well with supporting the Army’s FCS [Future Combat System]
in its follow-on role.”
Grossenbacher pointed out that while the joint interaction and interoperability
are already occurring with the rest of the services—including special
operations—there are long-term issues that still need to be discussed.
Among these is the role of the SSGN (a reconfigured nuclear-missile submarine
that fires conventional Tomahawk cruise missiles) and eventually the Virginia
class—the next generation nuclear powered attack submarine—in expeditionary
This month, the Navy is starting technology demonstrations in the Bahamas with
the USS Florida, an Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarine that soon will be
refurbished to carry special operation troops and to fire up to 154 Tomahawk
cruise missiles. The Florida and three other Ohio-class boats will become the
The demonstration, dubbed Giant Shadow, will experiment with Navy SEAL commandos
conducting a mission ashore. The SSGN will also launch an unmanned underwater
vehicle that will be part of a network connecting the SEALs ashore and the submarine
via an unmanned aerial vehicle.
“The SSGN is a huge change,” said Grossenbacher. “We have
never had a submarine like this before. We have never had the kind of payloads
that would be available to us. We did not have Tomahawk cruise missiles. We
did not have the same experience we have today with special operations forces.”
Bowman also expressed optimism about the capabilities of the SSGN. “By
leveraging the concepts and the payloads that are being developed and demonstrated
in the SSGN, we could even fit a payload interface module, a plug if you will,
onto the Virginia class to further enhance the sub’s flexibility to operate
with joint forces anytime, anywhere.”
According to Bowman, the SSGN combines a triad of strike, special operations
forces and ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) to deliver a
“new level of expeditionary capability.”
This platform, he said, “will allow a special operations force campaign
to be conducted for the first time from a submerged platform.”
In the future, he added, SSGNs also could launch tactical ballistic missiles
or long-range UAVs.
The scenarios discussed by both Bowman and Grossenbacher promote the launching
of unmanned vehicles as one of the biggest selling points of the next generation
submarines. The ability to deploy unpiloted aircraft, surface or undersea craft
is paramount, officials said, even if that means giving away the location of
“Anytime you transmit energy there is a danger; anytime you launch a
vehicle from a submarine and you create something that is visible on the surface,
there is a danger,” Grossenbacher said. However, he said that the Navy
is not afraid that a submarine may be located. “Sometimes, compromising
your position, stealth and sometimes compromising your stealth knowingly, and
making the decision to stand and fight, is something that we are ready to do
and in the future will probably do more of,” he said.
In the case of Operation Enduring Freedom, the deployment of Predator UAVs
was delayed until mid-October, because of basing rights and logistics site preparations,
said Bowman. Such constraints do not apply to submarines operating largely uncontested
in international waters.
“Think about an SSGN equipped with a UAV of requisite range and endurance
and operating close in where other platforms may have been potentially vulnerable
and especially at the beginning,” he said. “That could have provided
the data and surveillance data weeks and maybe months earlier.”
Grossenbacher said that the Navy already has “operated and controlled
the Predator from a submarine.”
While the Navy extensively has experimented with unmanned undersea vehicles,
UUV development programs currently underway have yet to yield useful war fighting
capabilities for the service, Rear Adm. Michael Sharp, the Navy’s program
executive officer for mine and undersea warfare, told National Defense (October
He said he is more concerned about the long-term employability of the UUV on
the new Virginia-class attack submarines and is expecting the development to
progress over the next 10 years.
It is also unlikely that Navy budgets for submarine procurement and upgrades
will rise significantly in the foreseeable future, particularly in light of
the high costs of submarines.
“It is a healthy thing that there will be competition for funding and
support,” said retired Navy Rear Adm. Steve Baker, an analyst at the Center
of Defense Information. “I think the CNO [chief of naval operations] wants
to see that all aspects are being looked at. There is in-house competition between
the warfare communities, [but] each warfare has very unique capabilities, and
that is not to [undermine] what the sub can do.”
“I think you would have to agree that some of this really is promising
sub capability,” said Bowman. “Some of it is in the near-term pipeline,
some of this is war-fighting concepts that are in embryonic developments. But
all of it is about urgent challenges that the nation and the expeditionary team
are facing right now.”
During the Millennium Challenge 2002 joint experiment last summer, Bowman said
the Navy tested “both a virtual SSGN based in Newport, R.I., and a so-called
emulated SSGN that was an operating fast attack submarine in the ocean.”
While those tests showed the SSGN’s potential to respond rapidly to various
missions, “we also learned an awful lot about the challenges that we have
to work through to realize this potential,” he said.
Despite the current achievements and the “impressive” list of capabilities
listed for the SSGN, the submarine community has yet to work on promoting it
as a concept of joint expeditionary warfare, said Bowman.
“Given our intense sub culture, we are all going to risk just talking
to ourselves about these kinds of ideas and about how we would employ them,”
he said. That “does not necessarily serve best the joint force requirements.
These advanced capabilities have to fit in with some larger purpose.”
Much work remains to be done, starting with concepts, technology, experiments
and operations, he said. Culture change is also necessary, Bowman said, which
“often is the most difficult part of implementing role change.”
The good news for the submarine force, said Grossenbacher, is that its capabilities
essentially are unmatched by any other nation. No enemy would dare to engage
the U.S. Navy directly, he said, because of its superiority. Nevertheless, submarines
do not operate in a threat-free environment. Potential enemies are likely to
challenge U.S. forces through asymmetric warfare, such as planting mines in
“Our subs should be the first to the fight; they should be involved in
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance long before that,” he noted.
“We have to operate in the vicinity of mines with confidence, be able
to figure out where they are.” | <urn:uuid:f9545c12-cffd-4511-a57c-9c01f7900470> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/ARCHIVE/2003/JANUARY/Pages/Submariners_Want3962.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945345 | 2,435 | 2 | 2 |
Encrypt Your Computer
Encrypting your computer means that someone has to have your password (or encryption key) in order to peek at its contents should they get access to your hard drive. On a Mac, you just go to your settings, choose "Security and Privacy," go to "FileVault," choose the "Turn on FileVault" option. Boom goes the encryption dynamite. PC folk need to use Bitlocker. | <urn:uuid:4f93fe53-5561-40c1-8898-81074b8325c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mhl45lmem/encrypt-your-computer-5/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963701 | 90 | 2.828125 | 3 |
If an individual is preparing for a trip abroad and understands the need for a specific type of medical insurance policy that will cover him during his trip, he will often hold his breath and ready himself for the impact of a giant premium as he, understandably, assumes that the international insurance premiums will be similar to premiums for domestic health care.
Of course, the impact is never actually felt because international insurance policies are much less expensive than policies in the U.S.
Medical Tourism – A Hint That International Insurance Is Cheaper
In an August 2012 article in Florida Today, a plastic surgeon in Columbia is quoted as saying that 30 percent of his clients are from the United States. The article goes on to discuss findings from the organization Patients Beyond Borders, which states that U.S. residents receiving medical treatment abroad can save up to 80 percent over domestic medical treatment prices depending on the location to which they travel.
These facts and figures are likely not surprising to industry professionals. Patients Beyond Borders noted on its Medical Tourism Statistics & Facts page that international accreditation for medical treatment affiliates abroad is growing roughly 20 percent per year.
If Medical Care is Cheaper Abroad, Why Do I Need International Insurance?
After discussing the reduced cost of medical care abroad, some might be wondering why a special medical insurance policy is even necessary when you travel abroad. After all, if you can save up to 80 percent over U.S. healthcare costs, why worry?
First of all, it’s important to consider the region that you are visiting. While Malaysia’s healthcare costs may be up to 80 percent less than those in the U.S., in Brazil you may save only 40 percent. In other regions, such as the U.K., your net savings could be even less.
Even with the savings, the costs of treatment could be much more than you can afford to pay out of pocket. Let’s say you are traveling to Malaysia and you have an accident that requires remote emergency evacuation and hospital care. In the U.S., let’s say these services would cost $100,000 or more. If you save the full 80 percent, you’re still looking at a bill of at least $20,000. This is significantly less than it would be in the U.S., but it’s not exactly affordable.
The Difference Between Medical Tourism and Emergency Care
Medical tourism is ideal for individuals who have a pre-existing condition that they need treatment for. International insurance provides a different set of coverages altogether. Its goal is to mitigate the expenses of treating an unexpected accident or illness while you travel abroad. In addition, it can be designed to provide coverage for specialized costs such as repatriation of bodily remains and trip cancellation.
The crux of purchasing insurance for your trip abroad is to control your potential costs for an unexpected accident or illness. By paying a predetermined, predictable premium you can manage the amount of your emergency treatment bills. In order to save more money on your premiums, you may choose a deductible for your policy, but you still get the comfort of knowing that beyond your premium and that deductible you likely won’t have any bills unless your treatments are so severe that they exceed the limits of your policy. Then, beyond these savings, you secure additional protections for events that can negatively impact your trip but are not necessarily related to medical treatment.
One More Question
One final question all of this might bring up is whether someone who is traveling abroad specifically for medical tourism purposes also needs a special insurance policy. The answer to that is yes. While the medical insurance issued for the trip abroad would not help with any pre-existing conditions, it will help keep the trip within a certain budget if you have an unintended accident that is unrelated to your pre-existing condition and needs separate treatment.
No one wants to come home from a trip abroad with an unexpected bill, even if that bill marks a significant discount over what it would have been if accrued in the U.S. Whether the cost of your emergency illness or accident treatment abroad is $5,000 or $50,000, ideally coming home without the bill is better.
NYIG is focused on providing international insurance solutions. Contact us today and let us help you find the best solution for your individual or group needs. | <urn:uuid:bb4186c2-d0a7-4053-a51d-d2544c0f8796> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nyig.com/blog/why-does-international-medical-insurance-cost-less-than-domestic-health-insurance/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956916 | 877 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Before the gun was invented, the dagger and sword were generally regarded as the most used weapons in the medieval world. The keris, also spelt and pronounced as crease, creese, kreese and kris is synonymous with Malay culture.
It originated in Java in the 9th century during the Sri Vijaya empire and subsequently spread throughout the Indonesian archipelago, Malaysia, Southern Thailand, Southern Philippines (Mindanao), Singapore, Brunei and some parts of Cambodia, Laos and Burma as the favoured close quarter fighting weapon. The serpentine blade is reminiscent of a snake in mid-strike.
Many functions are attributed to the keris, first and foremost as a double edged stabbing weapon, secondly as a symbol of social status and thirdly as a talisman for protection. It was also used as an execution device, for various ceremonies and rituals, and as an object of reverence, and was widely believed to possess supernatural powers.
There are seven main types of keris which are:
2. Keris Semenanjung atau Utara (Peninsular or Nothern keris)
3. Keris Bali dan Madura
4. Keris Sumatra
5. Keris Bugis
6. Keris Pattani &
7. Keris Sudang (sulu atau Mindanao in Philippines).
Each has its own characteristics and a straight or a wavy blade. Some of them underwent changes according to circumstances, for example, the Mindanao keris was modified and made longer like a sword (keris panjang) to counter the Spanish rapier. A good keris is made of iron, nickel, several alloys and a piece from a meteorite. Traditional keris makers are known as Empu in Indonesia and Pandai besi in Malaysia. Some Empu go into a trance when working the metal and thereafter fashion the red hot metal with their bare hands.
|Javanese daggers owned by the writer |
Each wave in the blade is called a lok and the number of lok would indicate the owner’s status. A three lok keris would belong to a warrior while a Rajah’s (Sultan’s) keris would have nine. The wave represents the Naga or cobra.
The keris is believed to have the power to jump out of its sheath and engage the enemy in battle on its own. It is also able to warn the owner of impending danger by rattling in its sheath. Keris which are tied to the main beams of traditional Malay houses as a talisman are known to fly on their own and kill the enemy.
The sheath known as “wrangka” in Indonesia and “sarung” in Malaysia usually denotes the owner’s status i.e. red for the Sultan or his close relatives, green for Ministers, brown for courtiers and black for people in general. A keris was usually presented by the Sultan to his warriors as a special token of appreciation. It was held in such high esteem that if one cannot attend a wedding or ceremony, one can send one’s keris through a son or close relative and the host would deem that he had attended. Giving up one’s keris also signified surrender. A well dressed Malay would consider himself “naked” without his keris to complement his attire. The royal keris worn by the King of Malaysia, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong is made of iron alloy collected from the soil of the 9 states of Malaysia.
It is said that you can hurt your enemy by simply thrusting the blade into his footprints. Water has been drawn from the point of a keris, and fire from a burning ship has been transferred to shore by pointing the tip at the fire and then elsewhere.
The most famous Malay dagger is the “Keris Taming sari” owned by the legendary Malaccan warrior Hang Tuah. The one, who possessed it, was said to be invincible. This was Malaysia’s equivalent of King Arthur’s sword, the legendary “Excalibur”. It is believed that Hang Tuah cast the “Keris Taming sari” into the Sungai Duyung river after he killed his childhood friend Hang Jebat in a duel, due to the latter’s disloyalty to the Sultan of Malacca.
Another well known keris in colonial Ceylon was the “Henaraja thalaya” (Blade from the thunderbolt) used by the legendary bandit Utuwankande Saradiel in the 18th century. This was a Javanese keris and it was believed that whoever had the Henaraja thalaya on his person was “bullet proof”. When Saradiel was gunned down by Police Sergeant Mahath, the keris was not on his person but under a pillow. The Sinhalese words “kirichchiya and kinissa” are probably derived from the Malay word keris.
A collection of Keris on display at the Kandy gallery of the National Museum
Owners of keris are required to bathe and oil the keris during the month of Muharram to retain the weapon’s supernatural powers. If the keris is neglected, it may cause the guardian spirit to depart from the weapon, leaving it powerless.
Usually a lime is cut in two and one half is rubbed on each side of the blade to remove rust, oil and grime and then thoroughly rinsed in running water. The blade is then dried over a low charcoal fire and fragrant oil (atthar) is applied on the blade, handle and sheath.
The curved wooden hilt is designed to fit snugly into the hand with a 10” to 15” long blade for close combat, unlike a sword which needs space and is unwieldy for fighting in jungles or confined spaces.
When held correctly it becomes an extension of the forefinger with the user having total control over the weapon. The hilt is gripped like a pistol at waist level with the blade parallel to the ground. An upward thrust will enable entry of the blade between the ribs. The targeted organs are the abdomen, lungs, kidneys and throat of the opponent.
The sheath is usually boat shaped since the Malays being sea-farers were fond of their boats. Motifs were engraved on the sheath to give it an aesthetic appearance. Gold or silver wire was also used in the decorative process.
It is the detail at the bottom of the blade which distinguishes a keris from an ordinary knife. Several guards have been designed to catch an opponent’s blade from reaching the hand and to prevent slipping. The elephant trunk and the precious stones arranged in the 8 petal lotus pattern at the base of the hilt signifies the connection the Malays had with their Hindu/Buddhist past. The hilt is usually carved into the shape of a mythical bird, beast or plant.
It is certain that the keris was introduced to Sri Lanka by the Indonesian nobility and political exiles, their retinue, Malay soldiers, Javanese mercenaries and various other recruits, who were brought to Sri Lanka during the Dutch and British periods. It was also a popular gift presented to Kandyan monarchs and adigars by British ambassadors visiting the Kandyan kingdom. More recently the Department of Museums has also come across Malay keris dating back to the Portuguese period. This would have been possible with the interaction of Malays from Malacca to Ceylon, which were both under Portuguese rule in the 16th century.
Some very fine Keris are on display at the Kandy gallery of the National Museum in Colombo 7 as well as in the upper floor.
(The writer is President, Sri Lanka-Indonesia Friendship Association and Vice-President (Social/Cultural Affairs) of the Mabole Malay Association)
Written by By M.D. (Tony) Saldin
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June 23: The crew of STS-117 applauds astronaut Sunita Williams, left, newly minted holder of records for women in space, in Houston.
June 22: Space shuttle Atlantis touches down at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
June 22: Muslim children pray for the return of astronaut Sunita Williams, whose father is from the Indian state of Gujarat, in Ahmadabad, India.
June 21: Christian schoolgirls pray for the safe return of astronaut Sunita Williams, whose father is Indian, in Hyderabad, India.
June 10: Space shuttle Atlantis approaches the international space station as it prepares to dock.
June 17: Steve Swanson and Pat Forrester, top right, are shown on a space walk outside the international station.
June 9: A 4-inch gap in space shuttle Atlantis' heat-protecting blanket.
June 8: A long shot of space shuttle Atlantis lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Atlantis' seven astronauts reunited with their families in Texas on Saturday, a day after the space shuttle capped a two-week mission with a perfect landing in the Mohave Desert.
"This gravity thing takes a bit getting used to," she said moments after landing with the rest of the crew on a NASA Gulfstream jet around 2:45 p.m. at Ellington Field.
Williams set an endurance record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 195 days, as well as the record for most time spacewalking by a woman.
"It's just the time and the place," said Williams, noting she hopes her mission paves the way for more women to travel to space, during a 20-minute ceremony in an open hanger.
The crew was assembled on a stage with a giant American flag as the backdrop. Along with Williams were shuttle commander Rick Sturckow, pilot Lee Archambault and mission specialists Patrick Forrester, James Reilly, Steven Swanson and Danny Olivas. Each offered his thanks to family, ground crew and others in brief remarks.
Williams said she would spend the rest of the weekend getting reacquainted with her husband and dog, Gorby.
The homecoming was delayed by a day when NASA rerouted the shuttle from Florida to California because of bad weather. That diversion is expected to cost $1.7 million because the shuttle has to be ferried back to Kennedy Space Center atop a jumbo jet.
NASA's first manned flight of the year provided a much needed image boost for the space agency. It had been dogged by distractions this year including a bizarre astronaut love triangle and a murder-suicide involving a disgruntled contractor.
The mission certainly wasn't dull.
Atlantis delivered a 35,000-pound addition to the space station and Clay Anderson, who replaced Williams as the U.S. representative at the station. He will live with cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov for the next four months.
While at the space station, the astronauts installed a new truss segment, unfurled a new pair of power-generating solar arrays and activated a rotating joint that allows the new solar arrays to track the sun.
At one point, computers that control orientation and oxygen production on the Russian side of the space station crashed while Atlantis was at the outpost, forcing NASA officials to talk publicly about the remote possibility the station would have to be abandoned because of the problem. Engineers in Houston and Moscow worked around the clock to come up with a fix.
Atlantis' thrusters helped maintain the station's orientation until the computers resumed operating last weekend.
"It just feels great to have all this behind us," Sturckow said during the ceremony.
Atlantis lifted off June 8 on a 5.8-million mile journey to the space station. NASA hopes to have three more launches this year.
Two days were added to the mission so that Olivas could staple up a thermal blanket that had peeled back during launch. An extra spacewalk — the fourth of the mission — was added to get the task done.
The mission was then extended to 14 days after weather prevented Atlantis from landing on Thursday. | <urn:uuid:32bac05a-b8f3-4427-8983-4de200a49367> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,286557,00.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00053-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94993 | 855 | 2.171875 | 2 |
At first glance, some of the Russian veterans of World War II appear too small and frail to bear the weight of all those medals arrayed over their chests. But a closer look at their faces reveals the fortitude and fire — long banked — that must have sustained them in the battle for their homeland; a battle that ended in victory 65 years ago.
On Victory Day, celebrated May 9 each year, many veterans gather at Gorky Park in Moscow. James Hill, a contract photographer for The New York Times in Russia, attended the gathering in 2006, set up a canvas background and took portraits in this impromptu studio of field nurses, snipers, anti-aircraft gunners, wireless operators and partisans. He wove the images together over the popular wartime song “The Blue Handkerchief” to create the lovely portfolio, “Victory Day in Gorky Park: The Women of World War II.”
Mr. Hill returned to Gorky Park on Victory Day 2007. And 2008. And 2009. Even as the number of surviving veterans was diminishing, his gallery was growing — to about 500 photographs.
“They are rightly regarded as heroes in Russian society,” Mr. Hill has written. “But I did not try to make heroic poses of them. I wished simply to show them as themselves, ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary times; men and women who lived and fought through the most tumultuous years of the last century and who have lived with those memories ever since.”
Victory Day 2010 is being marked by the publication of “Victory Day,” a collection of these portraits, by Kolibri, a division of Atticus Publishing in Russia. An exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art opened April 29. | <urn:uuid:2a711a5b-256d-4c9f-b4fb-ac0c220c5d2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/showcase-158/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964405 | 364 | 2.484375 | 2 |
Dear Saxena ji,
Thank you for inquiry.
West facing windows can be a big source of heat, first measure which you...
Why all these are not applicable to Tuticorin port or the one planned in AP or WB ?
What an eye opener! As an environmental engineer,disposal of sanitary napkins has always been a concern during waste...
A BRITISH astronomer may be the first to have witnessed a bizarre celestial phenomenon: the formation of strange heavenly bodies when a superdense neutron star -- one that has been crushed by its own gravity -- insinuates itself inside a red giant star and transforms it (Science, Vol 262, No 5134).
Philip Charles of Oxford University observed certain bright stars seem to be trapped in orbit around massive objects such as neutron stars and black holes. On analysing the light from these stars, Charles found the stars to be abnormally rich in lithium, which is a legacy of Thorne-Zytkow objects. But Charles realised that he may have glimpsed the celestial hybrid only when he compared his notes with those of Philipp Podsiadlowski, a theorist from Cambridge University.
The existence of Thorne-Zytkow objects was postulated as early as 1975 by Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology and Cambridge University's Anna Zytkow. According to their theory, these celestial objects are formed when a neutron star is in close orbit around a red giant star -- a massive and expanding star. The powerful gravity of the neutron star siphons matter from its younger giant companion and eventually, the neutron star drills into its fellow-star, sinks like a stone to its centre and starts destroying it.
Even though these bodies look like ordinary stars, there is lot of strange and wonderful stuff going on inside, say astrophysicists. The neutron core keeps pulling matter inward, compressing and heating it to generate 10 times more heat than the star's original core did. As a result, the star's outer layers churn vigorously, forging heavy elements not seen in ordinary stars -- molybdenum, yttrium, and rubidium, for example.
Last year, Podsiadlowski and Garrett Beale, a former student of Thorne, independently predicted large amounts of lithium also could be one of the elements produced -- just what Charles observed in the light from three stars.
Podsiadlowski reckons that after forging huge amounts of lithium and other elements, the neutron star may have exhausted its fuel, started a runaway contraction and exploded, throwing the remains of the giant star into a disk. This material, says Podsiadlowski, may have coalesced into a new companion star, which he thinks is what Charles has spotted. | <urn:uuid:936275ce-fdd0-4017-a226-ba75f109b4f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.downtoearth.org.in/node/29470 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931543 | 566 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Because rollerbladez aren't cool anymore but some people still can't shake the feeling they need wheels strapped to their feet, inventor MICHAEEEEEL JEEEEEENKINS! invented Chariot Skates. What are Chariot Skates? F***ing ridiculous looking for one.
Costing up to $11,000 for a pair, the wheel-skate features two large carbon fibre wheels. The skater's feet are suspended below the axle, which is believed to enable a smoother ride than skiing or cycling and can be worn for hours without discomfort.
It can also reach a top speed of 40km/h (~25MPH).
To pull up, skaters need to do a "t-stop," where one foot is dragged sideways on the road surface.
Mr Jenkins, 50, came up with the idea by combining his favourite forms of transport - skiing, cycling and skating. He then started developing it from his garage in 2004.
Everybody dug my Leroy Jenkins tribute up there, right? Cool, I did that just for you. Also, I don't know if Chariot Skates could get any cooler UNLESS YOU STRAPPED ROCKETZ TO THE SIDES, AMIRITE?! Hey, it's Wyle E. Coyote would do. Isn't that right, Wyle? WYLE?! Haha, what are you doing at the bottom of that ravine?
Hit the jump for several more shots and a couple videos of the Ben-Hur blades in action.
Thanks to Samson, who knows all too well you should never trust a bitch with scissors. | <urn:uuid:7d95e5b7-7649-4269-8b78-d67b4e094072> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://geekologie.com/2010/04/damn-those-look-cool-chariot-s.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959661 | 334 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Internet Chatter: Diesels Are on the Rise
If chatter on the Internet is any indication of market trends, then clean diesel technology will become a strong contender in the world of green motoring. In a report entitled, “Shaping the Future of Automotive Engine Technology,” BrandIntel, a market research firm, analyzed the volume and sentiment of online discussions about eco-friendly transportation. The firm concluded that U.S. consumers are starting to see diesel as a viable alternative to hybrid and gas-powered vehicles.
“Diesel has been under the radar. Now we are seeing new diesel technology, including clean diesel, the fact that consumers can use biodiesel, and new players coming into the space, all of it is creating a bit of buzz and excitement,” said Vince Bucciachio, BrandIntel auto analyst.
Automakers leading the diesel charge—Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen, Audi, Honda, and BMW—should be encouraged by the online buzz about diesel engines, which might finally be ditching its stigma as dirty, loud and unrefined. According to the study, Mercedes Benz has made the largest leaps forward in terms of Internet buzz. This is largely based on Benz’s Bluetec clean diesel technology, which is viewed as a market leader. The company will be making its biggest push with Bluetec in the upcoming year when it expands distribution of its E320 Bluetec sedan, and rolls out three new diesel-powered SUVs, all of which will be available in 50 states.
The BrandIntel study found several statistics that indicate diesel’s emergence into the public consciousness, including:
- Diesel discussion share increased by 75 percent this year compared with 2006.
- Mercedes Benz’ discussion share increased relative to diesel engine market leader Volkswagen. Benz chat went up 106 percent, while Volkswagen dropped by 46 percent.
- While chatter about gasoline engines decreased by 10 percent from 2006 to 2007, talk about diesel grew from 8 percent to 14 percent.
Modern diesel power offers advantages–such as environmental friendliness, better fuel efficiency, and higher low-end torque—when compared with gasoline engines. Diesel fuel costs can be higher than gasoline, and emissions generally remain higher than hybrid cars. Nonetheless, the study from BrandIntel shows that public acceptance of diesel power is growing in the United States. “We will see substantial gains [in Internet chatter] for both diesel and hybrid," said Alan Dean, vice president/business innovation at BrandIntel. "But the one that will look more surprising to some people is diesel." | <urn:uuid:d937af53-fe3a-4795-8912-2c8ee15cd575> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hybridcars.com/internet-chatter-diesels/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936125 | 526 | 1.914063 | 2 |
BWB REMEMBERS THE BOOKS OF OUR CHILDHOOD (3 OF 3)
The third and final part in our Children’s Book Week series on the books that BWB employees remember from their childhood. Don’t forget...
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Every color has many aspects, many variations, and many meanings. Red, for instance, can mean passion, or suffering, or anger. How are these aspects represented in works of art from Titian and Bosch to Matisse and Warhol? Painters use colors to convey a message as much as they do for surface appeal. In design and fashion, color is omnipresent as well, but incredibly varied in its significance. This fascinating book focuses on the most important colors in art--red, blue, yellow, black, white, green, and gold--and looks at them through some 200 beautifully printed works.
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© Better World Books (BetterWorldBooks.com) | <urn:uuid:75e5ec96-72ca-4de1-a5bc-315ffcd14e6d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.betterworldbooks.com/9781419701115-id-9781419701115.aspx?t=MarketPlaceBooks | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.915144 | 329 | 2.375 | 2 |
SOIL undefined reference?
hi i've just started learning opengl and i'm having trouble with uploading images/textures. i downloaded the soil library,included it in my header file, and linked it by doing Project->build options->linker settings. but when i compile and run my program i get many "undefined reference" errors.
can someone please help me?
This is not an OpenGL question, so I don't think you are getting much help here. Look for a forum that is using your IDE, whichever that is.
Sometimes it is easier to just read the BMP file. You don't need a library for that (free source code easy to find). You don't need png files to save space, as the bitmap in OpenGL is going to be unpacked anyway.
alright i found some code for loading the bmp, i'll try it. thanks!
Tags for this Thread | <urn:uuid:8eae8e34-80af-4096-b752-e9dbd78f5a02> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/showthread.php/177842-SOIL-undefined-reference | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945325 | 192 | 1.90625 | 2 |
THE economic approach to global warming is relatively straightforward. The emission of greenhouse gases generates a negative spillover—global warming—that harms others. Someone driving a car emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which contributes to climate change, but because most of the cost of the car's contribution to warming will be felt by people other than the driver, he has an incentive to drive too much. Aggregate that decision to emit too much across all of the world's population, and you get a serious economic problem.
Luckily, there is a solution. By taxing the emission of greenhouse gases, one can align private and public costs. The cost of the driver's emissions will be "internalised", he'll drive less, emissions will fall, and warming will slow. All that remains is to tot up an estimate of the "social cost of carbon" and convert that into an optimal tax rate. And in fact, many models reckon the tax need not be too high, as it makes sense to accommodate quite a lot of warming. The costs of climate change will mount over time, but so too will global income, the thinking goes. Economic actors are resilient and will be able to adapt. All in all, we shouldn't expect global warming to dent expected GDP growth so much that a stifling tax rate is necessary.
There is some wisdom in this analysis. Remarkably, Americans have adopted what is effectively an even more sanguine view of the harm from warming, by refusing to tax carbon and investing quite conservatively in green technology and research. But as the devastation from Hurricane Sandy makes clear, the economic approach is a bit too anti-septic and simplistic a way of understanding and responding to an incredibly complex and potentially catastrophic climate phenomenon. The American approach is out-and-out reckless.
With the superstorm now dissipating, estimates of its economic impact are beginning to emerge. Kate Mackenzie comments on some of them here. Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius notes that damage estimates of $10 billion to $20 billion look small and may well be revised up (Hurricane Katrina was responsible for roughly $113 billion in damage). Yet the observed impact of the storm on economic numbers could be even smaller. October data will probably take a hit, but much of the shortfall may be made up in November and December such that fourth-quarter GDP will hardly register the event. Pimco's Mohamed El-Erian reckons that the storm will show up in the fourth-quarter data, but mostly because state and federal governments are less fiscally willing and able to provide support. Still, the fact that such an epic storm might not even knock the GDP statistics off track lends credence to those who argue, for instance, that things like a massively expensive sea wall to protect New York City or an Apollo programme for green energy would represent useless waste.
But there are two problems with this mode of thinking. One is that the economic resiliency that allows us to shift economic activity across time and geography, holding down the cost of such storms, has its limits. People cluster together in New York City, despite the high cost of living, because of the extraordinary advantages of being there, surrounded by other skilled professionals. There are "returns to scale" that hold New York together—productivity per person rises with population and density. Given limited disruption, the city will quickly bounce back, but a larger disaster could disperse enough of the city's people and businesses to undermine the scale that acts as New York's gravity. That could generate very large economic losses. New York can't easily be replaced, and even if it were logistically possible to create another megacity there's no guarantee that resources would re-congeal there. They might stick, instead, to lots of smaller cities: a much less productive distribution.
The more serious issue, however, is simply that GDP is not capturing everything we care about. GDP is a flow of income, for one thing. A storm that destroys existing wealth could actually raise the flow of production in the short term as people rebuild, such that higher GDP growth might nonetheless mean less wealth overall. Moreover, GDP is a very imperfect measure of human welfare. Even if GDP and wealth were relatively unharmed by the storm, we might nonetheless want to prevent a great deal of human suffering. The damage to America's northeast pales in comparison with the destruction wrought in Haiti, but because Haitians are so poor the economic cost of the damage there is almost imperceptible. The fact that the average Haitian emits about a hundredth as much carbon dioxide each year as the typical American suggests that unaccounted-for economic injustice may be at least as big a concern with global warming as underestimated human costs.
And so it would be entirely appropriate if the damage done by Sandy shakes Americans out of complacency on the issue of global warming, despite the relatively tolerable price tag of the storm. The storm is costlier than the estimated bill reflects. And future storms will be costlier still.
Many scientists and journalists are cautious in listing climate change as a causal factor behind a storm like Sandy. Understandably so: weather emerges as part of a complex system, and it would be impossible to say whether a storm would or would not have materialised without global warming. But scientists are becoming ever less shy in drawing a line between a higher frequency of "extreme" weather events and a warming climate. Climate shifts the probability distribution of such events, and so global warming may not have "caused" Sandy, but it makes Sandy-like storms more probable. As the ever-less-funny joke goes, 500-year weather events seem to pop up every one or two years these days. Frequency and intensity of storms aside, future hurricanes that hit the east coast will do so atop rising sea levels. Contemplate the images of seawater rushing over Manhattan streets and into subway and highway tunnels. Then consider that sea levels are rising. And then reflect on the fact that New York is very much like a typical megacity in being located on the water; tracing a finger around America's coastlines leads one past most of the country's largest and richest cities.
Americans may absorb all of this and decide that the smart choice continues to be a course of inaction. They may continue to believe that the storms—and droughts and heat waves and blizzards and floods—to come will be manageable because they'll be richer and well-equipped to adapt. Hopefully, there will at least be a better sense of what that is likely to mean and the trade-offs it will involve. Adaptation will be an ongoing, costly slog, with a side order of substantial human suffering. It will be one American icon after another threatened. Adaptation is not going to be easy. Hopefully Americans will ask themselves whether it's so much worse than the alternatives—high carbon taxes or large public investments or both—after all.
(Photo credit: AFP) | <urn:uuid:f3a49103-f501-43d0-9725-57936d07e6ff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.economist.com/comment/1724194 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956535 | 1,410 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Cedar grows in wet ground well. One thing that it has to adapt to this environment and fight the bacteria that would rot it out while still young is that it has it's own aromatic oils and some toxic compounds. cedars that grow in jungle areas of the world have more of these than those that grow in colder, drier places. These are the toxins that keep cedar fence posts from rotting and that make a closet smell nice while repelling moths.
If you didn't have a reaction to the dust while actually doing the sanding, you have little to worry about. Most woodworkers who create cedar dust learn eventually that it is good to wear a dust mask.
I have quit using Port Orford cedaar very much because it has irritated the sinuses of my crew members and it landed me in the hospital with a lung irritation that gave me symptoms like a heart attack, great pain with every atempt to breathe in. | <urn:uuid:cf2b63e8-6398-4ded-828e-9693bcdbbefa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bobvila.com/posts/3883-cedar-poisoning?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975741 | 194 | 2.09375 | 2 |
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. will lose millions of dollars a year on its free music service for the foreseeable future, as the high cost of content surpasses the advertising revenue the service earns.
CBC Music was launched in February just as the broadcaster was bracing for deep budget cuts that would lead to the loss of 650 jobs and prompt the CBC to request permission to sell advertising on its Radio 2 service.
Private companies who charge for digital music services have complained about the CBC’s encroachment, arguing the public broadcaster uses taxpayer money to run a service that will put them out of business.
The stakes are high: Canadians spend about $500-million a year on music and digital sales account for about 34 per cent of the market. Dozens of competing services such as Rdio and Galaxie are trying to woo consumers to their sites, hoping to take a bigger piece of that spending away from traditional retailers.
Chris Boyce, executive director of radio and audio for CBC English services, said the broadcaster is providing a unique service to Canadians. That means plenty of Canadian content, including interviews and live concerts in addition to the actual 40 channels of music.
“We have a very different business model than a for-profit company focused on the shareholder bottom line,” Mr. Boyce said. “Revenue is important to us, in that it allows us to reinvest in Canadian content and deliver on our mandate as a public broadcaster.”
The service has been hugely successful from a listener perspective, with 7.8 million visits on the web since launching. Users have streamed 17.6 million hours of music – the equivalent of listening to Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe on repeat 880,000 times.
But despite its popularity, the broadcaster only expects to sell about $750,000 in advertisements this year to help offset more than $6-million in costs (some of those are one-time costs associated with launching the service).
While it expects costs to go down marginally, much of the money it spends is to pay musicians and producers royalties and to produce programming. Other companies operating in the space estimate it costs about $6 a customer to run an online service, once copyright fees, infrastructure and marketing costs are considered.
“We do expect that expenses will continue to be larger than costs for some time, largely because of the cost of creating all the rich content on the site,” Mr. Boyce said. “Though we expect ad revenue to continue to grow and the gap to close.”
Monetizing music is a problem affecting much of the online music industry. Pandora, one of the largest services in the world, lost $5.4-million in its last quarter even as more subscribers joined. Sirius Canada Inc., which charges users a monthly fee, has never posted a quarterly profit despite having more than 2 million Canadian users.
Eric Boyko, whose Montreal-based Stingray Digital is one of the largest music companies in the world with more than 75 million subscribers for its Galaxie music service, has been one of the CBC’s most vocal critics. It’s not the service he has a problem with, it’s the broadcaster’s refusal to charge for a service that he thinks has value.
“If music is given away for free then people will say that it’s free,” Mr. Boyko said in a recent interview. “It will upset the market. That remains a threat, and that is why I’m mad at the CBC – someone is always paying.”
Turn it up
Users have access to 40 channels of streamed music, each with a particular theme. The free service has 40 channels and makes much of the CBC’s vast music vault available to listeners on demand, and supplements the music with articles and videos.
Best known for its television channels that stream music into millions of homes as part of cable and satellite subscriptions, Galaxie also offers a standalone app that offers dozens of genre-specific channels for about $10 a month.
For $10 a month, subscribers have access to millions of songs. They can also download them songs to mobile devices for when they are not connected to the Internet.
Sirius XM Canada
The satellite radio service has more than 100 channels, most dedicated to specific genres of music. The service tops out at about $20 a month for its latest version, which allows users to download content and rewind and fast-forward through playlists.
Canadian users can listen to professionally programmed radio stations and use a “station creator” to hear music programmed to their own tastes. They can also skip six songs an hour. The service costs up to $10 a month, depending on the package. | <urn:uuid:3db3812a-0330-4779-be05-537e6f745238> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/business-technology/cbc-music-losing-millions-as-content-costs-surpass-revenue/article4607689/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957852 | 982 | 1.523438 | 2 |
On New Year’s Eve, a bus driver in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, located just across a river from Hong Kong, died from the virus H5N1, commonly known as bird flu. The news must have unnerved a lot of people who saw the 2011 hit movie Contagion, in which a fast-mutating type of bird flu first surfaces near Hong Kong and ends up wiping out about a quarter of the world’s population within a matter of months.
The fear of pestilence is a valid one, with deep roots in human history; but it’s a fear frequently exaggerated and exploited by the media. One rather fanciful sci-fi theme – of extraterrestrial microbes arriving via meteorite to wreak havoc upon Earthlings utterly lacking any resistance to them – launched an extremely lucrative writing career for the late Michael Crichton with his first best-seller, The Andromeda Strain. But if some modern scientists are positing that nucleic acids from other worlds may have laid the foundation for life on Earth, then isn’t it also possible for a virus to hitch a ride on a bit of space debris?
If questions like these keep you up at night, you’ll definitely want to check out the lecture being presented on Wednesday, January 11 from 6 to 7 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Division of Infectious Diseases, at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine will discuss “Mammals, Martians and Dinosaurs: Thoughts on the Origin of Microbial Virulence.”
Dr. Casadevall’s talk is but one in the “Citizen Science” series being offered to the general public this month, free of charge. This innovative program for all Bard freshmen, involving three weeks of intensive study during January intersession, is intended to help students develop a core understanding of both the conduct and the content of science, preparing them as citizens to grapple with the ever-increasing number of national and global issues influenced by science. This year, Citizen Science will focus on infectious diseases: what they are; how they are transmitted; where they are most prevalent and why; and what we can do to reduce the global burden of disease.
On Thursday, January 12, Dr. Rebecca Goldin will present “Should You Believe It? A Mathematical Perspective on the Science of News,” also from 6 to 7 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater. Goldin is director of research for Statistical Assessment Service (STATS). This lecture is sponsored by Citizen Science, the Women and Science Project, the Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series and the Mathematics Program at Bard College.
On Friday, January 13, Dr. Michael Kalos will present “The Translational Research Program at U Penn: An Academic Paradigm for Integrated Translational Research” from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater. Kalos is adjunct associate professor in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, founding director of the Translational and Correlative Studies laboratory and a member of the Translational Research Program of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
On Tuesday, January 17, Dr. Ronald Taylor will present “One Health: The Interplay of Human, Agriculture and Environmental Health” from 6 to 7 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater. Taylor is professor of Microbiology and Immunology and director of the Microbiology and Molecular Pathogenesis Program (M2P2) at Dartmouth College.
Lastly, on Friday, January 20, Edna Bonhomme will present “Constructions of Race in North Africa 1820 and 1850: French Portrayals of the Indigenous in Popular and Scientific Texts” from 5 to 6 p.m. at the Lásló Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium in the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Difference and Media Project at Bard College.
All of the guest lectures in the Bard College Citizen Science Program are free and open to the public; no reservations are necessary. For more information, contact Julie Cerulli at email@example.com or visit citizenscience.bard.edu/events. | <urn:uuid:fc79011d-fafd-4551-847c-0403e4cdbb4d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hudsonvalleyalmanacweekly.com/2012/01/09/pondering-pestilence-free-citizen-science-lecture-series-at-bard/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928474 | 930 | 2.8125 | 3 |
When you're commander in chief of the world’s only superpower and find yourself flying to Oslo on your private 747 to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, it helps to have someone along on the trip to keep you humble.
And White House pool reports from Oslo show first lady Michelle Obama is doing her part to keep President Obama grounded during his trip to pick up a prize that has also been won by Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Wifely advice: Brevity
Before picking up his prize and delivering an eloquent speech, the president and first lady visited the Nobel Institute to sign a guest book in the room where the Nobel Committee meets to vote on prizes. Mr. Obama carefully wrote seven lines of text, prompting Mrs. Obama to ask, “are you writing a book?”
When it was Mrs. Obama’s turn to write in the guest book, she quipped, “mine won’t be as long.” The president’s response: "She will resist writing something sarcastic since this will be recorded for the future." | <urn:uuid:d25aba8f-12b7-4ceb-92f2-7c22fda47260> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/2009/1210/at-nobel-prize-ceremony-michelle-obama-keeps-her-husband-in-line | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966872 | 230 | 1.539063 | 2 |
If you want to understand how global integration and cross-border investment have left U.S. trade policy in need of a new purpose, check out today’s Wall Street Journal article about the Apple iPhone’s complex production-supply chain. (And then see this analysis for more depth and detail.) The story is both testament to the benefits of globalization and the latest indictment of a decrepit international trade flow accounting system that nourishes misleading trade skeptics and misinforms policy.
Following in the footsteps of a groundbreaking and widely-cited 2007 UC-Irvine study, which disaggregated the components of a Chinese-assembled Apple iPod and assigned its constituent value to the companies and countries responsible for their production, two researchers at the Asian Development Bank Institute applied a similar analysis to the Apple iPhone. Like the UC-Irvine iPod study before it, the ADBI analysis found that just a tiny fraction of the cost of producing the iPhone is Chinese value-added. The only Chinese input is labor, which is used to assemble the components manufactured in other countries. The value of that labor accounts for $6.50 or 3.6 percent of the total cost of $178.96 to produce an iPhone (about the same percentage as the iPod). The other 96.4 percent of that total is the cost of components produced (and the labor and overhead employed to produce those components) in Japan, Germany, South Korea, the United States, and several other countries. This breakdown is very similar to that found for the iPod in 2007, and the punch lines are identical.
While firms in Japan and Germany account for the most expensive parts (and quite obviously benefit from the advent of the iPhone), most of the value of the iPhone (like the iPod) accrues to Apple, which reaps the lion’s share of the approximately 100 percent markup. When iPhones sell for $399 in the United States, the difference between that retail price and the $178.96 cost of production goes to retailers, distributors, marketers, other firms in the supply chain, and to Apple, which distributes some earnings to its shareholders and retains some for research and development, supporting engineering and design jobs higher up the value chain so that the virtuous circle can continue.
Rather than appreciate how this complementary process harnesses the benefits of our globalized division of labor, some begrudge iPod and iPhone sales in the United States for adding to the bilateral trade deficit. Technically, for every $399 iPhone sold in the United States, the U.S. bilateral trade deficit with China increases by $178.96. Even though only $6.50 of that iPhone is Chinese value, under our antiquated, pre-globalization, method of tallying a nation’s imports and exports, the entire $178.96 is chalked up as an import from China because that was the product’s final point of assembly. According to the authors of the ADBI study, iPhones added $1.9 billion to the politically volatile U.S. trade deficit with China in 2009. Alas, this is the basis of the claim—popular among the most shameless trade critics—that America has a “high-tech” trade deficit with China.
Should we lament a trade deficit in iPhones or any other products assembled abroad, particularly when those products comprise U.S. value-added and support high-paying U.S. jobs? I think not. As I wrote last year:
U.S. factories and workers are more likely to be collaborating with Chinese factories and workers in production of the same goods than they are to be competing directly. The proliferation of vertical integration (whereby the production process is carved up and each function performed where it is most efficient to perform that function) and transnational supply chains has joined higher value-added U.S. manufacturing, design, and R&D activities with lower-value manufacturing and assembly operations in China. The old factory floor has broken through its walls and now spans oceans and borders. Though the focus is typically on American workers who are displaced by competition from China, legions of American workers and their factories, offices, and laboratories would be idled without access to complementary Chinese workers in Chinese factories. Without access to lower-cost labor in places like Shenzhen, countless ideas hatched in U.S. laboratories—which became viable commercial products that support hundreds of thousands of jobs in engineering, design, marketing, logistics, retailing, finance, accounting, and manufacturing—might never have made it beyond conception because the costs of production would have been deemed prohibitive for mass consumption. Just imagine if all of the components in the Apple iPod had to be manufactured and assembled in the United States. Instead of $150 per unit, the cost of production might be multiple times that amount.
Consider how many fewer iPods Apple would have sold; how many fewer jobs iPod production, distribution, and sales would have supported supported; how much lower Apple’s profits (and those of the entities in its supply chains) would have been; how much lower Apple’s research and development expenditures would have been; how much smaller the markets for music and video downloads, car accessories, jogging accessories, and docking stations would be; how many fewer jobs those industries would support; and the lower profits those industries would generate. Now multiply that process by the hundreds of other similarly ubiquitous devices and gadgets: computers, Blu-Ray devices, and every other product that is designed in the United States and assembled in China from components made in the United States and elsewhere.
The Atlantic’s James Fallows characterizes the complementarity of U.S. and Chinese production sharing as following the shape of a “Smiley Curve” plotted on a chart where the production process from start to finish is measured along the horizontal axis and the value of each stage of production is measured on the vertical axis. U.S. value-added comes at the early stages—in branding, product conception, engineering, and design. Chinese value-added operations occupy the middle stages—some engineering, some manufacturing and assembly, primarily. And more U.S. value-added occurs at the end stages in logistics, retailing, and after-market servicing. Under this typical production arrangement, collaboration, not competition, is what links U.S. and Chinese workers.
The proliferation of cross border investment and global production-supply chains is a major reason the world averted a global trade war of 1930s proportions during and in the wake of the recession, as described in this paper; it explains why Chinese currency appreciation between 2005 and 2008 did not reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China during that period, and why Yuan appreciation, alone, going forward will have no discernible impact on the deficit in this paper; and, it explains why the world should rejoice in China’s becoming the world’s largest exporter in 2009, in this oped.
Global integration requires new thinking about trade statistics, which should be reported on a constituent value-added basis, if at all. It also requires that trade policy get with the times and consist of goals that are not mired in the old “Us” versus “Them” way of thinking. Relying on old-fashioned trade statistics for 21st century policy decisions is a recipe for disaster. | <urn:uuid:eeb653b8-0157-4fe1-b544-5c8b4f39d846> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cato.org/blog/archives/201012?page=6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952011 | 1,503 | 2.125 | 2 |
Michael Thelwell: Paging through a life in literature
PELHAM — The best books evolve, they are not contrived. Rather than being the product of “bottom-line” calculations among an agent, editor and the publisher’s merchandising department most good books evolve naturally — in retrospect almost inevitably — out of a life or, rather, a life’s work. They are the product of the abiding concerns, commitments, interests and intellectual preoccupations of solitary, disciplined and original minds.
The above insight, albeit not a very original one, is one direct result of reading Jules Chametzky’s latest — “Out Of Brownsville.” This little book is a cultural memoir consisting of a series of reminiscences of Chametzky’s encounters, over a uncommonly consequential career as editor, literary activist and historian, with 50 or so significant writers of our time.
For the 40 years that I’ve lived in Amherst, Jules Chametzky has been actor, driving force and these days something of a benign institution in the cultural, political and intellectual life of this community. As founding editor of the Massachusetts Review, director of the Institute of the Advanced Study of the Humanities, co-founder and president of the Coordinating Council of Little Magazines, he has contributed greatly to the shape of the literary environment. As scholar and literary historian his oeuvre definitively documents the cultural/ethnic expansion of the national literature and particularly the emergence and effect of a powerful current of Jewish-American writing in the middle of the previous century.
Among the more influential of these works are his pioneering “From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan,” “Our decentralized Literature: Cultural Mediations in Selected Jewish and Southern Writers” and most recently his editing of the seminal “Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology.”
In a life dedicated to literature and literary activity, and particularly as an influential editor, Chametzky met and worked with hundreds of writers major and minor. For this book, that number would of necessity have to be reduced. But by what process of selection?
The book’s subtitle is “Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers.” And that decision would prove an inspired one. It brought important thematic and cultural focus to a work that might otherwise have seemed another rambling, subjective gathering of disconnected literary memories.
Instead, by bringing original literary personalities into conversation with the author and each other, we become eyewitnesses to literary and cultural history. But be not dismayed by this stifling academic terminology. At the hands of Chametzky, you will not be abused by a prose of pretentious erudition that has reduced recent “serious” cultural discourse in academic circles to a hollow mockery.
What we have here are memoirs — fond, astute recollections and finely drawn portraits of some 50 literary characters and events with judicious commentary on the work, rendered with the immediacy of a warm and recognizable human voice.
A raconteur’s timing and wit leaven the author’s perceptive literary intelligence. This combination is so seductive, the stories so entertaining and engrossing that we only gradually come to recognize how gracefully we have been ushered into serious literary history.
After the death of Grace Paley, a writer known and greatly respected in this community, the Massachusetts Review devoted an issue to her work. Chametzky was asked to contribute a tribute. Upon reading it, his youngest son Peter suggested he compile a collection of short pieces. Skeptical but intrigued, his father began to make a list of writers, which grew to over 100 names.
How to intelligently reduce the list? “In light of my professional interests in recent years,” he reasoned, “I decided to focus on Jewish writers I had met and who had made a memorable inpression.” That list had 70 names and was winnowed down to the present book.
The task of writing and organizing the material was well in hand before the question of a publisher came up. By fortuitous coincidence, he mentioned his latest project in a chance discussion with a boyhood friend who lived two houses down in his old Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn.
As boys, these two sons of working-class Jewish families had become close because of shared intellectual inclinations. The friend, David Kantor, had become a nationally recognized systems psychologist who had founded a small house, Meredith Winter Press, utilizing high technology to publish with some success his own and other work in his field.
For some time he had been thinking about broadening the intellectual horizons of his publishing operation. Now his old friend’s project seemed a possible beginning in that direction. Upon reading it, he found it “an important document on the intellectual life of the second half of the 20th century.”
It was a meeting of minds and a marriage made, if not in heaven, in the streets of Brownsville.
Michael Thelwell is a retired University of Massachusetts professor, former colleague of Jules Chametzky and lives in Pelham.
“Out of Brownsville,” published by Meredith Winter Press, can be ordered through Amazon.com. | <urn:uuid:3f4821e1-c345-4106-8d12-77c57299e265> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gazettenet.com/opinion/columns/4265016-95/literary-chametzky-cultural-jewish | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959037 | 1,097 | 1.835938 | 2 |
To begin on a happy note, the world didn't end this year.
December 21 came and went without a sign of the Four
Horsemen, leaving the Mayans (or rather their ancestors) with
egg all over their faces. It just goes to show the perils of
prediction - but why would we let that deter us? Nobody is
So, instead of the usual trek through the events of the past
year, why don't we use this yearender to examine the entrails
of recent events for portents of the future? Like, for
example, the vicissitudes of the Arab revolutions in the past
On one hand, there were the first truly free elections in
modern Egyptian history. On the other hand, judges inherited
from the old regime dismissed the lower house of parliament
on a flimsy pretext, and then the Islamist president
retaliated by ramming through a new constitution that
entrenched conservative ''Islamic'' values against the will
of more than a third of the population. Is this glass half
full or half empty?
On one hand, Libyans managed to hold a free election even
though the country is still overrun by various militias, and
Yemen finally bid farewell to its dictator of 30-odd years.
On the other hand, Syria has fallen into a full-scale civil
war, with government planes bombing city centres and 40,000
dead. Did the ''Arab spring'' succeed, or did it fail?
Well, both, of course. How could it have been otherwise, in a
world of fallible human beings? But the mould has been
broken, and already half of the world's Arabs live in
countries that are basically democratic.
The political game is being played pretty roughly in some
Arab countries, but that's quite normal in new democracies -
and in some older ones, too. In the years to come the
transformation will deepen, amid much further turbulence, and
most Arab countries will emerge from it as normal, highly
imperfect democracies, just like most of the world's other
The European Union staggered through a year during which the
common currency of the majority of its members, the euro,
tottered permanently on the brink of collapse. The financial
markets have been talking all year about ''Grexit'', the
expected, almost inevitable withdrawal of Greece from the
eurozone, and speculating on which country would leave next.
It's a mess and Europe certainly faces years of very low
economic growth. But the EU was always mainly a political
project, intended to end centuries of devastating wars in
Europe, and the euro was invented to reinforce that political
So the EU will survive, and will even recover its financial
stability, eventually. It will also remain a major economic
player in the world, although the centre of gravity of the
global economy will continue to shift towards Asia. There is
even reason to think that Asia's triumph will arrive somewhat
later, and in a rather more muted fashion, than the
enthusiasts have been predicting in recent years.
In the last months of 2012 China went through the 10-yearly
ritual in which power is handed on to a new generation of
leaders, and both Japan and South Korea elected new
right-wing governments. North Korea, the nuclear-armed rogue
state that lies between them, put its first satellite into
orbit, thus demonstrating its ability to build long-range
ballistic missiles. And China was almost continuously
embroiled in border disputes with its neighbours (Vietnam,
the Philippines, Malaysia) in the South China Sea.
The world's drift towards global catastrophe due to climate
change is becoming impossible to deny. This northern summer
saw prolonged droughts and heat waves ravage crops from the
United States Midwest to the plains of Russia, and soaring
food prices as the markets responded to shortages in food
This September, Arctic sea ice cover was observed to fall to
its lowest level: and that was only half of the total area
covered by ice in September 10 years ago. And October saw
Hurricane Sandy devastate much of the US east coast, causing
100 deaths and more than $30 billion in damage. It was the
second-costliest tropical storm in American history (after
Katrina, in New Orleans, seven years ago).
Yet the global response is as feeble as ever. The annual
round of global negotiations on cutting greenhouse gas
emissions, held this month in Qatar, merely agreed nations
would try to get some sort of deal by 2015. Even if they do,
however, it won't go into effect until 2020.
So for the next eight years the only legal constraint on
warming will be the modest cuts in emissions agreed at Kyoto
15 years ago. Moreover, those limits only apply to the old
industrial powers. There are no limits whatever on the rise
of emissions by the fast-growing economies of the emerging
industrial powers in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Even
lemmings usually act more wisely than this.
November brought a week of massive Israeli air and missile
strikes against the Gaza Strip, allegedly in retaliation for
Palestinian missile attacks against Israel, but the
tit-for-tat has been going on for so long that it's pointless
to discuss who started it. And nothing Israel does can stop
the growing support for a Palestinian state: in late November
the United Nations General Assembly granted Palestine
non-voting observer state status by a vote of 138-9.
And then there's the United States, where Barack Obama,
having accomplished little except health care reform in his
first presidential term, was re-elected, anyway. The
Republican candidate concentrated his campaign on Mr Obama's
slow progress in overcoming the deepest recession in 70 years
(which had been caused by the previous Republican
administration), but just in time the numbers started to turn
upward for Mr Obama.
The economic recovery will probably strengthen in the coming
year (unless the United States falls off the ''fiscal cliff''
in the next week or so), and strong growth will give Obama
enough political capital to undertake at least one big reform
project. The highest priority is obviously global warming,
but there is a danger that he will fritter his resources away
on hot-button issues like gun control.
So much for the big themes of the year. There was also the
usual scatter of promising changes, like Burma's gradual
return to democracy, the start of peace talks that might
bring an end to the 60-year-old war between Government and
guerrillas in Colombia, and the return to the rule of law in
growing areas of anarchic Somalia.
Similarly, there was a steady drizzle of bad news: the revolt
by Islamist extremists that tore the African state of Mali in
half in April, the pogrom against Burmese Muslims in July,
and the police massacre of striking miners in South Africa in
Business as usual, in other words. 2012 wasn't a particularly
bad year; if you think it was, you've been reading too many
newspapers and watching too much CNN. Their stock-in-trade is
crisis and tragedy, so you can always count on them to give
you the worst news possible. It wasn't all that great a year
either, but there'll be another one along shortly.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent London | <urn:uuid:6cd9eca8-93ec-4144-8e4d-2c1fffd36cc1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/opinion/240895/what-year-not-so-bad | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00072-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954293 | 1,571 | 1.734375 | 2 |
“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” ~ Harriet Tubman
Welcome to the final week of our six week Making My Life Work for Me Program. (If you’ve only just joined us, you might like to pop back and read the very first post so you can gather the materials we’ll be using today and catch up on all our prior activities.)
Our focus this week is on putting it all together – now that we’ve been journalling and collaging and visualising, it’s time to get a plan! Change and progress come from action.
We have followed the same format each week. Read through this entire post before you get started. You can do the activities all on one day, or spread them put over the week – whatever works best for you.
This week’s meditation exercise is a simple walking meditation.
To start hold your crystal or place it in your pocket, draping your scarf or shawl around you. Then step outside and go for a walk. It doesn’t matter where you walk, although walks in nature are wonderful. What is important is the sense of movement, and being able to empty your mind and simply enjoy observing your surroundings.
Remember this technique:
Breathe, and look around me. Breathe and put one foot in front of the other. Breathe and be aware of my body and my surroundings. Breathing and walking and being aware.
Set aside ten minutes for this, although you can take longer if you have the time or are enjoying yourself.
If it is not possible for you to walk, then close your eyes and take a walk in your imagination. It will have the same effect.
Do this straight after your meditation, when you are ready and open for receiving! Close your eyes and use your imagination. See yourself the way you want yourself to be in the world. See yourself in a space of calm, filled with certainty and enthusiasm. See yourself as healthy. See yourself as happy. See yourself having the life you desire, in as much detail as possible. Really put some energy into this. You can repeat this step again this week (even daily) if it feels right. Thoughts are things, and this is how you manifest in the Universe!
Using Your Journal:
Go back to the front of your journal and read your Pledge out loud one more time.
Then turn to the next blank pages, and write the following Positioning Statement, and sign it. When it’s written, repeat it out loud, with as much sincerity as you can muster. That way the Universe is put on notice of your intentions:
I am grateful for the clarity, direction and inspiration I have received so far.
I am ready to begin creating a life for myself that is satisfying and richly meaningful - a life that reflects my values, and that best uses my talents and gifts.
I am ready to embrace positive change and to accept an avalanche of good in my life.
My commitment to you is that I will create a plan, and take consistent small steps in the direction of my dreams.
I am open to Divine Inspiration, Higher Guidance, Magic and Miracles. I am open to Breakthroughs, New Opportunities and Helpful People.
I am excited about co-creating a brighter future for myself and the ones I love.
With love and gratitude,
(insert your own name here)
Get creative! Use your paints, coloured pens, glitter and stickers to make your Positioning Statement and your journal visually attractive.
Card of the Week:
Let’s start our week by selecting some reflective spiritual Guidance. Take your deck of positive cards, or your rune bag. Close you eyes and offer up a prayer for the Highest Good, and then quiet your mind.
Randomly select a card/rune, trusting that it will have a message to guide you this week. Write down the name of the card/rune and the message. Feel free to add any additional thoughts or insights you might have.
The final card I’ve chosen for us is all about the magic of thinking big – it encourages us to dream, and reminds us that there are powerful forces in the world which come together to support us as we move in the direction of our dreams.
This week, give yourself permission to dream of that brighter future. Actively look for ways to bring more of the energies of positive change into your life.
Week 6 Journal Activity:
This week use your stream of consciousness around the question Where to from here? Stay open to whatever you write down, and don’t censor or judge anything as it pours out onto the page. Draw pictures or mind map if you feel like it.
And this week’s creative activity is:
Collage – The Best of Everything This collage will help you to clarify the essence of what your heart desires.
Take your pile of old magazines and place them in front of you. Holding your crystal close your eyes and say out loud “Universe, I am open to all Guidance and my own Higher Wisdom. I know that I am worthy and deserving. From this place of self love and self worth, show me what I most value and enjoy.” Take a moment and sit in that energy, really feeling yourself connecting into and opening to all that your soul desires.
When you’re ready, open your eyes and start flicking through the magazines. If any pictures or words appeal to you, cut or rip them out and place them beside you. When you have enough images cut them up neatly.
Place the images in your journal, laying them out so that you feel good when you look at them. Allow yourself to be excited!
If your journal isn’t big enough, feel free to use a sheet of cardboard. Glue your images to the page and leave it open to dry.
Pulling It All Together:
In the coming days and weeks, go back over your journal. Take a highlighter, and look for all of the positive, inspiring and directional words and phrases you have included on these pages.
Look for repetitions of images, words and themes.
Look for words and images that strike a powerful emotional chord within you.
Look for the messages from your Soul to your Conscious Mind.
Write down a list of those themes and messages.
Now pick just three.
Choose one, and find a way to begin to bring that energy into your life.
When it has begun to appear, then begin on the second. When that energy has also appeared in your life, begin on the third.
If it moves you, go back and do this process again.
Change comes from small consistent steps in the direction of our dreams. And small steps often travel us great distances…
What’s already working in your life? List five things in your journal each day that you are grateful for in your life.
Nightly Healing :
Get into bed and spend five minutes lying quietly in meditation with your eyes closed. Call on God, Universal Energy, your Angels, your Guides, your Ancestors, whomever you feel comfortable and safe with. Ask for their help. Fill your body with white light, and then draw coloured light (just allow a colour to come to you) through your crown chakra (an energy point on the top of your head) and send it anywhere in your body that needs healing. Feel the warmth as the energy radiates through your body, uplifting and healing you. Know that answers will come while you are sleeping.
Give thanks, send this same healing gift from you to anyone or anywhere else if it feels right, and then sleep. Expect dreams that clarify, empower and enlighten.
Thank you so much for taking part in this project. I trust that you can find ways to keep moving yourself in the right direction, so that your life works better and feels better for you!
Much love to you, Nicole ♥ xx | <urn:uuid:e8669541-d699-4fcf-b4d8-8b1999ce0736> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cauldronsandcupcakes.com/category/manifesting-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927345 | 1,687 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Only the Bible has been more influential as a source of Christian devotional reading than The Imitation of Christ. This meditation on the spiritual life has inspired readers from Thomas More and St. Ignatius Loyola to Thomas Merton and Pope John Paul I. Written by the Augustine monk Thomas a Kempis between 1420 and 1427, it contains clear instructions for renouncing worldly vanities and locating eternal truths. No book has more explicitly and movingly described the Christian ideal: "My son, to the degree that you can leave yourself behind, to that degree will you be able to enter into Me."
Customer Questions & Answers: | <urn:uuid:d2055975-d41d-4e39-89d8-722101ba868b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://answers.christianbook.com/answers/2016/product/00189/random-house-inc-the-imitation-of-christ-questions-answers/questions.htm | 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 | 0.942425 | 129 | 2.1875 | 2 |
National Wildlife Refuge
|P.O. Box 189
Cokeville, WY 83114
Phone Number: 307-279-2800
|Visit the Refuge's Web Site:
|The American bittern is well-known both for its camouflaged feathering and its unique oonk-a-lunk call.|
Cokeville Meadows National Wildlife Refuge
Cokeville Meadows National Wildlife Refuge (NWR), located south of Cokeville, Wyoming, is centered on a 20-mile stretch of the Bear River and its associated wetlands and uplands. The Refuge was established in 1993.
Wetlands within the acquisition area provide excellent habitat for a variety of migratory and resident wildlife species. The Refuge supports one of the highest densities of nesting waterfowl in Wyoming, provides nesting habitat to colony nesting bird species, has excellent potential for reintroduction of trumpeter swans, and provides habitat for resident species, including greater sage grouse, mule deer, elk, and pronghorn.
Because it was only recently established, Cokeville Meadows NWR is not open to public use. However, over the next several years, Refuge staff will begin public planning processes that may open Refuge lands to a variety of public uses such as wildlife viewing, interpretation, fishing, hunting, environmental education, and photography. Some of these activities may be contingent on acquisition of additional lands so the public has clear boundaries on which to recreate without infringing on adjacent private lands.
Getting There . . .
To reach the Refuge, travel south from Cokeville, Wyoming, on State Highway 30. The acquisition boundary of Cokeville Meadows NWR begins about one mile south of Cokeville, Wyoming and continues 16 miles to the south. Highway 30 forms the eastern acquisition boundary of the Refuge. Non-contiguous Refuge lands are located within this acquisition boundary intermingled by tracts of private land. There are currently no visitor facilities located on the Refuge. Cokeville, Wyoming is located about 7 miles northeast of the Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming tri-state boundary.
Get Google map and directions to this refuge/WMD from a specified address:
The refuge is closed to public access.
Cokeville Meadows NWR is a relatively new and growing Refuge with a limited staff. Since its inception, Cokeville Meadows NWR has been managed as a satellite of Seedskadee NWR, 75 miles to the east. While the approved acquisition boundary for the Refuge totals 26,657 acres, only 8,106 acres have been purchased or protected through conservation easements to date. Land acquisition is ongoing from willing sellers only.
Newly acquired lands are posted with boundary signs and evaluated for a variety of factors. Local ranchers and Refuge managers work together on Refuge projects, including irrigation, weed control, tract cleanup, fence maintenance, and conversion of marginal croplands to permanent native vegetation. Ranchers also provide food plots for wildlife and implement selective haying and grazing activities. In exchange, ranchers receive hay, crop, and grazing shares. This management regime maintains the vigor of wet meadow and other vegetation that is critical for wildlife.
Refuge staff also work closely with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to identify and achieve management goals and objectives and to conduct annual wildlife inventories. | <urn:uuid:ed410eb8-eed5-4590-94e7-97f9f1cea445> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fws.gov/refuges/profiles/index.cfm?id=65581 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943108 | 670 | 2.15625 | 2 |
Editor: Like everyone else, I have been watching the price of 87 octane gasoline.
On Oct. 30, I filled my car with $2.59.9 gas and drove to the Chicago area.
On arrival that same day they were paying $2.35 to $2.45 per gallon; and in Cook County, one of the highest-taxed counties, gas was cheaper than St. John's County!
On Nov. 7, I returned to Florida and can you guess what I found out on the way back down?
Illinois gas price dropped to $2.29.9.
Indiana gas price dropped to $2.09.9.
Kentucky gas price dropped to $2.17.9.
Tennessee gas price dropped to $2.02.9.
I paid $2.07.9 at the Flying "J", Exit 2, in Georgia.
At Exit 305 in Florida, the Flying "J" had $2.49.9 on its pumps and the Citgo at S.R. 206 and US 1 was priced at $2.56.9.
Why are we still being price-gouged?
Why can't our prices come down as rapidly as these other states.
Florida used to be the cheapest next to Georgia.
What has happened to St. John's County? | <urn:uuid:ec74469f-9e61-4443-a42f-f79c16d0da09> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://staugustine.com/stories/111905/opi_kr008094.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966494 | 282 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Here is a question for SNP politicians, members and supporters, I have asked this in various ways over the past months since in fact this deed was done and I can't get a single nationalist to comment.
Some time ago I heard the SNP leader wee Alex (the spiv) Salmond say; no that's not quite right as we have subsequently found out he "declared" "Affirmed" "Stated" choose your own description, that if Scotland became independent the Present Queen Elizabeth 11 or to give her her proper name, "the full bhuna" as it were. Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, Defender of the Faith, would be Queen of Scotland and subsequently 'Head of State' She has literally hundreds more titles and can appear wearing more bling than Idi Amin Dada that other famous democrat, but I just want to give you a flavour of her power.
I want to ask Scottish nationalists everywhere what they think of this decision by wee Eck (the spiv) and also ask the following 1/ were any of you consulted about this in any way? 2/ if you were would one or more of you describe how that consultation took place? 3/ what do you feel about wee Eck (the spiv's) actions? 4/ are any of the tooth and claw nationalists that I grew up fighting with still out there, do any of you remember those shibboleths which were sacred to you? I remember them, I heard you sing about them often enough "Scotland hisnae got a King and hisnae got a Queen" remember?
I will print your answers if any of you have the courage to write, I will print them in Technicolour if you dare to give your names. | <urn:uuid:1c3b4a15-1091-4bcd-8fb0-d1e2128073f7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://councillorterrykelly.blogspot.com/2012/03/come-on-you-nats-all-together-now.html?showComment=1333813226320 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983245 | 372 | 1.734375 | 2 |
The ancient city of Tragilos developed in Visaltia
inland, end of the 6th century BC and it was destroyed beginning of the 3rd century
AD. The excavations brought significant findings to light, from the Archaic and
the Classical cemetery of the city which includes large burial monuments with
paintings and relief. Part of public buildings were also uncovered, presumably
of an agora and a sanctuary. The Monastery
of John the Baptist, a dependency of the monastery
of Koutloumousiou in Mount
Athos, is located in the archaeological site of Tragilos.
This text (extract) is cited September 2003 from the Prefecture
of Serres tourist pamphlet. | <urn:uuid:2b1f8988-65e1-408b-8b2c-c75621bf52c6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gtp.gr/LocPage.asp?id=60839 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958564 | 154 | 2.859375 | 3 |
THE long-suspected link between Alzheimer's disease and abnormalities in the way amyloid protein is processed in the brain has been confirmed at last.
Usually harmless, the amyloid protein is thought to trigger neurological damage when it is broken down and transformed into toxic fragments of beta-amyloid. Previous studies have shown that people with Alzheimer's have reduced levels of several proteins involved in processing amyloid.
To find out whether low levels of any of these proteins could cause the production of toxic beta-amyloid, Peter St George-Hyslop at the University of Toronto in Canada and colleagues studied the DNA of 6861 people, 46 per cent of whom had Alzheimer's (Nature Genetics, DOI: 10.1038/ng1943).
Those with the disease proved significantly more likely to have variants of the gene SORL1, which usually produces a protein that binds amyloid and transports it to an area of the cell where it can be harmlessly recycled.
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content. | <urn:uuid:fdba6a19-3e12-41ea-8189-8e227f034a28> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19325875.500-how-brain-protein-turns-toxic-in-alzheimers-disease.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941337 | 232 | 3.484375 | 3 |
Brief history of MVC and its convolutions, so I can point people to this in the future ;-)
Smalltalkers fought for years over the details of the right way to do this but the basics... UI (view) intimately knows the Model. It can watch it, and pull any values from it, but it cannot change it. The View also knows the Controller intimately. It uses it. That is right, the view is tightly coupled to both the controller and the Model.
The Controller knows the Model intimately. In the Smalltalk world the controller was just a bunch of opaque delegates which forwarded messages on to things in the model. The Controller is tightly coupled to the Model.
The Model represents the problem domain. It doesn't know a thing about the View or the Controller. The model is capable of being observed (whether observation is fine grained or course grained is a source of deep fighting, and really depends on the cost of examining the model, imho). When the state of the Model changes, it fires off messages to observers saying that it has changed. These observers are (usually) Views which then know they need to update what they are displaying.
Implementing a view typically involves subclassing an existing View class which knows how to draw what you want to draw. In the subclass you provide the plumbing required to register the instance to redraw itself when the model signals that it's state has changed, and you point intersting events (mouse click, etc) at the Controller. If you change your model, you will probably need to change your Views.
Implementing a Controller means providing receptacles for interesting messages to come in, and mapping them directly out to interesting knobs on the Model. The Controller is really really thin.
Along comes NeXT, Objective-C, and a variant on MVC. Those spiffy NeXT people got tired of subclassing view components, and decided that really powerful views should be easily reusable. They therefore made the default views smarter, and added hooks for pushing data into the View rather than having the View pull data from the Model. Furthermore, they had the View advertise the messages it can fire, making the View into a black box. In fact, they made it sufficiently black-boxish that there was, and still is, a market for 3rd party view components which could be hooked to arbitrary controllers.
The NeXT Controller, on the other hand, got much more complicated. It now is an observer of the View, and an observer of the Model. The View observation is fine grained (mouse click in WhoozatScreen) and the Model observation can go on about its holy wars over fine or course grained. The Controller is now dependent on the View, and dependent on the Model. It observes the View and when interesting things happen which require updating the UI, feed that information back into receptacles on the View.
The Model is no different, conceptually, than in the Smalltalk MVC design.
Developing in NeXT MVC means writing big fat controllers, but these controllers are still, mostly plumbing. They are just more complicated plumbing as they need to understand the View and push appropriate information into the View, as well as forward messages on to the Model. Nice tools (InterfaceBuilder in OS X is a direct descendent, iirc) were created to make this pretty straightforward, and, by reports, worked well enough that NeXT still has a cult following.
Then the Web happens and Sun starts talking about Model2 in terms of MVC. Model2, basically, attempts to recreate NeXT MVC for a crappy user interface (the web). If we take the canonical Model2 system, Struts, the web request comes into the Controller and is mapped to an Action. The Action needs to do the plumbing of the NeXT controller -- fire the interesting message into the Model (your domain model), and fire the interesting data into the View (your jsp^H^H^H velocity template).
Because jsp's and velocity cannot exactly receive messages with the interesting data from the model, that data is bundled up into the FormBean and passed in, where it can be used to fill out template slots. Similarly, as the template cannot easily (well it can, but it is icky) be interrogated for its state in a useful way, the form bean is used to pass information from the interesting ui events into the controller. It has a dual role.
This caught on, but people didn't like it much. There are very few fully fleshed out, black box, useful, user interface components for the web. Worse, there is no way for those components to hold state (ie, not change until they need to). This means that all of the information needed to re-render the user interface needs to be passed to the templating system every time the user interface is updated (every page load). You cannot really use nice drag-and-drop InterfaceBuilder stuff with JSP's (yes, there are some things that can, we'll get to that), and pulling the interesting bits out involves building a model that will be almost the same as the underlying domain model. So people tend to just use the domain model in their View. It is much easier than creating a seperate DTO layer.
So the resulting application, which is supposed to look, logically, just like the NeXT MVC system, actually has a dependency from the View back to the Model. This is so much more useful and powerful than adding another mapping layer to map from
VerySlightlyDifferentFoo that applications do it. It is almost always easier to change the view template when the model changes then it is to create the mapping layer, and change the mapping layer when the model changes.
Now, we have, recently, a few more tools, which conceptually map back to the NeXT MVC style. The forerunner here is probably Tapestry, but JSF and RIFE are scrappy contenders (WebObjects, from NeXT^H^H^H^ Apple actually had the first popular web tool here). The core problem with the Model2 system was that there were no View components. There was a template which could hold no state, which had to be logically rebuilt every time, and which usually had to be totally aware of the model in order to be anywhere near productive.
These tools have the NeXT concept of the rich view component which is reusable across applications, a fat controller which handles pushing data around, and a domain model which can model the problem domain without being aware of anything else. Nice. Nothing has come close to the beauty of InterfaceBuilder yet, but JSF vendors are trying. Tapestry seems pretty hooked on XML instead of GUIs, but it should be amenable to a a GUI, and some people actually prefer XML.
All of these models are based around interactive, event-driven (menu, mouse click, etc), user interfaces. The web happens to be workflow oriented (page driven). A great many applications benefit from event-driven design, but a workflow (request == transition) oriented user interfaces fit, in many cases (not all), more logically into the request/response page model of the web (see gmail for a brilliant non-workflow web app). Workflow user interfaces, in the rich client world, involve things like wizards. Various tools attempt to model this (Seaside, Cocoon, Struts-Flow, RIFE (actually RIFE and Cocoon have the rich component idea too!)) and the there is a lot of variety in design there, yet.
System design in this world is quite different from system design in event-driven apps. Pick the right tool for the job =) | <urn:uuid:d5be1e39-849f-4cea-9457-2e0125e09faf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kasparov.skife.org/blog-live/src/java/mvc.writeback | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00075-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952393 | 1,596 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Recent events and analyses have suggested that global production of oil might peak sometime within the next few years to the next one or two decades. Other analyses, however, conclude that oil supply can meet global demand for some decades to come and that oil production peaking is much further off. To explore this issue, the NRC held a workshop, funded by the Department of Energy, bringing together analysts representing these different views. The workshop was divided into four main sessions: setting the stage; future global oil supply and demand balance; mitigation options and time to implementation; and potential follow-up activities. This report provides a summary of the workshop including the key points, issues and questions raised by the participants, and it identifies possible topics for follow-up studies. No consensus views, conclusions, or recommendations are presented. | <urn:uuid:24dea268-ae1a-44c9-b633-40867bd6335e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11585 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00051-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959234 | 161 | 2.265625 | 2 |
When creating process improvement initiatives, look at it as an opportunity to motivate your team members. Morale is likely low and improvements should be made. Hand-hold your team members during the process. Instead of sitting in front of them like an interviewer would, sit next to them -- be a peer. This will help them see that you're making things better, not making their lives messier.
For example, I'm currently spearheading a process improvement initiative where the objective is to improve the current project management techniques for project implementation. Before I even started this project, I was told that I'd face some adversity. But I have a plan.
I want to make the initiative as painless as possible, so I plan to turn the investigative process into a learning process -- both for my team members and myself. I will take on a student's point of view, rather than as the instructor, because I'm learning, too.
I'll also try to be more open. I want my team to share their plights and success stories with me. I'd like to construct a scenario in which my team members learn new things from their experiences, seeing the areas that can be improved or approached differently for themselves.
It is a common saying: Things will get worse before they get better. Managing team members during process improvement period is like that. They will dislike you before they like you. Adversity is to be expected, but as the saying goes, impossible odds make achievements more satisfying.
What do you think a project manager should do to garner cooperation from team members during a process improvement initiative? How do you turn process improvement initiatives into a learning process? How do you manage team member resistance to change or idea makeovers? | <urn:uuid:a3bf5926-4a05-4337-ae28-d077572ee517> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.pmi.org/blog/voices_on_project_management/2011/09/coaching-through-process-impro.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978281 | 350 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Hmm perhaps some people are misspelling unnecessary boot bloat.
For control, use Gentoo, yes you might actually have to make some effort installing it and 'shock horror' use some money downloading source, but, can you really argue with the logic of having a system optimised with your favorite compiler switches and you the user/admin controlling exactly what 'gets run on boot' and what optimisations or lack thereof your binaries run with?
In the same motif, I like Slackware, true enough it runs 'more' default boot stuff than I would like it to do, however in comparison to Mandrakeised/Red_Head distros it has pithe few user friendly options to make life 'easy'.
Debian I found with 2.2r2 had a miasma of processes and daemons running on boot that I had never told it to run, yet it was arguably as difficult 'I use the term relatively' to setup as Slackware.
When I think of literally gigabytes of disk space used up in Mandrakised installs as opposed to utilitarian installs of the Gentoo/Slack genre I become phased slightly that people think their own 'technical savvy' so incomplete that they feel they must be nursemaided by a user friendly distro.
Perhaps some people like having their OS switch on stuff arbitrarily (on whim of the designers) for some future date that the 'features' might get used..... but in my opinion/experience for whatever that counts for, stuff that I have installed for such reasons or not bothered throtteling once I found my OS had turned it on almost invariably never gets used and thus is a waste.
Do I want to waste cpu cycles, disk space ram and sacrifice performance for no good reason other than 'I might use these features in the future'... you tell me.
Maintained by the ILUG website team. The aim of Linux.ie is to
support and help commercial and private users of Linux in Ireland. You can
display ILUG news in your own webpages, read backend
information to find out how. Networking services kindly provided by HEAnet, server kindly donated by
Dell. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds,
used with permission. No penguins were harmed in the production or maintenance
of this highly praised website. Looking for the
Indian Linux Users' Group? Try here. If you've read all this and aren't a lawyer: you should be! | <urn:uuid:5b22ac94-0627-4158-9e71-a716a41751cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.linux.ie/lists/pipermail/ilug/2002-May/045760.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95715 | 509 | 1.546875 | 2 |
If you’ve received the Winter 2007 TechEdge, the first thing you probably noticed is the really interesting guy on the back cover. But once you open the magazine and start to read, what will you see? You’ll see an article by Mitch Aiken entitled AFI’s Center for Student Film.
What is so exciting about this article? It spotlights the American Film Institute’s Lights, Camera, Education! curriculum and professional development which is presented in collaboration with Discovery Education. Turn to the top of Page 21 and you’ll see a picture of the group of educators, all DEN STAR members, who attended the film institute last spring at Southern Methodist University.
The article includes quotes and information about how the program is being used by Judith Valle (Canutillo), Diedre Cook (Katy), JohnT Powell (Pasadena), and Howard Martin (Austin) and their school districts. If you are not familiar with AFI’s curriculum, you can visit Discovery Education streaming and search for AFI. You will then be able to watch videos that explain the program and download an excellent resource book that will give you everything you need to know.
Visit the original blog post, made during the early days of the DEN Texas blog, which includes links to some of the videos made during the SMU institute. Visit the AFI Screen Nation blog for information on how AFI can help you with film festivals and other contests in your district. | <urn:uuid:6a4ba31e-2331-4b6d-a58f-0b9d1d65d127> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/blog/2008/01/18/texas-stars-make-techedge/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933182 | 303 | 1.757813 | 2 |
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.
Twelve miles west of Redding, California, a fire touched off by lightning in late June 2008 continued to creep through timber and brush in the Whiskeytown National Recreation area in early July. This false-color image of the area was captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on July 6, 2008. The use of infrared and visible light in the image highlights the contrast between vegetation (red), naturally bare ground (tan), and burned ground (charcoal). According to the July 8, 2008, report from the National Interagency Fire Center, the Whiskeytown Complex fire was 5,050 acres and 50 percent contained.
This image originally appeared on the Earth Observatory. Click here to view the full, original record. | <urn:uuid:b4b7d57f-58a8-4789-9049-8e29eea35f38> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=20112 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.925555 | 203 | 3.0625 | 3 |
Such was the headline of an article from 1 February 1957 in the Auckland Star which caught my eye today in the Auckland City Library.
Iris Smith wrote a book called The Santa Claus Book in 1948, in which a story from Admiral Richard Byrd was included, written for his own children one Christmas when he was at the South Pole. The Auckland Library had a copy in their children's collection -- and in 1955, it was borrowed. The borrower, learning that the Admiral was off soon back to the Pole, posted the library book to him, asking for him to take it with him to Antarctica in order for him to autograph it on Christmas Day.
The book was posted back to the Auckland Library, and arrived on 31 January 1957. In it, as arranged, Admiral Byrd signed the book, and wrote:
"I have been up to see Santa Claus and was asked by him to send his greetings to all the children of the world. And a Merry Christmas to all, from Richard E. Byrd."
Along with him, his son Richard, one of the children for whom the story had been originally written, now accompanying his father and joining him in inscribing in the book:
"In anticipation of World Children's Day, greetings to children of New Zealand from the bottom of the world. I have the good fortune to be sailing with my Dad on this 7th Polar venture, Operation Deepfreeze. I am sending these greetings on behalf of my Dad's four grandsons -- my youngsters -- the oldest of whom seems to be a born explorer and wants to come down next year on Operation Deepfreeze. Their names are Dickie, Ames, Levi and Harry."
The message was written on Christmas Day, 1955. Three others in the party added their signatures.
And all this was what met the eyes of children's librarian Miss Joan Lawrence when she opened the parcel.
A little more than a month after the book was returned to the library, Admiral Byrd died in his sleep, 11 March 1957.
The library at the time bought another copy for lending purposes, so that the special book could be kept for display. David Verran at the research centre today found the book on the digital catalogue, lodged with the Sir George Grey Special Collections. I haven't seen the book yet, but -- hopefully, I'll bring back an update soon, to let you know if that is the same well-travelled version of the book signed by explorers so very far away.
I also don't know if the unnamed borrower was given a massive fine or not ... | <urn:uuid:bd051296-83fd-40a4-839f-4653440a5cc4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://timespanner.blogspot.com/2009/12/overdue-book-carried-greetings-from.html?showComment=1261180537454 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98471 | 527 | 1.976563 | 2 |
An American paper, Examiner, reported that Stevens, Obama's ambassador killed in Libya, was a sodomite. The paper says in particular:
"Serbian diplomat, and friend of Christopher Stevens, says State Department knowingly sent gay ambassador to Libya.
Arab media says ambassador Stevens was gang raped and then his body was put on display.
Hillary Clinton has been spending US taxpayer dollars to fund homosexual pride events in foreign countries. Her actions have prompted backlashes against the US in Italy, Russia, Pakistan, and other nations.
Last year, Barack Obama made it official US policy to fund homosexual rights groups overseas with US tax-dollars.
In Pakistan, the staff of the US embassy in Islamabad was placed in serious danger after being ordered to host a homosexual pride event. Pakistanis rioted outside the embassy and burned American flags.
Friends of Christopher Stevens in Chicago say he was gay.
A member of the Serbian diplomatic team based in Chicago told HillBuzz.org that the State Department knowingly sent a gay man to be the ambassador of Libya. HillBuzz.org reports "in Chicago's diplomatic circles at least there is no doubt that Chris Stevens was gay".
The question is, did Hillary Clinton know this? If so, she knowingly sent him into an environment where his presence would be considered a provocation.
According to leading Arab media outlets, the murder of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens was even more horrible than what was reported in on the US media. The Arab media reports that Stevens was beaten, gang raped, killed, and then his body was publicly displayed in a manner similar to Gaddafi.
A Libyan doctor who examined the body said Stevens had severe internal injuries and died of "severe asphyxia".
Three other Americans were murdered, including former Navy Seal Glen Doherty.
Christopher Stevens is the first US ambassador to be murder overseas since Adolph Dubs was killed in Afghanistan in 1976".
Department of Monitoring | <urn:uuid:1c7fed8e-9dcd-4f43-a1b1-1db6a3a5d28f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2012/09/19/16687.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973032 | 392 | 1.75 | 2 |
an extension to manage folder content
A few weeks ago I needed a simple file manager for a professional project. The components available for Joomla are extremely powerful, but because of this they were not suitable for my project.
After some research I found the module "Easy Folder Listing" by Michael Gilkes (http://www.valorapps.com). The basic idea was fascinating: this module simply displays the contents of a selected folder on the server. Because I needed significant enhancements for my project, I decided to recode Michael Gilkes module completely.
The result is DVFolderContent. It follows the basic principle of "Easy Folder Listing", but was greatly expanded. In particular, a lot of options for controlling the display using access levels have been implemented. The uploading of files controlled by access levels is possible too. The file links are encrypted, so that no association to the physical location of the files on the server are possible.
The package contains a component, a module and german and english language files. Use the extension manager to install the package. This extensions uses the internal updater of Joomla to install new versions.
DVFolderContent is licensed under the GNU/GPL V2.0. You can use it for free. If you like it, I would appreciate a small donation. | <urn:uuid:cf228945-172f-4e45-91e3-cf2a6687836f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dvextensions.de/en/extensions/dvfoldercontent | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.915771 | 271 | 1.601563 | 2 |
State Leadership Conference
Are your electronic patient records secured in case of a fire or office theft? How will you ensure that your electronic patient information is completely deleted if you dispose of an old computer system? Do you communicate with clients on your cell phone or BlackBerry? If so, what steps have you taken to ensure that information is secure?
These were just a few of the questions posed by presenters at the State Leadership Conference continuing-education session, "HIPAA security rule: The next step in compliance." Session presenters sought to help state leaders ready their members for the April 20 deadline of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule. The rule is designed to protect personal health information contained in electronic media--such as patient notes, e-mail with or about patients, and financial records with identifying patient information--from damage, theft or unauthorized access.
To do so, the Security Rule requires a psychologist to conduct a documented "risk analysis"--that is, an evaluation of security threats and vulnerabilities of his or her administrative activities, office space and technology, noted presenters. For example, practitioners need to ensure staff are trained to guard protected health information--such as patient records--that is transmitted or maintained in electronic media, that their billing service employs security measures and that computer screens with patient information aren't viewed by casual observers. The rule also requires a psychologist or practice to recurrently document and re-evaluate their safeguards and security policies.
"Though taking the concrete steps to implement security measures is important, also critical is the risk analysis process itself," said Billie Hinnefeld, JD, PhD, senior director of legal and regulatory affairs for the APA Practice Organization.
To help psychologists ready their practices, the APA Pracice Organization has developed a HIPAA Security Rule Online Compliance Workbook that includes a step-by-step analysis of security threats and vulnerabilities, compliance options and an automated process that captures a psychologist's chosen compliance options and generates needed policies and procedures, noted APA's David Nickelson, PsyD, JD, at the session.
The workbook--made available through the Practice Organization Web site at www.apapractice.org in early April--also offers a resource guide providing links to potential compliance tools, technical reports and "how-to" guides, and will carry continuing-education credits, said Nickelson, assistant executive director of technology policy and projects for the Practice Organization. The Practice Organization has also developed a free primer on the security rule, also available on the Practice Organization Web site.
Complying with the security rule is "just good business," in an age of identity theft and society's reliance on technology, noted presenter Sally Cameron, longtime executive director of the North Carolina Psychological Association (NCPP). Cameron--who along with NCPP member Charles Cooper, PhD, has been helping North Carolina psychologists comply with HIPAA--pointed to some actions psychologists need to take to comply with the rule:
Designate a security officer to assess security risks and other vulnerabilities. "In many cases, that person will be you," said Cameron.
Create a training program to bring administrative staff up to speed on security rule requirements and security policies.
Document everything, including the risk analysis, security policy and procedures, rationale for security choices, security updates and staff training.
Frequently re-evaluate security policies and procedures to ensure continued compliance.
Consult a technology expert, who can help put technical safeguards, such as encryption software, in place.
Presenters emphasized that while meeting the HIPAA Security Rule requirements may seem daunting, the requirements lay out safe computing and other electronic practices and are measures that any business should take to secure its data.
"Finance, banking and other industries are required by law to secure confidential information," added Nickelson. "The security rule extends this trend to health care and provides an opportunity for professional psychology to apply good security practices as well." | <urn:uuid:7dd24c6e-42a6-4774-8f33-dc1f92115dd2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.apa.org/monitor/may05/document.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941128 | 803 | 1.773438 | 2 |
RUSSIA – There is mounting scientific evidence that proves the existence of parallel worlds.
Physicists at Stanford University managed to calculate the hypothetical number of universes that were formed as a result of the Big Bang. According to them, the Big Bang created 101016 universes. It is quite possible, though, that they may exist inside one another, including our planet. Therefore, there is probably another Earth hidden inside planet Earth.
The hollow Earth theory can be traced back to ancient periods of the history of human civilization. Ancient wise men believed that there was a whole underground world with its underground creatures living inside the planet. It may seem to many that it is only a primeval and naïve perception of the structure of the world.
In Ancient Greece, there was a myth about Tartar – the ominous underground world. Philosopher Anaxagoras (5th century A.D) built a model of creation made of the flat earth surrounded by the air sphere and the cloud of ether. He wrote about the existence of the parallel world with its people, cities and even celestial bodies. If planet Earth is the center of the universe, where do these people live? Do they live under the ground?
Hypotheses about the existence of hollow space inside planet Earth appeared later as well. The theory was put forward by Galilei, Franklin and Lichtenberg among others.
In 1818, John Cleves Symmes showered the US Congress, universities and prominent scientists with messages, in which he was trying to prove that the Earth was made of several concentric spheres with openings near the poles.
Soviet academician V. Obruchev put forward a hypothesis about a giant meteorite that rammed into Earth in primeval times. According to him, the meteorite may have broken through the planet’s crust and created hollowness inside.
US researcher Cyrus Teed said that the surface of the Earth might be the interior shell of a sphere. The theory became known as “concave hollow Earth” hypothesis. According to this theory, we all live on the inner shell of the Earth.
Let’s just assume that the underground world exists and that there is someone living there in that world. What may those creatures look like? Can they be the mysterious monsters, the existence or non-existence of which has been perplexing mankind for centuries? | <urn:uuid:ba7f2eff-0c07-4644-a44a-918485eaec17> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://weeklyworldnews.com/aliens/34477/parallel-world-hidden-inside-earth/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=c49b096ccc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958857 | 484 | 3.578125 | 4 |