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More residents using Lafourche libraries
Published: Monday, February 18, 2013 at 8:43 p.m.
Last Modified: Monday, February 18, 2013 at 8:43 p.m.
Last year, the number of Lafourche Parish Public Library System visits, items circulated and people attending programs all increased, a good indication, library officials said, that more residents are taking advantage of their local library and its wealth of resources.
Library users made nearly 324,000 visits to Lafourche Parish’s nine branches in 2012, up more than 19 percent from the Library System’s 2011 total. More than 388,000 items were loaned out last year, everything from books, magazines, DVDs, eBooks and laptop computers — besting 2011’s numbers.
DOWNLOAD FREE MUSIC FROM YOUR LIBRARY
This year looks to be better, officials say, as the Library System is offering additional services and programs to residents. In early February, the Library System unveiled Freegal Music Service, a program that allows those with a library card to download free music ranging from hip-hop and country to pop, classical and more.
You’ll find some of today’s most popular artists and lots of favorites from years past.
Cardholders can download three free songs each week from the Library System’s website at www.lafourche.org. Look for the Freegal Music icon to get started.
All you’ll need is your library card number and a PIN number. Drop by your local Lafourche Parish library to establish a PIN, and call your local branch for help using Freegal, if you need it.
FREE ENGLISH CLASSES
More people — young and old — are attending library programs, with library program attendance topping 111,000 in 2012. From story hour and social media classes to eBooks and exercise programs, the Library System has something for everyone.
Library System staff members work hard to bring new and exciting programs to the library, and library officials said the system is doing more with grant funding than ever before. Staff members are excited about a number of grant awards the Library System has received in the past few months.
Recently, the Library System was named an American Dream Library by the American Library Association.
A literacy initiative for adult English-language learners — the American Dream Starts @ Your Library grant — is a national grant funded by the Dollar General Literacy Foundation. It provides money for libraries to add or expand literacy services in their communities. The Library System was one of 44 libraries to receive the grant out of the hundreds that applied.
The South Lafourche Library — 16241 E. Main St., Cut Off — applied for and received a $7,746 American Dream grant to pay for free English as a Second Language classes this year at the South Lafourche Library; Golden Meadow Library, 1403 N. Bayou Drive; and Larose Library, 305 E. 5th St.
The classes are tentatively set to begin in April. Those interested in attending should call Nadia, who speaks Spanish, at 632-7140.
Residents can learn about our nation’s past and other cultures through grant programs from the Thibodaux and Lockport libraries and other grant programs.
The Thibodaux and Lockport libraries received a Civil War 150 grant through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library of America and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
The program features an interactive display at the Lockport Library, 720 Crescent Ave., about the Civil War, as well as lectures, book discussions, musical performances, craft activities and more at both branches.
Be on the lookout also for new books exploring Islamic culture.
The Thibodaux Library recently won a Muslim Journeys Bookshelf grant.
The bookshelf, which contains more than two dozen books, will hit the shelves at the Thibodaux Library, 705 W. 5th St.; Lockport and South Lafourche libraries.
For information on what your library has to offer you, call your local library branch or visit www.lafourche.org.
Katina Gaudet is the
reference librarian at the
South Lafourche Library.
She can be reached at 632-7140 or firstname.lastname@example.org.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.
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- David Gorniak
- Edinburgh, Scotland
- United Kingdom
Bar Tender/ Night Porter/ Aspiring Writer/ Part time philosopher,
On demand novels
Writing a novel is a daunting task in a market that has heavy competition. To write is to gamble with time and effort because no-one knows whether that time and effort will pay off or whether it will join the big pile of forgotten literary works.
I've always wanted to write a novel but i lacked motivation and confidence as i was put off by all the worries mentioned above. Then one day I let my girlfriend read one of writings and she said that she really liked it and asked me to write a bit a more because she wanted to know where the story was going.
So this gave me an idea; instead of releasing novels as a whole, once they have been completed, writers release their novels in parts and see how much interest they gather up. The more interest a chapter gets, the more people there are who will be willing to pay for the novel and so the more motivated the writer will be.
So instead of write it and lets see who reads it, the idea reverses that; who would read it then write it.
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Pelham Bay Park
Hutchinson River, Long Island Sound bet. Bronc County Line and Middletown Rd., Watt Ave.
Bronx, 10461, 10464, 10464, 10465, 10469, 10475, 10803
Directions via Google Maps
The Daily Plant : Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Sweet Improvements At Sweetgum Playground
On June 16, Parks & Recreation cut the ribbon on the newly named and renovated Sweetgum Playground in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe was joined by State Senator Jeffrey Klein, Council Member James Vacca, Assembly Member Michael Benedetto, Parks Committee Chair of Community Board 10 Virginia Gallagher, Bronx Borough Commissioner Hector M. Aponte, Pelham Bay Park Administrator Margot Perron, and kindergarten students from P.S. 71.
The beautiful Sweetgum Playground, formerly known as Playground Number Two, now boasts many new features including play equipment, a spray shower, a painted games area, benches, fencing and safety surfacing. The playground also benefits from improved landscaping, which softens the perimeter of the grounds and provides extra shade. These improvements, which cost approximately $250,000, were made possible through Mayoral funds.
"We are delighted to celebrate the opening of this beautiful new playground," said Commissioner Benepe. "It is wonderful to see a playground, which opened in the 1930s, be transformed into a wonderful modern space for children to enjoy today."
Once the ribbon was cut it was clear how much happiness the renovations to the Sweetgum Playground would bring. The schoolchildren, wasted no time in enjoying the swings, slides and other features of the new play sets. They were soon joined by Commissioner Benepe and many other park visitors. Later, the spray shower was turned on, which attracted even more visitors to Sweetgum Playground.
Sweetgum Playground is especially notable because of the two towering Sweetgum trees located within the Playground’s gates. The trees can be identified by their star-shaped leaves and prickly hanging fruits or "gumballs." The trees are important to the history of Pelham Bay Park, as the site was once inhabited by the Siwanoy Native Americans. The Siwanoy used to use the balsamic sap that oozed from the "gumballs" as chewing gum and for medicinal purposes.
Today the beautiful trees provide pleasant shade for children who play in the brand new playground. Gummy Bears and pieces of Bubble Gum were handed out to all attendees in honor of the trees that inspired the Playground’s new name.
Pelham Bay Park is New York City’s largest park, with 2,765 acres of land. It includes attractions such as Orchard Beach, bridal trails, and the Pelham and Split Rock Golf Courses. The new Sweetgum Playground is a wonderful addition, offering safety and intimacy within this sprawling park.
Written by Mariel Bronen
QUOTATION FOR THE DAY
"Happiness comes when your work and words
are of benefit to yourself and others."
Siddhartha Gautama Buddha
Directions to Pelham Bay Park
- Request for Proposals Issued for Summertime Concerts at Orchard Beach
- Summer Interns Pitch In For Day Of Service
- Restoring the Orchard Beach Shoreline
- Barbecuing Areas
- Baseball Fields
- Basketball Courts
- Bicycling and Greenways
- Bocce Courts
- Dog-friendly Areas
- Football Fields
- Golf Courses
- Handball Courts
- Hiking Trails
- Historic Houses
- Horseback Riding Trails
- Kayak/Canoe Launch Sites
- Nature Centers
- Roller Hockey
- Running Tracks
- Soccer Fields
- Spray Showers
- Tennis Courts
- Water Fountains
Know when to go:
View upcoming athletic area usage
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The uninvited guest at a holiday feast
Holiday mealtime a boon for bacteria
November 18, 1999
By Cathryn Meurer
ATLANTA (CNN) -- The harried host who picks up turkey and fixings from a caterer would do well to bring home a high-tech food thermometer too, for a delicious holiday meal that doesn't bite back a few hours later as food poisoning.
The safe handling of all foods at a holiday meal, whether home-made or take-out, turkey or squash casserole, is the aim of the International Food Safety Council(IFSC), which is distributing information to restaurants and consumers this fall.
"Handling food safely is especially important during the holidays because food is often prepared in advance and served buffet style," Caitlin Storhaug wrote in a publication from the IFSC.
Bacteria multiply rapidly when food is left at room temperature (40 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit), and Storhaug advises after two hours on a buffet, food should be tossed. Holiday meals, which can be long, multi-course affairs, with diners sneaking back later for seconds, can offer the perfect environment for bacterial growth.
"If in doubt," Storhaug says, "throw it out."
Just about all foods which are reheated, not just stuffing, need to reach a temperature hot enough to kill bacteria. For sauces, custards, and casseroles made with eggs, that's 165 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's where new high-tech food thermometers come in -- checking food temperatures faster than a teen-ager can gobble up sweet-potato pie.
Instant-read thermometers have a slim metal probe which measures food, liquid and even air temperature, in seconds, from 14 to 392 degrees Fahrenheit. They sell for around $20.
A thermometer fork draws rave reviews from the people who run the Meat and Poultry Hotline, at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It's digital display shows the temperature of very thin foods instantly by simply inserting the tines into a hamburger or pork chop, for example.
The USDA reports only 50 percent of cooks actually bother with a thermometer, which the USDA sees as a critical problem, especially for turkey and stuffing.
Stuffing, or dressing, cooked with the delectable juices of a Thanksgiving turkey must reach 165 degrees Fahrenheit to kill bacteria. And that sometimes means dressing needs further cooking after the turkey is done. USDA Food Safety experts say turkey can reach the proper internal temperature of 180 degrees, measured in the innermost part of the thigh, before the stuffing reaches 165 degrees.
Another new gadget useful for cooking turkeys is an oven cord thermometer/timer. Once the sensor is placed in the food, the cook never need open the oven door again until a beep signals that the food is ready. A flat metal cord connects the sensor to a digital display which stays outside the oven.
The USDA gives complete guidance on turkey safety through it's Meat and Poultry Hotline, 1-(800)535-4555, and web site: http://www.fsis.usda.gov/. Among the turkey no-nos: cooking the gobbler below 325 degrees and defrosting the bird on the kitchen counter.
A spectacular holiday meal deserves to be relived with scrumptious leftovers, and the experts say if properly stored, foods can be safely enjoyed for three to four days.
Comfort House: Kitchen thermometers
LATEST FOOD STORIES:
Texas cattle quarantined after violation of mad-cow feed ban
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Purchasing a vehicle is among the greatest opportunities that you experienced. Whether or not your vehicle is actually completely new or even used, you’ll be having to pay lots of money like the cost, the price of energy, upkeep as well as maintenance, as well as your auto insurance. The actual elements previously mentioned allow it to be sensible to safeguard your own expense through environment problems and also the inevitable deterioration which arrives by using it. Purchasing add-ons along with other protecting equipment through dependable businesses such as carwest.com.au is one thing, but there are more factors for you to consider. Below are five tips you can follow to maintain the value of your four-wheeled friend.
1. Normal Upkeep
Among the best methods to keep your car’s worth this to obtain normal upkeep. Including fundamental treatments such as altering your own essential oil, planning an additional vehicle fatigue, motor checks and so on. You have to additionally examine essential things like timing belts, airbags, as well as drinking water sends. Each one of these components perform an intrinsic component for the car’s efficiency. Ensure that you maintain the upkeep report each time a person provide your vehicle with regard to maintenance.
two. Preserve Hygiene
Maintaining your vehicle thoroughly clean can make this appear good as well as razor-sharp. Cleaning your vehicle frequently will keep grime as well as particles away and prevent this through gathering. It will likewise assist you to place any kind of damage such as fresh paint scrapes as well as doorway blemishes that may grow into corrosion places in the event that without treatment. Your own inside is equally as essential, therefore cleansing your vehicle chairs as well as frequently dusting can make your vehicle appear as well as odor great.
3. Paint-less Ding Restore
Nicks could make an impact within exactly how audience view it. That’s the reason fixing from little doorway blemishes, grazes, as well as nicks are essential. Fixing nicks isn’t high of an issue. There are lots of businesses focusing on vehicle repainting that may troubleshoot any kind of ding represents present in your vehicle. Re-spraying a complete entire body solar panel can be quite costly that’s the reason you should safeguard your vehicle through damage all the time.
four. Purchase a Vehicle Include
Departing your vehicle subjected to environmental surroundings can be quite harmful. Purchasing your vehicle an excellent include may proceed quite a distance within safeguarding this in the dangerous sunlight as well as poor climate. Additionally, it retains your vehicle free of chicken excrement along with other animals. Additionally, it helps prevent the actual sun’s ultraviolent sun rays through leading to your own car’s colour in order to diminish as well as supplies discovered within your vehicle such as leather-based as well as plastic material in order to split.
Vehicle Ground Pads as well as Chair Handles
Vehicle ground pads as well as chair handles are essential add-ons which assist safeguard the inside of the vehicle. Chair handles generally are afflicted by scrapes each time a person are available in as well as from your automobile. Ground pads generally are afflicted by trampling as well as require continuous cleaning or even substitutes. The easiest method to safeguard your vehicle would be to purchase inexpensive chair handles as well as replaceable ground pads. Thoroughly clean each supplies as frequently as possible so that your inside may usually appear just like brand new.
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Building a Baby from the Foundation Upwards:
Neurological Issues Can Start From Conception If the Conditions Are Right
Genetics, nutrition, environmental toxins, vaccines, and their combined impact on the immune system, can all play a role in Autism spectrum disorders. Think of it as a pyramid with the child at the top and all the damaging features underneath starting in utero. Some children don’t need vaccines to tip them over the edge if the child was born at the top or near the top of the pyramid to begin with. Other children who are close to the top, all they would need is a major mineral imbalance combined with one or two vaccines to tip them over the edge.
Think about this quote in the United States Senate on May 12, 1999 by Dr. Bonnie Dunbar, a Professor of Immunobiology:
“I would challenge any colleague, clinician or research scientist to claim that we have a basic understanding of the human newborn immune system. It is well established in studies in animal models that the newborn immune system is very distinct from the adolescent or adult. In fact, the immune system of newborns in animal models can easily be perturbed to ensure that it cannot respond properly later in life.”
Children who have gone into an immediate regressive autism after vaccines are the ones who may have been able to cope, and not tipped over the edge, if they had more time to mature their immature immune systems. Others, without vaccines, were just too close to the top of the pyramid at birth or in utero.
Birth Control Pill Use:
Anything that affects hormones enough to stop a lining shedding could cause issues. The use of hormones disrupts mineral balance, and further disturbs the normal running of metabolic pathways. If enough are disturbed, then it could contribute to an unstable foundation for a baby. The pill can strip out magnesium, zinc, B6, folic acid and EFA’s from the body.
The pill can skew the hormone system long-term and changes vascular circulation permanently, and further trashes the body’s supply of magnesium, zinc, B vitamins, folic acid and essential fatty acids. All these things lay the foundation for a pregnancy in which fetal nutrient absorption comes from a deficit position right at the outset.
Dr. Ellen Grant wrote a book called Sexual Chemistry which explains it. She was involved in the original large trials on what the pill does to the body.
…”Our studies in 1981 and 1989 found significantly higher concentrations of copper and cadmium in hair in dyslexic children compared with matched controls.1,2 Sweat zinc was severely deficient in the dyslexic children, being 66% lower than that for control children. However, the control children in 1989 had much lower average zinc level than the children tested for laboratory reference range purposes 10 years before in 1979.2,3 Zinc deficiency allows accumulation of toxic metals which may be important causes of the increase in autism, asthma, dyslexia and hyperactivity in the past few decades.4,5
Biolab Medical Unit offers analyses of all toxic metal levels in blood, metal sensitivity tests and the effects of toxic metal substitution on proteins and some binding sites.6,7 Dr John McLaren- Howard presented the results of testing 61 autistic children at a Biolab Workshop for Doctors in June 2004, as he was attempting to find out which nutritional tests should be recommended. Among the 42 boys and 19 girls most were deficient in zinc and magnesium. Many were also deficient in copper, chromium, manganese, molybdenum and B vitamins. Therefore, essential fatty acids were also likely to be deficient. 16 children had DNA-adducts in leucocytes to malondialdehyde, 12 to cadmium, 9 to nickel. Three of the 61 children had DNA-adducts to mercury and one had DNA- adducts to lead. 37 children had antigliadin IgG antibodies, while 30 children had malabsorption detected by a D-xylose test. Malabsorption was most common in those with Asperger’s type syndrome, 16 out of 18 children.
The zinc and magnesium lowering effects of maternal use of progesterones and oestrogens, parental smoking and alcohol use and parental dental mercury and other dental metal levels like nickel and tin, need to be looked at in larger studies. Mercury is a toxic metal whether it is in dental amalgams or in vaccines. If 5% of autistic children show evidence of signs of mercury exposures, this still means large numbers of children have been adversely affected. Clearly the increasing incidence of childhood diseases needs proper biochemical scientific investigations.”
Toxic metals for vegetable fruit sprays, like Arsenate of copper and Arsenate of Mercury, DDT used to be used. Now, sprays are different, but are they really better? Our stolen future and Chem Trails.
The vaccine becomes the bullet for many children. They start out seemingly healthy, even with perhaps a shaky foundation. But once the bullet (vaccine) is injected, they begin to spiral downwards. Symptoms are pathway dysfunction, not illness.
Diet and Nutrition/Minerals:
Copper and zinc are important because if they are out of sync the enzymes that create neurotransmitters, that the brain cells use to transmit their messages from one brain cell to another, won’t work properly. B6 works with those. Proper balance is what is needed because if you get the copper and zinc right, you can modulate the brains regulation of mood and reaction to stress. These enzymes also need B6; as B6 often helps in treating depression. In women, low zinc and high copper can be linked to ‘rage’ episodes during PMS.
Suphur has a key interaction with selenium. Selenium is good for skin, hair, nails, to build certain amino acids in the cells and brain, and make sulfonated compounds for the joints. When there is a deficiency, there is a reduction in the activity of the enzyme gluthathione peroxidase. This results in reduced immune function, which has its greatest effect on the helper T dependent cells, and production of Ig.M is impaired. IgM is one of the front line Th1 antibodies which are made in the early stages of an infection. Children suffering from malnutrition fail to grow when given a recuperative diet, if it remains selenium deficient because selenium is necessary for protein synthesis. While it protects against the toxic effects of the pollutant cadmium, and mercury from all sources, it also increases the effectiveness of vitamin E, and it reduces the chances of all types of cancer. In communities where selenium intake is low, the cancer rate is high.
Maternal selenium nutrition and neonatal immune system development.
Skeletal muscle disorders associated with selenium deficiency in humans.
Deficiency in selenium or Vitamin E also shows reduced natural killer cell activity. With regard to the enzymes; Glutathione is essential for:
-detoxification and liver function
-effective immune response
-male fertility (low sperm counts)
-blood sugar metabolism
-blood pressure regulation
-inhibition of thrombus formation in diabetes
-prevention of neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson disease, Huntington’s chorea, stroke and brain trauma.
Effective Glutathione is important for T cell proliferation, development of large CD8+ T cells, cytotoxic T cell activity and production of CD16+ natural killer cells. Glutathione protects and repairs liver tissue under severe acute and chronic alcohol exposure.
Selenium protects against the toxic effects of the pollutants cadmium, and mercury. It helps prevent chromosome breakage in tissue culture. It is the basis of the unique enzyme system Glutathione peroxidase, which destroys peroxides before they can attack cellular membranes, while the vitamin E acts within the membrane itself preventing the oxidation of membrane lipids.
When discussing epigenetics; they know demethylation is carried down through the generations and they know it can be reversed.
This is the list of tests a DAN doctor may perform:
*Complete blood count w/ differential and platelet count
*Serum metabolic assay (complete)
*Thyroid profile (T3, T4 and TSH)
*Amino acid profile (plasma)
*Organic acid profile (urine)
*Lactic acid level
*Pyruvic acid level (pyruvate)
*Heavy metal profile (lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium), blood
*Vitamin A level
*Zinc and copper (serum)
*Measles, mumps and rubella antibody IGG titers
*IgG, A, M, E
*T cell function tests
*Myelin basic protein and neural axon filament antibodies
But other minerals should be tested as well such as:
Immunologist have begun to test for a genetic variant in an enzyme called Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) and Glutathione.
METALLOTHIONINE PROTEIN DYSFUNCTION
Diseases that can occur because of MT protein dysfunction include:
· Psoriasis and eczema
· ADD and ADHD
· Schizophrenia and Obsessive Compulsive disorder
· Chronic fatigue syndrome
Metallothionine protein disorder is thought to be a genetic defect involving more than one gene. This disorder results in a decreased ability of the MT protein to function normally. Metallothionine protein helps regulate zinc and copper levels in the blood, withdrawal heavy metals as they enter the body, help development and continued functioning of the immune system, help development and pruning of brain cells, (neurons), help prevent yeast overgrowth in the intestines, aid in the production of enzymes that break down casein and gluten, aid in the production of hydrochloric acid by stomach cells, help taste and texture discrimination by the tongue, and aid in the behavior control and development of memory and social skills.
In 2000, William Walsh, Ph.D. of the Pfeiffer Treatment Center discovered that the majority of autistic patient’s exhibit MT dysfunction and the classic signs of autism can be explained by a MT dysfunction. There are four primary types of MT proteins and each has an important role in the body.
MT-I and II are present in all cells throughout the body. They regulate copper and zinc, are involved in cell transcription, detoxify heavy metals, play a role in the immune function, and are involved in a variety of G.I. tract functions.
MT-III is found primarily in the brain and functions as a gross inhibitory factor in the brain. MT-III is located primarily in the central nervous system with small amounts present in the pancreas and intestines. It plays a major role in the development, organization and programmed death of brain cells.
MT-IV is found in the skin and upper G.I. tract. They help regulate stomach acid pH, taste and texture discrimination of the tongue and help protect against sunburn and other skin traumas.
Deficits in sulfur metabolism
Abnormal liver detoxification
A genetic weakness (C4B null allele) and/or predisposition, combined with one or more of the following:
1) Shortened or absent breast-feeding preventing the full development of transferred cellular immunity. (Fudenberg)
2) Early gluten (usually wheat) introduction prior to one year of age. Wheat has been genetically manipulated in the last 100 years to increase the gluten content.
3) Early use of cow’s milk or casein based formulas. (Allergenic and altered)
4) Immunizations with live viruses, especially the MMR after 1978. There is frequent regression after the MMR vaccine that has been observed and published (Wakefield). Other vaccinations and the resulting effects on interleukin or autoimmunity. (Singh) DPT (especially if whole cell pertussis is used) and HepB (not live viruses) may also play a role in immune alterations.
5) Use of antibiotics and resulting yeast and pathogenic bacteria infection or overgrowth, with resulting immune modification and toxic exposure. (Shaw, Fudenberg, Wuepper)
6) Maternal allergy, chronic fatigue syndrome, or leaky gut problems that caused the child to be pre-sensitized in the womb. (Fudenberg)
7) Leaky gut from any number of the above or also related to parasites or GI infections in the child that allow gluten and casein to leak into the bloodstream. Once in the body, the body alters them into toxic substances. Sucrose (table sugar) also leaks in and it is an abnormal sugar in the blood stream that causes a host of problems.
8) Defect in the detoxification pathway of the brain, Phenol Sulfur-Transferase or PST enzyme defect. Inadequate intake of sulfur compounds. (Rosemary Waring, Birmingham University, England).
9) They develop autoantibodies to Myelin Basic Protein (Singh, Fudenberg, and Gupta) and other brain components. Measles is known to induce MBP antibodies. I’ll talk about this a lot more later.
10) Defective cellular immunity, especially in the NK cell activity towards self and pathogens. (Fudenberg, Gupta). And the probable elevation of Interleukin-2 and 12.
Jeff Bradstreet, M.D., FAAFP
The International Child Development Resource Center
Let’s break each one above down…
1. Breast milk creates the right probiotics which absorb minerals the right way, and provide the foundation for cellular immunity and nutrient absorption. The gut makes up 70 % of the immune system. It also plays a role in e-coli endotoxin production.
2. It has nothing to do with the gluten. Salivary fluid has an enzyme in it, to break down grains when the molar teeth cut. Celiac for example isn’t caused by too much gluten. It’s caused by lack of the enzyme opening the pathway to those with epigenetic susceptibility. Before 1900′s, celiac was pretty much unheard of. More gluten isn’t good for some people.
3. Unpasteurized animal milk worked well versus pasteurized.
4. True, but you only know what you have looked at. What about the others?
5. Antibiotics cause immune modification all on their own, not necessarily as a result of the resulting yeast and pathogenic bacteria infection and overgrowth. What about e.coli?
6. What caused the maternal allergy? If you look at minerals and other, you may be able to eliminate the allergy.
7. Leaky gut would not be a problem if the foundation was laid right and a change in nutrition better understood.
8. If you have an inadequate intake of sulfur compounds and/or an inadequate intake of other minerals such as magnesium, zinc, selenium.
9. That is not the cause, but the end result. The cause needs to be worked out.
10. See # 9.
Fever reducers lower glutathione levels. When glutathione levels are reduced, you increase the level of the hormones. They also suppress the immune system further.
Filed under: Autism News, Questioning the Vaccine Decision | Tagged: autism, babies preconception, birth control pills, chem trails, METALLOTHIONINE PROTEIN DYSFUNCTION, minerals, Neurological Issues, nutrition, selenium, toxins, vaccines | Leave a Comment »
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The tag line for this blog is, "Joining together across Seattle to fight for public schools that deliver academic excellence for all."
But, imagine we are successful. What would that look like?
I would fight strongly any effort to define academic excellence by WASL scores alone, but I recognize and acknowledge the need to measure outcomes (what students can do), and know how difficult and time-consuming that can be to do well in a way that honors individual learning styles and differences.
I think academic excellence can be described, in part, by the range of school offerings or programs. For example, for Seattle schools to be academically excellent, I believe there need to be strong AP offerings, six periods of real classes a day at high school (not credit for helping the gym teacher sort equipment, which is what I have read is currently happening in some schools), rigorous and inspiring music and art classes, challenging hands-on science classes, and more.
Describing academic excellence in terms of what schools offer creates one problem and raises one question. The problem is that, with this kind of definition, a school could offer excellent academic offerings that don't meet the needs of their students. What one student may need to excel academically may not be the same as what another student needs. The question this raises is, should every school try to offer the same types of programs and offerings? Or, given that we are a district that (at least for now) offers school choice, should we be encouraging schools to specialize more?
These are my initial, unpolished thoughts on academic excellence. I would love to hear what others think. We need to know what "academic excellence for all" will look like in order to be able to achieve that goal.
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What's Important in the Financial World (2/22/2013)
Feb 22nd 2013 6:11AM
Updated Feb 22nd 2013 8:20AM
Eurozone Economic Forecast
The European Commission suggests - in a late forecast compared to those of many other economists - that the eurozone economy will shrink in 2013, and the EU economy will tick up by only the slightest. The news is proof once again that Europe has not found any concrete and successful means to escape the gravity of the last recession and the austerity budgets that have hurt employment and gross domestic product among almost all member nations. The EC report said:
The weakness of economic activity towards the end of 2012 implies a low starting point for the current year. Combined with a more gradual return of growth than earlier expected, this leads to a projection of low annual GDP growth in 2013 of 0.1% in the EU and a contraction of -0.3% in the euro area. Quarterly GDP developments are somewhat more dynamic than the annual figures suggest, and GDP in the fourth quarter of 2013 is forecast to be 1.0% above the level reached in the last quarter of 2012 in the EU, and 0.7% in the euro area
The 2013 forecast is wishful thinking, unless something profound happens to radically change the factors that have kept the region in recession.
German Business Confidence
The assessment of Germany's prospects, as measured by businesses there, took an unexpected jump just after the government announced the poor export numbers of late last year. Businesses must believe that something about their prospects will change, even though the balance of the region is weak financially, and German consumers are not consuming anywhere near record levels. Perhaps there is hope that recoveries in the United States, China and the developing word will help. Ifo reports:
The Ifo Business Climate Index for German industry and trade rose significantly by over three points in February. This represents its greatest increase since July 2010. Satisfaction with the current business situation continued to grow. Survey participants also expressed greater optimism about their future business perspectives. The German economy is regaining momentum.
Payroll Tax Effect
The Wall Street Journal has pulled together the wisdom of businesses, business trade groups and economists and come to conclusion that higher payroll taxes and gasoline prices have undercut a consumer recovery. The Journal reports:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Thursday joined a parade of retailers, restaurants and consumer-goods companies worried about the economic impact of the recently restored federal payroll tax that has left Americans with less money to spend.
The world's largest retailer, Burger King Worldwide Inc., Kraft Foods Group Inc. and others are lowering forecasts and adjusting sales and marketing strategies, expecting consumers with smaller paychecks to dine out less and trade down to less expensive purchases.
The expiration of the payroll tax cuts that knocked 2% off consumers' take-home pay is having an impact, these companies say. It will ding a household with $65,000 in annual income $1,300 this year, and shift $110 billion overall out of consumers' hands, estimates Citigroup.
Filed under: 24/7 Wall St. Wire, Market Open
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Magical Training Programmes
by Phil Hine (1998)
Some magical groups have training programmes which new or prospective members are expected to work through. Sometimes this is done within the context of a group setting - some magical groups have what are sometimes known as ‘Outer Court Working Groups’ which are specifically orientated to magical training; or, as is often the case when prospective members do not live within commuting distance of the group they are joining, the training is mediated through postal (or email) correspondence. In either case, the person undergoing the training programme will have a mediator - sometimes known as a mentor - who provides support, advice, and assesses their progress with the training material and overall suitability for becoming a full member of the group in question. The individual’s work with the training programme, be it in a training group or through correspondence, will usually be supplemented by occasional one-to-one meetings with their mediator.
Why do Groups Use Programmes?
Formal training programmes are usually (but not exclusively) a feature of the larger magical organisations such as orders or guilds. Having a requirement that all new or prospective members work through a formal training programme ensures that, prior to becoming full members of the group, candidates acquire a thorough grounding in the magical techniques and theory - what constitutes for that group the baseline body of knowledge and its application - relevant to the group. For example, in the late 1970’s, after meeting two people who were members of a magical order which was oriented towards Qabalah and Enochian magic, I applied for membership with the order and as a preliminary, was asked to complete their ‘outer court probationary’ training programme - a year’s correspondence course in basic Qabalistic magic. My responses to the course material could not have been particularly stunning as I was not invited to join the order as a neophyte - although by the time I had done the course, I had more-or-less decided that my interests lay in other directions. Some groups disseminate their basic training programme through books - Peter J. Carroll’s Liber Null & Psychonaut (Samuel Weiser) for example, details the Liber MMM training programme which is a prerequisite for gaining admission to the Illuminates of Thanateros magical order, whilst Edred Thorsson’s The Nine Doors of Midgard does the same for the Runegild organisation which he founded. Hence a magical training programme prepares the candidate for further exploration of a particular magical system or approach (such as Qabalah or the Runes) and ensures that they have both a theoretical and practical grasp of the basic magical skills, themes and symbol systems used by the group. In undertaking to complete the programme, the candidate is demonstrating not only a commitment to the group, but also a commitment to their own magical development.
The Pros & Cons of Programmes
Training Programmes have both advantages and disadvantages. A general advantage of training programmes is that they provide, both for the group and the prospective member, a period of mutual checking-out. The person undergoing the training programme will form impressions about the group through their contact with their mediators, and vice versa. Of course, this can quickly become a disadvantage if the candidate forms a poor impression of their mediator, or the mediator doesn’t get on with the candidate. If the candidate’s only contact with the group is through a single person, then they are more likely to judge the overall group on the basis of that person’s behaviour. Equally, if the mediator takes a dislike to the person they are training, the mediator can block their admission to the group.
A related issue is that of inflexibility on the part of mediators over the application of the training programme to individual candidates. Training programmes work best when they are tailored to meet the needs of the people who are working through them. This is fine if the candidate lacks any prior magical experience - the group’s formal training programme might be just what they need. However, when a candidate does have a magical ‘track record’, it seems to me to be pointless to foist upon them a training programme of magical exercises that they are demonstrably familiar with. I once mentored a candidate for a group where the training programme included basic yoga-type exercises (breath control, basic asanas, etc.). This particular candidate was teaching yoga at the time, so instead of insisting that he redo stuff he was already teaching other people, I asked him to run some yoga sessions for the training group and replaced that section of the programme with something else which he could get his teeth into.
Some negotiation, therefore, is useful. If nothing else, this shows that the mediator cares about the candidate and values their magical experience prior to their membership of the present group. It’s important however, that if the candidate tells the mediator they can do something or are familiar with a particular technique (and therefore don’t want to spend some months going over the basics again) that they be able to demonstrate such proficiency to the mediator - perhaps by allowing the mediator access to their magical diaries, or, as in the above instance, agreeing to lead a group training session in that area.
The Mediator as Ambassador
For the group, mediators are often the ‘first contact’ a candidate has with them. Prior to this, the candidate will only have had the impressions - gained from books or articles in magazines, other people who are in the group, or whatever ‘myths’ are circulating about the group in the general occult milieu - so it becomes important that mediators present an accurate ‘picture’ of what the group is about. Mediators who don’t answer letters, return phone calls or email, or who invite prospective candidates to meetings and then fail to turn up for them are unlikely to impress candidates, particularly if their expectations of the group are high in the first place. It’s not uncommon for mediators to have the job thrust upon them purely because they are the closest group member to where a candidate lives. Mediators need to be aware that they are, in some ways, ‘ambassadors’ for the group and that as they are the candidate’s main reference point, the candidate is likely to judge the group’s effectiveness in terms of their behaviour and effectiveness towards them. To be effective, mediators need to know what is expected of them when they assume that role. Mediators also need to know that they are supported by the group and that they can turn to other members for assistance in dealing with any problems that arise in respect to the candidates they are dealing with. This may require some training for prospective mediators. Knowing how to do something oneself is not a guarantee of being able to teach someone else how to do it too. A useful approach for mediators is that, just as one of the common requirements for training programmes is that the candidate keep a magical diary of their progress (which the mediator can look over), the mediator too can keep a record (or at least notes) on their contacts with each candidate - such as problems arising and problems solved, how their feelings towards the candidate change, and what is generally learnt from the mediating experience. It’s important to bear in mind that no matter how much experience one has with guiding candidates through a programme, each new candidate the mediator deals with is as much an opportunity for learning new approaches as it is for the candidate. Keeping some form of record in this way can help a lot in clarifying issues for the mediator - particularly when it comes to assessing the candidates’ overall performance and assessing one’s own performance as a mediator. It is also very useful to keep a record if one is running training group sessions as a diary of work done in sessions can help the mediator assess which exercises and experiments work, and which don’t. Thus evaluation becomes a two-way process.
Good assessment procedures are, in my view, essential to running training groups or moderating training courses. Good assessment however, need not be complicated or involve horribly complicated forms to fill out. The three basic forms of assessment are:
Asking for feedback (both verbal and written)
Reviewing Magical Diaries
Asking trainees to produce something for the group to perform (i.e. a Ritual, pathworking, or a ‘how-to’ session), thereby demonstrating their knowledge of, and practical application of a technique.
All of these are very simple, yet all of them can give the mediator a great deal of information about the candidate, and how they are dealing with the groups’ work.
Staying the Course
It’s not unusual for formal magical training programmes to have a relatively high drop-out rate. Candidates may find that during a programme, their interests change, their interest in the group wanes, their personal circumstances change so they cannot complete the course, they decide to go off and start their own group (sometimes as a consequence of some personal magical revelation), or suddenly decide that magic is ‘evil’ and become a born-again Christian! If, as is so often said, magic is about producing a change in circumstances, we should perhaps expect this sort of thing, and perhaps to applaud it. If someone drops out of a training programme doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on the programme or their mediator, but it’s a good idea, nonetheless, to try and find out why they’ve done so. It’s not always possible to do so, but dropouts can leave mediators wondering if it’s something they’ve said or done. Equally, when someone (for whatever reason) drops out from a magical training programme, it should not be taken as an indication that they are an abject failure both as a person and a magician.
"dear , I’m sorry to have to inform you "
It does of course occur that not everyone who begins a magical training programme is found to be suitable for full inclusion in the group concerned. There are myriad reasons why this is so, but what it comes down to is that the individual has to be informed as to why he or she isn’t going to be admitted into the group. Or not, as is so often the case. Writing ‘rejection letters’ is difficult, particularly if you can’t quite put into words why you don’t think the candidate is suitable or perhaps that you think the person is clearly bonkers but don’t quite want to state this quite so boldly. Difficult as this is, I do feel that some kind of ‘closure’ contact is more useful than simply ‘dropping’ the person concerned and hoping they’ll pick up the hint. Whilst some people do ‘get the hint’, others may well persist in their application to the group through other channels. In large groups - particularly those consisting of local sub-groups, it may be necessary to inform others about the decision not to admit someone to the group, if only to prevent them from getting in via another sub-group in the organisation. In these circumstances, mediators may need support from more experienced group members and clear lines of communication to ensure that the mediator’s decision is made known, and supported by the rest of the group.
What happens after Completing the Programme?
On completion of the programme, (assuming the candidate hasn’t dropped out halfway through it), the candidate will expect to be formally invited (or initiated) into the group as a full member. Some groups, as a precursor to this momentous event, invite candidates to a meeting so that other members can have a look at them. This can be useful when a candidate’s only contact with a group has been through one person or a local sub-group. Ideally, the candidates’ mediator should be present at such a meeting, to present an overall assessment of the candidate - perhaps countering other member’s initial impressions, which will tend to be based on how that person conducts themselves at the meeting.
Magical training programmes are useful for candidates when:
They provide the impetus and drive to work through exercises and techniques which the candidate might otherwise have lacked.
The candidate feels that the programme is relevant to their needs for magical experience and formal training.
The programme is reinforced by support from a mediator who gives useful suggestions, advice, and is open to negotiation over the formal content of the programme, time taken to complete it, etc.
The candidate has recourse to a support system so that, if for example, they find they do not get on with their mediator, they can turn to someone else for support.
The candidate’s interest in the long-term goal of the programme (i.e. being admitted to the group) is maintained.
Magical training programmes are more effective (in terms of the group’s needs) when:
The programme acts as a test of commitment on the part of the candidate - in terms of both commitment to the group and to his or her own magical development. The group needs the candidate to demonstrate that they are serious (as serious as existing group members feel themselves to be) about magic.
The programme demonstrates the commitment of the group to the individual - through the support given by mediators, paying attention to the candidates’ needs etc.
Mediators are supported by the group. This requires some kind of support system whereby mediators can discuss problems which arise from their interaction with candidates - which can range from interpersonal differences to exchanging information about areas of technique and theory. This might include periodic reviews where mediators meet to discuss issues, or training sessions for mediators.
The programme is periodically reviewed and fine-tuned.
The programme provides an opportunity for the group to assess not only the candidate’s magical competency but also how they will ‘fit in’ with the rest of the group in terms of personality - over time.
The programme provides an opportunity for those moderating it to acquire new skills & abilities.
The training programme reflects the values and skills which the group is looking for in members.
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- •Contact us
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© The Financial Times Ltd 2013 FT and 'Financial Times' are trademarks of The Financial Times Ltd.
The US presidential election has heightened interest in Steve Jarding’s Running for Office and Managing Campaigns course at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, which is taken by Harvard Business School students on the joint MBA/masters in public policy.
Mr Jarding, who has run a similar elective for Iese MBA students in Madrid for the past four years, has managed and worked on campaigns for Democratic party senate and presidential candidates including Bob Kerrey, Mark Warner, John Edwards and Jim Webb – and was described by the New York Times as a “smart and aggressive tactician” who wins races in places he is not supposed to.
Why do business students want to study campaign management?
Because it matters. Public service is important and as crazy as politics can be, it’s the vehicle that drives you to the place you can govern.
Campaign management can be the Wild West of management and it’s a pretty ugly profession: 18-hour days, seven days a week. But it’s how you make a difference. I believe I had a significant role in helping Jim Webb win in 2006 the seat that swung the Senate to Democrats. That sounds arrogant but you have to believe you can make a difference.
You may not like the political system but candidates don’t govern. I tell students it’s akin to two islands: the candidate island and the elected official island. Unfortunately, the water between those islands is more like a cesspool and you have to jump in if you want to govern. But hopefully I instil in my students the importance of values, so when they swim through that dirty water they don’t forget who they are. My role is to show students a path to victory and let them decide on the variables.
Do students want to run for office?
Yes, even those from the MBA track. Some students disenfranchise themselves, thinking they have to be wealthy or that they don’t know enough policy. So we try to demystify some of it. For example, you need to know only a little about everything. If you’re not a good speaker, we can teach you communication. If you have skeletons in the closet – we can show you how to address those.
How is the course structured?
We first ask what does public service mean to you? And why would you run? Then we examine how to know your district and not just the stats. You need to know voters’ fears and insecurities. You need to find what families in your district are talking about at their kitchen tables. If you can tap into those, you are more likely to sell your product, your candidacy, to them.
Then we launch into setting up a campaign plan – how do you raise money, how do you do opposition research, what consultants do you hire, what’s your policy position, how do you set up a policy team – before looking at get-out-the-vote techniques.
Any successful alumni?
I have a student who was elected to represent Delaware, two just elected to parliament in Switzerland and one who helped implement the winning campaign plan for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in Spain. I have another in Asia who plans to run for prime minister and I believe he will win, as he was a terrific student.
I’m the biggest cynic in the world about politics until I get into class and teach these students. Then I realise we’re going to be fine. If this course can create better leaders for the US and around the world, we’ll have a better world.
Why don’t other business schools offer campaigning courses?
I think some schools believe their students only want to go out and make money. However, you don’t have to devote your whole career to politics. You can work in politics for 10 years and then go back into business. My experience of business school students is that while they want to make money, they also understand their role in the world and that business and government depend on each other. If business schools could demystify the world of politics, why wouldn’t we want our best students to consider political careers?
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013. You may share using our article tools.
Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
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New isolator and disposable technologies address cost, containment and cGMP requirements and, as the technologies are further
refined, they will play a greater role in the future of pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Recent trends facing the pharmaceutical industry pose numerous challenges to manufacturers. Large and small companies focused
on both small molecule and biological therapies must conduct operations in accordance with cGMPs and protect their employees
and the environment from exposure to the increasing number of highly potent actives being developed today. At the same time,
cost control has now more than ever before become a primary issue for all players in the industry.
Equipment manufacturers have responded to the changing conditions with the introduction of technologies that require lower
capital investment, provide improved efficiencies and the enhanced containment levels necessary for potent substances. Isolated
systems and the availability of a wide range of disposables with applicability from lab to commercial scale, and throughout
the entire production process from reaction to final filling and packaging, are helping to dramatically improve operating
efficiencies (and thus reducing costs) while increasing employee protection.
A recent conference organised by the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE) at Bosch Packaging Technology
in Waiblingen (Germany) focused on these issues. Speakers from both pharmaceutical and CMOs exchanged information on technical
approaches to containment design. They also discussed key trends in high containment, including protection of employees, avoiding
crosscontamination, cleaning processes and new equipment options for filling operations.
The containment conundrum
The need for a better understanding of high containment is driven by the rapid growth of the pharmaceutical market. Just 10
to 15 years ago, only a small fraction of drugs were classified as highly potent compounds. Today, that percentage has been
multiplied many times over and will continue to grow as highly potent compounds are developed to treat chronic heart disease,
musculoskeletal problems, central nervous system disorders and other health problems, as well as cancer. With highly potent
drugs, much less active ingredient is required in the final formulation, which leads to cost savings for manufacturers. A
rising interest in personalised medicine is also leading to the development of targeted therapies, which often require highly
Working with potent compounds presents a different set of manufacturing challenges, though. Although these drugs can be highly
effective at fighting disease, they can pose a real threat to healthy people and thus present a heightened exposure risk,
leading to the need for higher containment levels, which in turn require higher investment costs compared with non-potent
drugs. Smaller market sizes for these specialised products means that most manufacturers need to produce multiple products
in a given facility. GMP requirements for cleaning validation of systems can be time consuming and add significant cost too.
Isolating the problem
Approaches to containment of highly potent drugs are evolving — as attendees at the ISPE conference learned. At the conference,
attendees recognised that over the past several years there has been an increase in attention paid to operator and environmental
safety at the development and production stages within the pharma industry, with an emphasis on equipment engineering as the
Early containment programmes focused on personal protection for the operators, according to Dr Bernd Mümmler, Director of
Pharmaceutical Production for contract manufacturer Excella. "Now we have a three-step approach, and personal protective equipment
is the third line of defence, serving as a back-up only to equipment design and use of specifically adapted procedures."
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Research is an important aspect of an undergraduate education in physics and astronomy, and therefore our curriculum includes courses to encourage physics majors to conduct undergraduate research.
Second Class physics majors are required to take two one-hour courses during which they have the opportunity to work with faculty on an independent research project. At the end of the semester, the project is documented in detail and presented orally to the department, giving students experience in writing scientific papers and in giving oral presentations.
The department also encourages physics majors to attend conferences and present their research results. For seniors, a senior thesis is available as an option. Some research topics include:
- Astronomical Research
- Research in Thin Films
- Research in Optics
- Sonoluminescence Experiment
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Email Checker - Validate & Check Email with Email Verifier
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| 0.904935
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| 1.546875
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A few days ago I was in Haiti. We traveled in public transportation, a small pickup truck called a “tap tap” with a wooden passenger compartment built onto the truck bed.
Our “tap tap” was not up to the task of pulling some of the steep grades in the mountains and on several occasions we had to hop out and push. Unloaded, the driver would creep to the top of the mountain and wait for us. Invariably, I arrived huffing and foot sore. But this is Haiti. And I was having a blast.
WIFI in the mountains
One night we turned from a paved road onto a nearly trackless path that wound upward. In the dark it looked more like a rutted, rocky wash than a road. We got out and pushed often. Walking on the rocks and stepping across the gouges cut by water was difficult by flashlight. Eventually, we arrived at the grounds of the Haitian Artisans for Peace International (HAPI), a group providing women artisans with training to make and sell craft goods.
After a good night’s sleep and a pleasant breakfast outside, four children settled in at the large table under the shelter of the sleeping quarters. They were on break from school. They carried a laptop and a tablet. They began to surf the internet, play games and eventually play YouTube videos.
One little girl was proficient at a tablet game that required considerable dexterity and quickness. Another was intent on a children’s website. Eventually they both pulled down a YouTube video of a little girl singing a children’s song in French. It was a circular tune. Each time it repeated, they changed gestures, facial expressions and body movements.
It was a memorable scene. In a place where physical access is difficult, wifi signals, beamed across the mountain and pulled down to computers powered by solar energy, were connecting these children to the outside world. They don’t yet have computers in their schools, but they are coming. Meanwhile, The Haitian Artisans for Peace International is installing a community technology center that will make it possible for local people to use computers in a cyber cafe.
Across Haiti, community-based information communication technology (ICT) centers are being installed. United Methodist Communications is a member of a partnership working toward this goal.
The little girls I saw in Haiti are ahead of the curve. Widespread access to wifi across the country, as in many other parts of the world, hasn’t happened yet. But it’s no longer something in the distant future. Low cost, low wattage computers powered by solar energy, impervious to sand, salt and humidity, along with durable “ruggedized” tablets are being manufactured now for global markets. My hunch is they will be ubiquitous before long.
Technology and Education
In the U.S., digital tools have entered the educational mainstream and they are radically affecting how we go about our lives daily. Cellphones made it possible for Africa to leapfrog over the technology barriers of landline communication. Asia is leading the world in digital technology. The process isn’t slowing, it’s speeding up.
While it’s ironic that it’s easier to reach out to the world from a mountainside in Haiti than it is to get to a place on the mountainside, that’s the reality. It’s happening. The digital future is becoming the digital present. And as the transition takes place lives will be changed. The world will continue to shrink. New possibilities and potential will be presented.
As I watched the little girls at HAPI, I realized I was looking at the future in the present tense.
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Alternatively, the disappearance of an open platform could spell the end of DRM technology altogether, at least for digital music. Since I believe strongly that the market in the end must and will be based on interoperable digital formats, if DRM is used to erect barriers to that goal, then there is no question it will be swept aside, and the industry may end up with what many have believed was the obvious choice from the beginning: open MP3 files.
Either way, Napster has the tools in place to adapt to whichever way the environment evolves and will remain committed to the common-sense goal of helping to shape a music industry that actually benefits consumers over the long-term.
Napster has bowed to the inevitable and stripped away the DRM from its entire catalogue of tracks, meaning music purchased through the service is Mac, iPod and iPhone compatible for the first time. The service is offering six million tracks, free of usage limitations, in high-quality 256kbps MP3 format.
(For an interesting exercise – check out the difference in tone between the Macworld (US) story and this one – the US one reads much more as a “Napster vs. Apple” tale. Or maybe that’s just me.
Both stories point out that the significant thing here is that Napster has apparently convinced all of the major labels to take part, including Sony-BMG, something Apple has been unable to do.
Napster’s subscription service continues, with a slightly higher price tag. The DRM-free option does not apply to the subscription service, only to songs purchased individually.
And shifting gears – from the MIT chapter of Students for Free Culture (freeculture.org) comes a fairly awesome research project – Youtomb.
From the project –
…YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.
And a little further down – they say that they became interested in the issue after YouTube announced that the takedown process would be automated. The students wondered if this would lead to collateral damage and take-downs of videos that should fall under fair use or that should not have received any scrutiny at all.
You can’t watch the videos anymore – and the site makes it pretty clear that this is an informational/research project only that’s trying to see what kinds of videos are being challenged and to see if there are any patterns to be found. So it’s kind of interesting to look at the comments on the TechCrunch story about it where it’s being discussed more like it’s just another startup.
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|Since getting involved in the book business a few years ago I've given a lot of thought to the clever German bookmaker and inventor Johannes Gutenberg, who helped make our modern book business possible. Can you imagine what it would be like if every single copy of your favorite books were still being printed by hand, by monks using fancy quill pens to form each letter of every word carefully on thick sheets of parchment?
The making of books was so slow back before Gutenberg's day in the 1400s that the average book could cost you three months wages. If it took three-months wages to buy a book today can you imagine what a dent that would put in Border's and every other bookseller’s bottom line.
On the other hand, from the author's perspective, there were so few books being hand-printed and sold back then that you could probably get atop the bestseller list with total sales of maybe three or four books.
Those who claimed to know such things say Gutenberg developed the first method of using movable type and the printing press, which, they say, he fashioned from a wine press. Considering how many writers over the years have shown a fondness for the grape, it's a little ironic that the first European printing press would have that grape-printing press connection.
But historians have since learned that movable type printing and other popular things like pasta and fireworks were known to the Chinese several centuries before Johnny Gutenberg got in the business.
In fact, a printed book dating from about 868 AD has been discovered in China with the dated bookstore’s receipt still in it. At least that’s what they claim.
Some historians say Gutenberg's main contribution to the printing process was the invention of movable type. But, here again, we’ve since learned that the Chinese beat him to the punch. Movable type was invented in China around the 11th century. His original type was made of earthenware, which is great material for coffee mugs but it proved to be less than ideal for printing type. Like many humans in the printing business, earthenware just couldn’t take the pressure.
So, if Johnny didn't invent movable type or the printing press, what DID Johnny do? Well, he undoubtedly ate a lot of wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut and also made a lot of important improvements to the materials used in printing, like metals and ink.
Gutenberg developed metal alloys used for making printing type and he found a way to make molds for casting blocks of type precisely and accurately. He also came up with an oil-based printing ink that was better than any before it.
Once he'd done all these things he retrofitted the old wine press and began printing books faster and cheaper than anyone before him. And for that people like me are very grateful.
Like others in the book business who followed him Gutenberg never managed to make a lot of money. I like to think that I am following in that noble tradition, although I'm not doing that badly, thank you very much.
So now, I'd like to raise an earthenware mug of grape juice to the great inventor - Johannes Gutenberg - and his wine-stained printing press.
Oh, and one more thing - wanna buy a book - cheap?
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Ever wonder why your students aren’t springing for the green beans, tofu, and spinach salad you so conscientiously offer at lunch? No, the answer isn’t, “Kids don’t like vegetables.” (Although that’s not a bad guess.) Maybe it has more to do with how and where you display the food in your schools’ cafeterias.
Skeptical? Then look at the “Op-Chart” in Friday’s New York Times, which shows how two Cornell Professors greatly increased the intake of all things green and healthy by making some simple changes to the food line. One example: “Moving the chocolate milk behind the plain milk led students to buy more plain milk.”
Is school technology worth it? That’s a loaded question, perhaps, because even instructional technology gurus — especially technology gurus — stress that it’s what you do with the technology, not simply whether or not you have it. Still, Amanda Ripley’s piece in Slate (which I found via the commentary of education blogger Joanne Jacobs) underscores that point by noting that schools in some high-performing nations (Finland and South Korea) make do with some pretty traditional tools.
Some interesting comments follow on Jacobs’ blog, including this perceptive one by “Dave.”
“A successful school is a great thing, but the article strongly suggests that low-tech is the secret, when I would say that time spent and parental involvement are the things making these examples successful.
Jacobs has another interesting post about the ironically named Liberty High School in Virginia, which barred students from taping their mouths shut to protest abortion. She says it appears to be a violation of Tinker vs. Des Moines the famous First Amendment case that upheld the right of students to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. She also notes that students have done the same thing during the Day of Silence Protest to support gay students.
Maybe. But you could make the case that taping one’s mouth changes the dynamics of the classroom think of the impact on a classroom discussion — in a fundamental way that adversely affects the education of other students.
That said, I think it’s important for students to be able to express themselves on important issues in school. Seems like a case you could argue both ways.
Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor
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Some key events in General Motors' history:
Sept. 16, 1908 - General Motors Company founded by William C. Durant, incorporating Buick Motor Co. Oldsmobile joins GM in November.
1909 - GM sells 25,000 cars and trucks. Acquires Cadillac for $5.5 million. Also purchases GMC, AC spark plug.
1910 - Durant brings the Champion ignition and other companies into GM. Sales rise 60 percent, but earnings lag. Durant is ousted by bankers as company sinks into debt.
1911 - Electric self-starter first appears on a Cadillac on 1912 model.
1915-16 - GM incorporated as General Motors Corp. Durant, after founding company that builds Chevrolets, regains control.
1917-19 - GM shifts most truck production to war effort. GM Acceptance Corp. (GMAC) is established in 1919 to finance car and truck sales.
1920 - Durant resigns, later files personal bankruptcy and dies running bowling alleys.
1920s - GM creates product policy aiming Buick, Pontiac, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile and Cadillac at five different groups of buyers.
1921 - GM accounts for 12 percent of U.S. car market.
1923 - Alfred P. Sloan named president and chief executive.
1925 - GM acquires Vauxhall Motors Ltd. of Great Britain. Also establishes operations in Germany, France, Argentina and Brazil.
1929 - GM acquires Adam Opel AG of Germany.
1937 - Violent sit-down strikes by GM hourly workers in Flint, Mich., shake company, lead to United Auto Workers representation.
1941 - GM market share grows to 41 percent. Air conditioning first offered in Cadillacs.
1942 - Civilian auto production halted and plants turned to war effort.
1945-46 - Workers strike for 113 days.
1948 - First automobile fins unveiled, on a Cadillac. First V8 engines introduced on Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs.
1949 - After purchase of National City Lines of Los Angeles, GM accused of buying streetcar companies since 1920s and replacing them with bus systems. GM is convicted just once, of conspiracy in the Los Angeles case.
1954 - GM's U.S. market share reaches 54 percent. Company makes 50 millionth car.
1956 - Sloan retires as chairman.
1959-60 - Reacting to invasion of small European cars, GM introduces Chevrolet Corvair. Car later attacked by Ralph Nader, who wrote book "Unsafe at Any Speed" that led to congressional auto safety hearings.
1979 - GM's U.S. employment peaks at 618,365, making it the largest private employer in the country. Worldwide employment is 853,000. Decade features sales decline, recession, Arab oil embargo and gains by Japanese automakers.
1980 - Roger B. Smith named chairman. GM loses more than $750 million as car and truck sales plunge 26 percent.
1981 - GM consolidates truck, bus and van operations. Auto workers bash Japanese cars with sledge hammers. Company earns $333.4 million on $62.7 billion in revenue.
1983 - GM and Toyota Motor Corp. of Japan form joint venture to build cars at a GM-owned plant in Fremont, Calif. Smith announces Saturn project to fight Japanese cars. GM makes $3.7 billion.
1984 - GM overhauls North American organization; acquires Electronic Data Systems Corp., owned by Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, for $2.5 billion. Earnings rise to $4.5 billion on revenue of $84.9 billion.
1985 - Company forms new Saturn Corp. subsidiary. GM acquires Hughes Aircraft Co. for $5 billion. GM makes $4 billion.
1986 - GM announces plans to close 11 U.S. plants. Employment grows to 877,000 as earnings fall to $3.9 billion. After infighting, Perot resigns from board and gets $700 million in severance.
1987 - GM and UAW reach contract prohibiting closure of a plant unless its product sales fall. Earnings fall to $3.6 billion.
1988 - Earnings rise to $4.6 billion and revenue hits $123.6 billion. Employment drops to 766,000.
1989 - GM complies with federal regulations and equips about 15 percent of fleet with driver's air bags, blames devices for boosting car prices. Profits fall to $4.2 billion.
1990 - GM and Saab-Scania AB of Sweden form joint venture to make cars in Europe. Smith retires as chairman, succeeded by President Robert Stempel. GM launches Saturn, takes $2.1 billion charge for four plant closings, and profits fall to $102 million as auto sales plummet.
1991 - Company loses industry record $4.45 billion. Stempel announces GM will close 21 plants over the next few years and eliminate 9,000 salaried and 15,000 hourly jobs in 1992, in addition to layoffs at shuttered plants.
1992 - Board strips some of Stempel's authority. Stempel later resigns, saying rumors about his future compromised his ability to lead. Jack Smith gets title of chief executive officer and outside director John Smale is named chairman.
1996 - GM spins off Electronic Data Systems as a separate company.
1997 - GM sells defense electronics business of Hughes Electronics to Raytheon and merges Hughes' auto parts business with Delphi Automotive Systems (now Delphi Corp.).
1998 - Strikes at two Michigan parts plants shut down almost all North American production.
1999 - Delphi is spun off as a separate company. GM purchases rights to the Hummer brand from AM General.
2000 - President Rick Wagoner replaces Smith as CEO. GM cuts 10 percent of white-collar employment.
2002 - GM spends $251 million on 42 percent stake in South Korea's bankrupt Daewoo Motor and names it GM Daewoo Auto & Technology Co. Stake later increased to 51 percent.
2003 - GM sells defense unit to General Dynamics Corp. for $1.1 billion and sells 20 percent stake in Hughes Electronics to News Corp. for $3.1 billion.
2004 - Last model year for Oldsmobile.
2006 - About 47,600 GM and Delphi hourly workers take buyout or early retirement offers. GM investor Kirk Kerkorian suggests alliance with Nissan and Renault, which GM's board examines and rejects; Kerkorian sells much of his stake. GM sells 51 percent stake in GMAC Financial Services to group led by Cerberus Capital Management LP for $14 billion.
2007 - GM loses $38.7 billion, including $39 billion third-quarter charge for unused tax credits. It's the largest annual loss in auto industry history. GM reaches historic contract with United Auto Workers that shifts billions in retiree health care expenses to union-administered trust. Company agrees to pay $33.7 billion into trust. Contract also lets company pay some new hires $14 per hour. U.S. market share is 23.7 percent. GM sells Allison Transmission to The Carlyle Group and Onex Corp. for $5.6 billion.
2008 - Gas prices hit $4 per gallon and truck sales plummet. GM announces plan to close four pickup and sport utility vehicle factories, plans to shed 8,350 jobs. Hummer brand put up for sale. By fall, executives begin asking congressional leaders for aid. GM and Chrysler talk about a merger, but talks die down as both companies' sales continue to fall on U.S. and worldwide recession woes. By December, GM tells Congress it needs $18 billion to stay afloat. It receives $13.4 billion, racks up a $30.9 billion annual loss and burns through $19.2 billion.
2009 - The Obama administration takes office in January. On Feb. 17, GM says it will need a total of $30 billion and its Saab unit files for bankruptcy in Sweden. In its restructuring plan presented to the U.S. government, GM say it will only keep Saturn running through 2011, but it's open to the possibility of spinning off the money-losing brand to retailers or investors. Discussions are ongoing.
March 30 -- President Barack Obama — a day after firing CEO Rick Wagoner — tells GM it hasn't done enough to restructure and gives the company until June 1 to make more aggressive cuts. Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson takes over as CEO. Board member Kent Kresa becomes interim chairman.
April 27 -- GM asks 90 percent of its bondholders to participate in a debt-for-equity swap to rid the company of $24 billion by giving them 225 shares for every $1,000 in bond for a combined 10 percent stake in the company. Existing shareholders would end up with 1 percent of the company following the issuance of 62 billion new shares and a 100-for-1 reverse stock split. GM also says it will end the Pontiac line.
May 7 -- GM reports a first quarter loss of $6 billion, with revenue falling by more than half.
May 15 -- GM says it will end contracts with about 1,100 dealers.
May 26 -- UAW agrees to job cuts, 14 plant closures, and a 20 percent equity stake in the company to cover retiree health care costs. Members are expected to vote on the changes by the end of the week.
May 27 -- GM says debt exchange offer has failed. Bankruptcy appears likely, as GM struggles to get all parties to agree to new, leaner terms before June 1. Government loans now total $19.4 billion.
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Welcome back to school! The 2012-13 school year will bring many important and exciting changes to our school that you should know about. For example, you will notice changes in what and how your child learns in school, how your child is tested, and how our school is evaluated.
All of these changes focus on improving student achievement and setting high expectations for all students in the Trevor-Wilmot Consolidated Grade School District. Why are these changes needed? We want to ensure that every child graduates ready for further education and have more students taking rigorous courses.
But we have work to do. We must close graduation and achievement gaps and improve the achievement of all students. In order to accomplish this, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers has launched an ambitious plan, called Agenda 2017, to reach specific goals that prepare Wisconsin students to be college and career-ready. One of these goals is to increase the percentage of students scoring proficient in third-grade reading and eighth-grade mathematics.
To achieve this goal, Wisconsin schools will focus on improving three central areas:
1. Standards and Instruction: What and how should kids learn?
What parents can expect: Look for our Mathematics and Language Arts teachers to set high expectations for classroom learning with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). These new academic standards reflect what students need to know and the skills they need to develop to be ready for college or career when they graduate from high school. In addition, look for programs in our schools to expand that promote literacy from kindergarten on, use digital learning to enhance instruction, and intervene quickly with students experiencing learning difficulties.
2. Assessments and Data Systems: How do we know if students learned?
What parents can expect: Wisconsin is changing the way we describe how well students can read and do math based on their test scores. With these higher expectations, look for fewer students in the proficient and advanced categories of the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examinations (WKCE) that students will take in Grade 3-8 this year. New proficiency levels will now be based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This is a tougher grading scale.
3. School and Educator Effectiveness: How do we make sure kids have highly effective teachers and schools?
What parents can expect: Look for Wisconsin's first-ever School Report Cards to be issued this Fall as part of a new system of school accountability. Every public school, including charter schools, will receive one of five ratings based on the performance of its students in four areas: state reading and math tests, growth in student achievement, and closing achievement gaps among groups of students.
Agenda 2017 proposes much-needed changes that will keep public education in the Trevor-Wilmot Consolidated Grade School District strong, ready our students for high school and career. More information is available on the DPI website. Please let me know if you have questions or concerns about the impact of these changes regarding your child's education, or feel free to discuss this with Principal Ted Gavlin or Curriculum Director Tracy Donich.
I look forward to working with you to make 2012-13 a great year of learning for your child and every child in our school district!
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The iconic filmmaker Chris Marker died today
July 30th 2012 marks the death of a legend in Cinema. Chris Marker the director of iconic films La jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), Sans Soleil (1983), AK (1985), and an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa has passed away one day of after his Birthday at the age of 91.
Many know him for his influence on Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995) but this pales in comparison to his Cinematic achievements. He was a writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His short film La jetée became known internationally and is the inspiration for other works as well, such as Mamoru Oshii’s 1987 debut live action feature The Red Spectacles and parts of Oshii’s 2001 film Avalon. It also inspired many of director Mira Nair’s shots for the 2003 film The Namesake.
I too have been inspired to learn from Chris Marker’s cinematic elements especially since seeing La Jetée which left quite an impression on me. I made a short during my college years in a similar vain. The assignment was to use pictures in some way for our next film. While many filmed scenes that interacted with actual photographs i wanted to try telling a story with still images much like i had seen and wanted to try ever since i saw Chris Marker’s film. I did not mimic his style or do a narration, i aimed to invoke an emotional tone with just my images using no more than a touch of sound. Unfortunately my film was never finished due to a strenuous schedule juggling full time freelance film and videography work while attending school full time but the result was still exciting. If you would like to see my short, visit this link : The Shore
I can go on and on about “La jetée” and its brilliance but it is best experienced. It can be found pirated on youtube but i will say this if you chose to go that route. PLEASE do yourself a favor and watch it in French Audio with SUBTITLES. There is no comparison to the the original once it has been dubbed, yuk. Half of the impact was lost on me when i saw that version, the voice does not invoke the same weight and eerie the original did.The best copy i have seen is easily the new transfer by The Criterion Collection. There is now a bluray of “La jetée” paired with “Sans Soleil” presented in an aspect ratio of 1.64:1, encoded with MPEG-4 AVC and a 1080p transfer. It has also been cleaned up a bit. This is an essential to any collection to say the least, I adore having all of my favorites in new HD prints and have been obsessively collecting my them with the updates. Previously i had La Jetée on a roll of film! I didn’t care for the DVD of it in comparison to my actual film copy but this is epic… You can find that here : La Jetée / Sans Soleil (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray] Most of his work can be viewed pirated around the net and while i don’t encourage that i do encourage you to view more than just La Jetée if you have the time for it.
Chris Marker is one of the few directors that changed everything for me after I saw his work. This happened with only a few films in my lifetime but with Chris it happened twice! The second time was with “Sans Soleil”. As such how can he ever be forgotten. Even if he has moved on from this reality i will always remember the impact he had on me growing up inspired by the greatest. As he has said “Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.” I find this especially true when i wished there were more great filmmakers still around today.
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HOME | LAWS | ORGANIZATIONS | CASES | LEGISLATION | HEADLINES
Accredited Correspondence School Report Card as CPI Year-End Assessment
Note: A report card from a correspondence school accredited by an agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education can satisfy the requirement of a year-end assessment. The Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators has prepared the following helpful document for guidance.
If you are not using a supervising teacher, an annual assessment is required. The annual assessment can be a standardized test, portfolio evaluation by a licensed teacher, or an end-of-year report from an accredited correspondence school. An accredited correspondence school’s end-of-year report may only be used for annual assessment purposes if the correspondence school is accredited by an agency recognized by the United States Department of Education. All annual assessments—including end-of-year reports from accredited correspondence schools—must be completed by May 1 and submitted to the Iowa Department of Education and your local school district by June 30 of the school year.
Below is a limited list of accredited correspondence schools. This list is not an endorsement by NICHE for any of the listed institutions—nor is it a recommendation of the accredited correspondence school option for annual assessment. Great care and discernment is necessary when choosing programs and legal options for your children. As you make these decisions, you will need to:
- Determine if enrolling your child in a correspondence school is best possible alternative.
- Decide whether you and your child can commit to all of the correspondence school’s requirements, including costs, curriculum choices, and timelines for completion.
- Verify that the correspondence school’s worldview is compatible with your own.
- Certify, each year you use the correspondence school for annual assessment purposes, that the school is appropriately accredited and obtain printed verification of this fact.
- Understand that utilizing end-of-year reports from accredited correspondence schools for competent private instruction annual assessment purposes does not automatically ensure that credits earned through an accredited correspondence school can be transferred to a public school, if you should ever desire to do so.
This list is not exhaustive. There may be other appropriately accredited institutions. There are notes with some of the entities on our list. These notes are for informational purposes to assist you in making your decision.
Please understand that NICHE is not endorsing any of the entities nor are we responsible for any changes in their accreditation status.
- A Beka Academy is accredited by FACCS, SACS CASI, and CITA.
- Alpha Omega Academy is accredited by CITA and NCA CASI.
- American School (Lansing, IL) is accredited by NCA CASI and CITA.
- Bridgeway Christian Academy (Alpharetta, GA) is accredited by SACS CASI.
- Calvert Education Services (Hunt Valley, MD) is accredited by CITA.
- Clonlara School (Ann Arbor, MI) is accredited by CITA and NCA CASI.
- Home Study International (Silver Springs, MD) is accredited by SACS and CITA. (This is a Seventh-day Adventist correspondence school.)
- Indiana University High School (Bloomington, IN) is accredited by CITA and NCA CASI.
- Keystone National High School (Bloomsburg, PA) is accredited by NASC.
- Kolbe Academy (Napa, CA) is accredited by National Association of Private Catholic and Independent Schools.
- Laurel Springs School (Ojai, CA) is accredited by WASC.
- Lighthouse Christian Academy (Bloomington, IN) was confirmed as accredited by the Iowa DE.
- North Dakota Division of Independent Study (Fargo, ND) is accredited by CITA and NCA CASI.
- NorthStar Academy (Colorado Springs, CO) is accredited by NCA CASI and CITA.
- Oak Meadow School (Brattleboro, VT) is accredited by CITA.
- Seton Home Study School (Front Royal, VA) is accredited by CITA and SACS CASI. (This is a Catholic correspondence school.)
- University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ) is accredited by NCA CASI.,
- University of Missouri-Columbia High School (Columbia, MO) is accredited by NCA CASI.
- University of Nebraska (Lincoln, NE) is accredited by NCA CASI.
- University of Oklahoma High School (Norman, OK) is accredited by CITA and NCA CASI.
Key to accreditation terms:
CITA: Commission on International and Trans-Regional Accreditation
FACCS: Florida Association of Christian Colleges and Schools
NASC: Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges
NCA CASI: North Central Association, Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement
SACS CASI: South Association of Colleges and Schools, Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement
WASC: Western Association of Schools and Colleges
©2007 Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators
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<urn:uuid:10f691a5-b44a-44b6-a7d4-2c57b7f96c27>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.hslda.org/hs/state/ia/200805120.asp
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.936845
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|
POTSDAM The town and the state Department of Environmental Conservation are trying to determine the severity of oil contamination found at the former town hall at 35 Market St., but so far there are more questions than answers.
The oil-contaminated soil was found last month by workers installing an elevator shaft in the basement of the building. Early testing showed that the contamination was spread throughout the basement, but most strongly in the front corner near 33 Market St.
Every area where we dug in the basement showed some sign of contamination, Town Supervisor Marie C. Regan said.
DEC was called to assess the contamination and guide cleanup efforts. Depending on the extent of the contamination, cleaning it up could become more than just the towns problem: it could involve other Market Street properties.
The first step is finding the source of the oil leak. Town leaders said they believe the oil came from a leaking tank buried beneath the sidewalk in front of 33 Market St. The problem was discovered in 1972, and the town board requested the owners drain the tank and remove it. It is not certain whether it was ever removed, although town leaders said it probably was.
A news report from the Daily Courier-Observer from May 17, 1972, describes oil fumes so strong that offices on the bottom floor of the town hall had to be shut down temporarily.
DECs first priority is ensuring the tank has been removed, and cleaning up the source of the spill.
They will be using ground-penetrating radar to see if there is a tank, DEC spokesman Stephen W. Litwhiler said via email. Its critical to remove any possible source of contamination before they continue their project. We will then work with the town to address cleanup of the contamination.
Officially, the person or persons responsible for the spill are responsible for paying for cleanup. However, because of the age of the spill, the cost will probably fall to the town, especially if it hopes to finish renovations on the Town Court without going through lengthy legal proceedings.
If we want this to get done, and in a timely fashion, I suspect were going to be the one footing the bill, Mrs. Regan said.
The oil tank belonged to Leonard Thomaris, who died in 2008.
The site is under renovation, and will be converted into the new Town Court. It is slated for completion in January.
Plenty of big questions will remain unanswered until the source of the contamination is found and its severity determined. It is too early to estimate how much cleanup will cost, or how it will be done.
Thats very worrisome, of course, Mrs. Regan said.
How the testing will affect neighboring buildings on Market Street is also uncertain, but Mrs. Regan said she suspects the contamination is not limited to the former town hall.
I suspect that there is more than just our building, she said.
Market Street property owners may not have to worry just yet. Mrs. Regan said she doubts DEC will focus on neighboring properties once the source of the spill has been determined and cleaned. Daniel M. Tebo, a Tisdel Associates engineer who is overseeing the renovation of 35 Market St., agreed.
I cant say for certain, but I dont think the DEC will make people continue taking soil samples all the way down the street, he said. But it depends on what is found under the sidewalk.
If neighboring properties are inspected and found to be contaminated, cleanup steps will have to be taken, according to Mr. Litwhiler.
DEC will begin its search within the next two weeks.
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<urn:uuid:fe7cbbb0-b3df-4cc2-8c14-199147cdc3d3>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20121119/NEWS05/711199967/1024
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
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|
Last night in Arlington, Virginia, a community spoke to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by bearing witness to fear and hardship sown by the immigration enforcement program misleadingly called Secure Communities. Hundreds of people were turned away from this field meeting of the Homeland Security Advisory Council's Task Force on S-Comm, but those 300 who crowded into a university auditorium – including students, clergy, nongovernmental organization activists, U.S. citizens and immigrants – conveyed eloquently-told stories of S-Comm's irreparable flaws. The community's message about S-Comm was "End It, Don't Amend It."
S-Comm, which DHS intends to force into every U.S. jurisdiction by 2013, is an arrest-based fingerprint identification program that has already cost taxpayers $550 million. Everyone is checked for immigration status, regardless of whether the arrest: (i) resulted from racial profiling of those perceived as looking or sounding "foreign;" (ii) led to charges that were later dropped or dismissed by a judge; or (iii) detained a person who was in fact a crime victim such as a domestic violence survivor. Congress never authorized S-Comm, but rather instructed DHS to prioritize finding and deporting dangerous immigrants convicted of the most serious crimes, a task for which DHS has ample tools other than S-Comm. Playing by its own rules, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) created S-Comm as a dragnet program that has captured, frequently detained, and deported more than 120,000 immigrants, 60 percent with no criminal record or only one or two misdemeanor convictions for offenses such as traffic violations.
The meeting's most resonant statements came from two courageous immigrant women who spoke truth to power by addressing their comments directly to S-Comm head Marc Rapp. Maria and Florinda told their S-Comm nightmares: both were arrested for selling phone cards without a license, a misdemeanor. Maria had called 911 for help after a domestic dispute with her partner; instead, she was arrested and, because of S-Comm, placed in deportation proceedings. Maria's phone card charge was dropped but the deportation proceedings continue. Both women face separation from their U.S. citizen children; Maria's little girl is already growing up without her father, who was caught by S-Comm after making an illegal turn and deported.
Arlington speakers stressed that S-Comm traps harmless immigrants while harming community policing and public safety by making immigrants afraid to call police and report crime. Mark Shmueli, a member of the Commission to Study the Impact of Immigrants in Maryland, noted that S-Comm outsources immigration responsibilities to state and local police "who are completely outside DHS's control," some of whom scoff at federal priorities. He cited Sheriff Chuck Jenkins of Frederick County, Maryland, who testified before the commission that police officers can always nab a driver for infractions such as hanging fuzzy dice on the rearview mirror. S-Comm turns arrests like these into deportations; it's no wonder that in Frederick County, 96 percent of S-Comm deportees had either no convictions or one or two misdemeanors.
Arlington County Board Member Walter Tejada spoke out against ICE's misleading public statements that S-Comm was a voluntary program for state and local governments. Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts all relied on these false representations to decide on public safety grounds not to collaborate with S-Comm. A federal judge later concluded that "[t]here is ample evidence that ICE and DHS have gone out of their way to mislead the public" about S-Comm, and there is a pending investigation by the DHS Inspector General.
A local priest described his parishioner from Uruguay, whose deportation after a misdemeanor left her U.S. citizen daughter without her mother for first communion. He added that in his community immigrants were too scared to notify police of a body found in the woods: this fear does not show up in any statistics but provides evidence that communities across the country are less safe under S-Comm. As a new report asks, "How Do You Police a Community That Won't Talk to You?"
After deporting a million people, more than half of whom had no criminal record, the Obama administration this summer belatedly recognized that its immigration enforcement efforts need better prioritization. Last night's meeting showed that S-Comm is a major part of the problem. DHS must not be the judge deciding that every jurisdiction in America has to implement S-Comm despite leading police chiefs' opinions that it harms their communities' public safety.
DHS must not be the jury mandating that traffic offenders and wrongfully arrested people have their fingerprints checked for immigration status. And DHS must not execute deportation orders for immigrants who pose no danger to our society, but rather contribute to its flourishing and ensure the welfare of their U.S. citizen children.
End It, Don't Amend It.
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<urn:uuid:20630c53-f0b4-4814-bee2-a596d64529ea>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.aclu.org/print/blog/immigrants-rights-national-security/dhs-told-loud-and-clear-stop-tearing-immigrant-families
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.968986
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Counternarcotics and Law Enforcement Country Program: Sudan
Established in 2005, the INL program in Sudan focuses on two main components. The first is the development of a Southern Sudanese criminal justice sector to better support the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, maintain security, and enhance governance. INL seeks to support the Government of Southern Sudan in its provision of security and peace benefits for the Southern Sudanese people through comprehensive development and capacity building of legitimate criminal justice sector institutions in Southern Sudan. The second component consists of support to two distinct United Nations (UN) missions in their efforts to provide security and stability in Sudan through civilian policing. INL supports the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) to mentor, train, and equip local police to help develop them into an effective, transparent, and legitimate police force. INL supports the civilian police mandate of the UN-AU Mission in Darfur to maintain peace and security through protection of civilians.
- Transnational Crime Affairs Section (TCAS) Director: The TCAS Director in Juba serves as INL’s primary program manager and policy expert in the field and is responsible for coordinating all INL programs in Sudan.
- Police Pillar: INL support of the Southern Sudan Police Service (SSPS) has been focused on the organizational growth and development of the service, especially relative to training capacity. INL also seeks to assist the SSPS in their strategic planning capacity, specifically relative to organizational growth and development, emergency planning, and their interface with other security sector institutions in Southern Sudan. Over all, it is the goal of INL to assist the SSPS in their development as a provider of security as a public good, and in their responsiveness to the needs of the Southern Sudanese public.
- Judicial Pillar: INL funds a Resident Legal Advisor who assists with the development of legal education materials, as well as INL interactions with the Ministry of Legal Affairs and Constitutional Development.
- Corrections Pillar: Through a partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), INL has provided assistance to the Southern Sudan Corrections Service focusing on health and hygiene, training of corrections officers, and the exploration of alternatives to imprisonment within the Southern Sudanese legal context. Additionally, INL has provided direct support to the improvement of critical health and sanitation infrastructure to prevent the outbreak of disease and the general improvement of prison conditions.
- Customary Law: INL is working with the U.S. Institute of Peace to complete a field study of dispute resolution at the local level, including how customary law, statutory law, chiefs’ courts, and government courts interact in practice. This research will inform INL program developmentand be made available to the public upon its completion in summer of 2010.
- UNMIS: Through UNMIS, INL-funded civilian police advisors assisted in the training of 3,763 local police on election security since 2009, training on management systems to track SSPS assets, and development of a SSPS personnel database resulting in discovery of 1,000 ghost employees. INL also provided equipment to enhance UNMIS training of the SSPS.
- UNAMID: INL provided equipment and training to formed police units (FPUs) from other countries that provide civilian protection in Darfur. Additionally, INL is working to deploy civilian police advisors to train and mentor in Darfur.
Funding FY 2005-2009
- FY 2005 - $2,000,000 (PKO)
- FY 2006 - $2,500,000 (ESF)
- FY 2007 - $9,800,000 (INCLE)
- FY 2008 - $13,578,000 (INCLE)
- FY 2008 (Supplemental) - $10,000,000 (INCLE)
- FY 2009 - $15,400,000 (INCLE)
- FY 2010 - $16,000,000 (INCLE)
INCLE: International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement funds
ESF: Economic Support Funds transferred from USAID
PKO: Peace-Keeping Operation funds
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<urn:uuid:e7bcf4d8-c1f6-4850-9f3c-c60da768cbf2>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://m.state.gov/md141707.htm
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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In the online world, cupboards are sometimes translucent and skeletons are visible. Or to draw a more apt analogy, what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas. These “skeletons” made up of bits and bytes are a concern if you are in the job market.
Background checks have been part of hiring processes for long. Google Search as a background check started few years back. Things have got far serious since then as companies are actively looking at your Facebook and Twitter (or any other social profile) postings to determine your suitability for a job.
It’s not only the hiring process, but social media background checks are the latest screening tools being used by colleges and universities too. Bob Sullivan’s blog post on MSNBC raises an issue that happened in Maryland.
The Hiring Weapon: It’s Around the World
Why only Maryland, but companies in other parts of the world are resorting to background checks on social profiles. In my country (India), we have a well-developed hiring system with outsourcing companies handling background checks in many instances. Now, they are stepping into the online social space.
Today, companies use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as hiring tools. Most companies have their own presence on these sites. So, it is natural to expect that they will scour the web for the right candidate and filter his selection with multiple checks. Heck, there are startups that do the job for them and it looks to be a HR niche of tomorrow. Take a look at companies like Reppify and Social Intelligence to understand the hiring process that has come of digital age.
Should You Shout Invasion Of Privacy?
In the United States, you probably can’t as the Federal Trade Commission says it’s okay to check seven years’ worth of publicly-available information from social networks and websites. Last year, Social Intelligence came into the limelight because of this ruling. The FTC found the company compliant with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. In other words, if you have publicly available information on the web, you are in the crosshairs.
The argument is – are companies looking at publicly available information or are they asking for access to private data? The former is fair game…the second is a much greyer area.
In my opinion, it is always going to be borderline case for both companies and candidates. A wronged candidate can easily sue the offending company. Without going into legal-speak, it’s difficult to see how the candidate’s charge will hold water if he or she has volunteered the information by giving access to their social profile or it is publicly available. But the case could be loaded against a company if they fire an employee without a clear reason.
There have been cases of employees being asked to leave on the basis of drunken pictures posted on Facebook while on vacation. See this ABC News video cast. An employee can shout discrimination and build up a case. Discrimination against sexual orientation or other factors could be a minefield. It could be worse if a company gets an identity wrong.
I couldn’t find a precedent where an employee has hauled a company to the court. A few that start the fire could set up further legal battles and clear the issue.
Use a Background Check to Your Advantage
The silver lining is that companies are using social profiles to screen and hire candidates. Look at it this way – it gives you, the candidate/employee, a powerful tool to get yourself hired. All you have to do is build up a professional squeaky clean profile. That doesn’t sound too difficult does it? (I hope you get the joke in the screenshot below)…
You can advertise your skills, showcase your portfolio, network with influencers, keep up with industry chatter, and more. Keep the thought that some company could be looking to hire you based on what you are doing on the web. A well thought out social media plan could give you the edge over another candidate. That’s where web companies like Reputation.com are serving.
And yes – do keep a strict eye on privacy controls for your social accounts. Here are some previous posts that could be invaluable:
- MakeUseOf: Facebook Privacy Guide
- The Top 5 Privacy Tips For Facebook Timeline Applications
- ROUNDUP: 5 Must-Know Critical Facebook Privacy Tips
Stay Hired – Manage Your Social Profiles
Privacy is the first step, but there are some more things you can do to wear the right online tie n’ suit for the job. Do a self-audit. Scour your online profiles and do a Google Search to catch anything that could be potentially embarrassing. Create a positive image on the web. Give your online reputation the same consideration you would to your real one. As always, keep the privacy filters on.
Is privacy dead? Do social media make it easier to land a job or get that pink slip? Tell us – would you say yes to a background screening of your social profile in order to land a job? Let’s argue in the comments.
More articles about:
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<urn:uuid:961b5781-aa36-42bc-8dcb-925bb772d4c5>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/job-seekers-careful-social-media-background-checks-employers-opinion/
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.937146
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| 2.015625
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Hope (Parker County sheriff's office)
Hope, the dog found brutally tortured in Texas last week, has a new home. According to the Parker County sheriff's office, the pug mix has been adopted by the family whose ranch she was first spotted wandering on.
Charlie and Kit Moncrief have agreed to adopt Hope, who continues to recover from what the Dallas Morning News described as "one of the worst cases of animal cruelty ever reported in the county." Hope was found dehydrated, her mouth sealed shut with electrical tape and her tongue protruding. She had five large cuts that took more than 100 stitches to close.
"I have known the Moncrief family for many, many years," Parker County Sheriff Larry Fowler said in an emailed statement to Yahoo News. "I can't think of a better family for Hope to belong to. She will think she is in heaven at her new home with her new family."
Veterinarians at Bowie Drive Animal Hospital say that Hope, who is estimated to be between 3 and 4 years old, will make a full recovery, though she may need part of her tongue removed.
Hope's story, coming the same week as a dog was put to sleep in Northern Ireland for looking like a pit bull, garnered worldwide media attention—and more than $35,000 offered for information leading to an arrest in the case.
Fowler said his office has investigated several leads but is still seeking the suspect or suspects involved.
"This is the bottom line," Fowler added. "If they will torture a defenseless creature, what else are they capable of? We need to find the person(s) responsible for this."
Meanwhile, the story of Lennox, the dog who was euthanized in Belfast, continues to spark outrage. A Facebook group is urging residents to boycott the Belfast City Council for its killing of Lennox, and sent a letter to U.K. media outlets demanding an investigation.
The petitions follow Victoria Stilwell, host of "It's Me or the Dog," who claims she was threatened by members of the city council.
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<urn:uuid:a4c1e54d-5a64-4441-a2a7-9d057e6069c6>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/hope-dog-tortured-texas-adopted-164604446.html
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.98235
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| 1.578125
| 2
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Oh, Theodore!: Guinea Pig Poems
A boy gets a guinea pig for a pet. The boy and his guinea pig, Theodore (so named because he's soft, fuzzy and brown like a teddy bear), cautiously adjust to each other, and their affection develops. Told in short, easy-to-read poems.
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<urn:uuid:b9416f60-0b6c-4777-aad6-4272e80e4a76>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.oprah.com/book/Oh-Theodore-Guinea-Pig-Poems-by-Susan-Katz?cat_id=
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00056-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.928362
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2008 Thomson medal and prize
Professor Edward Hinds
Imperial College London
For his important and elegant experimental investigations in the fields of atomic physics and quantum optics.
The Thomson medal and prize for distinguished research in atomic or molecular physics has been awarded to Professor Edward Hinds, Professor of Physics at Imperial College London, for his important and elegant experimental investigations in the fields of atomic physics and quantum optics.
First working at Yale University, then at Sussex and now at Imperial College, Professor Hinds has made major contributions to several areas of fundamental and technological interest: the physics of ultracold atoms, the study of quantum interactions between light and matter in an optical cavity, and precision measurements of fundamental properties relevant to particle theory.
For decades, Hinds has been a leader in low-energy, small-scale experiments probing the electric dipole moment of the electron and proton in the strong electric field of a heavy-metal molecule. Any asymmetry in charge would throw light on symmetry properties associated with fundamental interactions in matter, normally seen only at very high energies.
His work on ultracold atoms has been seminal, developing optical microcavities in microchip structures to trap atoms and control their wave-like behaviour. Clouds of atoms, collected and refrigerated by laser light, can be cooled to the lowest temperatures in the universe. This has created the new field of atom optics whereby cold atoms are manipulated, much as photons are controlled in traditional optics using mirrors, lenses, and waveguides. Hinds’ group has been making atom chips in which atoms are guided on microscopic magnetic tapes. He is building an atom interferometer with the aim of measuring accelerations and gravitational forces sensitively, and searching for new forces between atoms and surfaces. A long-term goal is to build a quantum computer using the interactions between the atoms to do logic operations.
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<urn:uuid:a1b05494-cd31-4e05-9640-f173402978a3>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.iop.org/about/awards/subject/thomson/medallists/page_38612.html
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.932422
| 377
| 2.40625
| 2
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You can, but it is not what you want. When your program is designed well, superclasses should not know anything about the internals of their subclasses.
Here is an ugly example, in which I cast this to the subclass type (I recommend that you never do this in a real application, this is just to show that it's possible!):
Sometimes, however, you might want to create an abstract superclass that leaves some parts to be implemented by subclasses. This version is much better than the example above, because the superclass doesn't need to cast this to a specific subclass type and doesn't need to access the internals of the subclass:
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<urn:uuid:4951a208-9b3e-468a-9c98-8f29469b23a6>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.coderanch.com/t/483444/java/java/Access-Child-class-members-super
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.970699
| 136
| 1.890625
| 2
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Although Swift's primary mission is to detect GRBs and observe the X-ray and optical afterglows, the satellite is also well designed for observing other transient astrophysical sources. Previous Targets of Opportunity (ToOs) have included supernovae, cataclysmic variables, active galactic nuclei and comets.
Swift possesses certain attributes which make it suitable for a wide range of ToO requests:
Commands can be uploaded to Swift within a matter of hours, where appropriate. More commonly, ToOs are discussed at the daily planning meetings and inserted into the schedule when possible.
ToOs may not impair Swift's capability to respond to GRBs. They should make use of more than one instrument and the target should be more than 46 degrees from the Sun in the sky, as well as more than 21 degrees from the Moon (see the Sun and Moon Angle Calculator) and 6 degrees from the orbit pole. Requests that satisfy these criteria and are for durations between 1 and 20 kilo-seconds have a good chance of being accepted for observation; ToO requests at a high hour angle from the Sun are most preferable, however, particularly those at greater than 9 hours. Only a brief proposal of a few paragraphs is required, within which the requested observing time should be justified.
To request a Target of Opportunity (ToO), or for more details, please visit the Penn State ToO website at: http://www.swift.psu.edu/too.html. Alternatively, contact the UKSSDC via e-mail at firstname.lastname@example.org, or by phone on +44 116 223 1706 (during office hours).
Note that very bright optical sources can deposit significant charge in the CCD pixels, so affecting the on-board pattern recognition of X-ray events. This PDF file shows the expected number of photons per pixel for a range of star magnitudes; those highlighted in green are expected to be acceptable and should not produce optical loading problems. Please check for bright optical sources in the field of view of your desired ToO. Also see the information on the magnitude limits for safe UVOT observations
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<urn:uuid:6911815a-5d44-4a18-9956-1ee9c3dbe33c>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.swift.ac.uk/support/too.php
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.925847
| 439
| 2.265625
| 2
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Department of Fish and Wildlife Requests Wolverine Be Listed as Endangered Species
On February 1, the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife officially proposed that wolverines be be added to the list of protected species under the Endangered Species Act.
Timothy Preso, a lawyer for the environmental action group Earthjustice, describes the proposal as “the culmination of a 12-year battle to show the plight of wolverines.”
Preso says that the wolverine is a prime example of a species adversely effected by climate change.
“I don’t think Montana knows how many wolverines it has,” Preso says. “But what I do know is that it is one of the rarest critters in the lower 48 and trapping them at this point doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Even if wolverines are classified as endangered, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokesman Ron Aasheim has said Montana will ask to continue to allow wolverine trapping.
Montana is the last state in the lower 48 to allow trapping.
“We have wolverines where we’ve always had them, and basically this suggestion that whether they should be put on the endangered species list has nothing to do with management in Montana,” Aasheim said.
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<urn:uuid:9c71cc7e-a42d-471f-a7d3-a5faf8cf97c4>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://kyssfm.com/132005/
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
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|
I'm writing a paper on the era of the Stamp Act (1765) concerning primarily the clash of legal cultures between what was then the Colonies of North America and the mother country, Great Britain.
You can email or message me for (an abbreviated version of) what I have so far. But my mode of attack in answering this question is mostly this:
The legal culture of Great Britain centered around two main principles. Firstly that it was a bureaucracy and with it had all the shortcomings of bureaucracies. These shortcomings which were established in the legal structure of how Great Britain operated made it difficult to respond in a timely fashion to the Stamp Act rebellions. In other words, Britain was never proactive and its reactive performance was severely hampered by the strict adherence to tradition. (Rather than the grassroots, propaganda driven culture in North America.) The Second main principle was Parliamentary supremacy. This was a huge road block because it essentially gave Britain the "right" to tax the colonists. While the colonists viewed taxation as a "privilege" that was not really granted to Parliament.
Firstly I'd like to field comments. Does anybody think this is a valid line of attack? Any idea how it may be improved where its strengths and possible weaknesses are?
Secondly, I've run into a bit of a problem with sourcing this argument. I need to find more sources relating to the bureaucratic structure of Great Britain and evidence that this structure did indeed slow down reaction times and lead to an over-dependence on "civil" techniques to combat aggressive and riotous ones.
If any one can point me to references that would be great as well.
Thanks so much,
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<urn:uuid:aea12d7f-a71e-4640-a7ae-16c14b133dec>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/1576/how-did-the-bureaucratic-culture-of-great-britain-affect-its-response-to-the-pro?answertab=active
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SIXTY-FIVE years is a long time to wait for recognition of wartime service and sacrifice, but the women aviators of World War II took it in stride. Like the thousands of women who went to work in factories when male workers went off to war, the first women to fly U.S. military planes were just proud to do their unheralded duty, pay their own way home, and disappear from the pages of history.
Until now. The extraordinary achievements of the women pilots, who would become an instrumental part of the war effort, are finally being acknowledged by their country. The surviving members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP, were recently awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on Capitol Hill.
During the war, a group of 1,102 female civilians, flying under the direction of the U.S. Air Force, transported military personnel, towed targets for gunnery practice, and tested planes that were newly repaired or overhauled. They flew more than 60 million miles in 78 types of aircraft - from Piper Cubs to B-29 bombers - and undertook every type of mission except combat.
Thirty-eight of the pilots were killed, but there were no flags or military honors at their funerals. For years, the military denied benefits to surviving WASP veterans.
Today, fewer than 300 WASPs are alive. All are in their late 80s or older.
For them, the medal is a wonderful, albeit belated, gesture of national appreciation.
Some WASPs also hope that their newfound recognition will allow younger generations, at long last, to learn of their contributions and accomplishments and, said one, to remind some still-skeptical men just how capable women are.46.05528 6.7756
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When in Spain, the lunch on the go usually is a bocadilla.
As long as you put it on a baguette you can call it a bocadilla.
My Mama Española used to make me one of these everyday. The most common is the tortilla española-- Spain's famed potato omlet. She'd slice it thin and stuff it in between a fresh baguette with a schmear of aioli. Sometimes it still be warm from the morning. Her other varitations of onions and cheese, or sauteed peppers were equally delicious but nothing stood out like the bocadilla made with Manchego and Membrillo. The first time I ate this I could describe the flavors: fruity, salty, nutty, with hints of citrus, but had no idea what exactly I was eating.
Turns out the Spanish have been doing the Manchego-Membrillo collabo for quite sometime. Manchego is a common table cheese made from sheep's milk and its best room temperature so you can really get the full effect of its nutty, salty flavor. Membrillo is a fruit paste made from quinces with splashes of lemon juice. The two flavors together are quite stunning and bright and a good way to change up things for your tastebuds as we burst into Spring.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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|
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Hive Mind: Your Brain is Like a Swarm of Bees
One of the most difficult-to-digest premises of Ego is the idea that we don't have a singular coherent self that drives what we do. This notion may challenge concepts of identity that many of us hold dear, but the fact is that our brains behave like a beehive, buzzing with competing ideas that eventually must reach a consensus, or at least drown out disagreement. Cornell University neurobiologist Thomas Seeley has discovered that the hive mind is more than just a metaphor, showing that there are remarkable parallels between how brains and beehives commit to a course of action without a central planner.
Neurons are like bees, and the brain is like a swarm. When bees decide to move the hive in the springtime, scouts go in search of new locations. When they return, they dance to show which place they liked the best. But how does the swarm finally decide where to move? By marking bees that had visited different places, Seeley and his team differentiated between factions. They then noticed that bees would head-butt one another during the "argument", causing them to stop dancing. Receiving enough head-butts, the bees arguing for one location would eventually stop. Seeley argues that our brains behave similarly, with the loudest neurons drowning out the rest, a process he called cross-inhibition.
Seeley and his team propose that cross-inhibition may be a general strategy for decision making, and indeed, their findings in bees recapitulate features of decision making and pattern formation in other systems. The remarkable unifying theme in all of these systems is how an aggregate swarm intelligence is built from just a few kinds of simple, local interactions between agents. Both neurons and bees are presumably unaware of how their impulses and signals transcend the individual, and lay the substrate for a grander, collective intelligence.
Does the brain make decisions by drowning out disagreement? It's certainly an interesting idea, and computer models for decision-making seem to agree with it. How all the competing thought processes in our brain come to a consensus remains a mystery for now, but there is no question that they are competing. Rather than conceive of our decisions as the product of a united ego, it's more realistic to think of them as the result of a vibrant and argumentative committee meeting.
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I first encountered bishop's weed about 20 years ago, when it suddenly sprang up everywhere. It grows 6 to 10 inches tall and thrives in shade or part shade. At first, I was delighted as it brought some needed light to the garden.
My initial delight quickly turned to alarm as the weed swept through the garden. Careful, weekly weeding only aided its quest for world domination because the roots are brittle, and each piece can create a new plant. Even soil sifting didn't control its spread.
Composting bishop's weed was only partially effective. The heat created in the pile killed some of the roots but not all, and those that survived seemed happy to have been vacationing in a pile of fertilizer.
Bishop's weed didn't just charge into shady places. It rose nearly everywhere, leaving only hot, dry sites alone. Plants such as 'Emerald Carpet' raspberries (Rubus pentalobus 'Emerald Carpet'), poppies, hostas, salad greens, pansies and hellebores were choked out or stressed.
While the scales seem to favor bishop's weed, there is some small compensation for those of us who have been pummeled by this botanical bully: It is edible. The flowers and youngest leaves can be picked and eaten raw in salads or sandwiches, added to soups or sautéed.
Foraging for this weed hardly squares the account and may only be a small victory, but I'll take victories where I can find them. So if you haven't planted bishop's weed, don't. If you already have it, I wish you luck. If you have found a control, please let me know.
-- Vern Nelson
OTHER WEEDS YOU DON'T WANT TO GROW BUT THAT YOU CAN EAT:
Lamb's quarters (aka wild spinach)
Whenever eating a plant that is unfamiliar to you, be sure to identify it, identify the part of it that's edible, and note any special instructions necessary in cooking or handling. Also, since body chemistry can vary person to person, eating just a little of the new plant can help you avoid the rare but potential stomachache.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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Close your eyes, if you will, and imagine a world without ITunes, IPhones, IPods, IPads, IPots, IPans, IPigs – somebody, stop me! Whew. Anyway, if you were one of the two people who in imagining such a world sighed deeply and thought it would be IPfree Paradise, you would have had your world had I been Steve Jobs’ mother, teacher, employee, friend or guru.
Had I been his mother, I would have grabbed him the minute he came within reach, and locked him in the bathroom until he came out smelling like a garden after a spring rain, so that he would have learned that cleanliness is as much about being cognizant of the sensibilities of others as it is about hygiene.
Had I been his teacher, I would have taught him that winning the race, or demonstrating a superior intellect is but momentary glory, as true fulfillment comes not by engendering envy and awe, but by earning respect.
Had I been his employee, I would have documented, notarized and tucked in a vault everything I ever produced for him or suggested to him, if necessary to be used in a court of law, to make him aware of the rights of others to their own ideas.
Had I been his friend, I would have asked him to step outside his ego, and use his keen powers of perception to see the world from another’s point of view, to tread lightly on the feelings of others, as vulnerability is our common bond.
Had I been his guru, I would have had him meditate on the thought that cruelty is the path to torment; peace comes only through an unconstricted heart, and that we are all chosen, each with our own part to play in the advancement of the human spirit.
The implication is that had Steve Jobs not been allowed to exercise his narcissism, he could not have created an empire that helped take communication a quantum leap forward.
And where would that have left us?
I don’t know, for me, with more questions than answers.
Could Steve Jobs have accomplished what he did without his narcissism? Were cruelty and remorselessness and irresponsibility and his distortion of reality vital to his success?
Was Steve Jobs the only person who could have taken technology to the point of providing trillions of megabytes of both helpful and inane information first to our homes, and then through our phones?
Does the fact that we have to play by his rules, use his Genius Bar, rely on Apple in order to find out what’s wrong with our I Anything, even as simple as needing a new battery in an IPod, mean that Steve Job’s is still exercising narcissistic control of us from his grave?
Was Steve Jobs a technological Messiah or a mere mortal?
Did that apple from which he ate fall from the same tree as Adam’s?
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://theoverthinkerblog.com/?tag=narcissism
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Franks definition is right on. Unfortúnately, I do not agree with his assessment that many crack at least not
in the Swedish factories.
If they crack, the gaffer has not annealed them properly or discovered whether or not the colors are compatabile.
If not, they will crack because of the different coefficients
of the colors and the clear glass.
Paradise Paints in California developed a paint which can be used to paint a blank and then overlay it with clear without oxidizing the paint. David Hopper, glass artist, owns this company. In other words, the painted image remains. Ulrica Hydman Vallien has used this paint when designing glass.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.glassmessages.com/index.php/topic,1660.msg10976.html
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| 0.921183
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by Chuck Eastman and Manu Venugopal
What is SEM?
A SEM is a structured, modular subset of the objects and relationships required in each one of multiple BIM exchange model definitions. It has two raisons d’être: ( 1) to enable BIM software companies to code import and export functions in modular fashion, such that a function written to export or import model objects according to any given SEM can be tested and certified once, and then re-used to fulfill multiple exchange model exports/imports without modification; (2) to provide a common high-level specification structure that allows non-programmers to compose an MVD at run-time by defining it in terms of SEMs, allowing multiple heterogeneous platform users to specify an SEM and to facilitate automatic compilation of the MVD on both sides to the exchange.
The central theme of this research is: “How can an improved model view development methodology be supported that reduces the inconsistency and redundancy of model views developed by parallel development teams, thereby improving the overall interoperability of BIM tools?”
There are two major research questions raised in this research and investigated as follows:
A. How can we develop model views consistently across research teams and domains?
In order to support IFC implementations, the consistency of model views designed is an important criteria. Lack of which causes an overhead to software developers and inhibits new IFC implementations.
B. What should be the building blocks of model views for semantic information exchanges?
The current approaches to model view development create redundant information that is spread across several domains due to lack of reusability. Defining the building blocks of model views and packaging them in an object-oriented, modular and reusable manner is needed.
A SEM Roadmap
A SEM can be defined as a binding to a set of IFC entities, attributes, relations, and functions and a corresponding set of Native model structures that carry the information associated with the IFC SEM definition. The SEM also carries the functions (methods) needed to reliably map data between the Native and IFC structures and other methods to integrate the two structures with associated SEMs. Once fully implemented, the SEM based approach can reduce the model view generation - implementation from the current 2 to 3 year period to that of three to six months. The SEM based approach has resulted in the static and domain specific model views to be converted into more dynamic and industry wide workflow specifications, thereby redefining the manner in which interoperability is addressed in the AEC/FM industry. A logical framework on the basis of well-defined and unit tested SEMs, thereby following a modular approach can be the future direction for creating exchange specifications and implementing them in a standardized and reusable manner, cutting across all domains and providing better interoperability.
National BIM Standard development projects currently supporting SEMs.
- Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI) ►
- American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) ►
- American Concrete Institute (ACI) ►
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<urn:uuid:00826942-9d40-455c-8dc6-e4a0e427bd0f>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.dbl.gatech.edu/sem
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On a conference call with Yankees beat writers, Dr. Bryan Kelly spoke for more than a half an hour this afternoon, trying to explain the details of what’s already happened to Alex Rodriguez’s left hip and what’s about to happen to it. Here’s an attempt to give you the basics of those details.
What exactly caused this problem?
Basically, the top of Rodriguez’s femur is misshapen, and it’s been misshapen for 20-plus years. The top of his hip isn’t perfectly round, which means it doesn’t fit perfectly into the hip socket.
“This is a condition that occurs during the developmental phase of the formation of the hip joint between the ages of birth to anywhere between 14 and 15 years,” Dr. Kelly said. “The reasons why you develop impingement has got to do with two things: the genetics of their hip and the mechanical forces that the hip is subjected to during the first 15 years of development, where growth occurs in something called the growth plate. A remodeling process can occur that leads to a non-spherical femoral head and the hip itself is designed to (resemble) a ball-bearing joint, a ball-and-socket joint. If you have a non-spherical head, which is very common in athletes both male and female, the anatomy of the hip limits the amount of functional motion that can occur in the hip joint.”
What damage has this caused?
Rodriguez could not have known about his hip abnormality. Basically, he’s lost range of motion over the years, and his body has found ways to make up for it. But in making up for it, he’s allowed his body to do damage, and it finally reached a breaking point.
“What happens is there’s premature contact between the ball and socket,” Dr. Kelly said. “That’s what the impingement is. For a lead leg in a hitter, a right-hander’s left leg, if you can’t rotate through the ball-socket joint before there’s premature contact, something is happening to alter the mechanics. The first is, that non-spherical portion crushes the labrum, and that’s what causes a labral tear. The second is — over time, this is an insidious process that takes years — the cartilage on the inside of the joint starts to break down.”
Why did Rodriguez think his problem was in his previously repaired right hip?
Apparently this is common. In the process of compensating for the range of motion issue, the body will create problems elsewhere, and athletes often don’t notice the hip problem and instead focus on those parts of the body that are compensating.
“When somebody ruptures their ACL, you can see it happen on TV, I think we saw it this weekend,” Dr. Kelly said. “When somebody breaks their femur and the bone’s sticking through the skin, it’s not unclear what’s wrong with them. But when somebody has mechanical dysfunction across the hip, what the body tends to do — some patients come in and they don’t have an X marking the spot of where the problem is… The body tends to compensate. It alters the mechanics such that other parts of the body are (affected).”
Is this really enough to explain Rodriguez being a non-factor late in the year?
The short answer is, yes.
“That’s where it becomes clear that there is a direct correlation between inability to use your hips and (lack of) performance,” Dr. Kelly said. “It’s no different from when your Little League coach told you your power was generated through your hips. If you can’t generate torque through your hips because of progressive loss of motion, and you can’t generate power, you alter your mechanics.”
Does that mean fixing this problem will bring Rodriguez back to his old self?
Depends on a lot of factors, including Rodriguez’s ability to rehab, regain strength and teach his muscles to work with this new range of motion (which should be better than it’s ever been). It also depends on Rodriguez’s cartilage. It will have been damaged by the repeated abuse, and Dr. Kelly won’t have a perfect sense of that damage until he actually cuts into Rodriguez’s hip on the day of surgery. Early exams, though, were promising.
“The imaging study shows that he has some cartilage wear that makes me think we will be able to get him back to his pre-injury level of play, that it’s not so extensive that it will ultimately impact his ability to play,” Dr. Kelly said. “Unfortunately, our imaging doesn’t give us all the information, and that’s something we’re going to know at the time of surgery.”
Are you certain this isn’t because of performance enhancing drugs?
The short answer is, once again, yes.
“This is a developmental, genetic predisposition to a certain shape of the hip joint that occurs during the first 15 years of development,” Dr. Kelly said. “This is not related to steroid use. Steroids don’t change the shape of your hip joint. This is a very well known developmental phenomenon.”
Associated Press photo
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Buffers & carbonates adjust the alkalinity, hardness and/or pH of your aquarium water
, and aid in (keeping levels stable despite changing conditions) which is also known as "buffering". This is crucial to the survival of aquatic life, and these levels should always be monitored to help keep water conditions safe for your aquatic life.
Using products like BufferPlus™ from CaribSea will help to stabilize pH and raise carbonate hardness. The proper pH for marine aquariums range from 8.1 to 8.3. A marine reef aquarium
should maintain a pH of 8.2 to 8.3. Carbonate hardness should range from 3.5meq/L to 4.5meq/L.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.ocreef.com/aquarium_buffers?page=2
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en
| 0.907917
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It is SoC strategy for Next Xbox
now that recent speculation that the new main System on a Chip (SoC) for the Next Xbox (or Xbox 720, if you like) began production is apparently accurate; the SoC did indeed start production in late December of 2011. Sources tell us that the code name for the chip is Oban, and it is being produced by both IBM and Global Foundries for Microsoft.
If speculation is correct, which our sources believe it is, the power behind the next Xbox will be a PowerPC CPU that is married to an ATI Southern Islands GPU, or modified 7000 series. Continued rumors of an x86 compatible CPU seem to be bunk, just based on where the chip is being fab’d.
This first run of these 32nm Oban chips will be destined for developer consoles, so any hope for a holiday console release in 2012 seems unrealistic, according to our sources, but an announcement perhaps before the end of the year might be possible. It would seem Microsoft’s strategy of getting it in 2013 is all but assured. We do think that the chips will be in production by the end of the year for consoles destined to be sold in 2013, which seems to agree with what others are saying.
There are still many unknowns, but those in the development community seem to be clued in at least a high level. From the shadows we hear whispers of expecting development kits as early as March, but more than likely April, if all goes well.
While we expect these development kits to shed some light on what Microsoft will be doing with the Next Xbox/720, it is very likely that we will see at least couple of revisions before everything is settled as they get closer to an actual production unit.
Charlie seems to be hearing close to the same thing right here
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http://fudzilla.com/home/item/25619-oban-initial-product-run-is-real
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Flores Bajawa Ngura Organic RFA
About Flores Bajawa Ngura Organic RFA
Flores is a small Indonesian island located about 200 miles to the east of Bali, and is northwest of Timor. The island is one of the few places on earth where Komodo dragons can be found in the wild and is part of the Komodo national park. Flores' population is about one and a half million people. Mountain elevations reach nearly 8,000 feet. It is known as the 'island of flowers' so named by the Portuguese not because of flowers, but rather by the colorful coral reefs that surround the island. The terrain is rugged and the island is replete with both active and inactive volcanoes which have created especially fertile soils ideal for organic coffee production. Flores was rocked by a 7.8 earthquake in 1992 which resulted in thousands of lost lives.
The coffee industry in Flores was not known for quality prior to 2005, however, a program begun by the Indonesia Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute changed its entire coffee methodology to a quality forward approach. Today there are twelve neighboring cooperatives in Flores and each them has been certified as organic. The Bajawa Ngura coffee name designates where it from and how it is processed. Bajawa tells us it is from the town of Bajawa in the Ngada District, Central Highlands where the Manggarai live, a clan based ethnic group and no doubt they are responsible for growing and harvesting this coffee. The word 'Ngura' means wet hulled.
Almost all coffee in Flores is Arabica grown between 1200 and 1800 meters. Among the major changes that have taken place in recent years are the harvesting of only fully ripe cherries, and, implementation of wet hull processing, also called semi-washed. Beans are depulped and while covered with mucillage are partially fermented, then dried. The drying takes place on raised African beds here, an excellent development as the coffee is not in contact with soil and is exposed to air from all sides. Coffee is dried to a high 30% to 35% moisture level while in its hull (or parchment); it is then hulled, or milled, while moist and the balance of drying is later continued. In the local Bahasa language the process is called "giling basah" or literally, wet grinding. This method produces deep green/blue coffees, now commonly seen in those from Sumatra. It is also responsible for the heavy body, low acid nature as full drying within parchment results in higher acidity.
Certified organic and now also Rainforest Alliance.
The desire to produce quality coffee has been contagious and the coops share information aimed at further improvement. Within just a few short years coffee from Flores has become a truly viable product in world trade. Varietals include Typica, Yellow Catuai (referred to as “Colombian”), Arobusta, and Juria, a local cultivar which grows wild and can be twenty-five or more feet in height. These wild grown trees produce fruit once every two years rather than annually.
While not a cup profile for everyone, Flores Bajawa Ngura Organic will have its followers.
Cup characteristics: Coffee from Flores is known for sweet chocolate, floral and woody notes. Very earthy and smooth, even more so than Sumatra. Background smokiness that makes for a distinctive cup. Mouth coating body and chocolaty texture. This is an especially clean and vibrant lot.
Roasting Notes: We roasted the coffee rather lightly and it produced the cup profile shown above. We would suggest using slightly less coffee than the charge weight of your roaster because this Flores may take a bit longer to roast; thus on programmed roasters you may run out of time. For example, if the program calls for a quarter pound (113 grams) try using 100 grams of beans. This coffee should also produce a very distinctive and interesting dark roast and could be a good candidate for a single origin espresso.
Indonesia coffee facts:
Population (2006): 245.5 Million People
Coffee Production: 6.79 Million bags (60 kg)
Country bag capacity: 132 pounds - 60 kg
Domestic Consumption: 2.14 Million bags per year
Coffee Export: 4.65 Million Bags
Cultivated Area: 250,000 Hectares
Harvests: Year round depending on region with peaks
March to June.
Arabica Introduced: Introduced in Java by the Dutch mid 17th century.
Specialty Coffee Regions: Sumatra (Aceh), Java, Timor, Sulawesi (formerly Celebes), Bali.
Grades: Grade 1 triple picked, grade 1 double picked, grade 1 , grade 2
All Arabica plantations were destroyed in 1877 by a coffee disease.
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<urn:uuid:7aa223d6-ff73-451c-801b-c9146b8e97c8>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.roastmasters.com/flores&Category_Code=organic_fair_trade&Product_Count=4.html
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en
| 0.952598
| 1,002
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Misleading Orientation Marks on Soft Toric Contact Lenses
Misleading Orientation Marks on Soft Toric Contact Lenses
BY GRAEME YOUNG, MPHIL, PHD, FCOPTOM, DCLP, FAAO, & ROBERTA McILRAITH, BOPTOM (HONS)
Assessing orientation is an essential aspect of toric soft contact lens fitting. Thankfully this is a simple process — or is it? We assume that an orientation marking that's 10 degrees off the vertical indicates that the toric lens has rotated because of lid forces and that we need to modify the contact lens prescription to compensate. By the same token, a vertical orientation mark indicates no lens rotation and that no compensation is required.
These assumptions are usually valid, but in a significant proportion of cases, perhaps in one-third, this is not necessarily correct.
Parallax and Asymmetry Effects
Toric soft contact lenses with markings at 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock have demonstrated that lens decentration can distort the angle of the orientation marks. For instance, in lenses showing inferior decentration, the orientation marks no longer align but appear to slope down in a ‘V‘ shape (Figure 1). This relates to parallax and the fact that the contact lens is tilted slightly when decentered. With an inferiorly decentered lens, the top edge (that nearest to the limbus) is generally closer to the observer while the bottom edge sits further away from the observer. As a result, the lens is viewed from an off-axis position and the markings appear to be rotated.
Even when the lens is well centered, a similar apparent twisting of the orientation marks can occur because of asymmetry of the cornea and, more importantly, of the sclera. The pioneers of scleral lens fitting were well aware that the nasal sclera is invariably flatter than the temporal sclera. From plaster casts of the eye, Marriott (1966) found that the temporal sclera is curved with an average radius of about 16mm whereas the nasal sclera was usually too flat to be measured. Because of this asymmetry, the nasal sclera is often positioned anterior to the temporal sclera, and a soft contact lens placed on this type of eye will, again, adopt a tilted position. However, without paired markings (such as at 6 o'clock and 12 o'clock), it's difficult to assess which soft toric lens fittings are affected.
Figure 1. Effect of lens decentration on orientation markings. The 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock markings are horizontally aligned, but because of parallax the nasal mark appears rotated counterclockwise.
Corneal asymmetry may exacerbate this effect. Most corneal topographies are relatively symmetrical about a vertical axis, but approximately one-third show some asymmetry, perhaps secondary to the scleral asymmetry. This can manifest as a difference in asphericity or corneal astigmatism between the nasal and temporal cornea (Lui, Huang and Pflugfelder, 1999; Reddy, Szczotka, Roberts 2000).
In Figure 2, the orientation marks have been extended across the center of the lens to better demonstrate the lens tilt effect. Because of parallax, the inferior part of the orientation mark appears rotated counterclockwise by about 10 degrees. However, assessing the marking as a whole indicates that there is no rotation, but merely that the marking looks slightly off-axis due to effective tilting of the lens. The horizontal marking provides further confirmation of no rotation, although its slight bend suggests one or a combination of three possibilities: slight inferior decentration; that the superior sclera is positioned anterior to the inferior sclera; and/or slight down gaze.
Consider Using Paired Markings
As with decentered lenses, this misleading appearance can go undetected unless there is a corresponding orientation mark on the opposite side of the lens. Only a few toric lenses incorporate paired orientation markings; these include Acuvue Advance for Astigmatism, Acuvue Oasys for Astigmatism (both Vistakon) and Air Optix for Astigmatism (CIBA Vision).
Because of this parallax effect, orientation marks can erroneously appear to be rotated 10 or more degrees. With a cylinder as low as 1.25D, this rotation would produce a resultant error of nearly 0.50D of oblique cylinder. The deceptive appearance of orientation marks may explain some instances in which apparently well-fitting toric soft lenses provide poor vision.
Modern molded toric soft lenses are manufactured with impressive accuracy and are thin enough to prevent any complicating tear lens. Normally, therefore, the optimum toric lens prescription should be calculable using the spectacle prescription and any observed lens rotation. However, in the event of poor vision, having rechecked the refraction and verified the accuracy of the lens itself (Young, Hickson-Curran, 2005), the next step should be to consider whether the orientation has been misread because of distortion of the orientation mark. Is the lens decentered? Does the eye appear to be naso-temporally asymmetrical? One clue in checking for asymmetry is whether you can focus the temporal and nasal limbal blood vessels by slit lamp simultaneously or whether some back and forth adjustment is needed to focus from one to the other.
Figure 2. Centered toric lens on a tilted cornea resulting in apparent counterclockwise rotation of the inferior orientation mark; this is mirrored by the opposite mark, confirming the absence of rotation. Note that nasal limbal capillaries are in focus while the temporal vessels are out of focus, indicating a difference in the heights of the temporal and nasal sclera.
Improving Soft Toric Success
Nowadays, most toric soft lens fittings are relatively straightforward. However, this observation suggests some additional pointers for successful toric fitting:
1. During the pre-fitting assessment, note any significant asymmetry in ocular topography or any other abnormalities (such as pingueculae) that might distort lens fit.
2. If the lens is decentered, be aware that this may have twisted the orientation mark. Generally, this extra rotation will be in the infero-nasal direction.
3. Where possible, note whether paired orientation marks are aligned and, if not, make the appropriate adjustment to your assessment of rotation.
4. In the event of unexpected vision results, consider the possibility of twisted orientation markings. In the case of 6 o'clock markings, these will tend to over-estimate infero-nasal rotation.
In conclusion, improvements in the quality and accuracy of toric soft lenses enable us to re-examine some of the finer points of soft toric fitting. This hitherto overlooked feature of misleading orientation marks helps to explain some instances of unexpected failure and provides some pointers towards better assessment of toric lens performance. CLS
Acknowledgements: These observations arose out of work sponsored by Vistakon Inc.
To obtain references for this article, please visit http://www.clspectrum.com/references.asp and click on document #151.
Dr. Young is director of Visioncare Research Ltd., a United Kingdom-based company specializing in eyecare clinical research. He's a past president of the British Contact Lens Association and a member of the International Society for Contact Lens Research. Ms. McIlraith is a New Zealand qualified optometrist currently working at Visioncare Research as a research assistant.
Contact Lens Spectrum, Issue: June 2008
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Mike DouglasArticle Free Pass
(born Aug. 11, 1925, Chicago, Ill.—died Aug. 11, 2006, Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.), American television personality and singer who , was the laid-back host of the daytime The Mike Douglas Show (1961–82), which featured musical acts, top celebrities of the day, and politicians, including seven U.S. presidents. Douglas’s nonconfrontational interviewing style appealed to his more than 30,000 guests, and his warm, easygoing manner made him extremely popular with audiences. Before launching his television career, Douglas was a featured singer with Kay Kyser’s big band, and he later scored a number of hit singles, notably “The Men in My Little Girl’s Life” (1966). During the 1940s he appeared on TV, on the musical quiz show Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, and in 1953 he served as host of the radio program Hi, Ladies! Douglas’s memoir, I’ll Be Right Back: Memories of TV’s Greatest Talk Show, was published in 1999.
What made you want to look up "Mike Douglas"? Please share what surprised you most...
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This story originally appeared in the summer 2012 issue of The Spirit of Washington University.
St. Louis philanthropists Marilyn and Sam Fox, BU51, take great pleasure in setting examples of leadership and service in many organizations.
At Washington University—the place Sam Fox once said "opened the curtains on a world I didn't know existed"—the couple is focused on giving deserving students the opportunity of a lifetime while building educational excellence. To help attract the best and brightest students, Mr. and Mrs. Fox have made a $5 million commitment. The majority of the gift—$4.5 million—will establish the endowed Sam Fox Scholars Fund in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. The remainder will provide a lectureship in that school as well as ongoing support for the John M. Olin School of Business.
Dedicated in 2006, the Sam Fox School comprises the College of Art, Graduate School of Art, College of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, and Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.
The contribution to scholarships is unprecedented for the Sam Fox School, bringing it closer to its $10 million fundraising goal as part of Opening Doors to the Future: The Scholarship Initiative for Washington University.
"Marilyn and Sam Fox are two of Washington University's most ardent supporters," Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton says. "It is impossible to estimate the true, long-lasting impact of the Sam Fox Scholars Fund, but each student who comes to the Sam Fox School to study will go out into the world with a singular ability to shape society. Here, students are offered a special combination of great teachers, artists, designers, and architects; rigorous study and practice; and immersion in a diverse, global community that will prepare them well for future success."
Currently, more than 50 percent of undergraduate students and 97 percent of graduate students in the Sam Fox School receive financial aid.
"Scholarships have never been more important to higher education," says Carmon Colangelo, dean of the Sam Fox School and the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts. "Marilyn and Sam Fox's extraordinarily generous gift will have a profound impact, allowing talented and creative students to pursue their ambitions of obtaining a world-class art, architecture, and design education in an engaging and collaborative environment."
While the Foxes have been supporting a variety of university programs for more than 30 years, their recent gifts have exceeded $10 million, bringing their total gifts, pledges, and commitments to more than $22 million.
Mr. Fox is founder and chairman of Harbour Group, a privately owned company that specializes in the acquisition and development of manufacturing companies for long-term investment. He has been a loyal adviser to Washington University for many years. Elected to the university's Board of Trustees in 1989, he served as vice chair from 1999 to 2001. In 2004, the board unanimously elected him a lifetime voting member. He also serves on the board’s 13-member Executive Committee.
Mr. Fox served as the U.S. ambassador to Belgium under President George W. Bush and has received many honors. They include the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; the Marco Polo Award, the highest award given to foreign business leaders by the Republic of China; and the St. Louis Citizen of the Year Award from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and past award recipients.
Mrs. Fox became the first female president in the history of the Jewish Community Center of St. Louis when she was elected to that post in 1992. Her board memberships have included the Missouri Botanical Garden, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis Variety Club, Webster University, Girl Scouts, Jewish Federation of St. Louis, United Way of Greater St. Louis, and National Council of Community and Justice. She twice has chaired the Old Newsboys' Children's Charity. Among her many awards are the St. Louis Woman of Achievement, the St. Louis Variety Woman of the Year, the Wetterau Old Newsboys Day Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Council of Community and Justice Brotherhood Sisterhood Award.
In recognition of the couple's commitment to improving the quality of life in their communities, Saint Louis University awarded Mr. and Mrs. Fox honorary degrees in public service in 2000. The Foxes also have shared the Jane and Whitney Harris St. Louis Community Service Award and the Arts & Education Council's Excellence in Philanthropy Award.
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For the first time ever, the adoption tax credit is refundable. This is a great change for parents who have adopted children in the past few years, because it means they could file their 2010 taxes and receive a bigger-than-expected refund. Keep in mind that refundable is a good thing when it comes to taxes; it means that even if you don’t owe any additional money to the government otherwise, the credit can make your liability less than zero. The government will owe you money, and you’ll receive a refund check. Here’s a deeper explanation of refundable tax credits.
If you’ve had adoption-related expenses, you can receive a tax credit, which reduces the amount you owe the government dollar for dollar. For the 2010 tax year, parents can receive as much as $13,170 per adopted child. The adoption credit lets you carry forward unclaimed expenses from the five previous years, as well. If you’ve paid more than the maximum in 2009 and claimed the maximum that year, you could claim the excess 2009 expenses for the same child on your 2010 tax return as long as the total claimed for each child does not exceed the maximum.
With the capability of receiving a larger refund due to the refundability of the adoption tax credit, the IRS has increased its requirements for documentation of the adoption. To qualify, taxpayers must complete Form 8839 and include additional paperwork.
While the U.S. tax system is designed for wealth distribution as well as raising money for governmental operations, the existence of refundable credits puts a spotlight on the more controversial aspect of the IRS. Additionally, the adoption tax credit is phased out at an adjusted gross income of $182,520 for 2010. This is a high maximum and will not disqualify most families who adopt children, but it means that the credit exists to help middle and low income families meet the needs of their children.
When it comes to the children’s needs, adopted children classified as “special needs” enable the parents to qualify for the entire credit, even if the family did not pay expenses that reach the total of $13,170 per child. In practice, adoption expenses tend to exceed tens of thousands of dollars, so even the maximum refund does not fully reimburse a family for an adoption.
As a result of the changes this year, a family earning a gross income of $39,000 in 2010 determined that the IRS will be paying them a $54,000 tax refund this year. This family has adopted five children over the course of three years. I could certainly argue that supporting the needs of five children on a $39,000 salary is going to be a challenge, but families manage to make it work.
I’m surprised that this family, as interviewed in CNN Money, did not recognize that their $54,000 windfall would be a perfect candidate for starting a college fund or replenishing savings accounts. The family is free to do whatever they like with a tax refund, but considering the needs of their adopted children might have been a good choice for a priority rather than a vacation. To be fair, I’m not in their shoes, so I don’t know what their needs are. The mother of the family indicates she does want to spend the money wisely, but anyone else receiving this credit should probably consider saving as well as spending.
If you file your taxes online using TurboTax or H&R Block, both of which offer free federal tax filing, the software will guide you through claiming the adoption credit. Meeting with a tax professional in person will be helpful, as well, to ensure you’ve claimed all that you can qualify for.
This credit will be refundable on 2011 tax returns as well, so any family adopting a child will benefit from the more generous tax law as well. Regardless, adopting children for the sole purpose of receiving a tax credit isn’t something I’d recommend.
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The Southeastern Connecticut Housing Alliance (“SECHA”) advocacy for the creation of affordable housing is critical to our region. Our housing advocacy services are essential in that our organization educates both the private and public sectors. The distribution of factual and timely housing data ultimately makes affordable housing more accessible by dispelling myths and removing barriers.
Access to affordable housing promotes a wide array of positive outcomes: promoting better health for most people particularly children, enhancing opportunities for better education, and strengthening families by allowing seniors and those struggling to remain near family members the ability to live closer to their support systems and healthcare providers. It allows young children to reside in a safe clean environment in conditions suitable for studying and focusing on their education while it also allows young adults the option to live in the towns where they were born. It allows young adults the opportunity to reside in our region to attend some of the finest educational institutions in the country, thus it spurs economic development with an educated workforce. Our advocacy services demonstrate collaborative initiatives with state agencies, major employers, municipal Chief Elected Officials, community leaders, lenders, real estate developers, planners, and others.
Connecticut continues to struggle with a serious shortage of affordable housing. What was already one of the most significant challenges facing low and moderate-income families in our State has become a crisis, expanding to encompass many middle class families who have never before experienced problems paying for housing. Today, individuals and families who are several pay checks away from becoming homeless or in jeopardy of foreclosure has unfortunately become more common than most people want to believe. Forced unemployment and underemployment have created a potential downward spiral for some families; however, having secure affordable housing appears to be a stabilizing factor in most people’s lives. The outreach intended by SECHA will provide education and technical assistance to developers interested in creating housing, to municipalities interested in expanding their housing inventory, and to those who may require housing information for themselves, their employees, their families, etc. Additionally, SECHA will proactively collaborate with organizations to distribute this valuable housing information regarding financing mechanisms, zoning incentives, sustainable development, and more.
With your sponsorship and generosity, the Southeastern CT Housing Alliance will be able to continue its work. By simply sponsoring our Housing Alliance, you will be eligible to receive updates on housing data and trends via our newsletter, receive invitations to attend housing related workshops, receive invitations and notices regarding regional forums, and have your name listed on our “sponsor” page on our website. Agency and Corporate Sponsors will have the opportunity to have their organizations logo advertised on the SECHA web site, as our public thank you for your charitable donation.
There are several easy ways to become a sponsor: 1) fill out the form below as your pledge to sponsor SECHA and an email will be sent to us and we will contact you to arrange payment; or 2) click the link below to open our flyer and form which can be filled out electronically, printed, and mailed to our office with your check; or 3) simply call our Director at 860-204-9050 or 203-536-9856 and we will be glad to assist you.
This form immediately below is a writable PDF which may be printed and mailed to our office with your check:
The form below is a direct email with your pledge to SECHA. After submitting the form below, you will be contacted by our office:
Sponsorship Campaign Form
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Abdominal pain, cramps or discomfort can occur anywhere in your stomach area (between your chest and groin). Get advice and information if you have abdominal pain.
Advice about back injuries, pulled muscles, whiplash, bumps, knocks, large force injuries and more.
Bites and stings can cause pain, redness, rashes and even allergic reactions. Discover how to deal with bites and stings from insects, plants and animals.
If you are experiencing any kind of breathing problem, such as tightness in the chest, coughing, wheezing or breathlessness; find out what to do here.
How to deal with burns including heat burns, cold burns, electrical burns, scalds and sunburn. Information on pain relief, aftercare and seeking further help.
Advice about pain that affects your chest and back area; whether the pain comes and goes, is constant, mild or severe.
If you have an injury to your chest area (between your neck and stomach; including the ribs), get advice about first aid, managing pain and when to seek further help.
For help with the symptoms of colds and flu; including sore throat, blocked nose, aches and pains, fever, high temperature and feeling hot and shivery.
What to do if you, or someone you are caring for, have collapsed, fainted or lost consciousness for any length of time.
Confusion can result from a lack of sleep, a bang to the head or another health condition. Get reliable advice if you are experiencing confusion.
Confidential advice on all contraception issues; including what to do if you've had unprotected sex or missed a pill.
Wisdom tooth pain, cracked fillings, finding an NHS dentist and more. How to deal with pain in your teeth, gums and mouth or any other dental issue.
This health and symptom checker offers advice about diabetes including: changes to blood glucose levels; diabetes medicine and insulin enquiries; and problems with monitoring and testing equipment.
Picked up a bug or eaten something that didn’t agree with you? Get self care information and further advice on dealing with an upset stomach.
Most children under 5 may have diarrhoea and vomiting at some point. Children who have diarrhoea and vomiting should be given plenty of clear drinks to replace lost fluids.
Dizziness can have a number of causes including, dehydration, vertigo and anaemia. Get an assessment if you are feeling dizzy or light-headed.
Find out how to deal with the most common types of ear problem including ear infections, earaches and hearing problems.
Advice about eye injuries and symptoms such as redness, dryness and soreness or problems with your vision.
A facial injury can be caused by almost anything, such as falling, cutting yourself shaving or being hit by something. Find out how to look after a facial injury.
Confidential advice on a wide range of symptoms affecting the female genitals and female sexual health problems; including STI concerns, rashes, pain, periods and more.
Get advice if you have an object in your body which doesn’t belong there; such as a bead up your nose or an insect in your eye.
A general assessment can provide reliable advice and information on everyday health concerns that affect you or your family
Help and advice if you are feeling unwell, including information if you have unexplained tiredness or exhaustion, a fever, or have started to feel unwell since taking new medicines.
Help and advice if your child is feeling unwell or has symptoms such as a high temperature, unexplained tiredness or extreme thirst.
Allergies can make you feel awful: itchy eyes, runny nose and more. Hay fever is an allergy caused by pollen and spores. Symptoms can affect the nose, eyes, throat and sinuses.
Whether you have had a bump, bruise or knock to the head or face, get self care advice and find out when you should seek further help for a head injury.
Headaches are mild to severe pains in the head and back of the neck. They can have a number of causes. Get advice about self care for headaches.
Joint pain can have many causes including osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, gout and wear-and-tear. Pain, inflammation and stiffness can affect any joint at any age.
Leg pain can have many causes including dehydration, cramp or muscle strain. Find out about how to manage pain in your legs.
The term limb injury is used to describe an injury affecting your arms, legs, hands, feet, fingers or toes. Get first aid advice, self care information and more.
Confidential advice for men on all aspects of male sexual health; such as pain, soreness, infections, rashes and symptoms affecting the male genitals, sexual performance and more.
If you’re feeling under pressure, get confidential advice regarding mental health issues, such as anxiety, stress and depression.
Help and advice if you have mouth problems including ulcers, sores, cuts, bleeding, soreness of gums and problems with dentures.
Neck pain or stiff neck can have a number of causes including poor posture, sleeping on pillows that are the wrong height or sitting in a draught.
Nosebleeds are quite common, especially in children. Find out how to deal with a nosebleed and how to stop the bleeding.
Reassurance and advice regarding a wide range of health issues during pregnancy including morning sickness, pelvic and back pain and healthy eating.
Advice about skin problems such as contact dermatitis, dry skin, prickly heat and hives; as well as warts, cold sores, acne and insect bites.
Common causes of rectal bleeding are constipation, tears in the anus and haemorrhoids (piles). Get self care advice and information about rectal bleeding.
Cleaning products, plants, toys...almost anything you can think of. It’s easy to accidentally swallow or inhale something. Find out what to do if you’re concerned.
Common urinary problems include UTIs (urinary tract infections), catheter care, cystitis and problems passing urine (weeing).
Wounds, lacerations, cuts and grazes. Get first aid advice, follow-up self care and after care advice on looking after wounds and keeping them clean.
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The Testimony of Kitty Werthman
Mrs. Werthman saw Hitlerís rise to power in pre-war Austria. He did not conquer by force. He was eagerly welcomed by the people who voted him into office because the Nazis promised free health care, retirement income,unemployment benefits, guaranteed wages, free nursery care, equal rights for women, gun control, and other enticements that now are part of the political landscape in all industrialized countries. Can we learn from Austriaís mistake before it is too late? 63 minutes. $15 alone or $12 with any other purchase.
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Although Christian radio stations are not possible in North Africa or the Middle East, those living there are still hearing the Gospel through HCJB Global’s shortwave, satellite and Internet radio broadcasting. Programs are produced by over 50 groups of local believers who we have trained as radio broadcasters and who have given evidence of their commitment to reach their communities for Christ. To allow these believers to record the programs quickly and easily, we provide them with portable studios they can use in their own city and then send us the recorded programs for broadcasting back into their countries.
FUNDS NEEDED FOR ONE PORTABLE STUDIO - TOTAL: $5,862
THE NEED AND THE SOLUTION
The 355.2 million people living in North Africa and the Middle East are about 98.99% Muslim. Political and cultural restrictions deny them access to the Good News of Jesus Christ, yet many are searching for love, truth and hope in their lives.
Most people in this region will never personally meet a Christian, and laws often forbid the sharing of Christian ideas. But radio overcomes obstacles like illiteracy and cultural pressures. The ability to listen in secret makes it an effective tool for both evangelism and discipleship. And responses and feedback have taught us that many radio listeners are finding answers to their hearts’ searching as a result of hearing the Gospel.
A recent independent media survey revealed that more than 1.5 million people listen weekly to either the satellite or shortwave service broadcasts of HCJB Global. And that does not include those who listen online via the Internet.
Since 1998, HCJB Global has been partnering with small groups of believers in North Africa and the Middle East who have a passion to use radio to reach their people for Christ. Innovations in technology have made it possible for us to supply our partners with equipment so they can record programs and send them to us without the risk of traveling outside of their country or making contact with non-Arabic speakers.
Each portable studio consists of a laptop computer with an external sound card/hard drive, software for audio recording and editing, professional microphone and headphone, and special security software. The entire studio fits into two small briefcases or shopping bags so it can be easily transported without attracting attention.
Portable studios empower and mobilize these local believers in North Africa and the Middle East to reach their own communities for Christ. HCJB Global provides equipment, training and broadcast airtime, and our partners provide the original ideas, cultural insights, and their own voices so that the content will be most effective in reaching listeners’ hearts.
We are eager to supply more portable studios this year to new groups in the region -- as well as upgrade others already in place -- so that many more people in this region can come to know the Savior.
Response From a Listener
When I listen about Jesus Christ I feel a peace inside that I have never felt before. I do not feel at peace unless I listen to your radio station and hear about Jesus. I am very eager to learn more about Him. Please send me the Bible and correspondence course and help me to embrace Christianity and be part of the Christian believers.
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Storm stories: Déjà vu all over again this year, but worse?
Could last year's robust hurricane season be only a precurser for things to come?
If Dr. William Gray is correct, the answer is "yes indeed."
Gray, a Colorado State University meteorologist who has been issuing forecasts for the Atlantic Ocean hurricane season for more than 25 years, has come out with his mid-season prediction.
It's not pretty.
"Information obtained through July 2005 indicates that the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season will be an extremely active one," Gray posted on the Internet late last week. "We estimate that 2005 will have about 20 named storms (average is 9.6), 10 hurricanes (average is 5.9), and six intense hurricanes (average is 2.3)."
He also said "The probability of U.S. major hurricane landfall is estimated to be well above the long-period average. This year is expected to continue the past-decade trend of above-average hurricane seasons."
Just what we need to hear, huh?
Besides a slew of scientific data collected globally, Gray and his team of researchers use a set of historical models to compile the forecasts. "We believe that the current active period is quite similar to the 1930s, where we had many active hurricane seasons, even though other features typically associated with active seasons in the 1950s and 1960s were not present."
You may remember reading about the "Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935," which struck the Florida Keys. More than 400 people were killed, the railroad line Henry Flagler was building from the mainland to Key West was washed away, and the storm was estimated to have had winds of 200-250 mph.
Gray said, "The 1930s were also a period of strong global warming similar to the global warming of the last decade. From the limited data available during the 1930s and '40s, we deduce that the Atlantic was quite warm, similar to conditions that we are presently experiencing. However, other features, such as strong easterly anomalies at upper levels in the tropical Atlantic which were present in the 1950s and 1960s, do not appear to have been present in the earlier period of the 1930s. We have seen a slight increase in tropical Atlantic easterly anomalies since 1995, but have yet to see the easterlies that were present in the earlier decades of the 1950s and '60s."
Gray has been a lone voice as naysayer regarding global warming and hurricanes. Simply put, he tends to pooh-pooh the global warming advocates. He addressed the matter in his posting last week.
"Many individuals have queried whether the unprecedented landfall of four destructive hurricanes in a seven-week period during August-September 2004 is related in any way to human-induced climate changes," he said. "There is no evidence that this is the case.
"If global warming were the cause of the increase in U.S. hurricane landfalls in 2004 and the overall increase in Atlantic basin major hurricane activity of the past 10 years, one would expect to see an increase in tropical cyclone activity in the other storm basins as well. This has not occurred.
"When tropical cyclones worldwide are summed, there has actually been a slight decrease since 1995. In addition, it has been well-documented that the measured global warming during the 25-year period of 1970-1994 was accompanied by a downturn in Atlantic basin hurricane activity over what was experienced during the 1930s through the '60s."
So what is causing all this heightened hurricane activity?
Gray attributes the major storm frequency to temperature changes in the North Atlantic. Warmer water, more storms, and the water has been warming in the past decade, he has discovered.
By the numbers:
Gray and his team have offered the following grim statistics for what we've got to look forward to in the next few months.
Probabilities for at least one major hurricane, Category 3 or more, making landfall on the U.S. coastline: 77 percent. Average for the past century is 52 percent.
Probabilities for the East Coast including all of Florida: 58 percent. Average is 31 percent.
Probabilities for the Gulf of Mexico coastline from the Florida Panhandle to Brownsville, Texas: 44 percent. Average is 30 percent.
Here we go again.
Hurricanes hit our gas tanks
Oil production is such a shaky market that a hurricane that strikes the offshore oil drilling rigs in the northern Gulf of Mexico can produce global petroleum price fluctuations, according to a report in the New York Times last week.
When Hurricane Dennis came ashore July 10, it also swept through the oil-rich and oil-derrick covered offshore fields of the northern Gulf. It was big enough and strong enough that all 30,000 people who work on the rigs were evacuated and the flow of oil was reduced to less than a trickle - about 4 percent of average.
The world's largest semisubmersible oil rig was left tilting at a 20-degree angle and is not expected to be up and running for months at its potential of 250,000 gallons of crude a day.
To add to the problem, when Hurricane Emily came calling on Mexico a few days later, it spurred the same evacuation of that country's oil platforms with a corresponding reduction of oil flow.
And, as we all know, no oil means more pennies-per-gallon at the gas pumps.
Hurricane Ivan last year severely damaged 24 offshore platforms and 102 underwater pipelines, causing $2.7 billion in damage and stalling oil flow for six months. To bring it home a bit, oil prices on commodity markets increased 19 percent in the two weeks following Ivan.
And it's not just hurricanes that cause damage, and it's not just oil flow outages that are the problem.
According to the St. Petersburg Times, Tropical Storm Arlene caused the evacuation of oil rigs off Louisiana and elsewhere. The storm, with 60-mph winds, damaged a derrick off New Orleans and caused a 550-gallon oil spill - not that big a deal in the global scheme of pollution threats.
However, the rig's spill ended up in a National Wildlife Refuge, and more than 700 birds died, many brown pelicans.
What to do?
Not much of anything can be done. The big oil rig that is the world's largest cost $1 billion to build, with all the bells and whistles and safety features known built within its structure, and it was hammered by a Hurricane Dennis. What about all those other, smaller, older derricks out there? How long will they hold out in the face of 150-mph winds?
The following notes have appeared in Sandscript before, but in light of the approaching 70th anniversary of the Labor Day Hurricane, they warrant repeating.
These comments are from Ernest Hemingway as he prepared his 40-foot fishing yacht "Pilar" for the storm while he was living in Key West. The excerpt is from Les Standiford's book, "Last Train to Paradise."
"Sunday you spend making the boat as safe as you can. When they refuse to haul her out on the ways because there are too many boats ahead, you buy $52 of new hawser and shift her to what seems the safest part of the submarine base and tie her up there.
"You go on to the boat and wrap the lines with canvas where they will chafe when the surge starts, and believe that she has a good chance to ride it out ... provided no other boat smashes into you and sinks you. There is a booze boat seized by the Coast Guard tied next to you and you notice her stern lines are only tied to ringbolts in the stern, and you start bellyaching about that ...
"You go home to see if you can get two hours' sleep before it starts, leaving the car in front of the house because you do not trust the rickety garage, putting the barometer and a flashlight by the bed for when the electric lights go. At midnight the wind is howling, the glass is 29.55 and dropping while you watch it, and rain is coming in sheets. You dress, find the car drowned out, make your way to the boat with a flashlight with branches falling and wires going down.
"The flashlight shorts in the rain, and the wind is now coming in heavy gusts from the northwest ... you have to crouch over to make headway against it. You figure if we get the hurricane ... you will lose the boat and you never will have enough money to get another. You feel like hell."
The "Pilar" survived the storm.
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Controlling Aphids in Your Gardencomments (3) March 19th, 2009
Aphids are those little pear-shaped gals that congregate around the undersides of leaves or the terminal buds on your rose bushes. You won’t be bothered by them in numbers of two or three, but when the situation resembles a Rolling Stones concert – that’s when you’ll sit up and take notice.
Another flag that may alert you to these ladies’ presence is a long ant trail, which much like groupies, seem to worship the ground the aphids walk on. The reality is that while the aphids suck the life out the tender greens on your plants, they are secreting a sticky-sweet substance called “honeydew” that the ants find quite irresistible. Hence, their tireless pilgrimage up and down every plant that may host an aphid.
Aphids come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and colors. They can be green, red, black, yellow, or brown. They don't have much of a discriminating palate, though - they'll attack various vegetables, legumes, stone fruit crops, roses, apples, and ornamentals.
Fortunately, in moderate amounts aphids do minimal damage to plants. They’re certainly unsightly and in massive amounts, they’ve been known to suck the life-blood (sugars) out of plants or distort flower buds or foliage. One of the ways a few aphids becomes an overwhelming mob of aphids is with the help of their devoted followers, the ants.
The ants become so punch-drunk with the honeydew that to ensure a steady supply of the nectar, they begin to protect the aphids from the aphid’s natural predators. These include parasitic wasps, lady beetles, lacewings, syrphid fly larva, and leatherwings. So, one of the best ways to control aphids in the garden is to take out the body guards.
The other reason a bazillion aphids seem to be born overnight is because they are – literally. Here’s the thing, aphids are all women. Every lady aphid is born pregnant. You just have to wonder what they did so wrong to deserve that. While they are born pregnant, they don’t actually give birth until they are a mature adult - which is about ten days after their own birth.
In the warm temperatures of spring, out of the over-wintering eggs emerge the female aphids called “stem mothers”. The stem mothers give birth to live daughters, who are also pregnant. No candlelight or jewelry necessary. In other words – they don’t need no stinking man. It’s really a superior race of women gone terribly wrong.
This odd phenomenon continues with every generation of girl aphid until the end of the season. This is where it gets interesting. At this point, the aphids begin to produce daughters and sons. These sons mate with the current generation of female aphids and those females lay eggs on bud scales to over-winter. Thus, the freaky cycle begins again.
Non-Toxic Aphid Controls
1. One of the best ways to control just about any pest in the garden is to be able to recognize the good guys, the cavalry, Indiana Jones. Learn your beneficial insects like the parasitic wasps (they can’t sting people). These dudes go through the abdomen of the aphid and lay their eggs inside. When the wasp larva is born, they emerge from the aphid’s belly. Okay, gross but effective.
Look at pictures of lacewings, leatherwings, and baby ladybugs. I promise, you won’t recognize a baby lady bug. They resemble red and black alligator (seriously). One ladybug will eat 5,000 aphids in its lifetime.
2. Plant flowers that attract beneficial insects to your garden. The adult forms of many beneficials feed on the pollen of these plants – so have a wide variety available. There are also online sources for purchasing beneficial insects for your garden.
3. You can always wipe off or prune away the leaves and buds to clear out colonies of aphids.
4. Using a forceful stream of plain water does the trick incredibly well. The aphids are knocked off the plant and usually end up breaking their jaw when they hit the ground (I don’t make this stuff up). Aphids are very slow movers, so even if they did manage to get back up the plant, they can’t very well eat with a dislocated jaw.
5. Try controlling their henchmen, the ants. Try Tanglefoot or Stickem around shrubs or trees.
6. If it just makes you feel better to “use” something, try an insecticidal soap. It kills aphids on contact, but doesn’t leave any toxic residues that could harm the beneficial insects. Insecticidal soaps are suppose to be safe for food crops, but if you want to be 100% sure try a mix of 1-3 teaspoons of household soap (not detergent) per gallon of water.
posted in: pests, aphids
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Punishments for male to male relationships: Imprisonment of less than 10 years
Female to Female Relationships: Legal
Marriage and Substitutes for Marriage: No law
Are you LGBTI? We want to hear from you! Help us inform other users of the site with your views on this country. Below is a random question about this country. If it is relevant to you please answer it.
Have you changed government documents in MYANMAR concerning your gender identity? How easy was the process?
I could change official documents easily
I changed official documents, but with much stress
I could not change my official documents
I have not tried to change official documents
HIV prevalence can be controlled and mitigated, according to multilateral lender Asian Development Bank (ADB).
This is the goal of two new projects aimed at curbing the growth and risks of HIV through a "focused and strategic approach," ADB Vice-President Stephen Groff said on Monday, December 3, two days after World Aids Day.
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It's been 31 years since Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft Corp. The software powerhouse now runs most of the world's computers and he is the richest man on the planet.
On Thursday, Gates said he will give up his day-to-day responsibilities in two years to focus more time on his charitable foundation. He will work "10-hour days" until July 2008 to help with the executive transition, but then will shed his duties as Microsoft's chief software architect. He will remain chairman.
The departure of the world's best-known technologist from the company he nurtured from scratch comes at a time when Microsoft is under increasing pressure from a crop of relatively new Internet competitors--Google Inc., eBay and Yahoo Inc., and others--that have slowly eroded Microsoft's dominance.
Furthermore, Gates, 50, who stepped down as Microsoft's chief executive officer in 2000 for his role as software architect, has been at the forefront of numerous initiatives at the company in recent years.
Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief technical officer, will immediately take the new title of chief research and strategy officer and will work with Gates in those areas.
Microsoft is putting its software on video-game consoles, hand-held devices, television sets and later this year will begin releasing, after an embarrassing delay, the next generation of its ubiquitous operating system. Another critical issue that Gates has championed is tightening the security holes that have plagued the Windows software platform in recent years, leading to an escalating wave of cyber-crime that has cost companies and consumers billions of dollars.
"Microsoft is at an interesting point at its history," said David Smith, the principal Microsoft analyst for Gartner. "It is facing very different competition and is changing horses in the middle. But I think it makes sense for them to look for new leadership because it can be difficult for founders to pull off reinvention over and over again.
"In the past they've shown an incredible ability to adapt, be nimble," Smith said. "In recent years, that's been tougher."
At a press conference at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., held after the financial markets closed, Gates said his decision to step aside should not be considered a retirement.
"It is a reordering of my priorities," Gates said. "With the success of Microsoft, I have also been given the gift of great wealth," he said, adding that he has made it clear in the past that almost all of that wealth "would be returned to society through my foundation."
Gates is the world's richest man, according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated wealth of $50 billion. He is still Microsoft's largest shareholder and plans to remain so. "I'm very proud of that," he said Thursday.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was formed in 2000 and its assets are now worth $29.1 billion, according to Microsoft. It is the world's largest philanthropic group and focuses on global health issues and education. Gates is chairman of the foundation, a title he will retain when he steps aside.
"He's created enormous wealth for so many people and created a business that's changed the world," said Gail Meneley of Chicago-based executive consultants, Shields Meneley Partners. "He has the ability now to go from what he's been doing to creating a life legacy rather than a business legacy."
Stephen Baker, an analyst for the NPD Group, said Gates' legacy has been critical for the development of the technology industry.
"When I think of Bill Gates, I think of one of the first guys who was a techie but also a businessman," he said. "He set the tone."
Nonetheless, Baker added, as the technology industry is changing, "it's probably a time for someone else to take that role. It could be Ballmer, it could be Ozzie or a group of guys."
Steve Ballmer, 50, has been CEO of Microsoft since 2000, when Gates left that role.
Ray Ozzie, 50, on the other hand, joined Microsoft in April 2005 when Microsoft bought his company, Groove Networks. Ozzie is a noted software innovator, who worked on the first electronic spreadsheet, VisiCalc in the early '80s and was a key force behind Lotus Notes later in the decade. He formed Groove in 1997.
Ozzie was Microsoft's chief technology officer until Thursday, when he was given Gates' title of chief software architect.
"They really need a full-time chief architect, somebody who's really current on technology and Ozzie is much more current than Bill," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at San Jose-based Enderle Group. "This allows Bill to mentor Ray. That mentoring probably will be very well received."
He called the two-year transition good for Microsoft.
"At different times in a company's life founders have to leave, and it's better to do it in a gradual way instead of suddenly and dramatically," Enderle said. "It provides for a much easier transition."
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Friday, June 3, 2011
Podcast Rewind: Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery
A special illustrated version of our podcast on Green-Wood Cemetery (Episode #64) is now available on our NYC History Archive feed. Just hit play and images of our topic will appear on any compatible media player.
If you're looking for a beautiful landscape of shaded hills and meandering paths, filled with classical architecture and populated with some of the greatest names in New York City history, look no further than Green-Wood Cemetery, once the most popular tourist destination in Brooklyn during the 19th century.
Green-Wood is one of New York's oldest gravesites, but its development reaches back all the way to the beginning of Brooklyn itself -- in fact, to Hezekiah Pierrepont, the founder of Brooklyn Heights. Find out why it took an inventive city planner with a funny name, a dead New York governor, and a few errant parakeets to make this place a beautiful, richly historical place to visit today.
Download it for FREE from iTunes or other podcasting services, or you can listen to the cleaned up audio version (without visuals) right here: Green-Wood Cemetery
Original version released Oct. 3, 2008. Pictures above courtesy the Library of Congress
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A new study by the Pew Charitable Trust’s Economic Mobility Project points out that trying to achieve more wealth than your parents is not much more than an unrealistic dream.
“The rags-to-riches story is more often found in Hollywood than in reality,” Erin Currier, the project manager for the Economic Mobility Project said to MSNBC.
While watching the success story may make a great movie, it’s far from the norm. According to the report, 70 percent of Americans born in the bottom fifth of the income ladder stay below the middle as adults. By contrast, 63 percent of those born in the top fifth of the income ladder stay above the middle as adults.
Overall, only 35 percent of Americans are considered “upwardly mobile,” which means that they have a higher household income than their parents at the same age. Those born in the middle three-fifths on the income ladder are the group that represents the possibility for a financial increase or decrease as adults.
The unsettling report also observes that African Americans have a smaller likelihood than their white counterparts of out-earning their parents.
Despite the lack of higher earning potential of future generations, once adjusted for inflation, most families are bringing in more money than their parents were at the same age. The problem is that the bigger paycheck isn’t resulting in a push up the income ladder.
“Clearly families do have more money in terms of what’s coming in every month, but they don’t have greater savings, they don’t have greater assets – for the most part – than their parents did,” Currier said.
So it seems, the problems lies in a lack of ability to save. Perhaps with more financial education and wisdom, families will begin to see a rags-to-riches dream, turn into reality.
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Despite a couple of minor tussles over baby-doll strollers, four children not used to much interaction outside of their families played, sang and colored together at a new playgroup offered by OSF Saint James-John W. Albrecht Medical Center.
The playgroup, Active Beginnings, is being held twice a month for children ages birth to 5 and Thursday was the group’s first gathering.
“I thought it went really well,” said Melissa Pina, a developmental therapist with the Medical Center’s Rehabilitation Department, which is overseeing the program. “We had a nice range of ages of children and they really did very well together,” she said.
The Rehab department is providing this program on the second and fourth Thursday of every month through a grant from the Livingston County 377 Board. There is no cost to attend the 75-minute gatherings, but parents or caregivers must attend as well.
“The focus of the playgroup is to teach children developmentally appropriate fine gross and motor skills, communication skills and socialization, while providing a support group for parents of small children,” Pina said.
“When families arrived, we let the children get to know each other while we asked the parents to fill out a survey on developmental topics they want to learn more about. Looking over the surveys, concerns expressed included ‘picky eater’ and ‘sharing.’ Once a month we will have personnel who can address those topics come in and talk to the parents. The other meeting will just focus on the children and parents interacting, mainly through play.”
Becky Dotterer, an occupational therapy assistant, is conducting the program with Pina at St. Paul Lutheran Church, 210 S. Deerfield Rd.
“The church has been so gracious to help us and this room is obviously child-friendly,” said Pina, noting the carpeting, toys and children-sized table and chairs. “It’s perfect because it’s cozy enough for interaction, yet big enough to give everyone a little space,” she said.
That was evident as Dotterer and Pina used a children’s learning CD, playing a counting song that required hand coordination before playing a “walking” song that parents participated in alongside their children.
“That was a lot of fun and the children and parents both engaged, which is the objective. And it was still play and lots of fun. Play is where children learn a lot of skills, but it’s still having fun.”
During two walking songs, parents and children, except one who was a little sleepy and was instead carried by his mom, walked forward and backward, tip-toed, hopped, ran and stomped around the room in a circle.
By the time the song ended, parents and children were smiling and ready to sit and listen to a couple of storybooks read by Pina and Dotterer.
A few minutes later, the children were grouped around a long table ready to use fine-motor skills needed for coloring.
“This is just great,” said Vanessa Sheppard of Odell, who was there with the youngest child of the group, Kamryn. “He’s an only child and he needs to learn to share and play well with others. This is really the only time he’s had with a group of kids, so I’m looking forward to these. I think it will also be a good resource for us parents,” she said.
David Naretto of Pontiac took his two sons, Jaxson, 5, and Gavin, 22 months, and said he was learning some new things as he had a chance to really sit and observe his sons.
“It’s nice to watch them, and also to join in their play,” said Naretto, adding that he and his wife, Cassandra, will be sharing playgroup attendance.
“The boys obviously have each other and they have a younger brother, Lucas, 10 months, at home. But it’s still nice for them to have other children to play with and learn from,” Naretto said.
Sarah Krueger of Pontiac brought daughter, Nevaeh, 3, to the group as a way to broaden her daughter’s social skills.
“She’s an only child and I think this will help her interact with kids more. She has Sunday school at church, but I think this is going to help even more,” Krueger said. She added that with the current economy, the free part of the program was also very appealing.
Pina stated there’s enough room for one or two more families to sign up to join this playgroup, and inquires can be made by calling 815-842-4584.
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It’s the Advanced Model for Extreme Lift and Improved Aeroacoustics, and it’s the brainchild of many, many intelligent beings planted at California Polytechnic State University. The aircraft has been in design courtesy of a grant from NASA, touting engines above the wings and the ability to achieve shockingly short takeoffs and landings. And did we mention it looks sexier than a freshly-washed 787? Yeah.
Visualized: futuristic AMELIA aircraft (theoretically) soars through NASA wind tunnel originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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In the past several days, Governor Cuomo's environmental department has announced that it's undertaking a new health review of fracking, and that it will likely miss a deadline and have to restart the rule making process to permit the gas drilling process in the state.
Governor Cuomo, speaking in Syracuse, denies that he’s delaying. “There is no step back,” he said.
Cuomo says the health review is in response to request by environmentalists, who had wanted an outside survey. The governor says his agencies can do a better job.
“It will be a stronger review to withstand a legal challenge,” Cuomo explained.
And the governor says lawsuits are likely.
The new delays mean fracking probably won’t begin until at least next year. That has angered some leaseholders hoping to make a profit from fracking. Environmentalists are cautiously optimistic.
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Research: Calcium supplements with or without vitamin D and risk of cardiovascular events: Reanalysis of the Women’s Health Initiative limited access dataset and meta-analysis
Research published in BMJ (British Medical Journal) in April 2011 adds to mounting evidence that calcium supplements increase the risk of cardiovascular events, particularly heart attacks, in older women. The findings suggest that their use in managing osteoporosis should be re-assessed.
Calcium supplements are often prescribed to older (postmenopausal) women to maintain bone health. Sometimes they are combined with vitamin D, but it’s still unclear whether taking calcium supplements, with or without vitamin D, can affect the heart.
The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study – a seven-year trial of over 36,000 women – found no cardiovascular effect of taking combined calcium and vitamin D supplements, but the majority of participants were already taking personal calcium supplements, which may have obscured any adverse effects.
So a team of researchers, led by Professor Ian Reid at the University of Auckland, re-analysed the WHI results to provide the best current estimate of the effects of calcium supplements, with or without vitamin D, on the risk of cardiovascular events.
They analysed data from 16,718 women who were not taking personal calcium supplements at the start of the trial and found that those allocated to combined calcium and vitamin D supplements were at an increased risk of cardiovascular events, especially heart attack.
By contrast, in women who were taking personal calcium supplements at the start of the trial, combined calcium and vitamin D supplements did not alter their cardiovascular risk.
The authors suspect that the abrupt change in blood calcium levels after taking a supplement causes the adverse effect, rather than it being related to the total amount of calcium consumed. High blood calcium levels are linked to calcification (hardening) of the arteries, which may also help to explain these results.
Further analyses – adding data from 13 other trials, involving 29,000 people altogether – also found consistent increases in the risk of heart attack and stroke associated with taking calcium supplements, with or without vitamin D, leading the authors to conclude that these data justify a reassessment of the use of calcium supplements in older people.
But in an accompanying editorial, Professors Bo Abrahamsen and Opinder Sahota argue that there is insufficient evidence available to support or refute the association.
Because of study limitations, they say “it is not possible to provide reassurance that calcium supplements given with vitamin D do not cause adverse cardiovascular events or to link them with certainty to increased cardiovascular risk. Clearly further studies are needed and the debate remains ongoing.”
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DADE CITY — Officials have hammered out a plan to move a controversial reclaimed water tank project out of the Mickens-Harper neighborhood.
City staff got the blessing from three agencies — the state Department of Environmental Protection, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Southwest Florida Water Management District — to instead build the 2 million gallon tank on a rural site on Summer Lake Road, where the city already has percolation ponds. The property is far removed from any neighborhood.
And city officials are laying the groundwork to go a step further and someday move the entire sewer plant.
At a commission meeting Tuesday night, City Attorney Karla Owens said she is drafting an ordinance that would establish a fund to tear down the wastewater treatment plant and build a new one elsewhere. The plant, which handles about 600,000 gallons of sewage a day, was built in Mickens-Harper in the 1950s, when the predominantly black neighborhood had little say in its location.
"There's a lot of satisfaction among our committee members and the community at large," said Bermice Mathis, a member of the neighborhood group that formed to fight the reclaimed water tank project. "Now we need to see these promises fulfilled."
The proposed sewer plant relocation fund would be strictly supported by donations, not assessments. City Commissioner Camille Hernandez said she would be one of the first contributors.
"It's a step in the right direction," she said. "I give (fellow city commissioner) Bill Dennis all the credit for this out-of-the-box idea. Not an ounce more infrastructure at the existing plant."
City Commissioner Curtis Beebe called the fund "a great gesture toward community ownership," although he noted substantial contributions would be needed to build a new sewer plant, which consultants estimated at $11.3 million.
"If everybody in town kicked in $100, would that even come close to raising the millions involved?" Beebe said.
Still, he was pleased with Tuesday's resolution.
"I was the first to propose the idea of relocating the plant entirely as an initial resolution to the problems," Beebe said. "Beyond that, I relied on city staff reports on the feasibility of altering the project. Now I'm thrilled that we can relocate the silo."
The controversy erupted in October, when Mickens-Harper residents discovered the city planned to build the reclaimed water silo on their neighborhood baseball field. The project would accompany an expansion and upgrade of the sewer plant. The tank would hold treated wastewater, which would be piped up to the Little Everglades Ranch for irrigation.
Mickens-Harper residents urged commissioners to build the tank elsewhere, and right a historic wrong by relocating the existing sewer plant as well.
The commission voted 3-2 last month to pull the plans for the tank in Mickens-Harper. Officials initially worried they couldn't change the tank site without jeopardizing grants for the project, including a Swiftmud grant worth up to $1.9 million. But staffers told commissioners on Tuesday that all of the agencies had given their blessing.
"The DEP has already approved the changes," City Manager Billy Poe said. "And when the USDA receives the new design and justification for the relocation, we can award the contract. At that point Swiftmud will extend their grant."
The move will add $52,000 to the tank project, including $39,000 in redesign costs and an estimated $13,000 in construction costs. The total project cost will be determined once commissioners pick a contractor Jan. 24.
The new plan marked a peaceful resolution to the controversy. But at the end of Tuesday night's meeting, a shouting match broke out when Dr. David Hernandez, the husband of Commissioner Camille Hernandez, challenged the mayor to justify his votes approving the original reclaimed water tank location.
"It was cruel," Dr. Hernandez said. "As a public health expert I recognize the most susceptible risk of the disease of pestilence is among the very young."
Mayor Scott Black roared back: "I do not affirm what happened during the 1950s," referring to the first decision to build the sewer plant.
"We are going to hit the rest button now," the mayor added, "as this line of questioning is creating heartache. People know where I stand and that I am not the ogre you have portrayed me to be."
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Masjid-i-Tarikh at Balkh
|Figure 1. Plan of Masjid-i-Tarikh showing the three aisles comprising nine equal bays.|
With its unusual enclosed square plan and nine domes, Masjid-i-Tarikh was the first of its kind in the Muslim world thus setting up a new development in both local and Muslim mosque design traditions. A few mosques were modelled after its establishment but this new arrangement was eventually abandoned, probably due to its limited functionality compared to the mosque of traditional plan. Masjid-i-Tarikh displays another important feature related to the extensive imitation of Samarra stucco carving decoration which adorned much of its surfaces.
Balkh is a town in the north of present-day Afghanistan about 20 km from Mazar-i-Sharif. Once a prominent Buddhist centre, it was Islamised along with the rest of Afghanistan in the eighth century. Balkh soon emerged as an important city, nicknamed the "mother of cities", in the Abbasid Khorasan province. It later became a royal town and a learning centre under the Seljuk and the Samanid rules. It produced a number of renowned Muslim figures, including the Barmakids who served as viziers to the Abbassids and the famous Sufi Jalal-ud-din al-Balkhi (al-Rumi) (1207-1273). In the thirteenth century, the town faced the same fate as Herat, Ghazni, Banyam and other Afghani towns which were sacked by Ghengis Khan's army. In modern times, Balkh was overshadowed by Mazar-i-Sharif which emerged as the political capital of the northern region of Afghanistan.
|Figure 2. Curtain wall showing here one of the arches being blocked up leaving a semi circular window.|
Among the many mosques this town had was Masjid-i-Tarikh, also known by other names such as Nuh Gunbad, Hajji Piyada and more famously as the Nine Dome Mosque. Built between the late eighth and early ninth century, the mosque, as the name Masjid-i-Tarikh or 'mosque of history' indicates, is not only one of the earliest mosques of Afghanistan but the first of its kind in Islam. It lies in an open plain some 12 km south of the present town of Balkh. Like many historic monuments of this poor and war-torn country, the mosque is now derelict in ruins, illustrating a story of appalling neglect and left to the mercy of the effect of weathering and other natural causes. The nine cupolas which originally formed its roof as well as a large proportion of its arcade have fallen burying its floor with more than a metre of rubble. The remains consist merely of four, out of the six, large pillars which still stand in the centre, a few of the arches springing from them as well as a handful of coupled columns flanking the walls. The mosque was discovered by French archaeologists who carried out a number of studies which has become the main source relevant publications. Recently in 2002, UNESCO became involved in the restoration of the mosque as part of its wider programme to rehabilitate Afghanistan's most important monuments.
|Figure 3. Detailed diagram showing a reconstructed Masjid-i-Tarikh.|
The Architecture of the Mosque
A surprisingly small mosque not exceeding 20 metres on each side, the Masjid was ordered in a square plan into three aisles with nine bays . A peculiar feature is observed here consisting of the absence of an external wall for the north eastern side opposite the Qibla which was replaced by an arcade serving as a façade and an entrance. The remaining sides had curtain walls and connected with double columns which provided the side support for the arcade . Whilst the square plan appears to be a local tradition seen in the Chahar Sutun at Termez, the open sides, according to Hellenbrend, originates from the pre-Islamic kushk theme. This type of building was common in Persia and later was adopted by Abu Muslim Al-Kharassani in his Dar Al-Imarah which he built at Merv (747). Under the Seljuks and Ottomans the Kushk became very popular used widely for private dwellings and villas.
|Figure 4. Robust piers described as elephant feet supported the arcade and roof of the mosque. The temporary metal roof was installed by UNESCO.|
The whole interior of the mosque consisted of two intersecting arcades dividing it into nine equal bays covered with domes . The arcades and domes were supported by six robust brick pillars covered with stucco decoration while at side walls a series of coupled columns provided the remaining support for the arcade . The whole construction scheme was based on layers of baked brick which the effect of weathering has turned into loosely bonded pieces. Although the brick was a local tradition, many of the remaining architectural elements reveal the extent of the influence of Muslim Mesopotamia, Egypt and North Africa. The combination of columns and heavy piers to carry the arcades was employed in these regions before. The Muslim historian Al- Maqrizi, for example, referred to what he called 'Jami' al-fiyalah', a reference to the prominent feature of large robust piers. Creswell provided some origins of this feature going back to Persian term pil-payah, which was used for pillar, literally meaning 'elephant-feet'. This was later rendered into Arabic as "fiyalah" meaning 'elephants', which is the derivation of 'jami' al-fiyalah', or Mosque of the Pillars.
Figure 5. Details of Samarra inspired stucco decoration.
In terms of the plan, the above features are strikingly unusual to the familiar design of mosques discussed in previous occasions. It appears that Masjid-iTarikh was used as an experimental workshop for the new design, probably aiming to find an alternative to the traditional hypostyle courtyard plan, or perhaps an attempt to introduce new ideas to meet local environmental and financial shortages. However, the established fact is that the scheme was experimented on a relatively modest scale whether in terms of geographical distribution or in terms of edifice size. Indeed only a handful of mosques including Abu Fatata ((Sussa, 838-41); Muhammad Ibn Khairun (Quairawan, 866); Shrine of Nabi Jirjis (Mosul, 9th century); Sharif Tabataba (Cairo, 950); Bab Mardum (Toledo, 999); Sab'a wa Sab'in Wali (Aswan, 1000) and Las Tornerias (Toledo, 1159), adopted the nine bayed design with domes and no courtyard. In Bab Mardum and Casa de las Tornerias the nine chambers were covered with domes exactly as in Balkh. In Bab Mardum the technique introduced in these domes is very revealing, with the insertion of supporting ribs intersecting each other in similar fashion to that of Cordoba. The ribs of the central dome were arranged in a star form crowning the structure and externally the dome was raised slightly above the rest of the roof. The whole structure was supported by only four centred columns which also defined its nine bays and above them horseshoe arches were placed.
|Figure 6. Elephant piers and Samarra style decoration in Nayin mosque (10th century)|
It is not known exactly why and what was the purpose of this parting from the traditional plan. Marcais suggested that they were private mosques built by influential individuals for the use of family and close relatives. Regardless of why these small mosques were built, they represented an ambitious endeavour to develop new forms and architectural themes. This is particularly seen in the well developed vaulting system these mosques used. Although it was difficult to reconstruct how the vaults (domes) of Masjid-i-Tarikh were built, but from the examples cited above, especially in Bab Mardum Mosque, it appears that these buildings inaugurated the use of a complex vaulting system, extending from barrel and groin vaults to the complex intersecting rib vaulting of domes. Such solutions clearly exceeded the vaulting techniques used by the Persian and Roman or Byzantine traditions which some Western academics claim to be their source of inspiration.
After these examples, no other building of similar design was known to have been built, thus indicating that the scheme halted, most likely abandoned due to unpopularity or uncertainty in its proper functionality.
In contrast to its unusual plan and main architectural features (piers and domes), Masjid-i-Tarikh re-employs the well-known Samarra's stucco decoration. Skilfully carved stucco themes such as vine scrolls twisting around leaves in high relief were largely employed to fill the spandrels of the arches. Meanwhile, the intrados were adorned with geometrical shapes in the form of circles, squares and star grid systems filled with vegetal forms such as palmettes, leaves, cones and buds . The capitals were adorned with a scheme combining between palmettes, trefoil lotus blossoms and plump pomegranates. These characteristics and the deep shadow carving technique which they were produced in clearly resembles the Samarra's prototype suggesting the wide spread of styles and forms from various regions of what was once, one Muslim Caliphate. Indeed, we find many of these elements reproduced in other Abbasid mosques including the mosque at Nayin, (Iran - mid 10th century) which even uses the same type of 'elephant' piers .
by: FSTC Ltd, Wed 11 May, 2005
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This site complies with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information:
you and us
Defeat Diabetes Foundation
150 153rd Ave,
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
Use of Insulin Pen Can Save $17,000 in Health Care Costs
Posted: Friday, August 31, 2007
Diabetics who need to switch from oral medications to insulin could reduce their annual healthcare costs up to $17,000 by using an insulin pen instead of a syringe to deliver their daily dose of medication.
A new study found that using an insulin pen may result in fewer trips to the emergency department and to the doctor's office, resulting in substantial savings to diabetics and their insurers.
For one, there is less chance of getting the wrong dose of insulin, said Rajesh Balkrishnan, the study's senior author and the Merrell Dow professor of pharmacy at Ohio State University. Diabetics who use syringes must carefully measure their insulin, so there is a risk of getting too much or too little.
The pen contains a pre-measured dose of insulin in a disposable cartridge. Users simply push a button on the pen, and the proper dose of medication is injected through a needle. A syringe user must extract the exact dose of insulin from a vial.
Balkrishnan and his colleagues followed more than 1,300 diabetic adults enrolled in a Medicaid program in North Carolina. Each patient had failed treatment with oral medications prescribed to control the symptoms of their disease and had begun insulin therapy. Oral drugs are typically the first course of treatment when someone is initially diagnosed with type II diabetes.
The researchers compared 1,162 patients who started insulin therapy with a syringe to 168 who began their therapy with a pen. Patients in the pen group used either the NovoPen or the FlexPen, which are both manufactured by the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk.
The researchers tallied all healthcare costs related to diabetes, including visits to an emergency room, hospitalizations, outpatient visits, prescription costs and costs to treat conditions related to the disease. They also collected data on insulin refill rates for each patient. Refill rates are a way of determining if patients take their medications regularly.
The numbers showed that the annual average healthcare costs were nearly $17,000 lower insulin for pen users than for syringe users ($14,857 vs. $31,764.) These figures represent the average amount reimbursed by Medicaid for diabetes-related care.
Prescription costs weren't included in the above totals because the researchers wanted to show a clear difference in non-prescription costs between the two patient groups.
The numbers suggest that the proper use of prescriptions can translate into major healthcare savings, Balkrishnan said.
According to the study�s results, the cost reductions are mainly reflected by much lower total hospital costs ($1,195 vs. $4,965 for pen and syringe users, respectively); total outpatient costs ($7,795 vs. $13,103 for pen and syringe users, respectively); and total diabetes-related costs ($7,324 for pen users vs. $13,762 for syringe users.) Diabetes-related costs include treatment for conditions related to the disease, such as vision problems like diabetic retinopathy, foot ulcers and circulatory problems that could possibly lead to limb amputation.
Annual prescription costs were also lower for insulin pen users in this group, $6,122 vs. $7,465 for syringe users.
The researchers found that roughly the same number of insulin pen and syringe users took their medication as directed, with 53 percent of the pen users taking their medications properly and about 50 percent of syringe users doing so.
While these rates are low, they are usually what we find in Medicaid populations, Balkrishnan said. In a privately insured population we typically see rates above 90 percent. But historically, patients insured by Medicaid are often subjected to both poor medication management and administration, this is usually a result of the overall care that Medicaid patients receive.
In a separate experiment, the researchers compared more than 1,100 diabetic patients who were already on insulin when the study started. Half of the patients switched from using a syringe to using a pen during the course of the study, and the rest of the patients continued using a syringe.
Results of this experiment showed that the annual healthcare costs of pen users were only slightly higher than those of syringe users ($11,476 vs. $10,755.)
This is likely due to starting a new, more expensive therapy,� Balkrishnan said. Also, patients using the pen were probably more compliant with their therapy; that is, they took it like they were supposed to. That means refilling their prescriptions often, which would initially reflect in higher costs.
Prescription costs for the syringe were lower than those for the pen ($535 vs. $670), and the cost of a pen itself was higher than the cost of a syringe ($840 vs. $0.)
�While the pen is initially more expensive than the syringe, in the long run it could considerably reduce overall healthcare costs,� Balkrishnan said.
Source: Diabetes In Control: the journal Clinical Therapeutics, Sept 2007
Costa Rica Travel Corp. will donate a portion of the proceeds to and is a sponsor of Defeat Diabetes Foundation.
Send your unopened, unexpired test strips to:
Defeat Diabetes Foundation
150 153rd Ave, Suite 300
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
Analyze nutrition content by portion
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Landmarked Buildings and Historic Districts
Landmark designation is used by the City of Boulder to honor, preserve and protect buildings or areas that have been determined to have a special character and historic, architectural, or aesthetic interest or value to the city.
Types of Landmark Designation
There are two basic types of landmark designation.
Both types of designations have the same protection and require the same procedures or review for exterior changes, though buildings within districts are further differentiated between “contributing” and “non-contributing.” Buildings in the non-contributing category are held to different standards for alterations than contributing buildings.
Landmark Designation Links
Last Updated on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 13:51
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By Carla Allen and Tina Comeau
As a strike by lobster fishermen drags into the one-week mark, at wharves around the region there are mixed signals and mixed opinions as to whether the strike should continue.
In some areas the strike is already over, with fishermen leaving their wharfs. At other ports, entire fleets remain tied up.
Lobster fishermen at some of the wharves in Yarmouth and Shelburne counties say they want to return to fishing but are being intimidated and threatened by others, who are continuing their strike for higher prices.
The strike action was initiated by the 1688 Professional Lobster Fishermens Association on April 27. The goal of the strike had been to have buyers commit to a price of $5.50 until the season ends on May 31. Although at wharfs around Yarmouth County on Thursday fishermen said they'd be happy with a committed price of $5 for the rest of the season.
Fishermen worry without a committed price in the remaining weeks of the season, the price will drop to $4 a pound or less, and they say they can't make a living on low prices coupled with high expenses, which is a situation that has faced them these past few seasons.
Both the 1688 Professional Lobster Fishermens Association and the LFA34 Management Board are working to find a resolution to this lobster impasse.
Although 1688 made the initial call for the strike, the sporadic acts of vandalism that have occurred goes against the policies of the 1688 association. At meetings and online the association has said it does not condone violence or vandalism. Approximately 900 belong to the association, although actual licence holders compose a small percentage of the total.
And at the majority of fishing ports where the strike has been peaceful, fishermen resent being painted with the same brush as those individuals who have slashed tires or used threats.
Still, others say the intimidation factor exists and some are staying ashore not because they want to or because they support the strike, but because they are afraid of what will happen if they go fishing. Others support the strike but have bills to pay and say they need to go fishing, given that the season is almost over.
In some cases the strike is pitting friends against friends, fishermen against fishermen, communities against communities.
- Read more special articles :
- - 1688 issues apology for confusion
- - Vote favours strike; but 1688 says go fishing
- - 1688 says strike continues
- - Striking fishermen seek price commitment
On Wednesday, May 2, a meeting was held at the Shag Harbour wharf by fishermen who wanted to return fishing.
Captain Gary Banks also fishes from Shag Harbour. "We're really being controlled by a few. A few radicals. We shouldn't be held hostage by a few that don't want to go," he said.
During the meeting, which saw a strong RCMP presence, a front tire was slashed on a truck belonging to an East Pubnico fisherman.
The overall consensus by those attending the meeting in Shag Harbour was to return fishing on Thursday.
The RCMP, meanwhile, have been busy keeping a visual presence at wharfs in Shelburne County over the past couple of days.
At the Port Maitland wharf in Yarmouth County on Thursday morning, May 3, one fisherman said a meeting had been held the night before.
"I think you'll see a lot of fishermen heading out today," he said.
A meeting was also being held at the Overton Church at 10 a.m. on Thursday by fishermen from the Yarmouth Bar.
The 1688 Professional Lobster Fishermen Association has scheduled a meeting for Friday, May 4 from 7-9 p.m. at the Mariners Centre. The association is continuing to confer with buyers in an effort to establish a price of $5/pound for the remainder of the fishing season, which ends May 31.
On a posting on the group’s Facebook page on Wednesday evening, which coincided with a meeting held in Woods Harbour that same night, the group said buyers association president James Mood had spoken to had said they could confirm a price of $5 until the end of the week and a price of $4.50 up until May 12. Beyond that, the buyers Mood spoke with couldn't say. It wasn't the news fishermen wanted to hear. At the meeting in Woods Harbour, fishermen voted to stay tied up until a fair committed price for the season is achieved.
Thursday was a beautiful day in Yarmouth County – a beautiful day for fishing, that is. Yet at many wharfs entire fleets remained tied up.
On the wharfs and in the parking lots the strike was all people were talking about. The consensus from fishermen at wharfs in Pinkneys Point, Little River Harbour and Wedgeport was that everyone wants to go fishing. But whether they can afford to go fishing is a different story. In fact at these three wharfs on Thursday morning, the only fishing happening was some rod and reel fishing off the Pinkneys Point wharf.
Decisions are weighing heavy on people's minds. Some fishermen are conflicted about how long they can stay ashore, while others say they are prepared to stick things out on shore for as long as it takes.
One fisherman said his daily expenses (and this didn't include paying his crew) are $600 a day. Another said a fisherman who operates a larger boat can face daily expenses of $900.
“We’re not in this just to break even,” said a fisherman. “We need something to get ahead.”
This isn’t just a black and white issue. Intermingled in it are many shades of grey. One buyer who was at a wharf talking with fishermen said a factor working against the strike effort is that lobster fisheries have opened up elsewhere over the past week. Fishermen are fishing lobster in Prince Edward Island, in New Brunswick, in northern Nova Scotia and in Newfoundland. He said as a buyer he can’t offer a $5 price if buyers elsewhere are offering $4.50, because it is those $4.50 lobsters that are going to be purchased for market. But if everyone were offering the same price, he said, it would be easier. And there is also the uncertainty the quality of lobster that is going to be landed, he told fishermen on the wharf, which also makes a committed price tricky.
But some fishermen responded by saying they just can’t make it on a $4 or lower price, particularly given the low prices fishermen received in the fall.
And with mortgage payments, boat payments, crew payments and other expenses, including supporting their families, they find themselves between a rock and a hard place. You can’t make a living while you’re staying ashore.
Then again, if the price is too low, they say, you can’t make one on the water either. Some have even questioned whether they should just haul up their gear and call it a day.
One thing most fishermen agree on is that discussions need to begin this summer about what will happen with the season next fall. Some fishermen said these talks need to begin in June.
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The Newspaper of the San Francisco Bay Chapter
May - June 2007
Richmond Council considers shoreline options
Will new General Plan protect shore - or sacrifice it to development?
Richmond has a huge length of Bay shoreline, but much of that shoreline is threatened with development - casinos, high-rise residential buildings, and gated communities - and little is adequately protected. As the city revises its General Plan, however, we have the opportunity to preserve these lands as parks, habitat, and other appropriate uses, to complete the vision that Sylvia McLaughlin, co-founder of Save San Francisco Bay, has articulated for creating a "necklace of parks and open space" along the East Bay shore. In addition, the Sierra Club supports applying principles of environmental justice and smart growth to planning for all the city's land.
The Sierra Club supports the North Richmond Shoreline Open Space Alliance, a local grassroots organization of North Richmond residents and environmental groups. It advocates protecting the North Richmond shoreline as open space. It would do this by specifying that existing open space remain zoned as habitat and open space. On properties already zoned for development, any right to development could be transferred to other locations away from the shoreline, and the shoreline lands then zoned as open space.
The city is now considering three options. Option 1 is the one that would protect the North Richmond shoreline, Point Molate, and the shoreline at the Zeneca site as park and open space. This designation, however, is defined as active recreation. Many of the shoreline areas are marshlands, and Option 1 needs to be strengthened to protect them as habitat.
For several of these key areas the city is considering competing proposals for inappropriately intensive development.
Write to the Richmond City Council:
Urge the Council to protect the North Richmond shoreline exclusively as open space and habitat, with compatible recreational uses, and to adopt the planning principles of the Sierra Club and the North Richmond Shoreline Open Space Alliance. Tell them not to allow development at Zeneca and Liquid Gold, and to limit development at Point Molate to the terms of the original plan which the old City Council scrapped in favor of the casino-hotel development. We have inserted a return post card in some copies of this Yodeler. You can send that in, although your hand-written letter is even more effective.
To work with the Club on these issues, contact or call (510) 848-0800, ext. 304
© 2007 San Francisco Sierra Club Yodeler
|EXPLORE, ENJOY AND PROTECT THE PLANET|
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The following is a list of most Navy enlisted and officer jobs, with short descriptions.
ENLISTED CAREERS (scroll down for Officer Careers)
Aviation Boatswain's Mates play a major part in launching and recovering naval aircraft from land or ships. This includes preparing and fueling planes prior to takeoff and after landing. They may specialize in launching and recovering aircraft on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, aircraft fueling and fuel systems, or aircraft handling, fire fighting and salvage and rescue operations.
ir Traffic Controllers perform duties similar to civilian air traffic controllers and play a key role in the effective use of Naval airpower throughout the world in operational and training environments.
Aviation Machinist Mates keep naval aircraft power plants and related systems, armament and ordnance systems, and aircraft ground support equipment in operational condition.
Aviation Electrician's Mates maintain electrical and navigational equipment in aircraft including power generators, power distribution systems, lighting systems, flight instrument and fuel systems, temperature and pressure indicating systems.
Aerographer's Mates are the Navy's meteorological and oceanographic experts, trained in the science of meteorology and physical oceanography.
Aviation Storekeepers ensure materials and equipment needed for naval aviation activities are available in good order.
Aviation Structural Mechanics (Safety Equipment) maintain and repair utility systems throughout the aircraft. They work on systems such as air conditioning, heating, pressurization and oxygen, plus multiple safety devices.
Aviation Structural Mechanics (Hydraulics) maintain all aircraft main and auxiliary hydraulic power systems, actuating subsystems and landing gear.
Aviation Structural Mechanics handle maintenance on the aircraft fuselage (mainframe), wings, airfoils and associated fixed and moveable surfaces and flight controls.
Aviation Ordnancemen inspect, maintain and repair aircraft mechanical and electrical armament and ordnance systems, and stow, assemble and load aviation ammunition.
Aviation Support Equipment Technicians keep naval aircraft power plants and related systems, armament and ordnance systems, and aircraft ground support equipment in top operational condition.
Aviation Electronics Technicians repair advanced electronics systems. Repair jobs can range from flight deck trouble-shooting of the electronic weapons system on an F-14 aircraft to changing computer circuit cards in an air-conditioned shop.
Aviation Warfare Technicians operate airborne electronic equipment detect, locate and track submarines, and operate radar to provide information for aircraft and surface ship navigation.
Aviation Maintenance Administrationmen perform a variety of clerical, administrative and managerial duties necessary to keep aircraft maintenance activities running efficiently.
Boatswain's Mates keep exterior surfaces of ships in good condition, maintain machinery and equipment on ships' decks, and handle cargo and operate small boats.
Builders make up a large segment of the Navy's Construction Force. They work as carpenters, plasterers, roofers, concrete finishers, masons, painters, bricklayers or cabinetmakers.
Navy Construction Electricians build, maintain and operate power production facilities and electrical distribution systems for naval installations.
Construction Mechanics repair and do maintenance on heavy construction and automotive equipment such as buses, dump trucks, bulldozers, rollers, cranes, backhoes, pile drivers and other heavy equipment and vehicles.
Cryptologic Technician (Administrative) performs technology-based administrative functions using software applications within a global information environment; perform personnel and physical security duties.
Cryptologic Technician (Interpretive) analyzes foreign naval developments, radiotelephone communications and preparation of statistical studies and technical reports requiring knowledge of a foreign language.
Cryptologic Technician (Communication) operates telecommunications systems that exist across the global communications spectrum. Advanced networking and information management skills support the movement of huge volumes of data to operating forces ashore and afloat.
Cryptologic Technician (Collection) collects and analyzes state-of-the-art communication signals using sophisticated high-powered computers, specialized computer-assisted communications equipment, video display terminals and electronic/magnetic recorders.
Cryptologic Technician (Technical) processes airborne, shipborne and landbased radar systems and associated signals.
Damage Controlmen do the work necessary for damage control, ship stability, firefighting, fire prevention and chemical, biological and radiological warfare defense.
Disbursing Clerks maintain pay records and process travel claims for the Navy.
Illustrators are draftsmen who prepare original art, technical illustrations and graphics for briefings, training aids and publications at Navy and joint service commands.
Dental Technicians perform duties as assistants in the prevention and treatment of oral disease and injury and assist dental care professionals in providing dental care to Navy people and their families.
Engineering Aids assist construction engineers in developing final construction plans.
Electrician's Mates manage a ship's electrical power generation systems, lighting systems, electrical equipment and electrical appliances.
Enginemen operate, service and repair internal combustion engines used to power some of the Navy's ships and most of the Navy's small craft.
Equipment Operators are construction workers who operate heavy transportation and construction equipment such as trucks, bulldozers, backhoes, graders, forklifts, cranes and asphalt equipment.
Electronics Technicians repair, adjust and calibrate a broad spectrum of electronic equipment, and analyze performance of electronic equipment, replacing or repairing parts.
Electronic Warfare Technicians operate and conduct preventive maintenance on computer-controlled electronic equipment used for detection, analysis, and identification of radar emissions.
Fire Controlmen repair, adjust and calibrate sophisticated electronic search systems, and align weapons control systems.
Gunner's Mates operate and maintain guided missile launching systems, gun mounts and other ordnance equipment, as well as small arms and magazines.
Gas Turbine Systems Technicians operate, repair and perform organizational and intermediate maintenance on electrical components of gas turbine engines, main propulsion machinery, auxiliary equipment, propulsion control systems, and assigned electrical and electronic circuitry up to the printed circuit and alarm warning circuitry.
Hospital Corpsmen assist in the prevention and treatment of disease and injury and assist health care professionals in providing medical care to Navy people and their families.
Hull Technicians do the metal work necessary to keep shipboard structures and surfaces in good condition. They also maintain shipboard plumbing and sanitation systems, repair small boats, operate and maintain ballast control systems.
Interior Communications Electricians install, maintain and repair the equipment needed for interior communications within ships and shore facilities.
Intelligence Specialists analyze intelligence data.
Information Systems Technicians operate and maintain the Navy's global satellite telecommunications systems, mainframe computers, local and wide area networks, and microcomputer systems used in the fleet.
Journalists gather news about people, places and activities in the Navy, and communicate it to the military and civilian communities through radio, television, military publications and hometown newspapers.
Lithographers run Navy print shops and are responsible for the production of printed material used by the Navy.
Machinist's Mates operate and maintain steam turbines and reduction gears used for ship propulsion and auxiliary machinery such as turbo generators, pumps and oil purifiers.
Minemen detect and neutralize underwater mines. They test, assemble and maintain underwater explosive devices (mines).
Machinery Repairmen make replacement parts and repair or overhaul ship's engines and auxiliary systems.
Mess Management Specialists are cooks, bakers, dining area and living quarters managers in the Navy.
Missile Technicians (Submarines) receive extensive training in the operation and maintenance of advanced electronic equipment and computers and electro-mechanical support systems used in submarine strategic weapons systems.
Musicians are involved in the vibrant tradition of performing at Navy ceremonies, parades, concerts, festivals, dances and many other events. Musicians perform in a variety of ensembles ranging from ceremonial band to jazz band to small ensembles, playing all styles of music.
Operations Specialists function as plotters, radio-telephone and Command and Control sound-powered telephone talkers and maintain Combat Information Center displays of strategic and tactical information. They operate surveillance and altitude radars, identification, Friend or Foe, and serve as air traffic controllers for helicopters and fixedwing supersonic jet aircraft. They also serve as watch supervisors and section leaders; interpret and evaluate presentations and tactical situations and make recommendations to supervisors during watch conditions.
Postal Clerks operate the Navy postal system.
Photographer's Mates serve as the Navy's professional photographers.
Personnelmen provide enlisted people with information and counseling related to Navy occupations, opportunities for general education and job training, requirements for promotion, and rights and benefits.
Aircrew Survival Equipmentmen keep parachutes, life rafts, personal flight gear, and other aviation survival gear in proper working condition.
Quartermasters stand watch as assistants to officers of the deck and the navigator; serve as helmsman and perform ship control, navigation and bridge watch duties.
Religious Program Specialists support Navy chaplains in developing programs to meet the needs of Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard personnel and their families.
Ship's Servicemen manage and operate shipboard retail and service activities.
Storekeepers are responsible for ensuring that all repair parts and general supplies for the ship, squadron or shore base are accurately ordered, received and issued through computer systems.
Signalmen stand watches on signal bridges and send/receive messages by flashing light, semaphore and flights. They prepare headings and addresses for outgoing messages; process messages; encode and decode message headings; operate voice radio; maintain visual signal equipment; render passing honors to ships and boats; and display ensigns and personal flags during salutes and colors.
Sonar Technicians operate sonar systems, underwater fire control systems, as well as support equipment on surface ships such as frigates, destroyers and cruisers.
Steelworkers rig and operate special equipment used to build metal structures.
Torpedoman's Mates maintain underwater explosive weapons, such as torpedoes, rockets and missiles and the systems used to launch them.
Utilitiesmen maintain plumbing, heating, steam, compressed air, fuel storage, and distribution systems.
Yeomen perform administrative and clerical duties.
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Trailer for The Dark Knight Rises
You’re all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.
The NY Times reports,
Conflict between rich and poor now eclipses racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born as the greatest source of tension in American society, according to a survey released Wednesday.
About two-thirds of Americans now believe there are “strong conflicts” between rich and poor in the United States, a survey by the Pew Research Center found, a sign that the message of income inequality brandished by the Occupy Wall Street movement and pressed by Democrats may be seeping into the national consciousness.
[…] The demographics were surprising, experts said. While blacks were still more likely than whites to see serious conflicts between rich and poor, the share of whites who held that view increased by 22 percentage points, more than triple the increase among blacks. The share of blacks and Hispanics who held the view grew by single digits.
What is more, people at the upper middle of the income ladder were most likely to see conflict. Seventy-one percent of those who earned from $40,000 to $75,000 said there were strong conflicts between rich and poor, up from 47 percent in 2009. The lowest income bracket, less than $20,000, changed the least.
The grinding economic downturn may be contributing to the heightened perception of conflict between rich and poor, said Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
“Rich and poor aren’t terribly distinct from secure and unemployed,” he said.
The survey attributed the change, in part, to “underlying shifts in the distribution of wealth in American society,” citing a finding by the Census Bureau that the share of wealth held by the top 10 percent of the population increased to 56 percent in 2009, from 49 percent in 2005.
I think most of us realize we’re one layoff away from poverty ourselves.
But in Mitt Romney’s world, this simply means more people are envious. Here’s some information on what might be fueling our ‘jealousy’:
What’s actually happened with working and middle class wages along with the decline in unions? CEO pay has skyrocketed 300% since 1990, corporate profits have doubled. Average “production worker” pay has increased 4%. The minimum wage has dropped.
Since 1990, your pay and mine increased only 4% (if we’re lucky enough to have jobs), while the 1 percent have enjoyed a massive pay increase of 300%! I suppose that’s justified if the 1 percent contributed and produced and worked 296% more than the rest of us — but my guess is that they didn’t.
How many jobs did Mitt Romney create at Bain? The Romney camp has gone from claiming “over a hundred thousand jobs” to “tens of thousands of jobs” to this past week’s “thousands of jobs.” Steve Benen says: By next week, I expect Romney to tell us, “I probably created a handful of jobs.”
Mitt worked for Bain for over two decades, derived a personal net worth between $190 and $250 million, and now admits he created only THOUSANDS of jobs.
Can you imagine the plutocracy that Romney could create as president of the U.S. and one, true Corporate Defender? The final destruction of the middle class, the rich grabbing the rest of the redistributed wealth, the wages and indentured servitude that would be available to the working class, and the living conditions at the inevitable corporate-sponsored Thunderdome Camps™?
Corporations are people, my friends. Romney is everything the one percent have been waiting for.
This figures: Senate Republicans and two DINOs have introduced a bill to take away money that was designated to go to consumers as part of the Affordable Care Act, in the 80 / 20 ratio:
As part of the Affordable Care Act, health insurers must spend at least 80% of the money they earn from premiums on actually providing health care, with the remaining cash used to cover all administrative, advertising and payroll costs. Those insurers with plans that don’t follow this ratio are soon supposed to start giving the extra money back in refunds and discounts. But new legislation introduced in the Senate this week could jeopardize this,while giving insurance companies even more money to stick in their dog pillows.
The bill, introduced by Senator Mary Landrieu (DINO) of Louisiana and co-sponsored by John Isakson (R) of Georgia, Lisa Murkowski (R) of Alaska and Nebraska’s Ben Nelson (DINO), is intended “to preserve consumer and employer access to licensed independent insurance producers“ by eliminating insurance broker commissions from the administrative overhead.
Does that “intent” sound like bullshit to you? Does to me. Broker commissions not coming out of insurance companies’ overhead helps WHO exactly? That’s right. It helps insurance companies and those who receive commissions.
So under the current rules, an insurer that takes in $100 million dollars in premiums must spend $80 million on paying for health care and those broker commissions are included in the remaining $20 million.
But if this bill becomes law, those commissions — let’s just put a number of $3 million on them for this example — would no longer be part of the equation. That would mean the insurer would only have to spend $77.6 million on health care but would now have $22.4 million to use for its own purposes.
The National Association of Insurance found that altering the rule to remove broker compensation will result in a loss of more than 60% of forthcoming rebates for consumers.
Conservatives in Congress like Landrieu, Isakson, Murkowski, and Nelson just can’t stop themselves from fighting for the best interests of the corporations and the one percent.
And, by the way, this is part of Obamacare, part of health care reform, so would all the Republican base voters who hate, hate, hate Obama and the Democratic Party,and pay for health insurance, please explain how this new conservative
trick bill will work out better for them personally? I’d like to hear that argument.
It’s way past time to put that Republican fairy tale called ”Investors and Job Creators Need Lower Taxes” to bed:
According to Republican gospel, taxes on investment must always be low, or else investors will simply sit on their money, refusing to do the very thing that could earn them more money. However, as David Abromowitz laid out in Bloobmerg View today, Mitt Romney’s tax returns undermine this argument.
After all, Romney made his fortune via investments made by Bain Capital, the private equity firm that he ran. And Bain’s investments between 1984 and 1999 “occurred when capital-gains rates were much higher than they are today. Yet Bain consistently attracted massive amounts of private capital, and thrived”…
[…] As billionaire investor Warren Buffett put it, “I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital-gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain.” It’s worth remembering that it was conservative icon Ronald Reagan who completely equalized the tax treatment of investment and wage income, rejecting the argument that a lower capital gains rate was necessary to incentivize investment.
As Pat Garofalo noted earlier:
[Would the wealthy really] squirrel away their money under the mattress if the capital gains rate goes back to the level at which it was under Clinton? In fact, business investment was stronger under President Clinton that it was under President Bush. The overwhelming majority of capital gains go to the richest households. Keeping that rate so far below the rates applied to normal income is simply a giveaway to the wealthy that doesn’t boost the economy.
And what’s Mitt Romney, the GOP’s preordained presidential candidate, have to offer? Nothing if you’re not in the top one percent. For the rest of us, it’s the same old bottom to top income redistribution scheme — only more so: Continue…
Romney tells west Mich. businessmen he’ll fight unions - ”I’ve taken on union bosses before,” Romney said before hundreds at a furniture manufacturer. “I’m happy to take them on again.” […] Romney kicked off his “welcome home rally” with a meeting with 10 business, economic and political leaders, who advised Romney of things on their wish list: less regulation, more certainty, more state power, less spending and right-to-work legislation. One business owner asked Romney to sign an executive order on Day 1 to end a provision that federal work be done by union labor. “You’ll have that,” Romney said. || Note: The King of Bain ‘kicked off’ his welcome home rally with the one percenters, promising to fight for their concerns, which in many cases includes reducing wages and benefits!
When Romney Courted The Unions - in 2002 the former Governor was actively courting the labor vote. Romney prominently featured on his campaign website a call for union members to vote for him because he would invest in infrastructure, adjust the minimum wage annually to inflation, and have labor be a critical factor in developing the state.
Class Warfare: Which Side Are You on? - The good news is that there is growing awareness among the 99 percent that they’ve been ripped off; that they’re engaged in a decades-long class war and their side is losing. As a result working Americans are in favor of raising taxes on the 1 percent. And there’s some evidence that the 99 percent are waking up to the problem of big money in politics, the problems caused by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. The bad news is that this may not be enough to save our Democracy. Over the last 30 years, the United States has been looted. The rich and powerful, the 1 percent, have taken a disproportionate share of the economic gains that we’ve all worked for. As a consequence America is teetering on the brink of Plutocracy. To remedy this inequity and restore Democracy, fundamental changes must be made. […] Barack Obama is not a perfect candidate but at least he is willing to talk about class warfare and to propose common sense steps towards economic justice. That’s a big difference from Mitt Romney who doesn’t think we have a class problem or issues with economic fairness and says of people who suggest this “[Its] about envy. It’s about class warfare.”
Worst of the Worst: Rob Walton, Walmart - Want to see who’s using their wealth to exploit the 99%? This series of 1-minute videos reveals the methods of the worst of the 1%. In 2007, according to the labor economist Sylvia Allegretto, the six Walton family members on the Forbes 400 had a net worth equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans.The Waltons are now collectively worth about $93 billion, according to Forbes. Watch how they take advantage of the 99%…
BREAKIN’: Mitt Romney to unveil brand new tax cut plan for himself - Nothing says “desperate loser seeking seal of approval from right-wingers” than proposing yet another tax cut for the wealthy in a last minute Hail Mary: Team Romney tells me there will be a bolder tax-cut plan released either at the debate tomorrow night (if Mitt gets it in) or more formally at his Detroit Economic Club speech on Friday. I’m embargoed from releasing details until tomorrow. But I can say that the new plan will be across-the-board with supply-side incentives from rate reduction, and that it will help small-business owners as well as everyone else.
Five super-rich men are deciding the GOP nomination - A quarter of the money that has fueled a bitter nomination battle among Republican White House hopefuls, from which no settled favorite has yet emerged, has come from just five super-rich Americans. The sway that wealthy donors have been able to exert has come about due to them pouring money into so-called super PACs, political action committees with no formal affiliation to a candidate but, more crucially, no funding cap. […] Around $126 million has so far been donated to super PACS, with nearly 25 percent of that money coming from Simmons, Adelson, Friess, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, and Houston construction magnate Bob Perry.
Romney Admits He’d Give Huge Tax Break To Top 1 Percent - Romney admitted that his tax plan contained a massive tax cut for the wealthiest Americans: SANTORUM: Governor Romney even today suggested today raising taxes on the top 1 percent, adopting the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric. I’m not going to adopt that rhetoric. I’m going to represent 100 percent of Americans. We’re not raising taxes on anyone. ROMNEY: Number one, I said that we’re going to cut taxes on everyone across the country by 20 percent, including the top 1 percent. So that’s number one. […] Romney’s plan to give a 20-percent tax cut, lowering rates for the wealthiest Americans from 35 percent to 28 percent, and repeal the alternative minimum tax would, as Romney admitted tonight, provide a huge tax break to the richest Americans, at a cost four times higher than the Bush tax cuts.
Santorum makes zero mention of jobs in CNN debate - In total, the four GOP contenders mentioned the word “jobs” only 10 times over the span of two hours — and former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) uttered the word a grand total of zero times. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said the word four times each. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) mentioned it twice (one of those mentions was in reference to “the job Barack Obama isn’t doing”). Moderator John King said the word “jobs” four times.
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ACER Institute: Improving Learning
Welcome to the ACER Institute where we provide teachers with practical, relevant evidence-based professional learning to build 14 effective classroom practice and improved student learning outcomes.
The ACER Institute is committed to teachers’ professional growth and supports the individual’s career development through tested and proven research-based learning.
Our courses support you to deliver effective classroom practices.
The ACER Institute delivers:
- Courses in Educational Assessment, and the Teaching of Literacy.
- A strategically selected series of seminars covering a wide range of topics that develop skills, knowledge and pedagogical strategies. Seminar topics are based onissues that are underpinned by currentresearch and evidence-based practice.
- A series of Leading Thinkers seminars to engage teachers and educational leaders in the latest research creating an awareness of educational issues that involve systemic change.
For more information about upcoming workshops and seminars visit the ACER Institute’s website.
Leading Thinkers is a national series that brings inspirational educational leaders to educators at all levels of policy and practice.
For more information about upcoming Leading Thinkers seminars, visit the website.
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Yale University is located in New Haven, Connecticut, 90 minutes north of New York City and 2.5 hours south of Boston. Yale's rich academic tradition dates back to 1701 and includes founding the American Association of Universities, becoming the first US institution to award the PhD, and educating five US Presidents and 19 US Supreme Court Justices. As a member of the Ivy League, Yale is consistently ranked as a top-three US college by US New and World Report, and is recognized as one America's leading centers of academia and as one of the world's preeminent research instutions.
Yale offers a unique combination of the substantial resources of a top-tier research instituition and the intimacy of a residential college system that builds community throughout a student's time at the university. The campus is a beautiful example of collegiate gothic architecture and provides the ideal location for students to spend a summer pursuing their academic passions.
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Reducing infant mortality among gastric patients in Egypt
Dr. Nabil Abdel Aziz (second from left) and other medical staff of the Abou El Reesh Children’s Hospital in Cairo, Egypt, estimates the new equipment could reduce the gastric mortality rate by two percentage points, saving hundreds of lives each year. Photo courtesy of the Rotary Club of Helipolis, Egypt
Rotarians in Egypt and the United States are helping doctors at a pediatric hospital in Cairo save the lives of hundreds of premature babies each year through the gift of lifesaving neonatal equipment.
Using a Rotary Foundation grant, the Rotary clubs of Heliopolis, Egypt, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, purchased several pieces of equipment for the intensive care unit of the Abou El Reesh Children’s Hospital, for use in its gastroenterological department.
The hospital treats 1 million patients per year and suffers from overcrowding and lack of equipment. Most of the hospital’s patients are from poor or underserved families. The mortality rate has reached 25 percent among all patients and 5 percent for gastric patients.
Wanting to reduce the number of infant deaths, the Heliopolis Rotarians asked the hospital’s doctors how they could help. The club, with its Minneapolis partner club, applied for a Foundation grant and raised funds for the US$23,000 project, which purchased a defibrillator, ventilator, infusion pump, syringe pump, and diagnostic devices.
The Rotarians also advised hospital staff on how to use and maintain the equipment. They plan to conduct a monthly health session to promote proper sanitation and nutrition. The project falls within Rotary’s maternal and child health area of focus.
“Our first objective for this project was to make an impact to improve child and maternal health and reduce child mortality,” says Ayoub Mahmoud Ayoub, a member of the Heliopolis club and the Rotary public image coordinator for Zone 20B. “Our second objective was to promote Rotary’s good work.”
Ayoub says a service project like this can raise awareness of Rotary. In Egypt, the public lacks knowledge, and in some cases is even skeptical, about the organization. Changing that perception, he says, is important.
“Our mission with this project and future undertakings is to show that Rotarians help those in need,” he added.
Nabil Abdel Aziz, the head pediatrician in the gastroenterology unit, praises Rotary’s efforts in reducing child mortality. He estimates the new equipment could reduce the gastric mortality rate by two percentage points, saving hundreds of lives each year.
“Without the support of Rotary, deaths of infants could have been far higher,” says Aziz. “Rotary represents the bright face of humanity. This type of international support and understanding is what Egypt needs now.”
“They gave more than just the equipment,” he adds. “They have given parents, many who are poor, hope that their children are going to be taken care of.”
The intensive care unit is still in need of additional equipment to serve all of its patients in the neonatal unit. Ayoub said the club plans to apply for other Foundation grants and raise more money with international partners to fill some of those needs by 2015.
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Learn everything you need to know about System Center 2012
Relax with the MVA videos
Among Windows systems administrators System Center 2012 is arguably the most hotly anticipated software release in nearly a decade.
Microsoft is at last taking the fight to VMware, and it is expending the resources necessary to ensure that sysadmins are prepared. One branch of the strategy is making good use of Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA).
I welcome the addition of tracks relating to up-and-coming technologies. The Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012 track is a great example of why: a full deployment of this software according to whitepaper would require more hardware than my test lab has available. Without something like this MVA track, I would be hard pressed to get a good look at VMM 2012's capabilities.
Count to three
The VMM 2012 track is fairly straightforward. There are three modules, each with a video and a pdf. The videos give an exhaustive view of VMM 2012's various capabilities while the pdfs provide good reference material.
The first module, unimaginatively titled "overview”, does what it says on the tin. If you care about VMM 2012 enough to be taking this course, then you have probably already read enough articles about it to be able to pass the self-exam without watching the video or reading the pdf.
Keep the video in the back of your drawer; it is great for explaining to the PHB (pointy-haired boss) why he should stump up for the upgrade.
There are lots of PowerPoint-esque slides and shiny Visio diagrams that cover the broad strokes. Mentally file under "mildly technical why you should care demos".
The second module is "Using VMM 2012 to configure a private cloud”. The first few minutes are functionally a recap of the overview video, and the rest is a combination of PowerPoint + Visio theory explanations interspersed with screencap demos.
There is plenty of useful information here: it is about on par with a really thorough tech conference demo.
Deep sea dive
The last module is "Modeling and maintaining virtualized services in VMM 2012”. Be warned: the video is just north of an hour and 20 minutes long.
But you will come away knowing nearly everything you could possibly want to know about creating, managing and maintaining virtual machine templates in VMM 2012.
This module dives pretty deep into the different ways in which you can deploy applications to virtual machine templates, including cascading updates from the master template to all linked descendants.
There is a lot of neat stuff here, especially bearing in mind that VMM 2012 can use Hyper-V, VMware or Citrix as the underlying virtualisation platform.
Demonstrating a few implementations could spark the imagination
My one gripe is the lack of a PowerShell module. The presenters in the videos keep informing you that all of the various neat things they are doing can be done from PowerShell, but they don't demonstrate this once.
Given the complexity and relevance of VMM 2012, I believe that PowerShell scripting is important enough to merit a module of its own.
There are all sorts of really sexy things you can do here, and demonstrating a few potential implementations could add a little spice and spark the imagination of some sysadmins.
Dress down Friday
I want to see entire racks evacuated of all virtual machines and then powered down in response to a PowerShell script.
And where is the video showing someone programmatically spinning up templates, injecting applications, configuring and making available hundreds of virtual machines in response to a web site button push or some other scripting trigger?
This minor issue aside, I like this MVA track. If you need to switch off a bit but still be accomplishing work-related things, you could do a lot worse than plunking yourself down in front of these videos.
Learning about VMM 2012 while catching up on a month's worth of paperwork could make for a relatively relaxed Friday afternoon. ®
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For more than a century, scientists have puzzled over how the smooth flow of a liquid through a pipe suddenly erupts into a chaotic tangle of eddies and swirls. Now, a team of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians has spotted the building blocks of turbulence in tubes.
Researchers know how turbulence develops in a few special cases. For example, the flow of fluid trapped between two concentric cylinders grows more complicated in well ordered steps as the outer cylinder rotates about the inner one faster and faster. But they've struggled to explain turbulence in a simple pipe, in which all hell breaks loose as soon as the speed passes a critical value.
Since 1990, however, theorists have used computer simulations to piece together a novel explanation of turbulence in pipes. According to the simulations, a fluid in a pipe can flow in various complicated swirling waves. These waves are unstable, so at low flow speeds they quickly die out and the liquid resumes its smooth, uniform flow. But once the flow exceeds a certain speed, it no longer returns to the smooth state when a wave dies out. Instead, the flow bounces from one swirling state to another, producing turbulence.
Now, researchers have spotted the type of waves the models predict. Physicist Bjorn Hof and engineer Casimir van Doorne of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and colleagues sent water through a long pipe, 4 centimeters in diameter, that was designed to suppress turbulence. A jet mounted on the side of the pipe disturbed the flow and a laser and cameras 6 meters downstream tracked the motion of beads in the water.
As the flow speed notched up, the researchers looked for signs that the jolt from the jet had created one of the fleeting waves. They observed vortices that shoved faster water toward the sides of the pipe and slower water toward the center, creating long streaks of slower and faster moving water stretching along the pipe. The patterns of streaks closely resembled those predicted by the simulations for various flow speeds, they report in the 10 September Science.
The results are a clear step toward explaining turbulence in pipes, says Alessandro Bottaro, an engineer at the University of Genoa in Italy. “They are justifying the theoretical work that has been done in the past 15 years,” he says. But Tom Mullin, a physicist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, notes that the patterns seen in the experiments and the simulations aren't exactly the same: “It's a long way yet to show that there's a complete connection.”
A primer on turbulence
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The negabinary representation of a number is its representation using base . Similarly, as with the ordinary binary number base, negabinary uses the digits 0 and 1, the difference being in its use of powers of to convert a negabinary number to its decimal equivalent. This Demonstration illustrates the steps of the conversion of a negabinary number into decimal. You choose a decimal number; the program converts it to negabinary and back to decimal.
Here is how to do this. First, powers of are selected according to the positions of the 1 digits, increasing from 0 in unit steps from right to left. Then the powers are computed and finally, adding all results gives the desired decimal equivalent. Some numbers have the same representation in binary and negabinary bases. Can you tell how we can recognize those from, say, their binary representation?
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I recall when one of our physicians spent over an hour providing compassionate care for a battered woman who left her abusive home with only the clothes on her back.
Last month we had an insulin dependent diabetic who had lost her job and health benefits, and had taken her last insulin shot the day she came to the clinic.
I have often experienced the joy of a mother or father's reaction when they learn that we can complete a sports physical and paperwork for their child without an appointment.
Such things are frequent occurrences at SOS Health Services of Walla Walla, the only free clinic serving people from Dayton to Pendleton with no other recourse to health care.
But my most memorable patient was a homeless middle-aged woman living in her car with her dog. She was out of medication and on the list for a place in the homeless shelter for women.
She was well-educated with advanced college degrees and planning to become a nurse. But she suffered from mental health issues that required multiple medications for her to function - medications for which she had no money to buy.
"SOS Clinic saved my life," she told me.
She now is helping college students who have mental health and learning disabilities who need help organizing their coursework and study time, and also tutoring writing and math.
The SOS Clinic resembles the rural working-class clinic started by Dr. Hunter Adams as portrayed in the movie "Patch Adams." Ours is not on a 316 acre farm like Dr. Adams' clinic, but in the heart of the Walla Walla Valley. We have about 1,200 patient visits a year. They are treated in a walk-in clinic that is open four hours a week.
But that number has been increasing since Washington cut basic care Medicaid. The action has affected local hospitals and clinics, which lack funds to continue charity health care.
Statewide, according to the Medicaid office, the cuts in the first three months of this year reduced by 30 percent statewide the number of adults covered by basic health care. In Walla Walla County, the number of adults covered by basic health dropped 76 percent over the same January-March period, from 2,683 to 636.
As a result, the SOS Clinic's patients load could triple in 2012. That means the clinic will need to expand its hours and medical staff to accommodate people who formerly received Medicaid benefits. An SOS committee is currently working with a fund-raising consultant to draft a strategic plan that will be presented to the board in 2012.
The SOS Clinic was started by Dr. Ron Fleck, who had a vision for a free clinic, a donation from St. Mary Medical Center, and shared space with the local food bank -- humble beginnings for a no-frills clinic.
It was established in 2000 as an urgent care facility that provides quality walk-in treatment for those who have no health insurance. While there is no charge for services, patient donations are encouraged and appreciated.
After five years, the clinic moved to a nursing home complex owned by SonBridge Community Center. In 2012, the clinic will move down the hall to a new medical wing built with donations and volunteer sweat. A grant from the Sherwood Trust, a local charitable organization, will complete the medical facility.
Patients who walk in for treatment come from all walks of life with a variety of health issues. Some needs are are urgent while some are chronic and often neglected due to lack of access to a physician. This is especially true for the growing number of mentally-ill patients seeking care in the Valley.
SOS is a "first come, first seen" walk-in clinic. After patients check in and fill out necessary paperwork, nurses document vital signs a list of all over-the-counter and prescribed medications.
If patients have symptoms that require lab tests to confirm, tests - the single most expensive clinic budget item - are then ordered.
SOS also provides a women's clinic by appointment. Nurse practitioner Cynthia Reese serves these patients, who have no other options for pap or breast exams.
All in a day's giving
But the clinic cannot serve the 13 to 21 patients in two hours that it does without the outstanding crew of volunteer nurses and specialists who support the physicians.
More are always welcome. In fact, there are about 50 to 60 physicians in our valley who could make a difference if each donated two hours a year. With that kind of help, we could keep the clinic open every day to serve the uninsured and keep down the cost of these patients going to expensive emergency rooms for non-emergency basic care.
The SOS clinic may be open for only four hours a week, but the nurses continue to volunteer after the doctors are done for the day.
These volunteers make follow-up phone calls for referrals to medical specialists and diabetic educators, calling in prescriptions, setting up appointments for the next women's clinic, picking up medical and office supplies, sorting through the thousands of donated medical items, boxing up supplies for foreign missions, getting the dictation picked up and inserted into each patient file, assisting patients with a variety of paperwork for various financial assistant programs, and so forth.
It never ends.
Janice Anhorn, a registered nurse and the clinic's supervisor, is my mentor. She has taught me all the basics for managing an outpatient free clinic. She has the ability to lead and inspire students and volunteers and she is the reason I am still a volunteer.
I have served as a nurse for six physicians and two nurse practitioners. I have met over a thousand patients and hundreds of volunteers in my three years at the clinic. My reward is the bliss I receive by volunteering at the SOS Clinic.
Where would these patients go for medical care if the clinic could not keep its doors open?
Bessie Hinchman is board secretary for SOS Health Services of Walla Walla and a nurse volunteer.
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Sisters leave a mark on Nigeria's music sceneBy BILLIE ODIDI | Wednesday, April 18 2012 at 13:38
Nigeria emerged as a potent musical force in the late 1960s and 1970s with a rich amalgamation of influences, from highlife, jazz and big bands.
The biggest names were Juju music star King Sunny Ade, who performed with a band of more than 20 musicians and Fela Kuti, who single-handedly spread the influence of Afro beat as a genre.
Other successful Nigerian musicians in the 1970s were guitar wizard Victor Uwaifo, Prince Nico Mbarga, whose pan African hit Sweet Mother sold 13 million copies, and Sonny Okosun, who experimented with highlife and reggae and is best remembered for Fire in Soweto, an international hit in 1977.
In the male-dominated Nigerian music industry, there were a few exceptions; women who held their own and emerged as stars. Salawa Abeni, gained fame and respect in the early 1970s, raising the profile of Waka, the traditional Yoruba music style, dominated by throbbing percussions.
Abeni is still adored in Nigeria, not just for her music, but also for speaking out on social issues, like the mistreatment of women.
Also creating a huge impact at the same time was a group of identical twin sisters born in the city of Jos, Northern Nigeria. The Lijadu Sisters, Taiwo and Kehinde, were born on October 22, 1948 and got their first taste of music when their mother introduced them to the sounds of Victor Olaiya, Miriam Makeba, Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles.
They also happened to be second cousins to Nigeria’s greatest ever musician, Fela Kuti, and the recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, Wole Soyinka.
The sisters say their music always drew inspiration from the socially conscious art of their iconic relations.
“Artistes should be the voice of the world. Not just of their own people, but of the wider world, for a problem which faces one, faces all.”
They started their own song-writing at an early age and before long had been recruited as session singers. Their first hit, Iya Mi Jowo (Mother Please), written by Taiwo, was released by the Nigerian subsidiary of Decca Records in 1968.
"The music business was hard for women in Nigeria," says Taiwo.
"Back then, they didn't think women had brains."
In 1971, the sisters met the British drummer Ginger Baker, who had set up the first 16 track-recording studio in Lagos and had been working with Fela. This meeting led to a chance for them to join Baker at a cultural festival held alongside the Munich Olympics in Germany in 1972.
The Lijadu Sisters recorded four albums on the Afrodisia label, a subsidiary of Decca Records West Africa, which was a major powerhouse in Nigerian music, releasing some of the most sought after Funk, Highlife and Afrobeat by Fela Kuti, The Oriental Brothers International Band and Chief Ebenezer Obey.
The albums were Danger in 1976, Mother Africa in 1977, Sunshine in 1978, and Horizon Unlimited in 1979.
Mixing Afrobeat with jazz and disco, they sometimes sung in English and other times in their native Yoruba and other local dialects. Nigerian multi-instrumentalist and producer Adeniyi “Biddy” Wright, whose mother was childhood friends with the sisters’ mother, played the guitar and funky organ on all four of their classic 1970s albums.
The music blended heavyweight Afrobeat with psychedelic Afro-Rock, High-Life, Disco and Soul in a truly unique combination.
The Lijadu Sisters were also featured in documentary Konkombe: The Nigerian Pop Music Scene by British director Jeremy Marre’s film in 1979. By the 1980s, their international profile was further enhanced by the release of the compilation album Double Trouble by the US label Shanachie Records while Horizon Unlimited was reissued by the British label, Earthworks.
In 1988, after a performance in the US with King Sunny Ade’s band African Beats, The New York Times described the twins as ‘a West African parallel to the Pointer Sisters: smiling free spirits, wearing dresses cut from the same fabric, mixing sisterly banter and flirtatiousness.’
Their years in the US were spent in Brooklyn, performing in clubs in Manhattan and Harlem. After touring the US with King Sunny Ade, various major international record labels came knocking on their door.
However, tragedy hit the group when Kehinde suffered serious spinal injuries after falling in the twins’ apartment building in the US. She recalls that the first doctor she saw gave her just six months to live and after that, then she was told that she would never walk again. During this period, the Lijadu Sisters stayed out of the public eye and Kehinde eventually overcame her injuries.
They prematurely retired from the music business and settled in New York City where they have spent the last 30 years languishing in obscurity.
Thanks to a renewed interest in classic Nigerian soul and funk, record companies are drudging up the archives to reissue past releases. The Lijadu Sisters have been thrust back in the spotlight with the reissue of their finest catalogue from the 1970s.
Four out of print albums by the twins, have been remastered and released for the first time on CD by Knitting Factory, a New York record company which has also made some of Fela’s rarities available.
The group accuses their original record company of robbing them from the sales of their music: “Decca sold 50,000 copies in three months,” Kehinde says, “but we were only paid once for royalties from all four albums.”
The twins were also left fuming after American Hip-hop star Nas, sampled an entire chorus of their song Life’s Gone Down Low, originally on the album Danger, without their knowledge. “He took our song!” they say.
The Lijadu Sisters were the most successful female group in Nigeria in the 1970s and managed to overturn many stereotypes and attitudes as they carved out a unique space for themselves in a predominantly male arena.
The twins, now 63 years old, are still enchanting as they were at the peak of their fame. They dress alike and complete each other’s sentences and a fully recovered Kehinde can dance once more.
“It is decades since we performed publicly,” she says, “but now we are ready, and the music will be of today.”
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Beyond the ballot
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A nonfiction novel, recounted in part from contemporary oral history.
Ten-year-old Enaiatollah (Enaiat) Akbari lives with his mother in Ghazni province, in Afghanistan, and neither one knows his life is about to change forever. One day the Taliban arrive at his school and tell the headmaster to shut it down, but he ignores—or perhaps defies—them. Two days later, the Taliban show up again, put the headmaster within a circle of students and shoot him. Thus begins Enaiat’s odyssey from his village, and he’s not to settle down again for five long and precarious years. Soon after the incident at his school, his mother gives her son three pieces of advice—don’t use drugs, don’t use weapons, don’t cheat or steal—and then she takes off, leaving Enaiat to fend for himself. He starts a pattern of relying on traffickers to get him across sundry borders, first to Pakistan, then to Iran, Turkey, Greece and, finally—at the age of 15—Italy, where he’s able to get asylum and start school again. Along the way he has various jobs, mostly selling wares on the streets or working illegally (and dangerously) on construction sites. He also relies on the kindness of strangers, a Greek woman, for example, who clothes him and gives him food and money. And while from an objective perspective Enaiat’s life is both unsafe and high-risk, he never loses his innate optimism or his buoyant pluckiness and ingenuity.One marvels that Enaiat has told his life adventure to Italian author Geda, and while the novelist has evidently shaped Enaiat’s story for publication, at its core is an authentic, open and marvelous voice of youthful exuberance.
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Ad agency Hill Holliday recently conducted an experiment, asking five families to give up cable TV in favor of connected TV devices for a week.
The growing availability of online content and video subscription services, coupled with an exploding market for connected devices, has pushed the idea of cord cutting — or dropping a traditional cable TV subscription package in favor of online video sources — into the mainstream. But how viable is the concept, really?
For its experiment (which the agency stresses was not intended as a scientific research study), Hill Holliday provided each family with a different connected device: the Roku, Apple TV, Xbox 360, Boxee Box and Google TV.
The agency conducted interviews with the participants at the beginning and end of the week, and also had the participants record their own thoughts throughout the process. Hill Holliday compiled that footage into a short video clip and presented the results of the experiment at last week's TVnext summit.
Check out the video:
Connected Devices Aren't Cable Box Replacements (Yet)
The big takeaway from the experiment is that in their current iteration, connected devices are not drop-in cable box replacements. Ultimately, this makes a lot of sense.
As Hill Holliday notes in its write-up of the experiment, none of the connected devices used in the study are advertised as cable TV replacements. Most of these devices are promoted as a way to augment regular TV viewing and not as a sole provider of video content.
Where connected devices fall short of emulating the cable TV experience (at least in this experiment) can be separated into two areas:
Lack of live content
The Live TV Conundrum
Live content is a problem for which there is no easy solution. Live streams of special events — the Olympics, the State of the Union, global rock concerts — are becoming more common, but traditional programming is still largely available online only after it has aired on regular TV.
Live sports content is actually making a lot of headway on connected devices — with subscription offerings from the MLB, NBA and NHL. This content is great for sports fans — it's basically akin to the various packages offered by satellite providers like DirecTV — but it can be expensive for the viewer who just wants to watch an occasional local or national game.
Interestingly, the solution for live content on connected devices is actually being offered up by the cable companies themselves.
After ignoring users who consume content on devices that are not traditional TV sets for the better part of the decade, cable companies are finally ramping up their own connected offerings.
In December, Comcast released the first version of its XfinityTV app for the iPad. The initial release of the app allows users to treat it as a giant remote control, but future versions will include the ability to stream OnDemand content on the iPad. Comcast has also said it will offer live TV streaming through the app in the future as well.
Meanwhile, Verizon is already testing some live streaming apps for the iPad and other tablets.
I have long been of the opinion that the cable companies have the most untapped potential in the evolving connected device market. Rather than competing against offerings from Amazon, Netflix and iTunes, cable companies should leverage their strengths and make content more accessible on computers, tablets and smartphones.
What Connected Devices Can Learn From Regular TV
The biggest hurdle for connected devices, in their current form, isn't necessarily with content — it's with usability.
One of the experiment's participants commented on how TV is a "passive" experience. This is true. For better or worse, television requires very little effort on the part of the user. Aside from changing the channel or looking at the onscreen TV guide, television is just "there."
Connected devices, on the other hand, demand a lot more user effort. Viewers have to make conscious choices about what content they want to watch. This is fine if someone wants to watch a specific movie or TV show, but it can be less satisfying for the channel surfer. There is much less serendipity built into the current generation of connected devices.
TiVo, arguably the biggest disruptor in the television industry during the last 25 years, understood the importance of becoming part of the passive experience. TiVo updates itself in the background, fuses its interface in with that of the cable box and works just like a living, breathing VCR.
Aside from content disputes, the biggest user complaint we hear about Google TV is that it is too hard to use. In other words Google and its partners didn't take a TiVo approach to integrating with the living room.
Likewise, even the best set-top boxes have usability issues that prevent them from truly operating as background devices. A frustrating aspect of setting up Boxee or Roku is that despite being "connected," these devices require using a computer or smartphone to set-up or enable accounts with Netflix or Pandora. Apple makes the Netflix sign-in process much less time consuming, but even then, a user cannot sign-up for a Netflix account from within the Apple TV.
Connected devices and their associated services are by design, not going to match the totally passive nature of a traditional television set. That doesn't mean that the setup process and playback options can't be better optimized to fit in with other aspects of the television.
Where this is particularly true is when it comes to finding content. Rather than having to search services individually, connected devices could take a page from Clicker's playbook and make it simple to search across providers from a single interface.
What Connected TV is Good For
The nature of this experiment was purposely strict. Still, in my own unscientific experiments, I have seen some different results when observing how regular TV watchers (and non-techies) adapt to connected devices.
For Christmas this past year, I got my parents — who represent the older end of the 18-65 television viewing demographic — a Roku box. I did not get this box as a cable replacement, but I intended for it to augment their viewing options. After I set it up and signed them up for Netflix, my parents love the Roku box, which they use to watch old movies and catch up on old episodes of 24
On a similar note, I got my mom an iPad for her birthday back in August. The device has become an integral part of her life and she takes it everywhere. Just this weekend, she was telling me how she uses the ABC app to catch up on her TV shows while putting on makeup in the morning.
Neither the iPad nor the Roku has taken on the role of replacing the regular cable box. The DVD player is certainly getting less use and TiVo — particularly for newer content — is less loved. But both devices are simply a way to extend and enhance viewing options, not a way to replace existing methods.
Connected devices are becoming a reality and cable companies should be worried that consumers now have alternative ways to view content on their TV sets. Premium movie services like HBO and Showtime should also be concerned about Netflix's growing dominance. Plus, while connected devices might not be ready to replace cable boxes yet, for many people they certainly can justify a switch to a less-expensive cable package.
Still, from my own observations (as well as the results of the Hill Holliday experiment), the real impact of connected devices is to the viewing ecosystem as a whole, rather than just the cable specific niche. For now, connected devices are best used to augment viewing options.
What do you think of the results of this experiment? Have you traded in cable for a connected device? Let us know in the comments.
More Digital TV Resources from Mashable:
- 5 Reasons Connected TV Could Flop in 2011
- 4 Predictions for Connected Devices in 2011
- Why Connected TVs Will Be About the Content, Not the Apps
- What Consumer Electronics Companies Must Do to Make 3D Profitable
- 7 Pairs of Stylish 3D Specs for Fashionable Film Fans
Photo courtesy of Flickr, theogeo
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Posted by: Loren Coleman on May 3rd, 2011
Paranthropus bust at the International Cryptozoology Museum, Portland, Maine.
Of the two schools of thought about what Bigfoot/Sasquatch might be, I come down on the Paranthropus side of the theories versus the Gigantopithecus one.
Now comes intriguing news that the original Paranthropus fossil find, which was called “The Nutcracker Man” didn’t eat nuts at all, but sedges or grasses.
New research by University of Utah geoscientists could overturn long-held views about an early human relative’s dietary choices in the East African savannah.
The teeth of the hominid Paranthropus boisei, first discovered by Mary Leakey in 1959 in Tanzania, are so big and flat, and the jaw so strong, that anthropologists wondered if the creature ate hard foods plucked from trees and nicknamed the species “Nutcracker Man.” That powerful face, however, was more likely built for chewing grass like a cow, according the research team’s findings.
The skull of Paranthropus boisei, known for decades as Nutcracker Man because of its large, flat teeth. Researchers from the University of Utah and other institutions are publishing a new study in which carbon isotope ratios in tooth enamel reveal that the early human relatives, which went extinct, likely used its big teeth and powerful jaw to chew grasses, but didn’t eat nuts. Credit: National Museums of Kenya.
This undated handout photo provided by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows the casts of two palates demonstrates the large size of the teeth of Paranthropus boisei (left), an early human relative that lived in East Africa between 2.3 million and 1.2 million years ago and is known as Nutcracker Man. (AP Photo/Melissa Lutz Blouin, University of Arkansas)
Monday’s paper had University of Arkansas anthropologist Peter Ungar “grinning ear to ear” because it affirmed his theories about P. boisei based on physical examination of the big occlusal or chewing surfaces of its teeth, which revealed wispy scratches that are hardly consistent with hard foods.
“We weren’t sure what that diet was. They answered the question of what are the not-hard foods these guys were eating,” Ungar said.
The study’s authors included Emma Mbua, Francis Kirera and Fredrick Manthi of National Museums of Kenya; Frederick Grine of Stony Brook University; and anthropologists Matt Sponheimer of the University of Colorado and Meave Leakey.
BTW, I want to mention an aside about this business of the diet of Paranthropus, as pointed out by John Hawks at his outstanding anthropology weblog: “What were these extinct species really eating? Was grass the food? For living geladas, grass consumption includes seeds — a fact that led Clifford Jolly to suggest that early hominins might also have specialized on seeds. Of course, humans today also specialize on grass seeds. We call them grains, eat them in bread and drink them in soda. And beer.”
As I recall one of my favorite professors of anthropology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale use to note, beer is one of the forgotten early secrets of the prehistoric human diet. Beer, Dr. Carroll Riley use to tell his students, might be older than bread. Perhaps Paranthropus drank old, disgusting, naturally fermented grains, which actually happened to be beer.
Nothing more exciting than thinking about Bigfoot and beer, probably. Maybe that explains some of their erratic behaviors?
The paper may have wide-ranging implications on other Paranthropus findings, hominology, and Sasquatch studies. Just saying.
Paranthropus aethiopicus Credit: Lesribalta.
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Ralph Benko, Contributor
I mostly write about economic growth policy and monetary reform.
How to create tens of millions of jobs, good jobs? Much hinges on the answer to this question.
Long gone are the golden Reagan-Clinton years that saw almost 40 million new positions created. In the decade since Clinton left office America created a paltry 3 million under George W. Bush, and Barack Obama recently was scored as having the worst job creation for a first period in office of any president since 1890, excepting Hoover.
The Permanent Government seems confused about what to say, much less do, to turn this around. The Insipid Recovery’s threat to turn into a Double Dip is starting to concentrate the mind of the political class wonderfully. D.C., where our tax dollars go to die, finally is beginning to focus on the right question: How to create jobs?
There are two theories. Progressives believe that the answer lies in government job creation (stimulus, bailouts, “shovel-ready” public works). Supply-siders believe that the answer lies exclusively in human action, entrepreneurs and businesspeople, and that the government needs to get its boot off our necks. Watch Fight of the Century for a wonderful rap version of the debate — between Keynes and Hayek — produced by John Papola and Russ Roberts.
President Obama, cheered on by the elites, relied on the power of government to create jobs … and failed. Reagan and Clinton relied on the free market. They were attacked as tools of the plutocrats for doing so yet delivered the goods: massive job growth.
Notwithstanding Obama’s catastrophic failure, the elites, as exemplified by Gregory Ip, of The Economist, writing recently in The Washington Post, “The Republicans new voodoo economics” wish for a continuation of government stimulating the economy by spending and monetary policy.
Constitutional populists, like the Tea Party Patriots, demand a return to free market principles to create jobs. Top notch populists such as Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review, anticipate bidding an unsentimental farewell to “A Tottering Technocracy.”
Elites, of course, find being criticized for their failures unbearable. Consider the explosive reaction to Gov. Rick Perry’s acid criticism of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Perry said that “printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history, is almost treacherous, or treasonous….”
This is consummate free market constitutional populism. Yet our governing elite has lost its bearings and even its moorings in historical reality. Perry’s views on what now is euphemistically called “quantitative easing” are virtually indistinguishable from those of a lot of irresponsible maniacs including most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and such disreputable figures as Thomas Paine, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.
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The U.S. Department of Education received about 371 applications, which represent 1,189 school districts, for its $400 million Race to the Top district competition.
The deadline for the competition, which was delayed because of Hurricane Sandy, was earlier this month. The department will award the money by the end of the calendar year and is expecting to name between 15 and 25 winners.
The applications come from 42 states plus the District of Columbia, with California and Texas—of course, because of their size—producing 170 applicants between the two of them.
Many districts ran into a lot of trouble seeking the necessary support to submit their applications, since backing of the teachers' union (if there is one in a district) is an eligibility requirement. (Districts may submit anything they want, as Los Angeles Unified has done, but whether it will be deemed "eligible" to compete by the department is a whole 'nother story.)
Districts were charged with pitching proposals that would jump-start individualized learning efforts for teaching and learning.
See the complete list of who applied.
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Budgeting for Outcomes (BFO) - November 12, 2012
Prerequisites: It is recommended, but not required, that students complete the What is BFO? course.
Course level: Intermediate
CPE credits: 8
Time: 1 day, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Who Will Benefit
This course is for finance officers, budget officers, budget analysts, and others who want to know more about the benefits and costs of budgeting for outcomes or priority-based budgeting.
Budgeting for Outcomes (BFO) is a strategic approach to aligning spending with results and overall community priorities. An outcomes-based approach represents a shift from the traditional public-sector budgeting approach focusing on line item costs and incremental adjustments. BFO focuses on results and encourages departments to become efficient and work together towards achieving results and accountability. This session will cover the budgeting for outcomes process, which includes:
- Shifting the emphasis of the budget process from inputs to outcomes;
- Integrating the budget process into the strategic plan process and other long-term planning processes;
- Focusing the budget process on the needs of citizens and other stakeholders;
- Creating organizational alignment from high-level goals to specific services;
- Using evidence and logic to prioritize services based on the relationship to meeting community needs; and
- Preparing a budget document that communicates the relationship between spending and results for citizens.
- Understand distinguishing characteristics, concepts, and best practices in budgeting for outcomes and the major ways in which it differs from traditional budgeting
- Learn the essential steps of a budgeting for outcomes process
- Understand best practices for implementing budgeting for outcomes
- Understand the implementation steps
- Analyze case studies and lessons learned from other jurisdictions
- The State and Local Government Performance Management Sourcebook
- A Performance Management Framework for State and Local Government: From Measurement and Reporting to Management and Improving
GFOA member: $370 Nonmember: $550
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According to a new report by Georgia Tech (in partnership with Google), the number of rogue DNS servers is steadily rising. Poisoned DNS servers have always represented a potentially potent line of attack, as we noted back in December, but this new study gives a concrete estimate on exactly how many poisoned servers are out in cyberspace. This study appears to be a follow-up on that earlier coverage, and gives more exact data than was previously available.
The biggest problem with rogue DNS server attacks is that traditional antivirus software won't detect the problem once the damage has been done. There are some software programs that can detect an attempt to change a system's DNS settings, but they aren't mainstream—at least not yet. Fortunately, there are still limitations on what web sites can be faked. If you use online banking, for example, your bank authenticates via an SSL certificate that the fake online banking site won't be able to provide. Even so, this method isn't foolproof—history demonstrates that a number of users would simply choose to initiate the login process anyway, even when warned of a certificate mismatch.
According to the paper, there are approximately 68,000 rogue DNS servers across the Internet, The authenticity of the sites such servers redirect to varies greatly, from near-perfect copies to laughably bad, but the problem they represent is quite serious. Once an end user's computer has been modified to use a poisoned DNS server, the system can be directed to any fake web site the malware author feels like serving up. Such attacks are typically aimed at gathering credit card information, login/password data to sensitive areas (think bank accounts) or the supposedly-secret Adult ID information for all those naughty sites you've been visiting. (Mmm. You have been naughty, haven't you?)
Since rogue DNS servers only return poisoned results a small
percentage of the time, they can be annoyingly difficult to hunt down
and disable. Adding to the problem is the fact that popular Web 2.0 "mashups" can draw on material from multiple sources around the 'Net, thus making it even more difficult to track an infection point. There are some security measures in place to prevent this type of attack, but again, such software may or may not be deployed at any particular site. Antivirus software can stop some attacks, and Vista's UAC
(as much as I hate to admit it's useful for anything) would prevent a
user's DNS settings from being altered, but it's not a bad idea to keep
an eye on these settings if you've a habit of playing with fire (or
visiting potentially dangerous sites). Nothing says "I Love You" like
turning your system into a botnet node spewing Valentine-themed Storm
- Associated Press: Use of rogue DNS servers on the rise
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April 29 2009 / by Garry Golden
Category: Energy Year: General Rating: 3 Hot
60 Minutes recently aired a program on the future of coal power featuring Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers (an advocate of longer term 'Cathedral Thinking' carbon reduction) and leading climate scientist James Hansen (an advocate of a moratorium on building coal plants).
The CBS report was solidly mainstream in framing coal as central to the conversation on energy, environment and global economic development- but it failed to move the conversation beyond ideas that have existed for several decades.
Time for Big Ideas, not Big Battles
Coal is the world's fastest growing source of energy due largely to growth outside the United States. And despite all the rapid growth rates expected with wind and solar, coal is likely to gain global market share in the years ahead.
So this is not just a conversation about US policy and US-based utilities! And there is no way to just 'wish' coal away. We must develop low cost carbon solutions that can be applied around the world within existing power plants. And everyone agrees - these low cost solutions do not exist today!
CBS Producers missed an opportunity to introduce more advanced non-geoengineering strategies to carbon neutralization and left viewers stuck at ringside watching the same old 'pro' vs 'anti' battle.
Carbon's Molecular Dance between Oxygen and Hydrogen
Carbon is a 'sticky' molecule that interchangeably binds with oxygen and hydrogen based on its journey through biochemical pathways or via human induced energy conversion (e.g. power plants and combustion engine).
Human beings have a choice to approach carbon solutions through geo-engineering (shoving it underground), or as bio-engineers who can bind carbon with hydrogen for use as a hydrocarbon fuel (for transportation or onsite electricity generation) or a bio-feestock for industrial applications. CBS viewers would have been better off understanding the long-term view of carbon rather than watch a debate without a viable solution. (Continue Reading Below).
Seeing Carbon through a Lens of Biology
The current carbon solution set is based on 'geo-engineering' principles- essentially pumping CO2 into the Earth (with the hope that it does not leak back into the atmopshere). It is an expensive and largely untested engineering process - yet remains our 'best' option on the table!
The other option is investing in a new platform for carbon that could evolve into a scalable, cost effective solution that can be retrofitted into most existing coal power plants.
Bio-based Carbon Solutions
Rather than think of carbon as a geo-engineer, we can look at carbon through the eyes of a biologist- and use the molecular power of biochemical pathways and enzymes to neutralize cabon by binding it with hydrogen.
Is there precedent for bio-based carbon solutions?
Yes. Coal and Oil.
Coal is made up of carbon-hydrogen chains (mostly carbon!) formed by ancient plants, and oil is a more 'hydrogen rich' mixture of hydrocarbon chains formed by ancient diatoms (algae).
We capture energy by blowing up these carbon-hydrogen chains resulting in captured energy (used to produce electricity and power vehicles) and CO2.
Bio-energy says 'close the loop' using biochemical pathways capable of binding carbon to hydrogen.
This is the basis of entreprenuerial efforts around 'algae' and bacteria-based carbon neutralization efforts.
Create large scale closed and/or open pond bioreactors that capture carbon emission flows from power plants then bind carbon with hydrogen (via algae/bacteria) for use as an energy resources (e.g. combustible liquid fuel; bio fuel cell) or biomass feedstock for industrial applications.
Hype vs Feasability?
There is no doubt that algae is in a 'hype' stage of development and there is a long road ahead. It is not a 'holy grail' solution, but nonetheless holds tremendous potential even when looking at a time horizon of 2020-2025. (An ambitious but reasonable time horizon for stabalizing global CO2 emission growth using advanced technologies.)
There is a lot of work ahead in scaling up algae/bacteria systems as well as reducing costs and improving reliability. But there are no show-stoppers to the 21st century mind.
More than one option to Carbon
60 Minutes missed the boat by saying that 'the only know way of carbon sequestration' is shoving it underground.
When in fact, there is a more elegant solution in biology.
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Posts Tagged ‘Mother Mary Magdalene’
January 18, 2012 | by Perrin Drumm
Modest, natural, and snazzy—those were the three directions Mother Mary Magdalene gave artist Julia Sherman for designing the habits for the Community of Compassion, Mother Mary’s new Anglican Catholic order in Fort Worth, Texas. “You can’t just go to the store and buy a habit,” Mother Mary wrote to me. “Every order has to have a distinct one designed by the foundress, and you’re not supposed to copy anyone else.” The difference between two orders can be as simple as a few extra pleats in the skirt or as noticeable as Mother Teresa’s blue-striped, sari-inspired head covering.
But Sherman’s habits are something entirely new. Moreover, the JF & Son store in New York has partnered with Sherman to produce and sell the habits for secular customers. So while Mother Mary is praying in her peach-colored harem pants in Forth Worth, a young New York woman might be traipsing across Fifth Avenue in the very same design.
Mother Mary found Sherman after she saw the artist’s work photographing nun dolls from the Nun Doll Museum in Indian River, Michigan, a shrine to more than five hundred dolls and mannequins, each dressed in the traditional garb of men and woman from religious communities in North and South America. Sherman, whose previous photographic work has focused on the intricate process of creating wigs for Jewish women, clearly has a thing for religious accessories. Read More »
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Created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, the International Monetary Fund (IMF or the Fund) remains one of the most controversial international organizations in the contemporary architecture of global economic governance.
Established in 2012 and hosted by the University of Birmingham (UK), the IMF Mailing List is a moderated e-mail list for social scientists to disseminate new publications related to the IMF, as well as news of research events such as workshops and specialist conferences on global economic governance.
The IMF Mailing List includes over 60 members ranging from early-career researchers to senior scholars in Political Science and International Relations, Political Economy, Sociology, and Economics at universities around the world, as well as researchers working in international organizations.
Using the IMF Mailing List:
• Please e-mail Dr. André Broome if you would like to join the IMF Mailing List
• Non-members are welcome to circulate details of published academic work on the International Monetary Fund to the IMF Mailing List
• Please include all available details of academic publications on the IMF , including: author(s); title; journal/publisher; volume/issue numbers; and page numbers. Please also include a web link to the publication if one is available
• NB: this is a moderated mailing list. Details of work-in-progress that has not been accepted for publication, publications not directly related to the IMF, and other unrelated messages will be deleted
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A panel of experts asked whether 401(k)s were a “failed experiment” at the 2013 NAPA/ASPPA 401(k) Summit in Las Vegas on Sunday. Despite a few disagreements on some of the particulars, the panel was largely in agreement: No, 401(k)s haven’t failed, but there’s always room for improvement.
Brian Graff (left), CEO and executive director of the American Society of Pension Professionals and Actuaries, led the panel in a discussion of what 401(k)s have done for participants and what could still be improved upon.
Kevin Crain, head of institutional retirement and benefit services for Merrill Lynch, told attendees that 401(k) plans started as a “great democracy” where the responsibility for decision making fell on individuals. Now, he said, we’ve moved to a “democratic paternalism” where plan sponsors are working to help people get more involved through built-in features like automatic enrollment, but as investors become more astute they can move away from the paternalistic aspects and take more control of their plans.
Karen Friedman, executive vice president of the Pension Rights Center, acknowledged that “there’s no question that everyone cares [about clients’ retirement] and wants people to save,” but noted 401(k)s had several weaknesses: they are designed as supplemental income, investment decisions and risk fall on individuals, and millions of people don’t have access.
Where people do have access, 401(k)s are useful, she said. People who can afford to make contributions can benefit —“if they can make the money last.” Payroll deductions make contributing easier for participants, and plans are easy to understand.
“We’d like to see money paid out over participants’ lifetimes and encourage annuitization,” she said. Unfortunately, many participants have to “overcome psychological barriers. When people see how much money they have, they don’t want to hand it over.”
Judy Miller, ASPPA chief of actuarial issues and director of retirement policy, agreed that automatic payroll deductions made saving easier for participants, and added that outcomes were even better when combined with automatic enrollment. She pointed to incentives like employer matches and tax deductions that help keep people in plans. Most of all, as a “free agent nation” where people change jobs frequently, 401(k)s’ portability allows participants to accumulate a good benefit over their lifetimes.
Graff raised fees and fee disclosures as a major issue in 401(k)s today. “There’s no appreciation among policymakers for how efficient the industry’s fee structure is,” he said. “We’re becoming exceedingly more efficient, but we’re not doing a good job talking about that success.”
Crain noted that larger plans can certainly take advantage of economies of scale for more participants, which keep fees low for both participants and plan sponsors. “There are two consumers” of 401(k) plans, he said: the participant and the plan sponsor. For participants, effective fee disclosure is “not there yet.” Fee disclosure for plan sponsors is “far clearer and they’ve been invoking their buying power quite effectively.”
“We look forward to seeing how consumers react to fee disclosure,” Friedman said.
Looking at some measures of 401(k) plans’ success, Miller pointed to participants’ increased likelihood of using a 401(k) plan over another retirement plan.
Investors are “14 times more likely to save if they have a plan at work than if they have to go out and get an IRA,” Miller said. “This is a broad-based benefit. We’ve managed to cover tens of millions of people.”
Balances, however, may not be the best measure of success. She warned that even among participants with modest incomes, account balances vary more with the time a participant has spent in a plan than with income. Furthermore, considering the number of times people change jobs, a participant may have more than one plan. Median balance figures often only reflect a participant’s current plan and current balance, Graff agreed.
“The 401(k) is just a structure,” Miller said. “The system has evolved due to the active marketplace. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s ludicrous to want to tear the system down.”
“We’re not trying to tear it down,” Friedman countered, “but there need to be improvements for when people don’t have access.” To benefit from a 401(k) plan, she said, “you have to participate and you have to know how much to contribute.”
Crain suggested one “easy way to engage people” was to tie the enrollment process to health care enrollment. “Everyone enrolls in health care,” he said, pointing to increased participation rates at Wal-Mart. When the retailer tied its health care and retirement plan benefits, participation rates increased from 20% to 70%, he said.
Another barrier for many investors, Friedman said, is that they are “more burdened than ever.” Contributing to a plan and saving for retirement are simply lower priority.
Furthermore, “financial literacy makes little difference to people’s outcomes,” she said, pointing to a 2010 survey from Brookings that found traditional sources of financial education have not generated strong evidence of positive or substantial improvements. “Even sophisticated people didn’t do well in the crash,” Friedman noted.
Leakage from loans on the plans represents a significant drag on investors’ balances, she said, especially among lower-income participants. Not only do they reduce their assets, they have to pay a penalty and taxes on the additional income. “If you do everything right, you still have to make the money last.”
Crain countered that “no matter what study you’re looking at, 80% of people who are contributing aren’t taking loans.” Furthermore, he said, the number of loans and hardship withdrawals participants are taking has been falling, and plan sponsors are allowing fewer loans.
The biggest problem, Miller said, is coverage. It’s “often called the small business problem,” she said, but about half of people who don’t have a plan work for a company with at least 100 workers. The problem is they work part time and are frequently ineligible to participate in retirement plans, she said.
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- pathogenic yeast of increasing medical concern
- we find that genes involved in mating and meiosis are as numerous in C. glabrata as in the sexual species Kluyveromyces delphensis, which is its closest known relative. C. glabrata has a putative mating-type (MAT) locus and a pheromone gene (MFALPHA2), as well as orthologs of at least 31 other Saccharomyces cerevisiae genes that have no known roles apart from mating or meiosis, including FUS3, IME1 and SMK1.
- Wong S, Fares MA, Zimmermann W, Butler G, and Wolfe KH. . pmid:12620120.
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The Business Administration Program at Lycoming College is distinctive, dynamic, innovative and one of the most versatile majors Lycoming has to offer. Business connects to every facet of the modern world, be it individual people, whole societies, health care, politics, education, museums or even peace and war; our world is comprised of consumers and business plays an important role in how our world is shaped.
Our mission here at Lycoming is to develop leaders who understand how business works and the impact business can have. We fulfill this mission by providing a well-rounded business curriculum grounded in a liberal arts education. Students may pursue any number of business endeavors, including finance, marketing, management, international business, economics, accounting, human resources, information systems and business strategy. We stress business ethics and environmental sustainability, and analyze in-depth how business relates to government, community and society. We develop each student's capacity to think critically, write clearly, conduct research and appreciate diverse cultures and peoples. All the while, we get to know each of our students on a first-name basis and involve them in our research, teaching and professional activities.
We strongly believe that for students to really understand how business works, they need hands-on experience. We facilitate numerous internships, student projects for local businesses and study abroad opportunities. In addition to providing students a chance to earn credit and hands-on experience, these programs cultivate personal growth and maturity beyond the basic classroom experience.
With the sturdy liberal arts foundation and real world experience through internships, our students leave Lycoming prepared to pursue careers in many industries or to launch their own entrepreneurial ventures. Our graduates have gone on to work for business enterprises, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, health care institutions, small businesses, local companies and global corporations.
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Thank you, again, maripat, for your thoughtful response. As in so many areas of life writers and thinkers must frequently agree to disagree. Naturally in life, we all take positions on all sorts of topics, subjects, religions and philosophies. Often that position is inarticulate and poorly thought out if given any thought at all. With that said, though, the apologetics I engage in is a never-ending exercise with time out for the necessary and inevitable quotidian tasks of life: eating, sleeping, drinking and a wide range of leisure activities. The apologetics that concerns me is not so much Christian or Islamic apologetics or one of a variety of those secular apologetics I referred to above, but Baha'i apologetics.
There are many points of comparison and contrast between any form of apologetics which I won't go into here. Readers here might like to check out Wikipedia for a birds-eye-view of the subject. Christians and Muslims have the opportunity to defend their respective religions by the use of apologetics; secular humanists can also argue their cases if they so desire. I in turn will defend the Baha'i Faith by the use of apologetics. In the process each of us will, hopefully, learn something about our respective Faiths, our religions, our various and our multitudinous positions, some of which we hold to our hearts dearly and some of which are of little interest.
Apologetics is a branch of systematic theology, although some experience its thrust in religious studies or philosophy of religion courses. Some encounter it on the internet for the first time in a more populist and usually much less academic form. As I see it, apologetics is primarily concerned with the protection of a position, the refutation of the issues raised by that position's assailants and, in the larger sense, the exploration of that position in the context of prevailing philosophies and standards in a secular society, a religious society, indeed, any society past or present. At this site most writers will engage in Islamic apoloetics.
All of us defend our positions whatever these positions are: atheistic, theistic, agnostic, humanistic, sceptic, cynic, realist, pragmatist and any one of a multitude of religions, denominations, sects, cults, isms and wasms. Apologetics, to put it slightly differently, is concerned with answering both general and critical inquiries from others. In the main, though, apologetics deals with criticism of a position and dealing with that criticism in as rational a manner as possible. Apologetics can help explore the teachings of a religion or of a philosophy in the context of the prevailing religions and philosophies of the day as well as in the context of the common laws and standards of a secular society. Although the capacity to engage in critical self-reflection on the fundamentals of some position is a prerequisite of the task of engaging in apologetics, apologetics derives much of its impetus from a commitment to a position.
I wish all those at this site who are obviously Islamic apologists much energy and wisdom in the defence of their faith. Our world is a complex one and we each require all the learning and etiquette of expression in dealing with those who do not share our views.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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Adult cyclists with child-like tendencies - always men, natch - have great fun applying the brakes of their mates as they’re riding along. Now, imagine you could do the same with a key-fob remote control and an infra-red controlled braking unit. What fun you could have!
In fact, the brand new Bike Stoppa is a real device, available only online, at a price of £29.99, and is aimed at parents who worry about the braking abilities of their kids.
This is a worthwhile worry. Many kids’ bikes have pitiful brakes and it’s takes a wee while for children to master the art of stopping their bikes. Google News is chocka with stories of little ‘uns getting killed while riding their bikes. Some of these deaths might have been prevented had a parent been able to stop their child’s bike in time.
A quick-thinking adult, riding close to a child cyclist, could execute an emergency stop by grabbing hold of the child but the Bike Stoppa has an interesting extra feature. It applies a tyre-centred brake when the frame-mounted device goes out of range of the key-fob. This is about 30 metres. For parents with long driveways and an adventurous young child, the Bike Stoppa could be, ahem, right up their street.
The company claims there’s no risk of the child shuddering to a sudden halt and head-planting over the handlebars as the braking is progressive.
The device has a short lifespan because children can’t be kept attached to digital apron strings for ever but for certain applications - including maybe for children with learning difficulties or with disabilities - the Bike Stoppa could be of interest. Naturally, adult supervision would be necessary at all times. This is a last resort device, not the main means for a child to stop their bike.
When the technology is miniaturised and placed, secretly, on your mate’s bike the laughter will never cease.
Braking is a life-skill. Here’s the definitive online article on learning to ride a bike. Definitive? I wrote it, I can label it as I like…
Modern ones have powerful brakes and super-efficient engines that can slow to a crawl and then accelerate away smoothly without breaking into a sweat.
So, how come so many motorists don’t like using these features? I’ve just finished a cycling holiday in the Highlands of Scotland and have been using minor country roads, with three young kids in tow.
In fact, they go to the front of me, with my wife out ahead.
Most of the time there have been few cars around, but when one is sighted, you know trouble is brewing (triple that if it’s a truck). Despite being on singletrack roads, motorists just don’t like slowing down, even when they see squishy fellow humans ahead.
Mind you, I’ve noticed they slow down when they encounter objects equal in size or bigger than them. Strange that.
Exactly how much time - or fuel economy - would they lose if they slowed down when passing vulnerable road users? What kind of moronic motor-centric society do we live in when it doesn’t even cross some people’s minds that speeding in proximity to tiny children on bikes is a bastard thing to do?
I’d love to conduct spot interviews with these folks (obviously, flagging them down with sirens and flashing blue lights first) and ask them what they were thinking.
I guess most will be perfectly decent people but the operative word is the last one: they will be guilty of not thinking. That’s the problem. Cars can go fast, so fast they must go.
When Critical Mass forces motorists to slow down it’s deemed by many to be a lefty, political act of anti-progress vandalism.
When truckers hold up motorists - as they did yesterday in London - it’s deemed by many to be a legitimate and much needed protest against rising fuel prices.
Being forced to go slow is ‘bad’ in one case, ‘good’ in the other.
Yet, as any dispassionate observer can see, forcing motorists to cut their speed is a way of civilising a city.
The creation of so-called ’slow cities’ is going to happen with or without intervention. Unrestrained, motorists will clog up cities whether we like it or not. Restrained, at least the motorists could be channeled into long streams of micro-moving queues.
It’s this second approach that most cities will eventually adopt. As a recent AA/Populis survey found, rising fuel prices aren’t forcing people out of their cars, they just spend less on other things. Petrol is thought to be an ‘essential’ not a ‘luxury’ for many city dwellers.
Given that motorists won’t easily or willingly change their behaviour - heck, it’s a free society, they opine, as they gas-guzzle over the rights of other members of society - the only real solution is design. Cities need to stop designing for cars and start designing for people.
This is a central premise of the ’slow cities’ movement. At last week’s Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle upon Tyne I attended a number of thought-provoking talks but the one that chimed most with me was the one given by Carl Honoré, a Canadian now living - slowly - in London.
He’s the author of the bestseller In Praise of Slow. He didn’t start the ’slow movement’, but his writings are getting the message to a wider audience. The ’slow food’ movement - started in Italy by a gastronome - was perhaps the first of the ’slow’ ideas to gain a mainstream foothold, but others are now growing in importance, including ’slow cities.’
Honoré touched on this topic in his talk, although ’slow sex’ got the most interest from the audience, some of them twittering his highlights, not a very ’slow friendly’ thing to do.
It is a cultural revolution against the notion that faster is always better. The Slow philosophy is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace. It’s about seeking to do everything at the right speed. Savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them. Doing everything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible. It’s about quality over quantity in everything from work to food to parenting.
Lately I have been paying a lot of attention to the rise of Slow Travel. The fast approach to travel and tourism is taking a heavy toll. The environmental damage caused by our penchant for air travel is well documented, but it is just the start. When we travel in roadrunner mode, we miss the small details that make each place thrilling and unique. We lose the joy of the journey. And at the end of it all, when every box on our To Do list has been checked, we return home even more exhausted than when we left. That is why Slow Travel is gaining ground.
Slow Travel is about savouring the journey (traveling by train or barge or bicycle or foot rather than crammed into an airplane); taking time to engage and learn about the local culture; finding moments to switch off and relax; showing an interest in the effect our visit has on the locals and on the environment. Obviously we don’t live in an ideal world so sometimes we have to travel faster than we want or should. But at least we should seek wherever possible to take a Slow approach to travel. It will deliver more pleasure, stronger memories and more sustainability.”
The whole of his talk from Thinking Digital can be watched below. He starts off by saying he nearly got knocked down in Newcastle by a ‘yummy mummy’ in an SUV talking on a cellphone, taking a bend too fast.
Click on the story titles to be taken to the most popular articles on Quickrelease.tv.
1. Lock it or lose it “Or lock it and still lose it? I bought a bunch of expensive locks and watched two burly ‘bike thieves’ smash into them within seconds. But it’s possible to make life difficult for professional thieves: there are locking techniques that will make your precious harder to half-inch.”
2. The celebs who cycle
Forget stretch-limos, a growing list of film stars, rock legends and leaders-of-the-free-world take to two-wheels for speedy, paparazzi-free transport and, of course, to keep their figures in trim.
4. Ergo saddle testing “Last year I got hooked up to a penile oxygen flow meter in the home town of William Shakespeare. This test - developed in Germany - has helped Specialized tweak its Body Geometry line of saddles to make them more ergo than ever.”
5. How often should you replace your bicycle helmet? 1. After a crash. 2. At least every two years. 3. When salt has frazzled the straps. 4. When your helmet stinks so much it goes riding without you. 5. Before the fashion police arrive. 6. After too many suncreen smears
The top Quickrelease.tv videos on YouTube (633,000 total views to date) can be found here. And, soon to go over 5000 views on Vimeo, here’s the Bicycle Anatomy video featuring music made from parts of my bikes:
British PM Gordon Brown is not popular. Conservative leader David Cameron and Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson are extremely popular.
Aside from their joint love of rosette colour, what most unites Cameron and Johnson? They are Britain’s highest profile utility cyclists.
It’s strange, most ‘normal’ Brits hate cyclists yet Cameron and Johnson have stuck to their bikes despite recent attempts by the mainstream media to shame them into going by car instead.
Cycling may be in decline, in terms of bums on saddles, but it’s the sort of healthy, non-polluting, earth-friendly activity that goes down well in the sort of key constituencies that win British elections.
Cycling is tops with middle-class white people, says top WordPresser Christian Lander. And that’s true for the UK as well as the US.
So, if Gordon Brown wants to tickle the fancies of the electoral minority power-makers - the middle ground voters so beloved of British politicos - he needs to address their concerns from a streaming bikecam.
His YouTube initiative, launched today, is lame without a bike. It’s just a bloke in a suit, fluffing his words. Never heard of ‘take two’, Gordon? You might not be able to follow David Cameron’s bike commute on Twitter.com but his website - webcameron - is stuffed to the gills with other social media fripperies.
The Tory leader famously quipped that Gordon Brown was an “analogue politician in a digital age.”
Brown’s YouTube appearance, sans bicycle, is a good case in point.
However, the initiative - conjured up by @DowningStreet? - gives us all a chance to tell Gordon he needs to get out and ride more.
Ask the PM will be a regular Q&A session open to everyone. You’ll also be able to vote for your favourite questions throughout with the most popular rising to the top.
So send in your video questions on any subject you like, from tackling climate change to improving the health service and creating jobs, and make the most of your chance to have a personal Prime Minister’s Question Time.
The first session will close to submissions on 21 June and the PM’s response will be shared shortly after.
Videos have to be less than 30 seconds long and can be ever so slightly frivoulous: “We will accept lighter questions not necessarily linked to Government policy.”
Interestingly, “questions will be selected based on their popularity with YouTube users…”
So, here’s a challenge. Let’s collaborate on a bike-topic video, post it to YouTube and then make it popular so Gordon has to answer it (preferably from a bike saddle).
As Gordon probably knows, fame on YouTube can be cruel. Gordon Brown’s official YouTube videos struggle to get 2000+ views. However, one of him picking his nose - and allegedly eating the results - has had 233,255 views to date:
Read the rest of "If Gordon wants to be more popular he should ape zeitgeisters David and Boris"...
The snippets - billed as ‘From the Archive’ - are brought to you in association with Muc-Off.
So, what’s available?
1 Mass v custom build, Raleigh v Dave Yates
This starts with some 1950s footage of the Raleigh factory, and includes a wonderfully cheesy ‘Head Designer’. The 1994 footage is also drenched in nostalgia. The factory - seen here humming with activity - was knocked down and made into student flats. Look out for the way Raleigh employees placed bike decals compared to the way a custom builder did it.
2 Wax or shave?
Bear in mind that I still look like this. I’ve not aged a bit. My leg hairs have grown back since, mind. This episode sees me going out with a road gang for the very first time. (And ripping their legs off…cameras never lie).
3 Bike versus sportscar
Car v bike through city centre traffic has been done umpteen times for TV cameras but this video is a little bit different, pitting as it does, an Aston Martin sportscar against an Aston Martin mountain bike (now a museum piece).
4 Malawi bicycle tour
Hi-8 footage from a hastily arranged bike tour of this beautiful African country. Along for the ride was Bob Strawson, owner of ‘trick bits’ maker Middleburn Engineering.
5 Behind the scenes
How the series was filmed. Helmet and bike cams are now ten-a-penny. In 1994 they were specialist items and required rucksacks…
6 Jason McRoy
Brilliant footage of the first British MTB superstar (RIP). He’s seen sliding around the NE of England as well as ripping down the Kamikaze course on Mammoth Mountain.
The videos will be placed on YouTube in daily installments next week, but are available as a package on iTunes right now. Subscribe to the podcast to start the episodes downloading, iTunes isn’t listing the individual episodes yet.
Read the rest of "‘Chain Gang’ video highlights now on iTunes"...
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Over the long weekend, I went to see both of the Andy Warhol shows that are being staged in Washington right now, “Warhol: Headlines” at the National Gallery of Art and “Shadows” at the Hirshhorn. Taken together (and it’s easy to do, the museums are within a few minutes walk of each other), the shows expanded my sense of Warhol as an artist — and my sense of the age.
One of the things that struck me most about “Warhol: Headlines” was the extent to which our concerns repeat across the years. In a copy of the National Enquirer, then labeling itself the “liveliest paper in the world,” a headline declares that “Connie Francis Tells Why… Hollywood Took One Look At Me and Said ‘ Too Fat.’” In an episode of a television show Warhol produced, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s daughter interviews him about a recent trip to Afghanistan. He calls it the forgotten war, whips out Kipling. The conflicts never change, from Madonna’s nude pictures, to royal weddings and reproduction, to celebrity gossip, to the latest fulminations of the latest president. Sometimes, the extraordinary happens, and Warhol rises to the occasion, as when he intercuts reports of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and funeral, Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder, with prints of the late president.
But in “Shadows,” Warhol’s far and away from his pop obsessions, repeating a shadow on the wall of his office over and over again, in neon series that look like the eighties, in grays that look like the edge of the New England woods at sunset, in demonic reds, in one particularly memorable image, in green and black swirls that felt like a malachite cave. I could have stared at it for hours. So much of Warhol’s work is about surfaces that it’s easy to forget about the depths he’s capable of creating — and everything those surfaces conceal.
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Thomas Pegelow Kaplan. The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xv + 304 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-88866-0.
Reviewed by Peter Fritzsche (Department of History, University of Illinois)
Published on H-German (January, 2010)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
In this ambitious, original study, Thomas Pegelow Kaplan explores the production and impact of Nazi words, which created "a political culture in which genocide was possible" (p. 5). He shows how National Socialist propagandists enforced the conceptual separation of Jewishness from Germanness so that readers would encounter "Jewry in Germany" but not "German Jews" (p. 63). At the same time, Pegelow wants to move away from a "top-down" model in which racial managers seamlessly directed the transformation of how Germans spoke about themselves and Jews. "At every step," he writes, "categories and statements were subject to change and were polyphonic and contested, involving multiple actors and dynamics" (p. 4). On the one hand, Pegelow wants to focus on the ways in which readers and writers co-produced the linguistic violence of the Third Reich, in which it was precisely the uneven application of Nazi language that attested to the homegrown nature of its usage. On the other hand, the "shifting, often contradictory," and even "embattled" language of racial exclusion allowed German Jews and particularly Jews of German ancestry and so-called Mischlinge to subvert and contest the categories of their oppression (p. 273). Over time, the spaces of interpretation became increasingly narrow; the Nazis themselves usually had little patience with fine semantic distinctions or the records of patriotic war service that newly designated racial Jews mobilized on their own behalf. In the "view of the Führer" in 1938, "Jews were to be excluded from exemptions and 'acts of mercy'" (p. 158). Even so, according to Pegelow's argument, Jews created new spaces for alternative and renewed Jewish identities in the semipublic autobiographical projects they pursued. As a result, "German Jews, converts and Nazi-defined Mischlinge" were "anything but passive victims of state-organzied violence"; they "actively engaged in a struggle for their survival and sense of self against the Nazi onslaught" (p. 11). Yet, these agents spoke up on "the verge of reifying the very terms the authors' interventions sought to subvert" (p. 84). Zionist ideas about "new Jews" who were faithful to "their ancestral Volk," came close to essentializing "Jewish being" (p. 265). Both during and after the war, the interventions of petitioners ended up relying on "Nazified anti-Semitic racial categories" (p. 265).
In this analysis, Pegelow walks a fine line between recovering agency in extremely difficult situations and registering the horrific violence and brutal impact of the new vocabulary. He shows the ways in which German Jews deployed a re-energized patriotic discourse, in which entitlements were grounded in war service and patriotic sacrifice that contested racial categories of exclusion but reaffirmed quite illiberal notions of citizenship. To describe these interventions as amounting to a "rupture" in the discourses on race by providing "the space for 'reinscriptions'" seems far-fetched, however; in any case, such dramatic effects are not sufficiently substantiated. Neither are claims that even interventions phrased in Nazi vocabularies involved a remaking of public and private Jewish identities and the care and cultivation of the Jewish self. One reason for this insufficiency is the somewhat risky multipart methodology Pegelow has employed. His analysis is both quantitative and qualitative. Pegelow very usefully selects particular months (April 1928, April 1933, September 1935, November 1938, September 1941, and November 1944) to track the transformation of words in the Frankfurter Zeitung, the Völkischer Beobachter, and the Jewish press, but this selection also strictly delimits his reading for meaning, so that he quite deliberately does not read beyond the selected months. This method does not seem designed to pick up the key articles in which German and Jewish identity might have been discussed. September 1935 is also not a good choice, since the Nuremberg Laws were only explained in the press in detail in November. Moreover, the articles themselves are not closely analyzed. Even when Pegelow moves on to petitions submitted by Germans of Jewish ancestry to various racial offices, analysis is brief, quotations (with some exceptions) scarce, and the actual nature of the request often strikingly absent. As a result, the qualitative interpretations of all the texts have a superficial feel about them.
Perhaps surprisingly, the book does not include a sustained analysis of Victor Klemperer and his own linguistic project, "Lingua tertii imperii" (LTI). Klemperer continuously hunted for new words, new phrases, and the hard-to-pin-down "voces populi" of Dresden that enunciated them in order to make sense of the Third Reich. But the conclusions he ultimately reached, in which he held that the Germans had poisoned themselves with Nazi words (such as "arsenic"), was very strongly shaped by his own determination to find Germans so weak-willed but actually not fundamentally guilty that he could live among them after the fall of the Third Reich. Moreover, Klemperer's own "observation that nobody, not even German Jews, could escape committing 'the same sin' of speaking and being corrupted by the LTI," though it moves in the opposite direction of Pegelow's ruptures and reinscriptions, would have been worth exploring further (p. 3). How else to explain the moving depictions, which open and conclude Pegelow's book, of the frantic, compromised efforts of Bertha and Bettina Moralat to negotiate German and Jewish identities and to find a means to belong in the Third Reich and then in postwar Germany? As a result of the violent assaults of language, Bettina Moralat never felt like a "normal human being" again (p. 277). It is also unfortunate that Pegelow did not consult the "My Life in Germany" collection of autobiographical reflections at Harvard's Houghton Library. Written up in 1939, they provide rich contemporary evidence of the experience of German Jews who left the Third Reich up to the war and include the extraordinary letters of Paula Tobias who, before her emigration to Grass Valley, California, confronted non-Jewish Germans up and down the social ladder with their antisemitism; she also received and archived their astonishing replies.
This important book opens up new consideration of Germans of Jewish ancestry and their humiliation by and redeployment of Nazi language, but its analysis is ultimately not as rich as it might have been, despite the author's well-intentioned commitment to the illustration of nuance and detail and to the restoration of voice and agency. What would have been in keeping with Pegelow's desire to capture the interpretive work of his subjects would have been to stop, to dig in, and to fully introduce the case; I fear the relentless movement from month to month across two decades kept him from properly doing so.
. Paula Tobias, Houghton Library, bms Ger 91, no. 235, Harvard University. See also Harry Liebersohn and Dorothee Schneider, My Life in Germany Before and After January 30, 1933: A Guide to a Manuscript Collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2001); and Wiebke Lohfeld, Es waren die dunkelsten Tage in meinem Leben: Krisenprozess und moralische Entwicklung: Eine Biographieanalyse (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998).
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Peter Fritzsche. Review of Pegelow Kaplan, Thomas, The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
|This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.|
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This is a descriptive major concert work of four movements, each movement connected with the steam train era, and lasting approximately 30 minutes in total.
CUZCO SANTA ANA 128 is the opening movement. This composition tries to evoke the steam train journey which runs between Cuzco in Peru and Santa Ana in El Salvador, passing along the way the ruins of the magnificent Inca settlement of Macchu Picchu high up in the Andes. The number 128 refers to the number of one of the great German-built post-war engines which used to regularly travel this route.
MALLARD, the second movement, is one of the 'Pacific' class of locomotives and on July 3, 1938 it broke the speed record for a steam locomotive having reached 126 mph, a record it still holds. The Mallard is preserved and at the time of writing is kept in the York Railway Museum, England.
LEANDER is one of three preserved 'Jubilee' class locomotives built by the London, Midland and Scottish railway. The slow tempo and rather melancholic mood of this piece does not reflect the speed at which it was capable, instead it tries to convey the sadness at the demise of the ear when steam trains were once a part of our lives.
EVENING STAR, the final movement brings THE TRAIN SET to a magnificent conclusion in grand style. This piece, named after the last steam locomotive to be built by British Rail in 1960, is a work full of dramatic contrasts and is a definite audience-pleaser.
Although each movement could well stand on its' own in performance, the four movements should be played as a whole.
'An informal performance by Steve Marsh of Evening Star, the fourth movement of his suite 'The Train Set', given in April 2011 at the Peak District Guitar Ensemble Weekend, Matlock, Derbyshire.'
"This collection, while in many ways typifying the contemporary stylistic uses of minimalism, effectively blends a variety of musical styles in a highly creative way. An indisputable valuable addition to the guitar repertoire" - CLASSICAL GUITAR MAGAZINE
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Producers who have used Miracon say their material costs have decreased because the properties of the AEA allow a reduction in other costly ingredients. They estimate their savings at 50 cents to $1.50 per yard.
Polymer AEAs involve a special machine at the plant that converts the product to precise air bubbles before it goes into the mix. A significant number of ready-mix and precast plants now have it, with others committed to adding it soon.Fly ash benefits
To help solve the problem of too much or varying amounts of carbon from fly ash, some manufacturers have redesigned their processes. With applications integrated into coal-fired power plants where the ash is produced, the carbon content of fly ash can be reduced, leaving a low-carbon material for use in concrete.
“With our electrostatic separation process, we can produce low LOI fly ash called ProAsh,” says Dave Timmerman of Separation Technologies LLC. “It has a carbon content of 3% coming from fly ashes, with sometimes over 30% carbon content.” The high-carbon material that the patented process separates is returned to the power plant as an alternative fuel source. “Because the raw material has undergone this process, the final product is consistently low in carbon and eliminates variable air-entrainment issues,” he says.
Several power plants are currently in ventures with Separation Technologies to remove carbon from their ash. Timmerman estimates that the treated ash is now increasing the nation's supply of usable coal ash by 1-2%.Fly ash neutralization
A different new treatment for fly ash leaves the carbon in place, but eliminates carbon fly ash's negative effects on AEAs. Its brand name is Carbon Blocker, supplied by FlyAshDirect, a fly ash marketer. It has outfitted several plants with the Carbon Blocker fly ash treatment system.
Jim Irvine, president of FlyAshDirect, explains that his system significantly reduces the absorptive tendency of carbon found in most fly ash sources, so that it cannot absorb admixture chemicals, including air entraining agents.
Carbon Blocker improves the air void matrix by minimizing bubble size and improving spacing, the company says. The improved air void system is said to be more durable, allowing it to survive mechanical mixing action and extended delivery time better.
The Carbon Blocker conditioning system is typically used at the power plant as the ash is loaded into trucks. The process costs no additional money to the producer because it is factored into the agreement the company maintains with the power plant.
It's too early to say that controlling entrained air will no longer be a problem. But it is not a stretch to think that as more ready-mix producers adopt stable new AEAs and more power plants improve fly ash quality, it will not be the major expense and headache that it is today.
Pieter VanderWerf is president of Building Works Inc., a consulting firm that researches new construction technologies. Visitwww.buildingworks.com, or telephone 617-232-2862.
For More Information....
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Siena always attracts many tourists for its wonderful monuments and many masterpieces which can be admired in its museums. Some great artists were born in Siena such as Duccio di Boninsegna and Nicola Pisano, who worked on the greatest masterpiece in the city: the Duomo.
In narrow and winding lanes, in the museums and oratories of the various 'Contradas' (districts) you may hear Palio propitiatory chants that recall the ancient customs and modern fables. Whilst, in the evening, the patter of soles on the deserted pavements contrasts with the peace of the green valleys which the governors had the foresight to enclose within the city walls centuries earlier.
In the town you can admire many masterpieces such as the Duomo, set in the Piazza del Campo, Siena's red-bricked main square, and the wonderful view from the Facciatone, the hall of Pellegrinaio in Santa Maria della Scala, the Piccolomini library, the prestigious Accademia Chigiana and the large rooms in Fortezza Medicea, that hides the rarest wines from Siena, Tuscany and the rest of Italy.
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Biography - Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D.
Stanislav Grof’s professional career has covered a period of over 50 years
in which his primary interest has been research of the heuristic and therapeutic
potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness. This included initially four
years of laboratory research of psychedelics - LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and
tryptamine derivatives - (1956-1960) and fourteen years of research of psychedelic
psychotherapy. He spent seven of these years (1960-1967) as Principal Investigator
of the psychedelic research program at the Psychiatric Research Institute in
Prague, Czechoslovakia. This was followed by seven years of research of psychedelic
psychotherapy in the United States.
The first two of these years, he worked as Clinical and Research Fellow at The
Johns Hopkins University and in the Research Unitof the Spring Grove State
Hospital in Baltimore, MD. The following five years, he held the position of
Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. In
this capacity he headed for several years the last surviving official research
project of psychedelic therapy in the USA.
From 1973 until 1987, he was Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in
Big Sur, California, where he developed jointly with his wife Christina a powerful
non-drug form of self-exploration and psychotherapy that they call Holotropic
Breathwork. They have used this method in workshops and in professional training
in North and South America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. They have also worked
with many individuals undergoing spontaneous episodes of non-ordinary states
of consciousness, psychospiritual crises or “spiritual emergencies.” During
these years of psychotherapeutic research, Stan Grof has made the following
- Developed theory and practice of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and
described it in his book LSD Psychotherapy, which has been until this
day the only comprehensive treatise on this subject.
- Published over 150 articles and 20 books discussing the theoretical and
practical implications of modern consciousness research for psychiatry, psychology,
- Created a new extended cartography of the psyche that includes, besides
the biographical-recollective level and the Freudian individual unconscious,
two additional levels - perinatal (related to the trauma of birth) and transpersonal
(including the ancestral, racial, collective, phylogenetic, karmic, and archetypal
- Developed, with his wife Christina, Holotropic Breathwork (a method of
psychotherapy that uses non-ordinary states induced by faster breathing, evocative
music, and focused body work), and The Grof Transpersonal Training, an extensive
training program for Holotropic Breathwork facilitators that has certified
over 1000 practitioners in various parts of the world.
- Formulated jointly with Abraham Maslow, Anthony Sutich, Sonya Margulies
and Jim Fadiman the basic principles of transpersonal psychology, a discipline
that explores the full spectrum of human experience and attempts to integrate
spirituality and new paradigm science. He received from the Association of
Transpersonal Psychology (ATP) on the occasion of its conference in Asilomar,
CA, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of its existence, a special award
for his contributions to the development of this field. Transpersonal psychology
has been rapidly growing since its inception in the late 1960’s. At present,
it is being taught at several American universities and accredited schools,
has two special journals, and symposia at professional conferences. Associations
of transpersonal psychology also exist in many countries of the world.
- Attempted to provide a solid theoretical basis for transpersonal psychology
by exploring in his writings its relationship with various revolutionary advances
of new paradigm sciences.
- Founder and past President of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA). Organized jointly with his wife Christina
nine large international conferences of this association in Boston, MA; Melbourne,
Australia; Bombay, India; Santa Rosa, CA; Eugene, OR; Atlanta, GA; Prague,
Czechoslovakia; and Manaus, Brazil. (Click
here to read: "The Past and Future of the International
Transpersonal Association", published in The International Journal
of Transpersonal Studies (Vol. 28, 2008)
- Together with his wife, Christina, they were invited by Metro’Goldwyn/Meyer
as special consultants for the science fiction movie, Brainstorm, and
later for the movie Millenium. At present, Stan Grof is interested
in returning to this work in a project that would use the best of special
effects available today to portray various non-ordinary states of consciousness
in the context of movies with transpersonal orientation.
To read this Bio in Polish, please visit
He has performed a great service for us in drawing upon not only psychedelic
and holotropic breathwork data, but upon literature, cross-cultural studies,
ancient mystical sources, and psychological data in his profound articulation
of what we now know about non-ordinary states of consciousness.
- Richard Alpert, Ph.D. (RAM DASS), psychologist, spiritual teacher, and author
of Be Here Now and The Only Dance There Is.
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West Nile virus 2012: Nearly 700 confirmed cases, 25 percent in Dallas county
(CBS/AP) West Nile virus continues to ramp up in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say there have been 693 cases of the disease as of August 14, with 26 deaths.
Mayor Mike Rawlings declared a state of emergency in Dallas on Wednesday and said the city would agree to their first aerial spraying of insecticide since 1966, when more than a dozen deaths were blamed on encephalitis - irritation or swelling of the brain - due to West Nile virus.
More than 200 cases of the virus have been reported in Dallas County, and 10 people have died. In the state, there have been more than 380 cases of West Nile virus in 2012, including 16 deaths, on track to have the most cases in the state since the virus first emerged in 2002, health officials said in a statement.
Dallas joins a list of North Texas cities that will also employ aerial spraying to combat the nation's worst outbreak of West Nile virus so far this year. Aerial spraying for mosquitoes could begin Thursday evening depending on weather conditions. The state health department, which will pay for the $500,000 aerial spraying with emergency funds, has a contract with national spraying company Clarke. Clarke officials have said two to five planes will be used in Dallas County. Texas health commissioner David Lakey has asked other North Texas mayors to advise the state by Wednesday on whether they want their cities sprayed from the air as well.
Mayor Rawlings told The Dallas Morning News that Dallas County accounts for 25 percent of all reported West Nile virus cases in the United States.
Health officials say this summer's dry weather has made people worry less about mosquitoes. But the type of mosquito that carries the virus does well in dry weather with occasional rain.
Up north in South Dakota, the state's dry summer has helped spread West Nile virus. A state report says there have been 41 confirmed cases of the mosquito-borne illness this year - the biggest number since 2007. One person has reportedly died from the virus.
South Dakota disease specialist Dr. Lon Kightlinger says the actual number of West Nile cases is probably much higher, because most people don't know they have the virus. It can cause body aches, chills and low-grade fever. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says one in 150 patients becomes sick with symptoms that may include paralysis and coma.
Across the country, in Massachusetts, health officials say a Middlesex County man in his 60s has been hospitalized with the state's first human case of West Nile virus this year but is recovering.
Infected mosquitoes have been found in nine Massachusetts counties this year. The state on Wednesday raised the virus' threat rate to "moderate" in Arlington, Belmont, Cambridge, Somerville and Watertown, and also raised the threat level to "high" in Ludlow in western Massachusetts because a horse was infected there.
On Wednesday, Indiana recorded its first death from West Nile virus but didn't disclose information about the victim. The state has seen seven confirmed cases of the disease this year, it said.
Health officials recommend using insect repellent and draining standing water, where mosquitoes breed.
The CDC has more information on the 2012 West Nile virus.
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By Brendon DeSimone
SEATTLE (Zillow) — Years ago, after closing on your American Dream with a 30-year fixed loan, you probably didn’t think much about the home’s value until you were ready to sell. Today, there’s so much more information available to homebuyers. Markets move quickly, and life happens a lot faster.
As a result, many people have become hyper-aware of their real estate investments, frequently watching the rise and fall of market values well after the close. Listing emails flow daily, and the Zillow app likely sits prominently on many homeowners’ smartphones and tablets. Good real estate agents compile “mini CMAs” -- comparative market analyses -- for their past clients, too, updating them yearly on the latest comps and values.
While it helps to be mindful of your home’s value, you shouldn’t obsess over it. A better strategy is to stay abreast of the local real estate market, just as you’d keep an eye on any long-term investment. Have an idea what’s selling and what’s not. Know what the trends and changes are in your neighborhood, school district or town.
One of the best ways to do this is to go to open houses. Here are some reasons why:
You can learn a lot from listing agents.
Open houses aren’t just for buyers. Often, would-be sellers and nearby homeowners represent a large portion of open house traffic. Use the open house not only to see what’s for sale and the price of comparable homes but also to learn about the market. Pick the brain of the listing agent to get his or her take on what’s happening in your area. Real estate agents tend to be aware of market changes well before the mainstream press.
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