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Ability to forget the past mistakes.
One of the most important strategies of champions is the ability to forget their mistakes. The more
you think and visualize the good shots, the more likely it will happen again. When you shoot a bad
shot, get over it and move on quickly. Visualize the next shot. Feel free to feel good when you
make a nice shot. Make notes in your mind and reward your self by enjoying the feeling.
Positive Self Talk and Imagery
To be a champion you must use your inner-mind to guide you. Think positive thoughts and imagine
what a good shot would look like. You must think positive thoughts and keep your focus. Allow
your self to gather concentration and learn to turn your mind quickly.
A mental Program that focus on what you think
Many top shooters learned to developed a mental program to occupy their mind so that it doesnít
have time to think critically. It helps the shooter to keep their focus and in total concentration and
perform the shot with consistency. The mental program gives them a series of conscious thoughts
to follow throughout the shot.
Ability to focus on the match
Discipline is the key word here. Learn to stay focused. Donít think about the winning or the loosing
outcome of the match. Stop your mind from drifting away. Get back on track and stay with your
Love the Pressure of the Competition
To have fun and succeed, you will have to love the pressure of competition. Anxiety, nerves and
pressure are all normal and positive feelings. Like what people say, " shooting with nerves is like
shooting in the rain. " Everyone feels it, your competitors feels it too. Youíll just have to focus and
take your best shot at it. Know that your mind is faster and your senses are heightened, putting you
in a Alert Mood. You should be able to concentrate better and perform better. If you are still
overwhelmed by your feelings and pressure, then, the only easy way out is to loose the match.
Think, Is that the outcome you had prepared for? Or, would you rather enjoy the sport and the
Shoot your average
It is very important that as an archer, you must learn to be consistent. Donít try to shoot better or
stranger than normal. Your arrow will go in different places. Donít try to shoot better when you are
behind and relax when you are ahead. Just shoot your same old shots in the same old style. Take
one shot at a time carefully, like the way you had always practiced and good shots will always
Be prepared for anything
To be successful in Olympic Round competition you must be prepared for anything that could
happen. This could include extra clothing for the inclement weather. There is no time for surprises
in an Olympic Round. You must be prepared to deal with them so that you can keep your focus.
Identify your mental errors and other mistakes. Think positive thoughts and focus on your shots.
Rehearse a mental program that tells you what to think and imagine. You will perform and enjoy
the competition much more, if you can develop the right discipline and good practice.
to the Bibliography
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Food products in the market
Economic analysts say the marginal fall in inflation figure for the month of December 2012 has raised the prospect of a positive economic outlook for 2013.
They also maintained that the ongoing negotiations between Nigerian banks and some of the preferred bidders of the electricity generating and distribution companies under the ongoing power reform programme would provide the basis for credit growth in 2013.
The latest Consumer Price Index rolled out by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Thursday showed that inflation figure, which was put at 12.3 percent in November last year, trended downward to 12 percent.
Analysts, who described the improvement in the nation’s economy as a sustainable development, postulated that the positive tempo might be retained by the time the inflation figure for the month of January is computed.
Responding over the weekend to THISDAY enquiries on the sustainability of the reduction in inflation rate in Nigeria, Head of Regional Research, Africa, Standard Chartered Bank, Razia Khan, said emerging economic fundamentals in the country favour further deceleration of inflation rate in Nigeria.
She said: “Come January, we expect to see an even sharper deceleration in y/y inflation, to 10.5% y/y or thereabouts – mainly driven by the base effect from the brief episode of full fuel price deregulation last year. “In order to adjust monetary policy, however, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) will need to be more certain that lower inflation can be achieved on a sustainable basis. With the threat of a higher benchmark crude price being adopted in the 2013 budget, we’re not certain that can be taken for granted for the moment. On this basis, we forecast unchanged monetary policy next week.”
Nigeria’s inflation eased to 12.0% YoY in December, from 12.3% YoY in November, on the back of a slowdown in food inflation to 10.2% YoY, from 11.8% YoY in the previous month, which was largely due to a base effect. This implies inflation in 2012 averaged 12.2%, up from 10.9% in 2011. Monthly food price increases remained strong in December (1.5% MoM vs 2.0% in November), so we are not inferring a softening of food price pressures from the YoY inflation number, as yet. “Core” inflation (which excludes farm produce) accelerated in December to 13.6% YoY, from 13.1% YoY in November, largely on account of clothing and footwear, and households’ equipment and furnishings, which likely reflects festive season pricing”, the report said.
The favourable report from the NBS, according to Director, Sub-saharah Africa Economist, Renaissance Capital, Yvonne Mhango, is bound to raise the prospect of a higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and a more robust credit regime.
Describing Nigeria as a country of choice in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market, Mhango said, “With our growth expectations for both GDP (6.7%) and credit (20%) up YoY into 2013, we think Nigeria is the one EMEA market that should benefit from accelerating top-down trends. EMEA is a designation for the division of a company that operates in the regions of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Insisting that Nigerian economy will experience credit growth in the New Year, the Rencap official said the ongoing power sector reforms and similar exercise in the oil sector would make lending irresistible to banks.
She said, “We could see acceleration in credit growth from the mid-teens to c.20% on the back of initiatives in the power and oil sector coming through.
Credit growth will also be impacted by movements in the Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR) – at 12%-it remains punitively high for the banks. With the naira having strengthened towards year-end, there may be scope for some relief on this front.
Managing Director, Skye Bank, Mr. Kehinde Babatunde-Etti, who painted a bright picture for the nation’s economy, corroborated that position as well.
The bank boss, who confirmed that banks are in discussions with preferred bidders of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN’s) succeeding companies, said Nigerian banks were ready to be part of the power sector reforms.
According to him, Skye Bank is discussing with a number of the bidders and the bank is ready to make funds available for the project.
Earlier, Managing Director, First Bank Plc, Mr. Bisi Onasanya, had told THISDAY that apart from local banks, some foreign investors have indicated their readiness to pump money into the power project, a development, which promised to raise the bar of credit facilities in Nigeria. However, Khan warned that “rather than take great encouragement from marginal improvement in the inflation rate as announced by the NBS, the detail is important”.
According to her, “The key driver of CPI appears to have been a rise in core inflation – up to 13.7% y/y in Dec, and marking the second consecutive month in which we’ve seen a rise, breaking up a trend where the tightening of monetary policy had appeared to be having a meaningful (and perhaps overriding) impact on price pressures.
Food prices, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, appear to have decelerated (in y/y terms) for the first time since the onset of the flooding. We will have to see how long-lasting this is,” she said.
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In announcing a National Museum of Immigration in this month's Throne Speech, the Harper government declared: "Our identities are bound up in the stories of ancestors from hundreds of lands." For this reason, the Conservatives want Pier 21, "the site where so many began their Canadian journey," to represent Canada's immigration story. But here's a question: What if your family didn't begin its journey in Halifax?
Does it make sense for people whose families arrived in the west to go all the way to the east to find out what Canada's national immigration history looks like? Well, not really. Rather than concentrating all of its energies in one place, the government should be encouraging the development of immigration centres across the country and supporting a robust online presence so everyone, regardless of where they reside, can contribute to the living legacy of decades of immigration to all parts of Canada from all parts of the world.
Since Pier 21 opened its doors to the public in 1999, it has educated millions of visitors about the migrant experience to Canada, with exhibits documenting the stories of war brides, refugees, evacuee children and Canadian military personnel who passed through Pier 21 between 1928 and 1971. It has brought to life the hopes and fears of people arriving on Canada's eastern shores during the turbulent 20th century. Visitors can walk around the refurbished port, then have a "migrant experience" by boarding a train that moves west to Montreal and Toronto, then Vancouver. But told this way, immigration to Canada goes in only one direction.
What about the thousands of people who crossed the Pacific as fishermen, miners, workers, picture brides, merchants and traders to try their hand at life in Canada? For Chinese, Japanese and Indians, migrating and settling in Canada was very different from the European experience.
Chinese migrants had to pay a head tax from 1885 to 1923 and were banned almost completely from 1923 to 1947. Early 20th-century immigration rules made it almost impossible for Indians to come to Canada according to "continuous journey" regulations that basically required them to be on one boat from India to Canada. For Japanese Canadians, migration is intimately linked to their removal from the West Coast and internment during the Second World War.
All of these groups, and many more communities in Western Canada, have their own migration stories about establishing themselves in this country after crossing the Pacific. Sadly, these experiences keep getting ignored. One has only to think of the dynamic Celtic presence during the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics and the absence of any Asian presence to see the dichotomy.
In the United States, the diversity of the migrant experience is captured in multiple immigration centres. The most famous is the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York, but it's not the only one. From 1910 to 1940, Angel Island, just outside of San Francisco, processed hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants. Called the "Ellis Island of the West," immigration officers who worked there preferred "Guardian of the Western Gate."
Today, visitors can learn about Pacific history by walking through the former barracks. The nearby National Archives makes it possible for people to do genealogical research, so they can locate their family's arrival, then visit the actual place where it occurred. President Barack Obama recognized the power of connecting physical spaces with historical experiences by declaring Jan. 21 to be National Angel Island Day and encouraging Americans to learn more about its history and their own.
Like the United States, Canada has a treasure trove of resources that can be mined to make its immigration history both nationally and locally relevant. Library and Archives Canada holds thousands of documents, including passenger lists and immigration registers that record who came, when and from where. The problem is that the originals are in conservation, hidden away from public view, and the microfilmed versions and limited online access are insufficient for inspiring a sense of the migrant experience. It's hard to get excited about an old government file appearing blurrily on a small screen.
But what a difference it would make if you could examine your grandfather's immigration record in the same place he arrived 80 years ago. Wouldn't it be great if students could be encouraged to conduct oral histories with older generations using historical materials relevant to their local community as a starting point?
Connecting the past with the present is the magic of Pier 21. But there's no reason why Western Canadians shouldn't experience the same thrill. All Canadians should have access to the immigration materials most relevant to them.
Laura Madokoro, the 2009 Trudeau Scholar and Liu Institute Scholar, is a PhD candidate in history at the University of British Columbia.
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There is a "critical shortage" of Catholic chaplains in the Australian Defence Force, despite the denomination representing almost a quarter of its members, reports the Canberra Times.
Five of the nine Catholic positions in the navy, 16 of the 22 positions in the army and five of the eight positions in the air force are vacant or being filled by other denominations.
Director-General, Chaplaincy (Navy) and Baptist Reverend Garry Lock said the same priest shortage in the wider Australian community had affected the number of Catholic chaplains in the military.
''It's very difficult for the Catholic Bishop for the ADF to provide Catholic chaplains,'' he said.
''If one denominational group can't fill it and others can, then we will definitely fill those positions.''
Of the 59,587 permanent members of the ADF, 14,252 identified as Catholic, 11,100 as Anglican, 9760 as Protestant and 452 other faiths such as Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam. More than a third, or 24,023, listed no religious belief.
Defence short of Catholic chaplains (The Canberra Times)
DVIDSHUB on Flickr
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The following HTML text is provided to enhance online
readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML.
Please use the page image
as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.
Once, Only Once, and in the Right Place: Residence Rules in the Decennial Census
in migrant worker communities and densely populated immigrant enclaves of major cities? Should prisoners be counted in exactly the same manner, or asked the same questions, as residents of college dormitories or nursing homes?
As a guide to how different living situations should be reconciled with the “usual residence” standard, the Census Bureau maintains a set of residence rules for the decennial census. By 2000, the Census Bureau’s listing included 31 formal residence rules. The actual compilation of residence rules is rarely if ever viewed by the general public. Instead, census respondents typically see only the instructions and questions on the census form, designed to distill the basic residence concepts and lead respondents to provide answers consistent with the “usual residence” standard. Though the full set of rules is rarely seen by census respondents, a clear concept of the meaning of residence, coupled with an effective mapping of that concept to the actual conduct of the census, is crucial to the accuracy of a census.
1–A THE PANEL AND ITS CHARGE
In 2004 the U.S. Census Bureau requested that the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) of the National Research Council convene a Panel on Residence Rules in the Decennial Census, with the following charge:
This study will examine census residence rule issues and make recommendations for research and testing to develop the most important residence rules for the 2010 census. Recommendations will address potential ways to modify census residence rules to facilitate more accurate counting of the population or identify the reasons why the rules should stay the same.
The panel would consider residence rules in terms of how they contribute to or inhibit an accurate count of the population. Its deliberations may include the appropriate geographic location for enumerating each person but would not include the issue of who should be enumerated in the census—for example, whether civilian citizens who live abroad or undocumented immigrants should be included.1
The latter issue, as to whether illegal immigrants—or, for that matter, any non-U.S. citizen—should be included in the census count, remains a contentious one. The issue was the subject of major legal challenges in the 1980 and 1990 censuses (Federation for American Immigration Reform v. Klutznick and Ridge v. Verity, respectively). A segment of the 1986 Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics workshop on residence rules (described in Section 1–B) provoked a lengthy discussion on this question. Most recently, H.J.Res. 53 introduced in the 109th Congress proposes that the Constitution be amended so that census totals used to apportion the House of Representatives “shall be determined by counting the number of persons in each State who are citizens of the United States.” As of August 2006, the bill had not been acted upon by the House Judiciary Committee; the House Subcommittee on Federalism and the Census (of the Government Reform committee) held hearings on the bill in December 2005. (See Massey and Capoferro for a recent overview of the limitations of current data sets in examining the size and trends in undocumented migration.)
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October 13, 2010
The October 13, 1963 matchup between the Cleveland Browns and New York Giants at Yankee Stadium was a key showdown in the race for the Eastern Conference crown. The Browns, under new Head Coach Blanton Collier, were off to a 4-0 start while the Giants, winners of the conference the previous two seasons, had a 3-1 record.
The big story in Cleveland during the previous offseason had been the firing of Head Coach/GM Paul Brown, who had been an innovative and winning coach since the club’s founding in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) in 1946. However, the team had not won a title since 1955 and some players on the talented club – most notably star FB Jim Brown – bridled under Brown’s strict coaching methods. Young owner Art Modell also clashed with the legendary coach, and finally dispatched Brown and elevated Collier, a long-time Browns assistant who had returned after a hiatus as head coach at the University of Kentucky. Collier brought a more relaxed style to coaching the team, and the players responded with the strong start.
Head Coach Allie Sherman’s Giants were a talented veteran team seeking to win an NFL championship – something the club hadn’t done since 1956 despite making it to the title game four times in the previous five seasons – before time ran out. QB Y.A. Tittle had directed the offense brilliantly in the previous two seasons since coming to New York in a trade with the 49ers, and the defense was regularly among the best.
As was to be expected in a game between these teams, the contest was intensely physical. The Giants scored first when CB Dick Lynch intercepted a pass by Browns QB Frank Ryan and ran 47 yards down the sideline for a touchdown. However, Cleveland came right back with an 11-play drive that culminated in a one-yard scoring leap by Brown.
The Giants responded with an 11-play drive of their own that covered 75 yards and was helped along by two personal foul penalties on the Browns. FB Alex Webster plowed into the end zone from a yard out to regain the lead for New York at 14-7.
In the second quarter, a poor 11-yard punt by Cleveland’s Gary Collins gave the Giants good field position, but they settled for a 25-yard Don Chandler field goal. DB Jim Shorter returned the ensuing kickoff 49 yards to midfield and the Browns followed up six plays later with a 10-yard touchdown pass from Ryan to split end Rich Kreitling. The score was 17-14 in favor of the Giants at halftime.
Jim Brown had a relatively quiet first half, by his standards, carrying the ball 13 times for 47 yards as the Giants defense – in particular MLB Sam Huff – keyed on him. But he broke loose in a big way early in the third quarter when Ryan tossed a screen pass to him and the great fullback sped 72 yards for a TD. The Browns were ahead for the first time at 21-17.
Before the third quarter was over, Brown struck again with a 32-yard touchdown run that all but nailed down the win for Cleveland. While the Giants scored once more on a 14-yard pass from Tittle to HB Phil King in the fourth quarter, the Browns countered with Ryan connecting once again with Kreitling for an 11-yard TD. The final score was 35-24.
Cleveland piled up 340 total yards to New York’s 211. Of that total, Jim Brown accounted for 209 yards as he gained 123 on 23 carries with two TDs and 86 on four pass receptions and another touchdown (he was the team’s leading receiver as well as rusher). Frank Ryan completed 12 of 16 passes for 169 yards with three touchdowns and the lone interception. HB Ernie Green contributed to the Browns’ total of 210 rushing yards with 69 on 12 attempts.
“It was a very rough game,” said Brown afterward. “No, I wouldn’t say dirty. I think they were just a little overanxious.” Sam Huff summed up Brown’s performance when he said “if he had run any harder, he’d have killed one of us.”
Y.A. Tittle was harassed throughout the game by the Cleveland defensive line but completed 17 of his 31 passes for 178 yards with a TD and none intercepted. Split end Del Shofner led the Giants with 5 catches for 54 yards. New York gained just 72 yards on the ground, with FB Joe Morrison leading the way with 38 yards on 9 carries.
The Browns remained undefeated for one more week before being dominated by the Giants in the re-match in Cleveland, 33-6. New York lost just once more the rest of the way and again came in first in the Eastern Conference with an 11-3 record; they lost the NFL title game to the Chicago Bears. Cleveland tailed off in the second half of the year and finished in second place at 10-4.
After just five games, Jim Brown had 787 yards rushing and went on to break his own single-season rushing record with 1863 yards on 291 carries (6.4 average per attempt) with 12 touchdowns. As the game against the Giants showed, he could also be effective as a receiver out of the backfield and added 268 yards on 24 catches with three TDs. He was named NFL MVP by UPI and the Newspaper Enterprise Association and received the Bert Bell Award.
Frank Ryan (pictured at left), in his seventh NFL season and second with the Browns, made great strides at quarterback. The fourth-ranked passer in the league (second by the current rating system, at 90.4), he ranked third in touchdown passes (25) and was tied for first with Tittle in percentage of TD passes thrown (9.8). He was also one of the most intelligent quarterbacks in the game – the product of Rice University earned a Ph.D. in mathematics.
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Recording bird sound
The sounds of birds singing rarely fail to arouse some degree of joy or happiness in most of us and in the case of familiar sounds we almost subconsciously correctly attribute them to the rightful owners. Conversely, when we hear something strange our curiosity is naturally aroused, all part of the process of learning. But whether you learn or not depends on just how curious you are!
Birds sing or make various other sounds for all sorts of reasons, usually relating to some sort of behaviour. Most Australians know the early morning chorus of Laughing Kookaburras which is basically a territorial advertisement call and now almost part of folk lore, but how many people know that a single, long “gwaaaarrrr” from a kookaburra signals a bird of prey overhead?
The total range of sounds made by any bird is known as its repertoire. Sadly, the complete repertoire is known only for a handful of the 600 or so different Australian birds (many more if you count subspecies) and if you add to this the variations between individuals and different regional dialects our collective knowledge can only be described as miniscule.
A few outstanding field ornithologists I know can remember and identify just about any bird call they hear almost anywhere in Australia. Not only this in some cases they can even tell you whether it’s a male or a female and also what the bird might be doing. Such knowledge only results from years of experience and can be very rewarding. Even with your eyes closed you can have a pretty good idea of what’s going on around you.
One of the best ways to learn much of this is to start recording bird sound. It’s an absorbing hobby and can lead you to all parts of Australia if you wish. Alternatively if you can’t travel, you could choose to get on close speaking terms with one or two of your local birds and try to document their entire repertoires, a task that could take years with some species.
The first step is to acquire/buy a suitable recorder and a microphone. Some recorders have built-in microphones but they are fairly basic and only useful as an emergency backup.
A wide range of recorders suitable for recording bird sound is available ranging in price from about AU$400 up to several thousand dollars. Rather than getting into detail about all of these (it’s all readily available on the internet - look at www.mineroff-nature.com as a starter) I’ll simply describe what works for me. I use a fairly simple recorder, but more importantly, a good microphone. Cheap microphones generally have poor signal to noise ratios resulting in unwanted background noise, but as a start, and correctly used, they can produce acceptable results, especially if you can get close to your subject (the essence of high quality recording) so that you don’t have to turn the input volume up too high. Cheaper directional microphones are available for less than $100.
THE OLYMPUS LS-11 RECORDER (see pic at right): This little (I mean little - it goes in my pocket) gem is capable of recording very high quality sound. It records on to inbuilt solid-state memory and also accepts SD cards. It has inbuilt microphones (only for emergency), small inbuilt speakers, runs on two AA batteries, has a tripod mount and the list goes on and on. Just Google 'Olympus LS-11' to see a heap of rave reviews, and look at a very interesting critical appraisal on listeningearth.com.au
One of the most important features for me is that the volume controls, both for microphone input and speaker sound, are old-fashioned rotating wheels, much easier to use than the push-button controls so common now on modern electronic equipment. My only gripe is that I need reading glasses to see clearly all of the info on the inbuilt screen. Fortunately, most of the time you only need to see the important stuff and this is clearly displayed. Better than this, I can operate mine in the dark simply by feel.
Now the big plus – it is available on the net for US$300 or so.
SENNHEISER K6/ME66 SHORT SHOTGUN MICROPHONE (see pic): This is a short shotgun microphone of high quality, relatively compact and easy to carry, powered by a single AA battery (important – the rarer batteries in some microphones are impossible to buy in rural Australia)
Most professional recordists use a long shotgun microphone such as a Sennheiser MKH 816 - they are slightly more sensitive, more directional and have a better signal to noise ratio so they are better at picking up more distant or softer signals, but for everyday use they are bulky and awkward to carry. They are also a lot more expensive.
Some people instead use a parabola which can employ a less expensive microphone. Parabolas are very bulky and awkward to carry and in my experience, can amplify unwanted sounds coming from behind your subject.
RYCOTE SOFTIE RYO33352 WITH MOUNT AND PISTOL GRIP (see pic): This accessory is unfortunately relatively expensive but absolutely essential when hand holding a microphone to minimise unwanted noise from both wind and handling. Sensitive microphones are quite prone to handling noise and keen recordists mount their microphone on a tripod to eliminate this – OK for recording static subjects, but birds are not always cooperative in this regard.
The microphone and Softie are currently available as a kit from Videoguys Aust, for about AU$850 posted.
A few comments on technique
The best recordings usually result from being close to your subject – you can usually turn the input volume down (try not to exceed -12 db on the level meter) and minimise other unwanted sounds coming from directly behind your subject. If you think that is a problem, try to get around the other side of your subject so that the unwanted noise is behind you. Aeroplanes and motor vehicles are the worst unwanted noises but fear not, these days it is possible to filter out such relatively low frequency noises with appropriate software on a computer. So don’t spit the dummy because of an aeroplane, go ahead and record – it can usually be deleted later on. One of the most frustrating thing about birds is that you hear them make an interesting call, grab your recorder and switch it on (remember to switch on the microphone as well!) and then what do your hear? Silence!
It is considered good practice to monitor your recording using headphones. Unfortunately I find that when wearing headphones I lose the ability to tell what direction the sound is coming from and point the microphone accordingly. On this score, ideally it is always better to keep the subject in view. It is not a good idea to record a bird you can’t see. Even if you are sure of the bird’s identity, you may not be able to document your recording fully.
Remember you can’t write labels on digital recordings! Speak to your microphone and ideally record time and place, species (never guess!!!), sex, age and importantly, what you think is happening. Ideally, before you go out recording it is worth learning whatever is known about a species so you may better anticipate and interpret behaviour. At least know how to ID both sex and age where that is possible.
Finally, when you get home you will need to transfer your recordings on to a computer, label and file and edit them. I use a Macintosh and the ideal software for editing sound is a programme called Peak (Lite). I may enlarge on this at a later date.
Before rushing out and spending all this money always remember for high quality recordings always try to get as close as possible to your subject. Fancy equipment is not the be all and end all – technique is just as important. I still have some old recordings I made on open reel tape back in the 1960’s. The recorder was quite good quality but the microphone was a simple all-purpose dynamic type, not particularly sensitive nor directional. The secret was I got close to the subject.
All the above is the rather slanted view of a keen ornithologist i.e. me!!
You may prefer to go out and capture the natural sounds of the environment purely to replay for your enjoyment. If that is the case I recommend you first refer to Andrew Skeoch’s excellent website listeningearth.com.au
Audiowings – Journal of the Australian Wildlife Sound Recording Group
(07) 4129 9060
Bird Song - by Catchpole and Slater
The latest authoritative text on the subject ISBN 978 – 0 521 87242 3
A Field Guide to Australian Birdsong
Set of 10 CDs covering nearly every Australian bird
Published by BOCA P O Box 185 Nunawading Vic.
Naturesound David Stewart
A range of CD’s covering a wide range of Australian birds.
David has recorded more birds in Australia than anyone else.
The Michael Morcombe eGuide to the Birds of Australia
Application for iPhone and iPod Touch
Contains David Stewart’s calls and songs of the Birds of Australia and is the most comprehensive, convenient and up to date presentation available of all but a few Australian birds.
Listeningearth.com.au is a remarkable website devised by Andrew Skeoch and Sarah Koschak. Very high quality stereo recordings largely featuring bird sounds in natural environments just as you would hear them. But lots more such as technical information and Sarah’s photographs. Highly recommended.
Rycote Softie fitted with Sennheiser microphone
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Grover Norquist Update: I Didn’t Mean it.
November 13, 2012
One step forward. Two quick baby steps back.
Conservatives including anti-tax activist Grover Norquist are trying to ensure that a carbon tax doesn’t gain any political momentum.
Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), said a carbon tax or a consumption tax would violate the ATR pledge against tax increases that a majority of Republicans have signed.
“There is no conceivable way to add an energy or [value-added tax] to the burdens American taxpayers face that would not violate the pledge over time,” he said in a statement Tuesday.
Norquist appeared to be backing off comments he made to National Journal in a story published Nov. 12. He told the publication that he opposes a carbon tax, but said that coupled with income tax cuts it could be structured in a way that didn’t violate the pledge.
But Norquist, who has a seen a drop in the number of lawmakers who have signed the ATR pledge, on Tuesday said that a carbon tax with offsetting reductions would, over time, inevitably lead to overall tax increases.
“The creation of any new tax such as a VAT or energy tax — even if originally passed with offsetting tax reductions elsewhere — would inevitably lead to higher taxes as two taxes would be at the disposal of politicians to increase taxes,” he said.
Beyond ATR, other conservative groups including the industry-backed Institute for Energy Research — which circulated a study Tuesday bashing carbon taxes — are also trying to ensure the idea of a carbon tax coupled with other rate reductions doesn’t gain steam.
Taxing fossil fuels like oil and coal to help address climate change faces long political odds, but the idea is gaining fresh attention, particularly as a way to raise new revenue and close the deficit.
The concept will be the subject of a daylong conference Tuesday co-sponsored by the International Monetary Fund and several think tanks: the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution and Resources For the Future.
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ICAT's successful campaign to get an anti-torture resolution passed in Chicago.In June 2012, the Illinois Coalition Against Torture (ICAT) produced a "How To Guide: Getting an Anti-Torture Resolution Passed in Your City" as a contribution to Torture Awareness Month. The guide is a useful tool for activists in cities across the United States who want to have their city declared a torture-free zone. It offers analysis and suggestions drawn from
The Chicago City Council unanimously approved the resolution and declared Chicago a "torture-free city" in January 2012. In an op-ed in The Chicago Tribune, Sister Benita Coffey, a member of ICAT, explained why the resolution was needed and why more work needed to be done to end the US government's use of torture. The resolution states:
- The City of Chicago declares that it will not tolerate, support or allow torture to be practiced by its employees or residents.
- The City of Chicago affirms that all prisoners under city, state or federal governmental control are entitled to have their human rights respected, including their right to be free from torture.
- The City of Chicago supports the observance of December 10th, International Human Rights Day, as a day to reaffirm that the human rights of all people must be respected and to publicly denounce the practice of torture, wherever it occurs. ]
This is the first time that any US city council has voted against the practice of torture on all three levels. Much of the impetus to pass the resolution resulted from the accumulated outrage that many in Chicago felt regarding the Chicago police's torture of black men. From the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, officers under the command of Jon Burge tortured 110 black men in a police station on the south side of Chicago in Area 2. The police employed various methods to torture these men, including placing plastic bags on their heads to threaten suffocation; pushing them against a hot radiator; burning them with cigarettes; and simulating executions. They used the "black box," as they called it, to send electric shocks on men's genitals.
News of these officers' torture first broke about twenty years ago, and in 1989, Andrew Wilson, one of the first men tortured by the Area 2 police, filed a civil suit alleging that he had been tortured. Since that time, Attorney Flint Taylor and attorneys John Stainthorp and Joey Mogul at the civil rights law firm, the People's Law Office in Chicago, have pursued civil cases against the officers who carried out the torture. Burge was found guilty of perjury for denying under oath that he tortured black prisoners in a criminal case brought against him by the US attorney's office in 2010 and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. To date, none of the other officers who tortured prisoners have been brought to trial, let alone convicted.
As the "Guide" details, ICAT conducted a vigorous, multilevel campaign to generate support for the anti-torture resolution. ICAT contacted Alderman Joe Moore, who enthusiastically agreed to sponsor the resolution and steer it through the City Council. He also helped to write the resolution, drawing on his knowledge of City Council politics and what would and would not be likely to pass. For example, when ICAT originally wrote the resolution, the organization included two points that Alderman Moore suggested be deleted. The first one said that the City of Chicago, therefore the taxpayers, should no longer pay Burge's legal expenses or pension. To date, the city has spent $15.5 million on Burge and other officer's legal defense. Furthermore, in 2011, the police pension board voted to continue paying Burge his monthly pension of $3,000. However, Alderman Moore counseled eliminating that point as well as one that demanded that the city pay reparations to the survivors of police torture. ICAT agreed to Moore's suggestions in order to secure passage of the resolution. ICAT also launched a successful petition campaign in favor of the resolution. The goals of the petition were twofold: to obtain a significant number of signatures to present to the City Council and to educate and mobilize people against torture. Initially, ICAT set 500 signatures as its goal. Members of ICAT circulated the petition online through SignOn.com and with hard copies. They spoke to hundreds of people at outdoor events, rallies and on the street in Chicago, asking them to sign the petition.
Chicago calls itself a world-class city, so ICAT decided that it was important to have people all over the world sign the petition to make Chicago a torture-free city. The group drew on human rights networks, personal acquaintances and social media to distribute the petition far and wide. As a result, hundreds of people from around the world signed the petition.
Mario Venegas is a member of ICAT and a survivor of torture in Pinochet's Chile. He solicited signatures of people who attended Occupy or anti-war demonstrations in Chicago, as well as passersby. Venegas also distributed the petition to Chilean human rights groups and survivors of torture. Eager to join in a campaign to condemn torture and to return the solidarity many of them had received during the Pinochet regime, a large number of Chileans signed the petition and encouraged their friends to do so as well. When the petition drive ended, ICAT and other supporters of the resolution had succeeded in gathering 3,500 signatures, seven times the original goal.
The resolution specifically condemned "being held in prolonged solitary confinement in Illinois prisons in conditions which often lead to physical and psychological breakdown" and classified this practice as a form of torture. Tamms Supermax Prison in southern Illinois is one of the main prisons to which the resolution referred. The prison opened in 1998 and currently holds 198 male prisoners. The men are held in permanent solitary confinement. As Tamms Year Ten, an activist organization that seeks to end the use of long-term solitary confinement at Tamms, writes, the men "never leave their cells except to shower or to exercise alone in a concrete pen. There are no communal activities, jobs or contact visits."
In June 19, 2012, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn announced plans to close Tamms. Families of prisoners, anti-Tamms activists and the human rights community greeted his decision with rejoicing. Inhabitants of Tamms, the village where the prison is located and members of American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 31, the union that represents the prison personnel, have vociferously expressed their displeasure and anger. On July 10, 2012, AFSCME held a press conference to declare their plans to work to reverse Governor Quinn's decision.
According to Michael Gosch, a member of ICAT, the group's work is not over. "Getting the anti-torture resolution passed is a major first step, but our efforts to end torture are not over. Now we need to make sure that Chicago really is a torture-free zone, that torture really does cease and that the victims and survivors of torture receive reparations for the cruel and not unusual enough punishment they received."
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Sunday Meditation: 10 a.m. Service 10:30 a.m.
Wednesday's Wisdom 7 p.m.
1201 Puerta Del Sol, First Floor
San Clemente, CA 92673
Dr. Heather Dawn Clark
"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up;
A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace." — Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8
As spring turns to summer, I am contemplating the seasons, subtle though they may be here in Southern California. We are reminded through this beautiful scripture that on the relative plane, there is a season for every thing. What does it mean that there is time for purpose under heaven? There are two possible reasons that spring to mind. First, under heaven could mean in the realm of form or effect, there is perfect timeliness. Second, every purpose under heaven could mean when the purpose is in alignment with the nature of the all goodness of Life Itself, then there is always sufficient time.
On the section on physical perfection in the Science of Mind text, Dr. Ernest Holmes writes, "We know that no idea of God ever comes too soon or to late, but always at the correct time. We know that right action prevails." Page 251 In this passage, Holmes is referring to childbirth, but what he says is absolutely true for all acts of creation. If you have consciously planted your vision in Mind, you are certain to experience the harvest of that vision at exactly the right time.
As we contemplate the seasons of our life, let us allow for the growth of every thing. With love and patience, let us look for and perceive the good purpose of every relationship and experience in our life. Then we can choose to take tender care for the beautiful, fragrant experiences in our garden of life. We can also choose to acknowledge ALL our experiences as coming from the same divine principle and consistently pluck out the ones that no longer serve us. There is no Divine Mandate stating we have to continue growing prickly, sticky or stinky situations. If it is not in alignment with our good then it does not have a permanent purpose under heaven and we are free to make its time short and sweet. Let decide to consciously create a season that is on purpose.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License
Contents copy; 2008 Center for Spiritual Living, Capistrano Valley
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African small hive beetle from Essex County is threatening the honeybee’s population. To stop the growth and spread of the beetle, the place of Essex County, Ontario Canada has been quarantined. The small hive beetle’s origin is from the sub-Saharan Africa. According to a provincial apiarist Paul Kozak last March 8, “It’s something we’re taking very seriously.” The first physical evidence of the African small hive beetle was discovered in Essex County, Ontario in September last year. What threaten the honeybee population is the small hives beetle’s larva which consumes honey, pollen, and developing honeybees. The larvae lives and develops inside the honeycomb and makes the honey spoil and ferment. Kozak said that the public…
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Eva Knott 6:37 p.m., May 25
Studies on population increase, climate change 'collide' at public talk
The World Resources Simulation Center on the evening of March 7 played host to a discussion of what Center director Peter Meisen termed “an oncoming collision” of projections – one from the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) on the region’s projected population growth through the year 2050, and another from the San Diego Foundation on the expected effects of climate change in the region over the same period.
The discussion is part of San Diego Green Scene, a broader series of once-a-month events at the Center focusing on various issues affecting sustainability in the region.
Clint Daniels with SANDAG presented projections from the 13th Regional Growth Forecast, a document that has been updated approximately every four years since the early seventies.
Over the next forty years, Daniels said, population within the state is expected to grow by 13 million, to a total of 50 million people. Six percent of that growth will occur in San Diego County, meaning SANDAG anticipates roughly 950,000 additional residents during that time, growth of about a third based on current population and requiring another 333,000 housing units to be built (75 percent of which are expected to be placed in already-developed areas through urban infill and increased density projects).
An item of concern presented by Daniels was a projection showing that 60 percent of the new population would be aged 50 or older, based on expectations that birth rates in the region would decline and a portion of younger residents would depart for more affordable locales, leaving behind a smaller percentage of working-age individuals to support the local economy.
“This is what we refer to as an age pyramid,” Daniels explained, pointing to a graph shaped more like an hourglass. Most elder-care benefits, such as Social Security and Medicare, depend on an actual pyramid-shaped structure, with a large base of young people effectively supporting a smaller, tapering group at the top. Demand for local services and benefits would be stressed based on the projection showing larger numbers of children and elderly requiring care than workers to provide or pay for those services.
Another issue that had Daniels worried was the growth of the Hispanic population, expected to rise from comprising 32 percent of the region in 2010 to 48 percent by 2050.
“Fifty-five percent of Hispanics don’t have a high school diploma,” said Daniels, though he later revised that figure to 38 percent based on a chart error. “I look at this as the red light that says we’ve got to do something,” he continued, advocating outreach programs to improve education rates among that demographic to fill the expected job growth in the professional services, health, and education fields that SANDAG’s projections show will replace manufacturing and the military in the region.
Low wage work in the leisure and hospitality industries, however, is expected to remain strong. Overall, the organization expects to add 479,000 jobs through the study’s duration.
Daniels’s talk concluded with a question session that included some heckling from the crowd about SANDAG’s Regional Transit Plan, which detractors have said fails to focus on transit as a solution to offset excess carbon emissions from population growth. Daniels repeated organization responses denying that the Plan was “back-loaded” to prioritize freeway expansion before transit improvements, and that increased growth was something to be welcomed, not feared.
“I’m a little bit of an optimist. I view population growth as a positive.”
Nicola Hedge, manager of the San Diego Foundation’s Climate Initiative, presented her organization’s projections on regional climate change through 2050, based on “input from over 40 technical experts and scientists,” and including SANDAG’s population growth and density numbers. The report was issued in 2007, and an update based on new numbers is in process.
What the county is expected to look like in 40 years absent a significant local and global change in emissions and energy generation methods, Hedge says, can be summed up simply: hotter and drier.
The San Diego Foundation expects average temperatures across the county to rise 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, water shortages to develop and worsen as outside sources of water including snow pack in Northern California decline and the Colorado River loses between six and 45 percent of its flow rate (Daniels stressed at several points, however, that the local water authority has said water availability should not be a hindrance to expanded future development), and wildfires to continue to increase in both frequency and intensity. Heat waves in inland areas such as eastern Chula Vista are expected to triple in frequency, particularly placing children and the elderly at risk, and ocean levels are expected to rise between 12 and 18 inches. This alone would be sufficient to wipe out as much as a third of beachfront along the coast, put many beach area streets beneath the mean high tide line, and create a situation where flooding of entire communities such as Mission Beach could be considered “moderately common.”
When the study was prepared, however, the massive slowdown in development due to the worldwide economic downturn was not anticipated, so a new study may revise these numbers downward somewhat, meaning models for 2050 expectations could actually take several years longer to realize.
There were some positive developments locally, Hedge said. Nineteen local government agencies have performed greenhouse gas emission studies as of 2012, and 11 have climate action plans in some stage of development or implementation.
A recent study finds that eight in ten San Diegans believe climate change is real (though its cause is a source of much greater debate), seven in ten believe the region should be a leader in emission reduction programs, and eight in ten believe it’s possible to have both a healthy environment and a strong economy.
As many as one in ten jobs in the region’s future economy, Hedge believes, could be environment-related or tied to “clean tech” industries, a developing field in which local companies have been asserting a foothold.
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EERE Network News
June 29, 2011
News and Events
The largest rooftop solar project is U.S. history has received a partial loan guarantee from DOE for a $1.4 billion loan.
Eleven DOE efficiency and renewable energy projects have earned R&D 100 awards for 2011. Overall, DOE national laboratories and facilities garnered 36 of the 100 awards.
DOE has awarded more than $11 million to support research and development of pioneering geothermal technologies.
To further research on the next generation of wind turbines, DOE has awarded nearly $7.5 million to six projects in four states.
As part of a new Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, DOE has offered up to $120 million to support transformational manufacturing technologies and materials.
The new Research Support Facility at DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory has earned LEED platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
A town in northern Maine has leveraged a DOE Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant to provide LED streetlights that can shine during the long winter months.
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Verdun. Heart of the Meuse and the World Capital of Peace. The meanders of the river quiet lull that country where the emotion comes from the rich history of a city which, by treaty and battle, has finally chosen the path of Memory and Peace.
This city is very surprising and pleasant. The Wharf in London is sympathetic with the river Meuse where cross many barges and pleasure craft.
Citadel Underground: single term recovery in Europe, presenting the lives of Hairy during the War. Discovered in "toy trains" of 15 galleries, reconstruction of a trench and choice of the Unknown Soldier. Tours in English, French, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish.
Monument to Victory: staircase of 73 steps cut into the old ramparts of Verdun and leading to a crypt surmounted by a tower supporting a warrior. In the crypt, the books are exposed gold medalists Verdun.
Notre Dame: beautiful building composite (Xe in the 18th century) which combines the styles of Romanesque and Gothic. Crypt of the 12th century cloister fourteenth-sixteenth century, canopy and organ eighteenth.
Dragees Braquier: company visit, discovery processes homemade turbines in ancient copper, almond sorting, peeling, coating ... Mini-Museum.
Sound and Light of the Battle of Verdun "Flames in the light": Historical particularly moving evocation of the Battle of Verdun. A poignant tribute to the hundreds of thousands of fighters with more than 300 000 died in a face-to-face in this tragic land of Maas. A great page of our history unfolds before your eyes. A magnificent Sound and Light, 300 actors on stage, 900 costumes, 1000 projectors, special effects for a very emotional moment that ends on a note of hope: the armistice, reconciliation and peace at last. In June and July, Fridays and Saturdays at dusk.
Festival "Music and Terraces" free concert of music and terraces on Saturday nights and Sunday evenings on the dock of London. In June and July.
ATTRACTIONS, LEISURES AND ACTIVITES AROUND
Guided tour of the Battlefield Verdun: aboard a bus and accompanied by a guide, discover this land still upset and marked impact of shrapnel to understand one of the bloodiest battles of WW1.
Panoramic tour of the most important monuments of the battlefield, to stop inside visit:
Verdun Memorial, Museum of the Great War.
Fort Douaumont witnessed fighting between French and German.
Ossuary of Douaumont, dedicated to victims of the Great War.
Trench of Bayonets.
From May 1 to September 11, starting at 14h every day (except Sunday).
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Species loss tied to ecosystem collapse and recovery
The world's oceans are under siege. Conservation biologists regularly note the precipitous decline of key species, such as cod, bluefin tuna, swordfish and sharks. Lose enough of these top-line predators (among other species), and the fear is that the oceanic web of life may collapse. In a new paper in Geology, researchers at Brown University and the University of Washington used a group of marine creatures similar to today's nautilus to examine the collapse of marine ecosystems that coincided with two of the greatest mass extinctions in the Earth's history. They attribute the ecosystems' collapse to a loss of enough species occupying the same space in the oceans, called "ecological redundancy."
While the term is not new, the paper marks the first time that a loss of ecological redundancy is directly blamed for a marine ecosystem's collapse in the fossil record. Just as ominously, the authors write that it took up to 10 million years after the mass extinctions for enough variety of species to repopulate the ocean – restoring ecological redundancy – for the ecosystem to stabilize.
"It's definitely a cautionary tale because we know it's happened at least twice before," said Jessica Whiteside, assistant professor of geological sciences at Brown and the paper's lead author. "And you have long periods of time before you have reestablishment of ecological redundancy."
If the theory is true, the implications could not be clearer today. According to the United Nations-sponsored report Global Biodiversity Outlook 2, the population of nearly one-third of marine species that were tracked had declined over the three decades that ended in 2000. The numbers were the same for land-based species. "In effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of the Earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago," the 2006 report states.
Whiteside and co-author Peter Ward studied mass extinctions that ended the Permian period 250 million years ago and another that brought the Triassic to a close roughly 200 million years ago. Both periods are generally believed to have ended with global spasms of volcanic activity. The abrupt change in climate stemming from the volcanism, notably a spike in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, decimated species on land and in the oceans, losing approximately 90 percent of existing marine species in the Permian-Triassic and 72 percent in the Triassic-Jurassic. The widespread loss of marine life and the abrupt change in global climate caused the carbon cycle, a broad indicator of life and death and outside influences in the oceans, to fluctuate wildly. The authors noted these "chaotic carbon episodes" and their effects on biodiversity by studying carbon isotopes spanning these periods.
The researchers further documented species collapse in the oceans by compiling a 50-million-year fossil record of ammonoids, predatory squidlike creatures that lived inside coiled shells, found embedded in rocks throughout western Canada. The pair found that two general types of ammonoids, those that could swim around and pursue prey and those that simply floated throughout the ocean, suffered major losses. The fossil record after the end-Permian and end-Triassic mass extinctions shows a glaring absence of swimming ammonoids, which, because they compete with other active predators including fish, is interpreted as a loss of ecological redundancy.
"It means that during these low-diversity times, there are only one or two (ammonoids) taxa that are performing. It's a much more simplified food chain," Whiteside noted.
Only when the swimming ammonoids reappear alongside its floating brethren does the carbon isotope record stabilize and the ocean ecosystem fully recover, the authors report. "That's when we say ecological redundancy is reestablished," Whiteside said. "The swimming ammonoids have fulfilled that trophic role."
Source: Brown University
- What triggers mass extinctions? Study shows how invasive species stop new lifeThu, 30 Dec 2010, 10:11:34 EST
- Land animals, ecosystems walloped after Permian dieoffWed, 26 Oct 2011, 9:35:11 EDT
- Scientists pioneer method to predict environmental collapseMon, 19 Nov 2012, 22:39:28 EST
- Mass extinction study provides lessons for modern worldMon, 29 Oct 2012, 16:33:48 EDT
- The winners of mass extinction: With predators gone, prey thrivesMon, 2 May 2011, 15:50:44 EDT
- Species loss tied to ecosystem collapse and recoveryfrom Science CentricMon, 10 Jan 2011, 14:26:41 EST
- Species loss tied to ecosystem collapse and recoveryfrom PhysorgMon, 10 Jan 2011, 11:35:25 EST
- Species loss tied to ecosystem collapse and recoveryfrom Science DailyMon, 10 Jan 2011, 11:32:55 EST
- Species loss tied to ecosystem collapse and recoveryfrom Science BlogMon, 10 Jan 2011, 11:32:08 EST
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Posted on November 15, 2012 by Alex Wilson
If there’s one thing that we can predict with certainty about fuel costs, it’s that they fluctuate a lot. That wasn’t always the case. The price of electricity, natural gas, propane, and heating oil were remarkably stable for decades — up until the 1970s.
Since then, prices of most fuels have gyrated wildly, driven by political unrest in some parts of the world, periods of greater or lower demand driven by periods of strong economic growth or contraction, resource limitations (real or perceived), and the situation in China and other parts of this increasingly connected world.
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On Friday, Congress failed to come to a resolution regarding the sequestration, and large, automatic spending cuts are set for federal programs. By the end of the fiscal year, $85 billion in cuts are expected to take place.
Although the extent and effects of these cuts are not yet known, they will likely deliver a blow to the travel and hospitality industries, as federal agencies furlough workers and cut travel and meeting budgets.
“Our industry is leading America’s post-recession recovery, and the nation cannot afford to see that economic progress derailed by gridlock in Washington,” says Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association. “We are communicating with federal agencies to understand the potential impact of cutbacks on travel and identify the ways in which those agencies will address the concerns of affected communities.”
Agencies affected by the cuts include he Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). These organizations will be forced to furlough workers, which will result in delays and extended wait times for airline and transportation passengers. National Parks across the country will also feel the effects of the cuts and may even be forced to close—a move that will directly impact both regional trips within and international travel to the United States.
And the hotel industry will not be immune from the impact of the cuts. Hotels can expect meetings to be postponed, travel bookings shortened, and government planners delaying contract signings as they await a solution.
“This sequester is taking a little bit of wind out of everyone sails right now,” says Joe McInerney, outgoing AH&LA President and CEO. “I have trouble understanding the people up on Capitol Hill. They’re more interested in what they want to do than what their constituents want to do. From our history we know that there are problems when you make these kinds of blanket cuts.”
Dow explains that the consequences of the budget cuts will likely not be felt until April 1, since most federal agencies are required to give 30-days' notice to furlough workers in advance of any widespread staffing cutbacks.
AH&LA and U.S. Travel are two groups that will continue to lobby on behalf of the travel industry in hopes of convincing leaders to minimize the impact of sequestration on federal programs. But one thing is clear—if no action is taken, the industry will feel a direct hit and the cuts will hamper 2013 progress.
“We will strongly advocate for minimized impacts on the traveling public as spending reductions are implemented,” says Dow. “And we will keep the pressure on all parties to find a pragmatic resolution to this artificial crisis.”
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I was attending a conference where people started discussing about the reason behind the name for Smoke tests.
Someone told that ‘Smoke test’ term came from electronics where it defines the testing that is done when the circuit is tested first time with the power flowing through it. It is actually to verify that ‘No Smoke’ is seen in any part of the circuit to ensure it is completely correct.
In software we actually use Smoke Tests to quickly verify the critical areas of the software to ensure that the changes have not broken the software in any form. But why is it called Smoke test in software? Does the software produce smoke if it does not work correctly?
Per Wiki, w.r.t. Software, Smoke testing is a preliminary to further testing, which should reveal simple failures severe enough to reject a prospective software release. In this case, the smoke is metaphorical.
So Smoke tests are actually to verify that after the integration, circuits/software behave correctly and are ready for further testing if there is no smoke coming out of it.
I was just thinking that instead of calling them ‘Smoke Tests’ will it make more sense to call these kind of tests as “No Smoke Tests“!
Please feel free to share your thoughts on the same.
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http://vipulgupta1.wordpress.com/tag/types-of-testing/
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Beijing: At least nine persons were killed and one went missing in south China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region after rainstorms battered the region, affecting millions of people over the last few days, local authorities said.
So far over 932,000 people were affected in the downpours that also inundated 51,860 hectares of farmland in Guangxi since June 21, according to the regional civil affairs bureau.
Over 3,121 houses have collapsed due to the rains, which lashed 44 counties of 13 cities in Guangxi. And direct economic losses are estimated to be about 389 million yuan ($61.15 million), Xinhua reported.
Local governments say they have relocated 226,000 people.
The regional government has allotted a relief fund of 3.5 million yuan and other relief goods, including tents and quilts for the disaster-affected regions.
In neighboring Guizhou province, downpours have battered eight cities and counties, blocking roads and cutting power supplies in some regions.
About 510,000 people have been affected by the rain and floods in Guizhou.
Local governments have relocated 10,084 people to safe regions.
Over 596 houses have collapsed and 13,431 hectares of farmland have been flooded in the region.
Torrential rain has also swept east China's Jiangxi province since June 22.
A total of 1.2 million people have been affected in the province, which was evacuated of over 40,000 people and saw 3,759 houses toppled by floods, as of last evening, according the provincial flood prevention and control headquarters.
Direct economic losses of about 1.7 billion yuan have been incurred.
Persistent storms have caused floods in three major Jiangxi rivers -- Ganjiang, Fuhe and Xinjiang, the water levels of which have risen above warning levels in some sections as of Tuesday.
The National Development and Reform Commission previously stated that rainstorms have frequented south China this summer, with drought-stricken areas, including Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, in the southwest also receiving rains.
China's meteorological authority said that heavy rains and storms will continue to batter the south until Wednesday.
Story first published:
June 27, 2012 08:23 IST
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Preeminent American archaeologist Lewis Binford passed away yesterday. During his time, he left an incomparable mark on North American and international archaeological thought and profoundly influenced this student of prehistoric culture. He will be missed, but never forgotten.
You can share this discussion in two ways…
Share this link:
Send it with your computer's email program: Email this
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Let’s keep this Barbie kick going with another game based on the alpha doll appropriating another classic fairy tale (a somewhat profound proposition to be sure, since Barbie is, herself, the modern embodiment of a fairy tale). Fortunately, Barbie as Rapunzel is already in the database, so this is just a screenshot recon effort (and credits entry, and I see that the description could use a touch-up).
In the story of Rapunzel — or at least in Barbie’s version of it — Rapunzel and her Prince Stefan are going to throw a masquerade ball. An evil witch named Gothel grows indignant that she did not get an invite. So she casts a spell on the castle, throwing it into immediate disrepair and the prince is turned to stone while 6 stones from his crown are scattered about the castle grounds. Gothel seems to have exacted the perfect revenge in response to the snubbing.
But there’s one doll she didn’t count on…
Barbie/Rapunzel’s task in this game is to move about 6 rooms in the castle, clean them up, find 1 stone in each, and then rescue the prince. Simple, concrete goals, and this definitely qualifies as a game. Above is one of the rooms that Barbie must restore. Each room has a number of areas which can be magically renovated by using a magic wand or paintbrush from the magic toolchest. But each room also has a creativity exercise. For the hallway shown above, the creativity exercise is the painting:
You get to select a painting design, color it as you see fit, and select a frame. Printing afterwards is optional. This is an interesting activity, algorithmically, because, rather than a freeform brush or area fill method, the paint brush only works on a particular layer as the program makes you work across sections of the painting.
After the room has been completely revitalized, you get to use a magical magnifying glass to find one of the stones in the room.
Then it’s on to the other rooms to repeat the same process, only with designing a floor mosaic, a carpet, a mask for the ball, matching thrones for the throne room, and customizing (pimping?) flowers for the flower garden. It became a bit rote after awhile and I developed a pattern for just getting through the activity (the game wouldn’t let me pass until all the areas were colored; I couldn’t even leave the clouds white). I was reminded of Mike Judge’s restaurant manager character in, Office Space; I could envision him asking, “What do you think about someone who only does the bare minimum?”
After all the stones are collected, it’s time to hit the hedge maze– real 3rd-person 3D action! At various junctures, that evil witch has thrown up strange obstacles that can easily be overcome by items in the magical toolbox:
And, long story short, the prince is rescued and the masquerade ball proceeds as planned. And the final insult is that Gothel’s evil spell was completely undone in less than a half hour.
- Barbie as Princess Bride
- Barbie as Sleeping Beauty
- Barbie Magic Genie Bottle
- Secret Agent Barbie
- Barbie Beach Vacation
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Jazz the Norway
2005 marks the centennial of Norwegian independence from Sweden. Though you might not know it, Norwegians can, have been, and will be jazzing things up for quite a long time. Some are even among us in NYC!
The field of jazz studies is indebted to jazz historians Bjørn Stendahl and Johs Bergh whose published work on Norwegian jazz history is expertly summarized...albeit in need of some editorial fine tuning...at the Norwegian Jazz Base website, part of the National Library of Norway and The Norwegian Jazz Archives. So far, the material covers the period between the '20s and up to the '60s...although the extant summary covering the 1950-1960 decade only gets to 1959 in detail. Therein, however, one can easily ascertain that in general the origin and development of jazz in Norway doesn't differ much, although the few differences are of importance, from similar processes throughout the world's jazz markets.
Ever since the latter part of the 19th century and just prior to WWI, Scandinavian audiences were already exposed to various black styles of music which contributed to the eventual acceptance and understanding of jazz when it came through en force after WWI. Therefore, just as it happened everywhere, jazz eventually appeared. Of course, the influx of the North American military, during and after both world conflicts, was of paramount importance, too...and not limited to the European theatres as is commonly presumed.
There is, however, no better way to make certain of such historical claims than listening to the jazz produced by Norwegians. Fortunately, The Norwegian Jazz Archives had the wherewithal of producing an excellent series of five CDs entitled Jazz in Norway. There is no better overarching historical introduction to Norwegian jazz than this remarkable digital remastering of recordings from 1920-1980. The collection is quite comprehensive and very well documented. In it, one meets musicians and groups whose speedy and gifted adaptation to a series of complex foreign musical forms deserves as much scrutiny as anyone else's.
Jazz in Norway has always encompassed all known styles. Internationally speaking, for example, the better-known groups and artists were initially represented through ECM releases. Thus, although the label has an extensive historical catalogue documenting Norwegian artists such as Jan Garbarek...who recently issued In Praise of Dreams...and Terje Rypdal (the subject of ECM's :rarum VII series), it also forges on with recent releases by Jon Balke & Magnetic North Orchestra, Trygve Seim, the Christian Wallumrød Trio, the critically acclaimed Tord Gustavsen Trio and Jacob Young...who features veteran drummer Jon Christensen, as does Dino Saluzzi too.
However, the ECM aesthetic doesn't convey the full Norwegian jazz picture, which is quite motley. Take bassist Ole Amund Gjersvik's tango inspired releases, which would be impossible to identify as Norwegian albums. Another bassist's two recent recordings, Terje Gewelt, feature Latinized world jazz followed by a duo with pianist Christian Jacob. Yet another highly promising bassist, Eivind Opsvik, is attracting current critical attention with his fresh playing and composing. Pianist Roy Powell (a British émigre) has also released several rather interesting projects based off Norway.
Singer Anne-Marie Giørtz, who was part of the group Ab und Zu, could also handle Brazilian material with Trio de Janeiro. The unbelievably eclectic vocal quartet Kvitretten, whose members...Kristin Asbjørnsen in particular...can switch musical genres at will, mustering singular mastery of their craft, while Magni Wentzel stays closer to mainstream jazz vocal territories. Somewhere in-between lies the acquiescent caressing of Silje Nergaard.
One can also find traditional swinging big bands...such as the Follo Big Band, fun horn-led ensembles like the Funky Butt, groups such as the Louisiana Washboard Five (whose name is self-explanatory and whose music is thoroughly authentic), New Age guitar music like the one recorded by Erik Wøllo, avant electronic ensembles like Supersilent and Eivind Aarset's Électronique Noire, experimental groups like Oslo 13, Tri O'Trang and Jøkleba, avant-roots/experimental/folk music such as Dadafon's and everything Karl Seglem is involved in, as well as more mainstream material...like what Torbjørn Sunde, Helge Lien, Jan Gunnar Hoff and the Winnæss/ Calmeyer Kvartett have issued.
Musically or otherwise, the general parameters of the story of jazz in Norway are similar to those of jazz in general. Even so, Norwegian jazz...if there is such a thing as Norwegians themselves debate whether or not is proper to distance their music from its North American pedigree...is as rewarding as any.
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Love RSS feeds? So do we!!
RSS feeds are a great way to follow updates on your favorite website. However, most RSS feed 'reader' apps, focus less on the reading aspect, and more on trying to manage feeds like an email client would manage emails.
RSS feeds are not emails, and lire does not treat them like emails, rather it tries to focus on the reading part.
Some sites set up their feeds to only show a portion of each entry, you know, to get you to click through to their actual website. We find that really annoying, and we're sure you do too.
Which is why, unlike other RSS feed readers, that either push you into a browser (in-app or otherwise), or depend on third party text parsing services and require you to be online to fetch the full text of one article at a time (which makes it no different from having to click/tap through to a website), in lire, you get your favorite RSS feeds as they should've been. You don't need to click through to any website (though, you do still have the option to, if you really wanted). It takes your favorite partial feeds, does it's magic, and converts them in to full feeds, so you don't have to click/tap on those annoying 'Read more' or 'Continue reading' links.
Once they're cached, you don't even need to be connected to read your full-text feeds.
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Hempstead Turnpike in Long Island and Broadway in Manhattan are the region's most dangerous roads, according to a transportation watchdog group.
A transportation watchdog group has named a 16-mile stretch of Hempstead Turnpike on Long Island as the region's most dangerous road.
The group found that between 2007 and 2009, 12 pedestrians were killed on Hempstead Turnpike. The busy highway stretches across Nassau County, from Elmont to Farmingdale. Most of the fatalities were recorded in Elmont, Franklin Square and Hempstead.
Broadway in Manhattan was the second most-dangerous, with 11 fatalities.
Also on the list of dangerous roads were US-322 (Blackhorse Pike) in Atlantic County, N.J.; Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn; and Bowery in Manhattan.
US-1 (Boston Post Road) made the list of dangerous Connecticut roads with 6 fatalities in the same period.
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http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/LIs-Hempstead-Turnpike-Regions-Most-Dangerous-Road-Panel-115713134.html
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Wizards & UNICEF Partner to Raise Funds for Tsunami Victims
The Washington Wizards and the U.S. Fund for UNICEF are teaming up to help raise funds for the smallest survivors of the recent tsunami in South Asia. Beginning at Tuesday’s Wizards game and online at WashingtonWizards.com, fans may purchase “Tsunami Relief Bands,” for a minimum $2 donation, with all donations collected going to UNICEF’s relief efforts. As of January 10th, your generosity has helped the Wizards raise over $30,000.
“The tragedy in South Asia is beyond description,” said Abe Pollin, Chairman of Washington Sports and Entertainment and former chairman of the Washington DC Advisory Council for UNICEF. “While there are countless victims during tragedies like this, children specifically are at extreme risk. We’re asking our players, coaches, fans, and employees to join together and to raise funds for the children who have been devastated by this disaster.”
UNICEF has estimated that children account for more than one-third of tsunami deaths and that there are an estimated 1.5 million affected children in South Asia, many of which have been orphaned or separated from their families and are in critical need of basic care and support. UNICEF’s relief plans give high priority to finding children who’ve lost their families, identifying them, and reuniting them with their extended families and communities. UNICEF is involved in efforts to register and care for unaccompanied children in every country. In Sri Lanka, UNICEF is supporting government and local communities to assess the number and whereabouts of unaccompanied children. Although figures are not yet available, UNICEF staff in Colombo reported as of late Thursday that there were more reports of parents in search of children than children who have been found to be alone.
Fans can purchase their wrist bands by downloading a printable order form (PDF) or at a donation table on the concourse of MCI Center during Wizards games.
Founded in 1946, UNICEF helps save, protect and improve the lives of children around the world through immunization, education, health care, nutrition, clean water, and sanitation. UNICEF is non-partisan and its cooperation is free of discrimination. In everything it does, the most disadvantaged children and the countries in greatest need have priority. To make a donation or learn more about UNICEF please call 1-800-4UNICEF or go to www.unicefusa.org.
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Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz
versão impressa ISSN 0074-0276
MAYRINK, Wilson et al. Comparative evaluation of phenol and thimerosal as preservatives for a candidate vaccine against American cutaneous leishmaniasis. Mem. Inst. Oswaldo Cruz [online]. 2010, vol.105, n.1, pp. 86-91. ISSN 0074-0276. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0074-02762010000100013.
For decades thimerosal has been used as a preservative in the candidate vaccine for cutaneous leishmaniasis, which was developed by Mayrink et al. The use of thimerosal in humans has been banned due to its mercury content. This study addresses the standardization of phenol as a new candidate vaccine preservative. We have found that the proteolytic activity was abolished when the test was conducted using the candidate vaccine added to merthiolate (MtVac) as well as to phenol (PhVac). The Montenegro's skin test conversion rates induced by MtVac and by PhVac was 68.06% and 85.9%, respectively, and these values were statistically significant (p < 0.05). The proliferative response of peripheral mononuclear blood cells shows that the stimulation index of mice immunized with both candidate vaccines was higher than the one in control animals (p < 0.05). The ability of the candidate vaccines to induce protection in C57BL/10 mice against a challenge with infective Leishmania amazonensis promastigotes was tested and the mice immunized with PhVac developed smaller lesions than the mice immunized with MtVac. Electrophoresis of phenol-preserved antigen revealed a number of proteins, which were better preserved in PhVac. These results do in fact encourage the use of phenol for preserving the immunogenic and biochemical properties of the candidate vaccine for cutaneous leishmaniasis.
Palavras-chave : leishmaniasis; candidate vaccine; phenol; merthiolate.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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Join for Just $16 A Year
- Discounts on travel and everyday savings
- Subscription to AARP The Magazine
- Free membership for your spouse or partner
1 alpha (OH) D3, 19-nor-1, 1 alpha-hydroxyvitamin D2, 1,25-DHCC, 1,25-dihydroxy-22-ovavitamin D(3), 1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3, 1,25-diOHC, 1,25(0H) 2D3, 1-alpha-hydroxycholecalciferol, 22-oxacalcitriol (OCT), 25-dihydroxyvitamin D2, 25-dihydroxyvitamin D2, 19-nor-1, 25-HCC, 25-hydroxycholecalciferol, 25-hydroxyvitamin D3, 25-OHCC, 25-OHD3, activated 7-dehydrocholesterol, activated ergosterol, alfacalcidol, calcifediol, calcipotriene, calcipotriol, calcitriol, cholecalciferol, colecalciferol, dichysterol, dihydrotachysterol 2, dihydrotachysterol, ecocalcidiol, ED-21 (vitamin D analog), ED-71 (vitamin D analog), ergocalciferol, ergocalciferolum, hexafluoro-1,25dihydroxyvitamin D3, irradiated ergosterol, MC903, paracalcin, paricalcitol, viosterol, vitamin D2, vitamin D3.
Vitamin D is found in many dietary sources such as fish, eggs, fortified milk, and cod liver oil. The sun also contributes significantly to the daily production of vitamin D, and as little as 10 minutes of exposure is thought to be enough to prevent deficiencies. The term "vitamin D" refers to several different forms of this vitamin. Two forms are important in humans: ergocalciferol (vitamin D2) and cholecalciferol (vitamin D3). Vitamin D2 is synthesized by plants. Vitamin D3 is synthesized by humans in the skin when it is exposed to ultraviolet-B (UVB) rays from sunlight. Foods may be fortified with vitamin D2 or D3.
The major biologic function of vitamin D is to maintain normal blood levels of calcium and phosphorus. Vitamin D aids in the absorption of calcium, helping to form and maintain strong bones. Recently, research also suggests vitamin D may provide protection from osteoporosis, hypertension (high blood pressure), cancer, and several autoimmune diseases.
Rickets and osteomalacia are classic vitamin D deficiency diseases. In children, vitamin D deficiency causes rickets, which results in skeletal deformities. In adults, vitamin D deficiency can lead to osteomalacia, which results in muscular weakness in addition to weak bones. Populations who may be at a high risk for vitamin D deficiencies include the elderly, obese individuals, exclusively breastfed infants, and those who have limited sun exposure. Also, individuals who have fat malabsorption syndromes (e.g., cystic fibrosis) or inflammatory bowel disease (e.g., Crohn's disease) are at risk.
Familial hypophosphatemia (low blood levels of phosphate in the blood) is a rare inherited disorder that consists of impaired phosphate transport in the blood and diminished vitamin D metabolism in the kidneys. Familial hypophosphatemia is a form of rickets. Taking calcitriol or dihydrotachysterol by mouth along with phosphate supplements is effective for treating bone disorders in people with familial hypophosphatemia. Management should be under medical supervision.
Fanconi syndrome-related hypophosphatemia:
Fanconi syndrome is a defect of the proximal tubules of the kidney, and is associated with renal tubular acidosis. Taking ergocalciferol orally is effective for treating hypophosphatemia associated with Fanconi syndrome.
Hyperparathyroidism due to low vitamin D levels:
Some patients may develop secondary hyperparathyroidism due to low levels of vitamin D. The initial treatment for this type of hyperparathyroidism is vitamin D. For patients with primary or refractory hyperparathyroidism, surgical removal of the parathyroid glands is commonly recommended.
Studies also suggest that vitamin D supplementation may reduce the incidence of hypoparathyroidism following surgery for primary hyperparathyroidism (partial or total removal of the parathyroid glands).
Hypocalcemia due to hypoparathyroidism:
Hypoparathyroidism (low blood levels of parathyroid hormone) is rare, and is often due to surgical removal of the parathyroid glands. High oral doses of dihydrotachysterol (DHT), calcitriol, or ergocalciferol can assist in increasing serum calcium concentrations in people with hypoparathyroidism or pseudohypoparathyroidism.
Osteomalacia (adult rickets):
Adults with severe vitamin D deficiency lose bone mineral content ("hypomineralization") and experience bone pain, muscle weakness, and osteomalacia (soft bones). Osteomalacia may be found among elderly patients with vitamin D-deficient diets, individuals with decreased absorption of vitamin D, individuals with inadequate sun exposure (such as those living in latitudes with seasonal lack of sunlight), patients with gastric or intestinal surgery, patients with aluminum-induced bone disease, patients with chronic liver disease, or patients with kidney disease with renal osteodystrophy.
Treatment for osteomalacia depends on the underlying cause of the disease and often includes pain control and orthopedic surgical intervention, as well as vitamin D and phosphate binding agents.
A number of different approaches are used in the treatment of psoriasis skin plaques. Mild approaches include light therapy, stress reduction, moisturizers, or salicylic acid to remove scaly skin areas. For more severe cases, treatments may include UV-A light, psoralen plus UV-A light (PUVA), retinoids such as isotretinoin (Accutane), corticosteroids, or cyclosporine (Neoral®, Sandimmune®). The synthetic vitamin D3 analog calcipotriene (Dovonex®) appears to control skin cell growth and is used for moderately severe skin plaques, particularly for skin lesions resistant to other therapies or located on the face. Vitamin D3 (tacalcitol) ointment has been reported as being safe and well-tolerated.
High doses of becocalcidiol (a vitamin D analog) used on the skin may be beneficial in the treatment of psoriasis.
Rickets develop in children with vitamin D deficiency due to a vitamin D-deficient diet, a lack of sunlight, or both. Infants fed only breast milk (without supplemental vitamin D) may also develop rickets. Although now rare, partially due to the availability of vitamin D-fortified milk, there has been a recent increase in rickets among children in latitudes with periodic, seasonal lack of sunlight. Ergocalciferol or cholecalciferol is effective for treating vitamin D deficiency rickets. Calcitriol should be used in patients with renal (kidney) failure. Treatment should be under medical supervision.
Vitamin D deficiency has been associated with muscle weakness and pain in both adults and children. Limited research has reported vitamin D deficiency in patients with low-back pain, and supplementation may reduce pain in many patients.
Without sufficient vitamin D, inadequate calcium is absorbed and the resulting elevated parathyroid (PTH) secretion causes increased bone resorption. This may weaken bones and increase the risk of fracture. Vitamin D supplementation has been shown to slow bone loss and reduce fracture, particularly when taken with calcium.
Renal osteodystrophy is a term that refers to all of the bone problems that occur in patients with chronic kidney failure. Oral calcifediol or ergocalciferol may help manage hypocalcemia and prevent renal osteodystrophy in people with chronic renal failure undergoing dialysis.
Supplementation with vitamin D2 has been reported to reduce seizure frequency in initial research. Further study is needed to confirm these results.
Breast cancer prevention:
High-dose vitamin D supplementation may be associated with a slightly reduced risk of developing breast cancer. Additional study in this area is warranted.
Limited research suggests that synthetic vitamin D analogs may play a role in the treatment of human cancers. However, it remains unclear if vitamin D deficiency raises cancer risk, or if an increased intake of vitamin D is protective against some cancers. Until additional trials are conducted, it is premature to advise the use of regular vitamin D supplementation to prevent cancer.
Data from a meta-analysis suggest that supplemental vitamin D may prevent the development of colorectal cancer. More research is needed in this area.
Some evidence implies that steroids may impair vitamin D metabolism, further contributing to the loss of bone and development of osteoporosis associated with steroid medications. There is limited evidence that vitamin D may be beneficial to bone strength in patients taking long-term steroids.
Diabetes (type 1/type 2):
Type 1 diabetes: It has been reported that infants given calcitriol during the first year of life are less likely to develop type 1 diabetes than infants fed lesser amounts of vitamin D. Other related studies have suggested using cod liver oil as a source of vitamin D to reduce the incidence of type 1 diabetes. There is currently insufficient evidence to form a clear conclusion in this area.
Type 2 diabetes: In recent studies, adults given vitamin D supplementation were shown to improve insulin sensitivity. Further research is needed to confirm these results.
Multiple trials have found conflicting results for the effects of vitamin D in the prevention of falls. More studies are needed.
Metabolic bone disease is common among patients with chronic liver disease, and osteoporosis accounts for the majority of cases. Varying degrees of calcium malabsorption may occur in patients with chronic liver disease due to malnutrition and vitamin D deficiency. Oral or injected vitamin D may play a role in the management of this condition.
High blood pressure (hypertension):
Low levels of vitamin D may play a role in the development of high blood pressure. It has been noted that blood pressure is often elevated under the following conditions: during the winter season, at a further distance from the equator, and in individuals with dark skin pigmentation (all of which are associated with lower production of vitamin D via sunlight). However, evidence is not clear, and a comparison with more proven methods to reduce blood pressure has not been conducted. Patients with elevated blood pressure should be managed by a licensed healthcare professional.
There is insufficient evidence in this area.
Preliminary human evidence suggests that vitamin D and its analogues, such as alfacalcidol, may act as immunomodulatory agents. More studies are needed to confirm these results.
Intake of vitamin D may be associated with a reduction in total mortality. Additional evidence is needed to confirm this association.
Multiple sclerosis (MS):
Scientists have detected MS rates to be lower in areas with greater sunlight and higher consumption of vitamin D rich fish. Preliminary research suggests that long-term vitamin D supplementation decreases the risk of MS; however, additional research is necessary before a firm conclusion can be reached.
There is insufficient evidence in this area.
Osteogenesis imperfecta (OI):
OI is a genetic disease that consists of unusually fragile bones that break easily, often under loads that normal bones bear daily due to a malfunction in the body's production of collagen. Proper calcium and vitamin D intake is essential to maintaining strong bones.
Osteoporosis (cystic fibrosis patients):
Osteoporosis is common in patients with cystic fibrosis (due to fat malabsorption, which leads to a deficiency of fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamin D). Oral calcitriol administration appears to increase the absorption of calcium and decrease parathyroid concentrations.
There is insufficient evidence in this area.
Rickets (hypophosphatemic vitamin D-resistant):
There are insufficient data to support a role of vitamin D in this condition.
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD):
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a form of depression that occurs during the winter months, possibly due to reduced exposure to sunlight. In one study, vitamin D was found to be better than light therapy in the treatment of SAD. Further studies are necessary to confirm these findings.
In early study, senile warts have been treated with topical vitamin D3.
Skin pigmentation disorders (pigmented lesions):
Application of vitamin D3 ointment on the skin, in combination with intense pulsed-radio frequency, may be beneficial in the treatment of pigmented lesions associated with neurofibromatosis 1 (NF1).
Oral bone and tooth loss are correlated with bone loss at non-oral sites. Research suggests that intake levels of calcium and vitamin D aimed at preventing osteoporosis may have a beneficial effect on tooth retention.
Vitamin D deficiency (infants and nursing mothers):
High-quality clinical trial evidence suggests that high doses of supplemental vitamin D provided to breast feeding mothers may improve the vitamin D status of both mother and child. More research is needed to confirm these findings.
Weight gain (postmenopausal):
Vitamin D supplementation (in combination with calcium) may have an effect on post-menopausal weight gain. Evidence suggests this may be particularly true in women consuming inadequate calcium and warrants further study.
Oral cholecalciferol does not appear to increase muscle strength or improve physical performance in healthy older men who are not vitamin D deficient.
There is preliminary evidence based on laboratory and human studies that high-dose vitamin D may be beneficial in the treatment of prostate cancer. This area is under active investigation, but clear evidence of benefit is not yet available.
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What happens when martial arts and hamsters collide? Kung Zhu™ Battle Hamsters, of course! The makers of the hottest toy of the 2009 holiday season, Zhu Zhu Pets™, are at it again with their latest innovation that is sure to make kids yell, ‘Hi-ya!’ and captivate them with epic Kung-Zhu fighting. Before they transform into Ninja Warriors or Special Forces, the Kung Zhu hamsters need to be "trained" to get ready for combat. Prior to their training, you might mistake the Kung Zhu squad for typical hamsters. They dart around, scurry from place to place and squeak. But all that changes when the hamsters encounter the magical "Tablet of Zhu," a special training ground that transforms them into Special Forces or Ninja Warriors. Just snap on armor and they’re ready to battle against each other in the battle arena! Within the Special Forces and Ninja Warriors, there are clans, each with two hamsters sharing a symbol of allegiance on their backs. Each hamster has its own unique features that provide insight into each individual personality.
DrToy.com is powered by ToyBase: Dr. Toy's comprehensive online searchable database of children's products.
About Dr. Toy
Dr. Toy, Stevanne Auerbach, PhD, is one of the world’s leading experts on play, toys, and children’s products. With 30 years of direct experience, Dr. Auerbach includes educationally oriented, developmental and skill building products from the best large and small companies in her four annual award programs. Many parents, teachers and toy buyers use Dr. Toy’s guidance in making selections. Continue reading...
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LMI Developing Green EPDM Compounds
Utilizing a new type of EPDM polymer, LMI Custom Mixing is playing its part in reducing carbon footprint and oil dependency through revolutionary developments in EPDM sponge and dense compounds, company officials report. Although the supplier, a joint venture between Lauren International and Meteor Gummiwerke, has not developed specific building and construction industry products with the new compounds yet, it sees potential for the new technology in window and door weatherseal applications.
The green EPDM material was developed by Lanxess using ethylene produced by dehydrating ethanol from Brazilian sugar cane, a renewable resource. LMI Custom Mixing is one of the first mixing facilities to formulate and test extruded sponge and dense compounds from the material, which is said to be the world’s first form of bio-based EPDM rubber, sold under the Keltan Eco brand name.
Comparable to standard petroleum-based polymers, the innovative green product offers high quality and high performance, LMI reports. To help reduce dependency on oil, the sustainable EPDM-based products can be up to 25 percent bio-based and 45 percent non-petroleum based.
LMI has already extruded and tested various profiles and is presently working on ASTM and FDA specified green compounds. “Our research will only go further, and the new line of green products and processes will continue to evolve. In the future, we want to include additional non-petroleum based fillers, plasticizers and additives to further improve these compounds,” says Jim Nixon, LMI general manager. “Anytime a renewable resource can be tapped to produce a product that is effective and economically competitive, everyone gains."
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Mary Doria Russell: Anthropologist on Rakhat
I'd like to recommend two books by Mary Doria Russell
that my good friend Cat Clyne, editor of Satya
, thought I'd like. Cat knows my taste perfectly, for I loved
them! For anyone who is interested in theology, geopolitics, the history of colonization, and "first contact," these books are for you.
Published in 1996 and 1998
respectively, The Sparrow
and Children of God
are set in the forthcoming eighty years of this century and concern two groups of Jesuit priests and assorted laity that receive transmissions (beautiful music) from another planet, Rakhat, and set off in search of the civilization that produced such exquisite sounds. What happens when they arrive constitutes a series of tragedies and misunderstandings that have profound consequences for their individual lives and the futures of the two peoples on the planet.
What these books brought home to me, more than any history or documentary about Columbus and the Native Americans, or the conquistadors and the Incans, Aztecs, and Mayans, or the British imperialists and the peoples of the African continent, etc., etc., was how even highly educated and thoughtful individuals can only operate within the worldview of their times, and how attempts to do good can have horrific and simply unforeseen consequences.
Another fascinating analogy I saw concerns the two peoples of Rakhat. The producers of the music, the Jana'ata, are a highly sophisticated and civilized minority who are the carnivorous cousins of the pastoralist, herbivorous, and much more numerous Runa. The Jana'ata have created a highly structured and ritualized society that is stultifying and fascistic; the Runa, generally content and deeply social, are kept hungry and in bondage. They supply the Jana'ata with their meat: i.e. their old and some of their young.
I won't describe in more detail what happens, except to say that one human initiates a freedom movement that frees the Runa, and decimates the Jana'ata. It also destroys the highly elaborate knowledge-based Jana'ata culture. In the ascription of civilization to a minority based on preconceived notions of culture, I was reminded of how the Belgians privileged the minority Tutsi at the expense of the pastoralist Hutus, and of the 1994 massacre that followed many years later. I also thought of the horrors of the Mayan civilization, where a priestly elite extracted tribute from slaves, prisoners, and other unfortunates and yet presided over an empire that advanced mathematics, astronomy, physics, and art.
Anyway, all these questions and more are asked and fruitfully debated throughout these books. Russell was a linguist and anthropologist before leaving academia for novel-writing, but she wears her learning lightly, and the characters are (for the most part) richly and dramatically drawn. Of course, this might be all old news to you, and I'm probably very late to the Mary Doria Russell party. But, as several of the characters in the book find out, better late than never.
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Paint Talk: Courageous Color
By: Chroma's Resident Artist, Jennifer VonStein
It’s easy to get into a rut when choosing colors for a painting. After all, there is something to be said for using the same colors, so you know exactly what to mix in order to achieve the combination you need. But if you are finding your paintings are getting a bit stale, or you want to stretch yourself, simply changing the colors you use can be a great exercise.
For example, in the Archival Oil and Atelier Interactive range, there are 11 colors of a red hue, not including earth tones. Many artists paint with a split primary palette (2 of each primary, each with a warm or cool temperature). Simply replacing 1 of your reds will result in a host of new oranges, violets and other toned mixtures. Furthermore, you will learn more about how the pigments, and color itself, operate in the real world of painting.
The earliest colors were based on inorganic elements from the earth, stones and natural elements. Colors such as Burnt Sienna, Indian Red Oxide, Light Red Ochre and Vermillion can all be used for “red.” These reds do not have the intensity associated with modern pigments, but are part of the “classical palette” that was prevalent up until the mid-19th century.
During the time of the Industrial Revolution, new colors were made based on metals, like cadmium, cobalt and chromium. These colors are more intense than those based on inorganic elements. In the hands of the Impressionists through the colorists of today, these colors help capture the natural effects of light. Some choice reds are Cadmium Red (Scarlett), Cadmium Red Medium and Permanent Alizarine.
Developments in technology during the 20th and 21st century have created new pigments. These “organic” pigments, based on carbon, are highly intense as well as transparent. Colors with names such as quinacridone, arylamides, pthalos, dioxazine and napthol are of this era. These colors have an additional tendency to keep their intensity (or chroma) even when mixed, unlike the older colors, which shift in value and intensity. This knowledge is very helpful if one wants to make a color that is light in value but with a high intensity. Quinacradone Magenta or Napthol Red Light plus Titanium White would create such a color, but Cadmium Red Light or Vermilion would not.
When it comes to using Black, did you know that there is a delicious family of toned blacks? Green Black, Blue Black, Red Black, Brown Black – any of these will give your shades more depth and work beautifully for chiaroscuro effects.
So for your next painting, try some new colors – you will be glad you did!
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Revisiting and recasting the master's work, from Cubism through Guernica to the Mosqueteros of his old age, new generations of artists are discovering Picasso all over again.
Pablo Picasso cast a long and sometimes oppressive shadow across the landscape of 20th-century art. American artists from Max Weber to Jasper Johns absorbed his example and marveled at his virtuosity. Jackson Pollock famously declared, “That [bleeping] Picasso . . . he’s done everything.” (Pollock even began a 1950 drip painting with a series of Picassoid figures but obliterated them under skeins of paint.) In Europe, painters as diverse as Richard Hamilton and Martin Kippenberger paid homage to Picasso, while Pop artists in the United States, like Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein, reworked his subjects in soft fabric or Benday dots.
But what about contemporary artists—the young and those in midcareer? Does Picasso still cast any sort of spell, almost 40 years after his death? The recent retrospective of George Condo’s work at the New Museum in New York drew attention to the question of how much the colossus of modernism still haunts artists in the 21st century. Condo, 55, claims to have spent two years trying to understand Picasso’s language “from within,” practicing what he calls “psychological Cubism.” Many others of his generation have also been wrestling with the master, while a number of younger painters and sculptors are discovering him all over again.
Many artists are introduced to Picasso as students. “My art history-survey teacher basically said, ‘I want to give any of you who come to this school thinking you’re going to be the next Picasso a dose of reality,’” recalls Sean Landers. “‘There are none of you who are artists of this caliber, or we would have known it by now.’” Landers, who shows at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York, took that as a challenge to make ambitious paintings that borrowed heavily from Picasso. He showed them at Andrea Rosen Gallery in 2001. Though the results provoked a mixed reception, Landers—at least briefly—found “a vehicle to talk about myself and my own creative practice, [using] Picasso’s imagery almost like an art material to make my own paintings.”
Nicola Tyson, a British-born figurative painter, recalls first encountering Picasso when she was an “angry young feminist painter in the 1980s. As students, we did a Demoiselles d’Avignon, substituting phallic imagery in place of the prostitutes.” Though her debt to him is more oblique now, Tyson, who also shows at Friedrich Petzel, concedes that Picasso is the one who “gave permission way back to represent the figure differently from the traditional academic form.” His depictions of “vacant women,” she adds, “worked as a spur for me toward more self-discovery—out of a kind of anger and a feeling that there was something lacking in his work, something that wasn’t represented.”
Like Landers, an artist might choose to do an apprenticeship with Picasso before moving on to other turf. Mike Bidlo, one of the original appropriation artists of the 1980s, spent the middle part of that decade pursuing what he describes as an “indentured servitude” to the artist. Bidlo, who shows at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York, created his own versions of the Demoiselles and Guernica and painted 80 canvases of Picasso’s women. “You would never mistake a Bidlo for a Picasso,” he admits, but those years he spent “engaging and dialoguing with him” opened up many doors. “You never really drop an artist of his stature,” he adds, “because he then becomes part of your DNA.”
Since Picasso’s output was so prodigious and multi-faceted, an artist can engage with only selected aspects of his explosive creativity. Ray Smith, for instance, has returned to Guernica several times, often recycling it for satiric ends. After then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a speech at the United Nations in 2003 announcing that the United States would start bombing Iraq, he answered questions from the audience while standing in front of a tapestry based on Guernica, a painting that denounced the aerial devastation of a small Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. Smith took a photo of the reflection of the tapestry on the room’s marble floor and fed it through a filter in Photoshop that reads temperatures in lines and colors. The result is a painted, 24-foot-long melting-and-swirling distortion of the original.
“If a guy is standing in front of a replica of Guernica and talking about weapons of mass destruction,” Smith asks, “what the hell does this painting mean?” We have to wonder. Smith, who shows at Dorfman Projects in New York, has also made fruitful use of this and other Picasso imagery in his series of “Exquisite Corpse” paintings that mix and match his interpretations of the master.
For British artist Richard Patterson, who now lives and works in Dallas, it was Picasso’s portrayal of himself as the mythical Minotaur that resonated most. Throughout his life, but especially in the “Vollard Suite” of the 1930s, Picasso presented the Minotaur as an alternately loving and rapacious beast, who, in the words of biographer John Richardson, “would maneuver the woman he loved into sacrificing . . . her body and her will.” But that creature—half-man, half-bull—has also been seen by many as alluding to a defenseless tenderness in the artist’s psyche. When Patterson, who shows at James Cohan Gallery in New York, found a child’s rubber toy in the shape of the Minotaur, he used it as a surrogate for his attitudes toward his own art in a series of paintings in the late 1990s.
“I blew the toy up to life-size, so it’s slightly a child but also a kind of monster,” he explains. “It was painted in such a way that you can’t see the individual brushstrokes, dispelling the notion of the authentic mark.” Like Picasso’s protagonists, he adds, “It has a sort of tragicomic aspect to it. It was presenting a certain image of maleness, but it was also about being vulnerable.”
Toby Kamps, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection in Houston, also sees similarities between Patterson and Picasso, in both their training and their versatility. Patterson “experiments with different styles of painting, as did Picasso, and like Picasso he had a terrific academic training, where he got tight so he could get loose later,” Kamps says. “You see more and more artists now who learn how to do things in the traditional manner, so they have that bedrock to work from, as did Picasso when he was a student in the 19th-century academies. Whereas the old model used to be you start out loose so that you can get looser.”
Kamps also cites the German artist Anton Henning as following in Picasso’s footsteps. “He’s gone back and re-invented a 20th-century avant-garde movement he calls Curvism,” Kamps says. “Instead of the fractured, largely geometric aspects of Cubism, he does sinuous lines running through things.” Unlike the pioneering efforts of Braque and Picasso, however, Henning’s “movement” does not appear to have attracted any followers. But Kamps notes that “he toggles in and out of realism, in the same way as Picasso.” And Henning, who shows at Zach Feuer in New York, himself admits that he goes back to the master over and over again.
“Initially, when I began to paint, I was fascinated by his early works, then by the last paintings and especially by the portraits of the 1930s and ’40s,” Henning says. “Some are so good that I kind of forget the image but always recall the energy I got looking at them. Picasso proved that it doesn’t matter what you paint, but how you paint it.”
Kamps speculates that many younger artists may be dialing into the zeitgeist the way members of the avant-garde did early in the 20th century. “A lot of people hypothesize that Picasso and Braque were osmotically in touch with the great advances in science and physics at the time, so they intuited Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the new conceptions of time and space, and through Cubism gave those physical form,” he says. “Every young artist now has the Internet pipeline coming into his or her studio, and they’re gorging on news and information. They want to move through art and life the way Picasso did.”
A highly praised show at Gagosian Gallery in 2009, “Picasso: Mosqueteros,” brought renewed attention to the artist’s late works, which many had previously dismissed as a decline into self-indulgent kitsch. Critics praised the works for their emotional intensity and their pictorial inventiveness. “People have tended, in recent years, because of the renewed interest in the late paintings, to imagine that that’s the most generative aspect of Picasso’s legacy at the moment, and to connect that with artists like Dana Schutz and George Condo,” says Scott Rothkopf, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. But in the works of other artists—Josh Smith, Kelley Walker, and Richard Aldrich, for example—he sees the earlier collage esthetic finding a contemporary incarnation.
“The interest that Picasso had in using in collage a lot of different printed mediums—like trompe l’oeil woodgrain and newsprint—connects up to younger artists who are looking into print at a digital moment, combining different materials on the surface of their paintings,” Rothkopf says. Aldrich, he notes, “sees the picture plane as a repository for different materials that come from different parts of our lives, and that’s something Picasso was investigating early in the last century.”
Walker himself says that he’s “interested in the way Picasso created an image that had to be resolved by the viewer, using materials that call attention to the world around us and negative space to hold the work together.”
Beyond collage, he adds, there are other aspects of Picasso’s life and work that intrigue him. “He’s a scanner, and I’m a scanner myself,” says Walker, who shows at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. “He could look at something and make a perfect outline of it and then put it right back into his own artwork.”
Francesca DiMattio, whose work is also oriented toward collage, says she “gravitates to Picasso’s sense of public/private and inside/outside.” She looked at Cubism early on and admired its way of breaking down hierarchies, showing an object that is simultaneously a body part or a face and incorporating high and low references. Picasso “starts with everyday objects but presents them in such a way that they become anxiety-provoking,” says DiMattio, who shows at Salon 94 in New York.
For many artists, in fact, Picasso was all about anxiety, especially for the earlier generations that included Pollock and Hamilton, and perhaps Landers and Condo as well. For a show called “Influence, Anxiety, and Gratitude” at the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, curator Bill Arning, now director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, showed Hamilton’s 1973 mixed-media drawing Picasso’s Meninas, which substitutes Picassoid figures for Velázquez’s characters and depicts the 20th-century master taking his illustrious forebear’s place at the easel.
Arning also included an audiotape of Sean Landers reading aloud his “Dear Picasso,” a letter beseeching the master’s blessing, and one of his takes on Guernica. Both Landers and Hamilton, Arning notes, “showed us a Picasso who must have shared their self-doubt in order to be a great artist.”
For many younger artists, though, Picasso seems a far less fraught and intimidating figure. Amy Bessone, who shows at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, says, “When I was in school in the ’80s, it was pretty uncool to look at Picasso or to admit that you’d looked at Picasso, because he was so ingrained in the popular culture. But I feel like I have a much more relaxed and comfortable relationship with modernism than the preceding generation.” Her works, she says, “are both an homage and a love song” to the artist.
For German artist Corinna Heumann, who ransacks the imagery of recent artists—juxtaposing a Picasso-like figure against a Warholian camouflage background, for example—Picasso represented a way around the almost stifling heritage of artists in her own country: Richter, Kiefer, Baselitz, Polke, and the rest. Heumann, who shows at Dorfman Projects in New York, says, “My work investigates questions of originality and what makes people creative. I like Picasso because for me painting is about thinking with my hands. And in a way, repainting Picasso is like rethinking all of art history.”
Far from fading into irrelevance or inspiring contempt, as has been the lot of certain great artists in the past (one thinks of Caravaggio or Rodin), Picasso still seems very much with us, an inspiration for both the way he lived and the works he made. Even the outsize aspects of his personality can be captivating.
“I’m from Wisconsin, so a little grandiosity and pretension have tremendous appeal to me,” says Kamps. “When you get an artist in his studio and he goes ‘Yo, Picasso!’ my hat’s off to him. I think more artists should aspire to that model, to having your name be ‘Picassoid.’ After all, how many people get that honorific?”
Ann Landi is a contributing editor of ARTnews.
Copyright 2013, ARTnews LLC, 48 West 38th St 9th FL NY NY 10018. All rights reserved.
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The Inner Amalek
Volume 20, No. 20
11 Adar 5766
March 11, 2006
Kenneth and Lillian Schor
on the yahrzeit of his father
Dov Ber ben Akiva a"h
Daf Yomi (Bavli): Pesachim 53
Daf Yomi (Yerushalmi): Kilayim 20
This week, in addition to Parashat Tetzaveh, we read Parashat
Zachor, in which we are commanded (Devarim 25:19), "You shall
eradicate the memory of Amalek," the nation that launched an
unprovoked attack upon Bnei Yisrael immediately after the Exodus.
Elsewhere (in the Torah reading for Purim - Shmot 17:14), we read, "I
[Hashem] will surely eradicate the memory of Amalek." If Hashem is
our partner in this endeavor, asks R' Nachum Mordechai Friedman z"l
(the Chortkover Rebbe), why has it proven so difficult throughout
Jewish history to defeat Amalek and nations like it?
He explains: Our task and Hashem's task are different ones.
Hashem protects us from the physical Amalek, while it is our
responsibility to battle the Amalek, i.e., the evil, within ourselves.
Moreover, Hashem's ability to destroy the physical Amaleks of the
world is dependent upon our destroying our own Amaleks. This is the
meaning of the Gemara (Chullin 139a) which states: "Where is Haman
alluded to in the Torah? In the verse (Bereishit 3:11), `Hamin
ha'etz' / `From the tree from which I commanded that you not eat, did
you eat?'" When Adam committed the first sin in history, he made
possible the existence of Haman and Amalek. (Haman was a descendant
In truth, however, the difficulties of the exile make it hard for
us to battle our personal Amaleks. [Ed. Note: This dvar Torah was
said by the Chortkover Rebbe in Vienna, Austria in 1935.] We must
therefore look to the verse (Devarim 25:19), "And it will come to pass
when Hashem will let you rest from all your enemies around you, [then]
you shall eradicate the memory of Amalek." (Doresh Tov)
"Now you shall command Bnei Yisrael that they shall take for
you pure, chopped oil for illumination, to kindle the lamp
The Gemara teaches: "Pure, pressed oil is required for the
menorah, but it is not required for the menachot / meal offerings.
Thus, the first oil that comes from the olives is set aside for the
menorah, and the second oil is to be used for the menachot."
R' Yitzchak Karo z"l (1458-approx. 1520) observes: Usually, one
uses his best oil for cooking, and his inferior oil for lighting.
Here, we give the best entirely to G-d (in the menorah), and use the
second-best for ourselves (in the menachot, which are partially
consumed by man).
R' Karo also notes: The word "chopped" ("kaf-tav-yud-tav")
alludes to the first two Temples, the first of which stood for 410
("tav-yud") years, and the second for 420 ("tav-kaf,") years. Both of
these Temples were "chopped," i.e., destroyed. The third Temple,
however, will stand forever - "to kindle the lamp continually."
"They shall take the gold, the turquoise, purple, and scarlet
wool, and the linen." (28:5)
What is this verse teaching? asks R' Moshe Feinstein z"l (see
back page). Could the artisans have made the Mishkan and its
implements if they did not have the materials?
R' Feinstein explains: Hashem commanded that Betzalel and the
other artisans be the ones to make the Tabernacle because they were
filled with a "spirit of wisdom." But if not for our verse, others
from among Bnei Yisrael could have handed the materials to them. G-d
did not want this, so He commanded: "They shall take the gold . . ."
Why? R' Feinstein writes that Hashem wanted Betzalel to be
involved in the mundane aspects of building the Mishkan as a lesson
for future generations. Many people are willing to accept the
authority of their rabbi over "spiritual" matters, but they think that
a rabbi is entitled to no say in the "mundane" affairs of the shul.
(The examples that R' Feinstein gives are the design of, and fund-
raising for, synagogues.) That view, our pasuk teaches, is in error.
(Darash Moshe Vol. II)
"Aharon shall bring atonement upon [the altar's] horns once a
year, from the blood of the sin-offering of the atonements,
once a year, shall he bring atonement upon it for your
generations; it is holy of holies to Hashem." (30:10)
Why does the verse say twice that Aharon shall "bring atonement"
on the altar "once a year"? R' Shlomo Kluger z"l (rabbi of Brody,
Galicia; died 1869) explains:
There are two aspects of our sins. The first is personal; man is
responsible for his own sins. The second is communal; if one of us
sins, all of us bear some blame because "Kol Yisrael areivim zeh
b'zeh" / "All Jews are responsible for each other." Thus, the first
atonement is for the personal aspect of the sin, while the second
atonement is for the communal aspect. That is why the second phrase
refers to atonement "for your generations." When one person sins, the
entire generation needs an atonement.
(Kohelet Yaakov: Shekalim, Drush 14)
"Yesod Ve'shoresh Ha'avodah"
("The Foundation and Root of Divine Service")
This year, we are presenting excerpts from the work Yesod
Ve'shoresh Ha'avodah by R' Alexander Ziskind z"l (died 1794).
In Sha'ar Ha'mifkad, Chapter 3, the author writes about the
thoughts that one should have on Ta'anit Esther:
The reason for this fast on the 13th of Adar is because on this
day our ancestors rose to fight for their lives [against Haman's
allies] and they needed G-d's mercy. We do as they did in the days of
Mordechai and Esther by gathering to pray to and beseech Him.
In addition, it is written that this fast is an obligation for
all Jews because of the miracle that happened on this day--the day on
which Haman had planned to exterminate the Jews. When one experiences
a miracle, especially when his life is saved, he should fast and pray
every year on that day and give thanks to the One Whose Name Is
Blessed. It is appropriate for a person to awaken his heart at all
hours of this day to thank Hashem for our great salvation.
One should don his Shabbat garments before Minchah and recite the
Minchah prayer while wearing them.
R' Moshe Feinstein z"l
R' Moshe Feinstein, whose 20th yahrzeit will be observed on
Ta'anit Esther, stands out as the foremost halachic authority for
American Jewry in the 20th century. As the sh'ailot u'teshuvot /
responsa collected in his Igrot Moshe attest, his halachic opinion was
sought on virtually every significant question that arose as Torah-
observant Jews adapted to a new civilization in America and enjoyed
the benefits of rapid advances in technology. Among the subjects
addressed there are questions of Shabbat-observance, medicine (for
example, halachic issues raised by new procedures and surgeries),
business and legal matters, kashrut, and cultural trends.
R' Moshe Feinstein was born on 7 Adar 5655 / 1895 in Uzda, White
Russia, and was named after Moshe Rabbeinu, whose birthday he shared.
His father, R' David, was the rabbi of Uzda and a great-grandson of R'
Avraham, brother of the Vilna Gaon. R' Moshe's mother, Faya Rachel,
was a descendant of the author of the Mishnah commentary Tosfot Yom
Tov and of the Shelah Ha'kadosh. (Faya Rachel's sister was the
maternal grandmother of R' Joseph B. Soloveitchik.)
R' Moshe's first teacher was his father, who taught the boy all
of Tanach before he studied his first page of Gemara. R' Moshe's
family reports that throughout his life, R' Moshe studied two chapters
of Tanach every day. Young Moshe also was an expert chess player
until he realized that the game had ceased to relax him and instead
demanded his full strength and concentration. At that point he
considered the game to be harmful to his growth in Torah study, and he
gave it up.
When the future R' Moshe was 12 years old, he was sent to Slutsk
to study in the yeshiva of R' Isser Zalman Meltzer. R' Moshe's
primary teacher there was R' Pesach Pruskin. In 1908, R' Pruskin
decided to take his students and form his own yeshiva, and R' Meltzer
called him to a din Torah before R' David Feinstein. R' Feinstein
ruled that R' Pruskin was within his rights and, soon after, the new
yeshiva opened. The guest of honor at the dedication was none other
than R' Meltzer. One of the original students in the new academy was
13-year old Moshe Feinstein.
When World War I broke out, R' Moshe sought the blessing of the
Chafetz Chaim that he be spared from the draft. The elder sage told
the young rabbi, "I've heard of you." The Chafetz Chaim then told
him, "We learn in Pirkei Avot that anyone who accepts the yoke of
Torah is spared from the yoke of the king." Soon after, R' Moshe
learned that his call-up had been delayed for six months. As further
security, R' Moshe accepted his first rabbinic position at that time,
in his birthplace Uzda.
-- to be continued next week --
Copyright © 2006 by Shlomo Katz
The editors hope these brief 'snippets' will engender further study
and discussion of Torah topics ('lehagdil Torah u'leha'adirah'), and
your letters are appreciated. Web archives at Torah.org start with 5758 (1997) and
may be retrieved from the Hamaayan page.
Hamaayan needs your support! Please consider sponsoring Hamaayan in honor of a happy occasion or in memory of a loved one. Did you know that the low cost of sponsorship - only $18 - has not changed in seventeen years? Donations to HaMaayan are tax-deductible.
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Boy or girl? A simple blood test in mothers-to-be can answer that question with surprising accuracy at about seven weeks, a research analysis has found.
Though not widely offered by U.S. doctors, gender-detecting blood tests have been sold online to consumers for the past few years. Their promises of early and accurate results prompted genetics researchers to take a closer look.
They analyzed 57 published studies of gender testing done in rigorous research or academic settings — though not necessarily the same methods or conditions used by direct-to-consumer firms.
The authors say the results suggest blood tests like those studied could be a breakthrough for women at risk of having babies with certain diseases, who could avoid invasive procedures if they learned their fetus was a gender not affected by those illnesses. But the study raises concerns about couples using such tests for gender selection and abortion.
Couples who buy tests from marketers should be questioned about how they plan to use the results, the study authors said.
The analyzed test can detect fetal DNA in mothers' blood. It's about 95 percent accurate at identifying gender when women are at least seven weeks' pregnant — more than one month before conventional methods. Accuracy of the testing increases as pregnancy advances, the researchers concluded.
Conventional procedures, typically done for medical reasons, can detect gender starting at about 10 weeks.
The new analysis, published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, involved more than 6,000 pregnancies. The testing used a lab procedure called PCR that detects genetic material — in this case, the male Y chromosome. If present in the mother's blood, she's carrying a boy, but if absent, it's a girl.
Tests that companies sell directly to consumers were not examined in the analysis. Sex-detection tests using mothers' urine or blood before seven weeks of pregnancy were not accurate, the researchers said.
Senior author Dr. Diana Bianchi, a reproductive geneticist and executive director of the Mother Infant Research Institute at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, called the results impressive. She noted that doctors in Great Britain are already using such testing for couples at risk of having children with hemophilia or other sex-linked diseases, partly to help guide treatment decisions.
The research indicates that many laboratories have had success with the test, but the results can't be generalized to all labs because testing conditions can vary substantially, said Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson, a genetics professor at Florida International University. He was not involved in the study.
Simpson noted that using gender-detection blood testing for medical or other reasons has not been endorsed by guideline-setting medical groups and some experts consider it experimental.
Dr. Lee Shulman, chief of clinical genetics at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, said the testing "isn't ready for prime time."
He said his hospital doesn't provide the blood tests, and doesn't offer more conventional techniques, including amniocentesis, to women who have no medical reason for wanting to know their baby's gender.
"I would have a lot of difficulties offering such a test just for gender identification. Gender is not an abnormality," Shulman said. "My concern is this is ultimately going to be available in malls or shopping centers," similar to companies offering "cute" prenatal ultrasound images.
Recent research found that increasing numbers of women in India who already have daughters are having abortions when prenatal tests show another girl, suggesting that an Indian ban on such gender testing has been ineffective. The expense of marrying off girls has contributed to a cultural preference there for boys.
Evidence also suggests that China's limits on one child per couple and traditional preference for male heirs has contributed to abortions and an increasingly large gender imbalance.
There's very little data on reasons for U.S. abortions or whether gender preferences or gender-detection methods play a role, said Susannah Baruch, a policy consultant for the Generations Ahead, an advocacy group that studies genetic techniques and gender issues.
Consumer Genetics Inc. a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company sells an "early gender" blood test called "Pink or Blue" online for $25 plus $265 or more for laboratory testing. It boasts of 95 percent accuracy, using a lab technique its scientists developed from the type of testing evaluated in the new analysis, said Terry Carmichael, the company's executive vice president.
Carmichael said the company sells more than 1,000 kits a year. He said the company won't test blood samples unless women sign a consent form agreeing not to use the results for gender selection.
The company also won't sell kits to customers in China or India because of fears of gender selection, he said.
Medical techniques that can detect gender include amniocentesis, usually done at around 16 weeks, using a needle to withdraw fluid surrounding the fetus to identify abnormalities; chorionic villus sampling, done at around the 10th week to detect abnormalities by examining placenta tissue; and ultrasound, most accurate at around 13 weeks. The first two methods can slightly increase risks for miscarriages.
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What is Flat Head Syndrome (Plagiocephaly)?
Flat Head Syndrome in babies, known as Plagiocephaly, is a condition where the back or side of baby’s head becomes flat or mis-shapen due to prolonged pressure on the skull from flat surfaces like cot mattresses, bassinets or floors, while baby is asleep, or on their back.
A newborn’s skull is very soft, so it’s more likely to occur in very young babies up to 4 months, but can affect children up to 12 months.
Plagiocephaly can also occur during birth, when the baby’s head comes under pressure from the birth canal. It is more common in multiple births, due to lack of space, and premature babies, as their skulls are very soft and they spend more time lying down.
How do I know if my baby has Plagiocephaly?
Your baby’s head may have a flat spot, or be lopsided or mis-shapen.
How will Flat Head affect my baby?
Plagiocephaly was originally thought not to affect babies, however recent studies from the Seattle Children’s Research Institute suggest that it may be a ‘red flag’ for developmental delays. Dr. Matthew Speltz, clinical psychologist, noted in his study of babies with Plagiocephaly that approximately 25% of babies with Flat Head Syndrome displayed motor or movement skill delays when compared to babies without the syndrome.
What should I do about my baby’s head shape?
Check with your pediatrician or health care worker about your baby’s head shape if you are concerned. If the problem is severe and your baby is over 4 months, your baby may have to be fitted for a corrective helmet or band to reshape their head.
Can Flat Head Syndrome be prevented?
Flat Head Syndrome can be prevented and corrected in babies up to 4 months by the use of the Baby –Head-Rest™. The Baby-Head-Rest allows the baby to still sleep on its back, as recommended by SIDS, while gently holding the head in place and provides support against the cot mattress, preventing flattening. You can also use Baby-Head-Rest to correct cases of Flat Head, as well. Prevention is much easier on your baby and less expensive than helmet treatment.
Is the Baby-Head-Rest™ a pillow?
The Baby-Head-Rest is not a pillow, but a head support that gently cradles baby’s head while sleeping. It does not restrict baby’s head movement in any way.
For more information or to find out where to purchase the Baby Head Rest, visit www.babyheadrest.com
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How big can a laptop screen get? The Sony PCG-GRX570 PC is the first mainstream portable using a 16.1-inch LCD, with a dazzling 1,600-by-1,200 (UXGA) resolution. That gives it the same screen real estate as a 17-inch desktop CRT monitor. Think of it as a weighty9.6 pounds, including the brick-sized AC adaptermobile graphics workhorse.
For projector-free presentations, the unit is a killer machine. It's all you need to present a high-impact demo before a half-dozen people in a small conference room. Other likely candidates are Web designers, desktop publishing pros, and gamers who want to take their PC with them occasionally.
For everyday Windows tasks, we're a little less sanguine. A UXGA resolution on a 16.1-inch monitor can be hard on the eyes. While it's possible to zoom the size of the system fonts, Windows doesn't manage scaling at all well.
Other performance was top-notch, as you'd expect from a system with a 1.6-GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 512MB of DDR memory, a 40GB hard drive, and an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics subsystem with 32MB of video DDR SDRAM. The BatteryMark score was 2 hours 14 minutes, and you can double that by replacing the optical drive with a second battery.
We were surprised to see what was missing, starting with wireless Ethernet. The Sony spokesperson said there wasn't enough room in the chassis. Also missing are an internal floppy disk drive, dual pointing devices, and the PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports. Sony did find room for a Memory Stick slot, along with three USB 1.1 ports, an IEEE 1394 (iLINK) port, and a TV-out port.
In an era of little free software, the system is a refreshing contrast, with Microsoft Word 2002 and 13 movie, TV, music, and photo programs, including Adobe Premiere LE for video editing and Photoshop Elements for still-photo editing.
For those who need the biggest screen possible in a portable computer, the Sony PCG-GRX-570 series is the current champion.
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“ACCEPTED WASTE” “Accepted waste,” a definition of government by Brian McLaughlin is probably the most accurate definition of government. Consider, all government is involved in taking wealth from the citizenry and ‘redeploying’, or redistributing the wealth to others. Sometimes, government performs a necessary service to the community ( inefficiently, of course). Theoretically, government is populated by altruistic, dedicated and selfless public servants who would never take into consideration politics, self-serving, lobbying or greedy redistribution of wealth seized from the populace through taxation. All realities and facts fly in the face of this concept; everyman knows the pettiness, corruption, and grasping that is the hallmark of government at every level. Yet, in every age we have liberals, progressives, politicians, and bureaucrats tell us that ‘this time it will be different’ if only we will give them a little more of the treasure produced by the people. Long ago, in 1867, Sir Louis Mallet’s rightly observed: “... we add to these considerations the singular inaptitude of the governing classes of this country to comprehend foreign affairs, the extraordinary errors which are usually to be observed in their judgements and opinions ....” Mark those words “inaptitude” and “errors ... (of) judgement” and think of the heavy corrupt hand of government coming in ObamaCare. Yes, I know liberals and progressives assure us this time it will be different. In modern days, Robert Heinlein notes: “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded - here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’" But in our day, Pres. Obama assure us, the workers and creators, that “you didn’t build that.” In his Second Inaugural Address he assures us that only the collective and not the individual is the road to success. The collective and its handmaiden government trump personhood and freewill. From utopian communities, to the Soviet Union and now in European Socialism, the history of the collective has been failure and more failure. Is America to slip back into abject poverty to prove once again the inaptitude of the collective and government? Many times incompetence of governance becomes a source of pride. Nancy Ward, Administrator at FEMA, recently justified FEMA’s incompetence by saying “It doesn’t always work out the way we intended; but we never stop trying.” Isn’t one of the definitions of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? That which is surrendered to government is lost forever to the citizens, the producers of wealth. “There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him,” says Robert Heinlein. What can we do to not accept the waste? Shouldn’t we be persons and not slaves to the collective? “Accepted Waste” is the true definition of government which we must protest at all times.
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MINNEAPOLIS – December 12, 2012 – Carbon monoxide (CO) incidents increase by more than 10 percent during the winter months and is often called the silent killer. CO is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas and when inhaled, it enters the blood stream preventing proper absorption of oxygen, which can lead to illness and even death. According to the National Fire Incident Reporting System, municipal fire departments across the country respond to more than 60,000 CO incidents each year.
“Typically, CO is created when fuels such as gasoline, wood, coal, natural gas, propane, oil or methane don’t burn completely,” said Tim Boettcher, master service technician for CenterPoint Energy’s Home Service Plus®. “Home heating and cooking equipment that burn fuel inadequately can be sources of carbon monoxide.”
“According to the Minnesota Poison Control Center, there are thousands of deaths each year as a result of carbon monoxide, making it the leading cause of death due to poisoning,” said Perry Ebner, Minneapolis Fire Marshall. “Additionally, our response to non-fire related CO incidents increase by 10 percent during the winter, so the time for prevention is now.”
CenterPoint Energy together with the Minneapolis Fire Department reminds the public of important safety tips about how to recognize the symptoms of and avoid CO exposure:
• Physical symptoms of CO exposure can resemble the flu causing headaches, nausea, fatigue, confusion and dizziness that disappear when a person breathes fresh air.
• Unusually high indoor humidity with persistent heavy condensation on walls and windows and soot or water collecting near a burner or vent
• Stuffy or stale indoor air.
If you suspect CO exposure, leave the area immediately taking your pets with you and tell others to do the same. Once you are safely away from the area, call 911 to report the suspected CO incident.
Treatment for CO exposure is fresh air or oxygen. Severe exposure requires medical attention. Do not return to your home or building until the source of the problem is discovered and corrected.
To prevent CO build up:
• Purchase a CO detection device with an audible alarm and digital display and install it no more than 10 feet from each sleeping quarter, as required by law. Fuel-burning appliances, equipment and combustible engines all produce CO that can reach dangerous levels if improperly operated or maintained.
• Have fuel-burning equipment regularly checked by a qualified technician (most manufacturers recommend annual check-ups).
• Never operate an automobile, lawn mower or any combustion engine, barbecue grill or similar equipment in an enclosed area such as your home, garage, tent, fish
house, trailer or place of business, even with the door open. Any pollutants in the air from the garage, such as a car engine running, can travel into the structure and CO can accumulate.
• Never leave a fire smoldering in a fireplace.
• Check frequently for visible signs of problems, such as high indoor humidity and soot or water collecting near a burner or vent.
• Equipment that uses natural gas should produce a clear blue flame. A yellow or orange flame may indicate a qualified technician should check for a potential problem with the equipment. When natural gas equipment is properly operated and maintained, it usually will not produce CO.
• Provide adequate combustion air for all your appliances.
• Be certain fuel-burning equipment properly vents to the outdoors.
• Keep vents, fresh air intakes and chimneys clear of debris or other obstructions and check for vent pipes that have gaps, leaks, spaces or are rusted through.
• Never attempt to heat a room with a natural gas range, oven or clothes dryer
For more information about natural gas safety, visit www.centerpointenergy.com/besafe or call 612-372-4727 or 1-800-245-2377.
CenterPoint Energy, Inc., headquartered in Houston, Texas, is a domestic energy delivery company that includes electric transmission and distribution, natural gas distribution, competitive natural gas sales and services, interstate pipelines and field services operations. The company serves more than five million metered customers primarily in Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas. Assets total more than $22 billion. With about 8,800 employees, CenterPoint Energy and its predecessor companies have been in business for more than 135 years. In Minnesota, CenterPoint Energy is the state’s largest natural gas distribution utility, serving about 800,000 customers in 260 communities. The utility also operates a non-regulated business in Minnesota called Home Service Plus®. For more information, visit CenterPointEnergy.com.
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< Return To Hearing
Mr. Gene Kimmelman
March 6, 2002
Consumers Union is extremely concerned about the enormous concentration of control over multichannel video distribution systems - predominantly cable and satellite - which has prevented the growth of vibrant competition. Attached to our testimony is an Appendix entitled "Cable-Satellite Competition (And Other Myths That Are Distorting Mass Media Policy)," prepared by Dr. Mark Cooper, Research Director for the Consumer Federation of America, which describes in great detail the market structure and concentration levels for multi-channel video services.
Direct broadcast satellite (DBS) stands as the most likely competitor to today's cable monopolies. While further consolidation in the satellite industry could be dangerous to consumers, it also holds the potential to make satellite more competitive with cable monopolies. We believe that antitrust issues related to satellite mergers should be reviewed in the overall context of policies designed to foster more competition in the multichannel video market.
It is important to understand that, while antitrust is an excellent tool to prevent monopolization or substantial dilution of competition, it may do nothing to create new competition or explode existing monopolies. Consumers need both - strong antitrust enforcement and strong pro-competitive policies.
Today, EchoStar and DirecTV serve nearly every home that has a satellite dish. And now EchoStar is attempting to buy DirecTV.
If this merger is approved, it would combine the dominant players in the satellite TV market to become the second-largest pay-TV company in America, behind AT&T's combined cable holdings. See Appendix at 35 (describing AT&T's full and partial cable ownership interests, covering as many as 30-40 million households).
The potential antitrust problems presented by this merger are serious and substantial. Currently, most consumers have three choices for pay-TV services: EchoStar's Dish Network, DirecTV, or their local cable company. This merger would reduce their choices from three to two. For rural America, the prospects are even grimmer. Approximately 13 million homes in rural areas are not wired for cable TV. These consumers can only choose between DirecTV and EchoStar. Thus, the merger would leave them with EchoStar as their only option.
Therefore, Consumers Union believes that this proposed merger poses significant antitrust problems and must be rejected, unless the problems are adequately addressed before the merger is completed. Under certain circumstances, we also believe the merger could offer consumers some significant benefits, such as more local broadcast channels and better high-speed Internet options available via satellite. We believe that government approval should be contingent on specific market-opening preconditions and protections against anti-competitive practices. These would involve antitrust consent decree requirements to prevent monopolistic pricing and inferior service, plus Federal Communications Commission (FCC) action to encourage competition.
Sixteen percent of American households have satellite dishes, while about 68 percent have cable. A substantial portion of satellite subscribers also purchase cable in order to receive local broadcast programming or to satisfy multiple TV viewing needs. Thus far, satellite has failed to provide price competition to cable. As one industry analyst writes:
We believe that more than 95% of all cable churn is caused by factors other than DBS competition. Competition generated churn rates of just 1.3% per year during the past five years, suggesting that former cable customers make up less than one-third of DBS's current customer base. The implication of this finding is significant because it suggests that the vast preponderance of DBS's growth depended on first-time multi-channel video (MVC) subscribers. We believe that growth in the MVC market will drop off in the next several years as the potential population of first-time MVC subscribers dwindles.
Every year, cable rates keep going through the roof. In the five years since the Telecommunications Act became law, cable subscribers have seen their rates go up 36 percent. That's nearly three times the rate of inflation. Cablevision recently announced a 7 percent rate hike, two weeks after AT&T announced a 7.4 percent hike. In cities all around the country, cable companies are raising rates with an alarming pace. The following are just a sampling of rate increases: Wichita, KS - 14%, St. Louis, MO - 14-26%, Reno, NV and Memphis, TN - 15%, Boston, MA - 12%, Vancouver, WA - 9%, Atlanta, GA and Austin, TX - 10%.
Unfortunately, the 1996 Telecommunications Act phased out cable rate regulation. It gave consumers the impression that cable competition would expand sooner rather than later, and cable prices would go down, not up.
The law assumed that the elimination of legal barriers to entering the cable business would unleash a torrent of competition from local telephone companies, electric utilities and others.
Unfortunately, it just hasn't happened. The local telephone companies have virtually abandoned their efforts to compete with cable, and electric utilities have had difficulty breaking into the market. Without the benefit of regulations that prevent cable price gouging, only consumers in the few communities where two wire-line companies engage in head-to-head competition for cable services are receiving the benefits promised in the 1996 Act. FCC data show that head-to-head competition saves consumers 14 percent compared to prices charged by cable monopolies (where satellite service is also available), and independent research indicates that competition can save consumers as much as 32 percent on their cable bills.
Unfortunately, two-wire towns are the exception to the rule in today's marketplace. Large companies that are well-positioned to block competition increasingly dominate the cable industry. Currently two companies (AT&T and AOL Time Warner) together own cable systems serving more than 50% of the nation's cable subscribers and are partially co-owned through Time Warner Entertainment. In most places, the local cable company is the only cable company. As cable TV pioneer Ted Turner recently said: "I think it's sad we're losing so much diversity of thought and opinion.... We're getting to the point where there's going to be only two cable companies left."
Cable companies often argue that programming costs and capital outlays account for the increase in rates. But these arguments simply do not hold up under scrutiny.
For one, cable industry data show that a substantial portion of the increase in programming costs are offset by corresponding increases in advertising revenue. As programming gets more expensive, cable companies get more revenue from advertisers who run commercials during the programming.
Secondly, the largest cable system operators have financial interests in about one-third of all national and regional programming. So when cable companies complain about having to pay more for programming that they partly own, some are simply taking money of the right pocket and putting it in the left pocket.
Even at the local level, the cable industry's complaint about rising programming costs does not hold water. Since the passage of the 1996 Act, cable revenues have increased much faster than costs. Since 1996, total revenues have increased by 50 percent, while operating revenues are up 43 percent. Average operating revenues (total revenues minus operating costs) have actually increased by 32 percent. Most notably, the revenues that are associated with the expansion of systems -- advertising, pay-per-view and shopping services, advanced services and equipment -- are up 123 percent. The dollar value of revenue increases for new and expanded services since 1997 alone swamps the increase in programming costs. Virtually all of the increases in basic and expanded basic service revenues have been carried to cable's bottom line in the form of increases in operating profits.
If satellite can provide local channels in more areas and continue to bring down up-front equipment costs, it could be well-positioned to be the most likely competitor to cable in the future.
One of EchoStar's major arguments for a merger with DirecTV is that combining the dominant players of the satellite industry is the only way for them to compete head-to-head with the cable monopolies. We do not believe this combination alone would guarantee that satellite becomes an effective competitor to cable TV. However, the combined companies would have additional satellite capacity to beam local channels into more markets than they do now. They would also be able to reduce costs per subscriber and possibly speed up the availability of high-speed Internet service in rural areas. Once again, all of these would increase the likelihood that satellite could become a price and service competitor to cable.
Nonetheless, the only way that antitrust and other competitive concerns about this merger can be addressed is to require the conditioning of the merger with two significant safeguards.
First, EchoStar should be required to implement a broad array of protections for rural subscribers. The company should have to agree to offer the same prices, terms, and conditions to consumers in rural areas as it does to consumers in more competitive areas. The same installation options, program packages, promotions, and customer service that EchoStar provides in the closest, most competitive markets would then be available where consumers have cable and only one satellite choice. An alternative approach to achieve the same result would require a structural separation (divestiture) of enough satellite capacity to serve rural customers through a new satellite competitor that could challenge the combined Echostar/DirecTV.
The second safeguard we would suggest is aimed at improving competition. If consumers are going to lose one competitor in the multichannel video market, particularly when it means unwired markets will go from two choices to one, the FCC should move forward to open the door to another competitor.
For example, Northpoint/Broadwave is a promising potential competitor to both cable and satellite TV. It is trying to secure a license for its service, but it is caught in a regulatory morass at the FCC. Two of the companies that have pressed the FCC to reject the application are the companies that could see the stiffest competition - EchoStar and AT&T.
The addition of Northpoint/Broadwave or a comparable firm to the marketplace could offset the loss of a satellite competitor as a result of this merger. Therefore, we are asking the FCC to approve licensing of Northpoint/Broadwave -- if the service can be provided without interfering with satellite service -- before the antitrust officials complete their review of this merger.
In conclusion, I would like to recall the last telecommunications merger to receive this kind of attention from Congress - the merger of America Online and Time Warner. Some of you probably remember the antitrust concerns that were raised when AOL first unveiled its merger plans.
I know that former FTC Chairman Pitofsky remembers them well. And thanks to his insight and leadership at the FTC, that merger was transformed from a potential threat to consumers to a model for the protection of consumers.
Like the merger of AOL and Time Warner, the merger of EchoStar and DirecTV presents serious problems that could be dangerous to consumers. But as the government's approval of AOL Time Warner demonstrated, problems can be fixed if the companies and federal officials are willing to do so.
Rather than reject this proposal out of hand, we would urge the federal government to seize an opportunity to improve consumers' standing in the marketplace and bring some sorely-needed competition to the multi-channel video market.
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A problem about genetics and the transmission of disease.
Use the computer to model an epidemic. Try out public health policies to control the spread of the epidemic, to minimise the number of sick days and deaths.
How is the length of time between the birth of an animal and the birth of its great great ... great grandparent distributed?
Simple models which help us to investigate how epidemics grow and die out.
Estimate areas using random grids
Why MUST these statistical statements probably be at least a little
Use your skill and judgement to match the sets of random data.
How do you choose your planting levels to minimise the total loss
at harvest time?
Are these statistical statements sometimes, always or never true?
Or it is impossible to say?
This is our collection of tasks on the mathematical theme of 'Population Dynamics' for advanced students and those interested in mathematical modelling.
Invent scenarios which would give rise to these probability density functions.
By exploring the concept of scale invariance, find the probability
that a random piece of real data begins with a 1.
How efficiently can you pack together disks?
Formulate and investigate a simple mathematical model for the design of a table mat.
Which countries have the most naturally athletic populations?
Can you suggest a curve to fit some experimental data? Can you work out where the data might have come from?
An observer is on top of a lighthouse. How far from the foot of the lighthouse is the horizon that the observer can see?
Here are several equations from real life. Can you work out which measurements are possible from each equation?
If a is the radius of the axle, b the radius of each ball-bearing, and c the radius of the hub, why does the number of ball bearings n determine the ratio c/a? Find a formula for c/a in terms of n.
Which line graph, equations and physical processes go together?
Can Jo make a gym bag for her trainers from the piece of fabric she has?
The probability that a passenger books a flight and does not turn
up is 0.05. For an aeroplane with 400 seats how many tickets can be
sold so that only 1% of flights are over-booked?
Find the distance of the shortest air route at an altitude of 6000
metres between London and Cape Town given the latitudes and
longitudes. A simple application of scalar products of vectors.
Learn about the link between logical arguments and electronic circuits. Investigate the logical connectives by making and testing your own circuits and fill in the blanks in truth tables to record. . . .
Each week a company produces X units and sells p per cent of its
stock. How should the company plan its warehouse space?
How do you write a computer program that creates the illusion of stretching elastic bands between pegs of a Geoboard? The answer contains some surprising mathematics.
Investigate circuits and record your findings in this simple introduction to truth tables and logic.
Go on a vector walk and determine which points on the walk are
closest to the origin.
Can you make matrices which will fix one lucky vector and crush another to zero?
Explore the meaning of the scalar and vector cross products and see how the two are related.
Can you sketch these difficult curves, which have uses in
Is it really greener to go on the bus, or to buy local?
Use vectors and matrices to explore the symmetries of crystals.
10 graphs of experimental data are given. Can you use a spreadsheet to find algebraic graphs which match them closely, and thus discover the formulae most likely to govern the underlying processes?
Use trigonometry to determine whether solar eclipses on earth can be perfect.
Many physical constants are only known to a certain accuracy. Explore the numerical error bounds in the mass of water and its constituents.
See how enormously large quantities can cancel out to give a good
approximation to the factorial function.
Starting with two basic vector steps, which destinations can you reach on a vector walk?
To investigate the relationship between the distance the ruler drops and the time taken, we need to do some mathematical modelling...
In Fill Me Up we invited you to sketch graphs as vessels are filled with water. Can you work out the equations of the graphs?
Can you work out which processes are represented by the graphs?
How would you design the tiering of seats in a stadium so that all spectators have a good view?
Which dilutions can you make using only 10ml pipettes?
Explore the properties of perspective drawing.
Imagine different shaped vessels being filled. Can you work out
what the graphs of the water level should look like?
In which Olympic event does a human travel fastest? Decide which events to include in your Alternative Record Book.
Get some practice using big and small numbers in chemistry.
Explore the meaning behind the algebra and geometry of matrices
with these 10 individual problems.
Explore the shape of a square after it is transformed by the action
of a matrix.
Explore how matrices can fix vectors and vector directions.
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Fri June 1, 2012
Annual Creek Sweep Aims to Clean Floyds Fork
The 21st annual Floyds Fork Creek Sweep is tomorrow. Volunteers will boat down the river and climb along its banks picking up trash, in an effort to keep the waterway clean.
Teena Halbig is the co-president of the Floyds Fork Environmental Association. She says the annual cleanup is necessary.
“We like to do education and awareness and raise people’s consciousness about how when they throw something out the car window or leave something alongside the road, every time it rains it just keeps migrating toward the creek,” she said. “We need to take better care of our natural resource.”
Halbig says in the past, volunteers have fished items as diverse as oil drums, rolls of carpet and tires out of Floyds Fork.
Volunteers are meeting at Floyds Fork Park at 8:00 tomorrow morning. For more details, visit the Floyds Fork Environmental Association's Facebook page.
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The proposal on next Tuesday’s ballot calls for allowing patients with qualifying conditions to buy marijuana from nonprofit dispensaries with a doctor’s recommendation, but local governments also could ban the facilities. Local officials opposed to the measure are exploring that as a backup plan, but also say they’re worried it could lead to a proliferation of home-grown marijuana.
That’s because while the proposal allows local governments to restrict the dispensaries, they cannot prohibit another part of the measure that would allow qualifying patients to grow their own marijuana if they live more than five miles away from a dispensary.
“The ability to grow six marijuana plants could make this more pervasive in our society than the dispensaries themselves. I think each jurisdiction, each county would have to look at that question,” said Chris Villines, executive director of the Association of Arkansas Counties, a group opposed to the measure. “Do you want the dispensaries or do you want to have a more ubiquitous growing operation across your county?”
Supporters of the medical marijuana proposal say they wanted to allow local governments to have some say over the number of dispensaries, but didn’t want to render the law moot by allowing them to prohibit patients from growing themselves. Chris Kell, campaign strategist for Arkansans for Compassionate Care, said he believes counties would rather allow the dispensaries so they could have some oversight rather than banning them outright.
“It’s going to be treated the same way alcohol is now,” Kell said.
Forty of Arkansas’ 75 counties ban alcohol sales, but allow exceptions for private clubs. Kell thinks it would be counterproductive for local governments to ban the dispensaries, and said most patients would prefer going to them rather than growing their own marijuana.
Health conditions that would qualify under the proposal include cancer, glaucoma, HIV, AIDS and Alzheimer’s disease. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana in some way.
Arkansas’ proposal faces an uphill fight in next week’s election, even though backers have enjoyed a wide fundraising advantage. Many of the state’s top elected officials, including Gov. Mike Beebe and Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, are opposed to the measure.
More than half the voters surveyed in a University of Arkansas poll released last week said they were opposed to the proposal. The annual Arkansas Poll, taken Oct. 9-14, surveyed 800 people and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
That polling has meant many mayors and city officials aren’t yet making plans to restrict or prohibit the dispensaries. The county association and the Arkansas Municipal League say they haven’t yet heard from local governments seeking guidance on what to do if the measure passes.
“They haven’t gone to Plan B because they don’t think it will pass,” said Don Zimmerman, the municipal league’s executive director. The league hasn’t taken a formal position on the measure, but its public safety advisory council has opposed it, Zimmerman said.
Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola, a former local prosecutor, is among those who are skeptical of the proposal. He said he will look at any restrictions the city can enact if voters approve it.
One of the chief opponents of the measure, Jerry Cox, said if the proposal passes, he will make it his priority to encourage the state Legislature to repeal the law. That would require a two-thirds vote in both the state House and Senate.
Cox, who heads the Family Council Action Committee, said he also will likely lobby local governments to ban the dispensaries.
“What you’re dealing with is varying degrees of bad,” he said. “Letting people grow their own and having dispensaries is worse than if we didn’t have the dispensaries.”
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.couriernews.com/pages/full_story/push?article-Marijuana+proposal+could+lead+to+local+fights%20&id=20663931
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Permanent Senate Commission for the Investigation of Health Hazards of Chemical Compounds in the Work Area
The Commission for the Investigation of Health Hazards of Chemical Compounds in the Work Area (MAK Commission) is responsible for determining the current state of research relating to the health risks posed by substances and materials used at the workplace and for advising public authorities accordingly. To this end, the MAK Commission draws up proposals for MAK values (maximum concentration at the workplace) for volatile chemicals and dusts, BAT values (biological tolerance values), and also develops procedures to analyse chemical substances in the air and in biological materials. Substances that are carcinogenic, germ cell mutagenic, sensitizing or percutaneously absorbed, as well as those that pose a risk to the embryo or fetus, are classified accordingly.
On 1 July of each year, the proposals for the MAK and BAT values and the classifications are published in the annual List of MAK and BAT values, which is presented to the German Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs. The Ministry’s Committee on Hazardous Substances ("AGS") subsequently reviews the proposals and makes a recommendation for their inclusion in the Hazardous Substances Ordinance.
In addition to the publication of the List of MAK and BAT Values, detailed scientific documentations are given for all the proposed MAK and BAT values and classifications, which are published every year in German and English, on approximately 1,000 printed pages.
Since 2005, the MAK and BAT values, with their proposed classifications and associated scientific documentations, are put up for public discussion for six months prior to publication.
Furthermore, methods for the analysis of the substances in the air and in biological materials are published at regular intervals.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.dfg.de/en/dfg_profile/statutory_bodies/senate/health_hazards/index.html
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| 0.936276
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Tic Tac Toe for Three Equations in a Row!
We all know how difficult it is to get some fifth graders to sit down and complete math homework, let alone do additional practice to review new skills. One way to “trick” your child into getting extra practice with one-step equations is to play a variation of the classic game, tic tac toe. Your child will be so busy strategizing ways to get “3-in-a-row”, she may not realize she's actually practicing important pre-algebraic skills. So, skip the workbooks and break out the tic tac toe board—your child's sudden enthusiasm for math just might surprise you!
What You Need:
- small paper clips or other objects to use as markers
- tic tac toe board
- equation list (see below)
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<urn:uuid:ddae1323-814d-40b4-9cf7-75945210c018>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.education.com/activity/article/Tic_Tac_Toe_fifth/
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The Spanish city of Valencia sits under a blanket of ash, as two converging fires continue to devour the eastern coast of the country. Since the blaze ignited last week, more than 45,000 hectares of land have been destroyed, forcing upwards of 2,000 people to flee their homes.
Drought in the Sahel region of West Africa is fast becoming a humanitarian crisis; Henry Makiwa travels to Burkina Faso to see how the lack of rain and an influx of refugees have affected the country.
I read with a great deal of dismay last week that a House of Lords committee proposed an overall hike on water prices without calling for a greater number of water meters in homes. It was even more disconcerting that the findings of the committee were echoed in today’s Queen’s Speech, when the announcement of the government’s new Draft Water Bill shied away from mentioning water meters.
Over the past few months, a barrage of posters and news reports have informed us that the country is now in drought after two of the driest years on record. But would restricting our individual water usage help the situation – or should water companies be doing more?
I have to admit that I am a self-indulgent when it comes to showers. There is nothing I like more than to stand under hot water, washing the sticky sleep out of my eyes, preparing for the day ahead. It is also the easiest cure for a hangover, although if you actually want to recover completely I would recommend going into work or doing some exercise.
For decades Africa has been the problem continent, and the Horn it’s struggling epicentre. Ravaged by leaders unanimously opting for autocratic rule, looted and fractured by base sectarian warfare and economically stifled by unyielding climate change and abusive agriculture mechanisation; Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea have monopolised global tragedy for as long as the world has been watching.
The faces of hunger and famine have become part of perennial shame as drought hits the East African region once again. I have to say, this did not come as a surprise – the writing has been on the wall as early as last year August.
Latest from Independent journalists on Twitter
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://blogs.independent.co.uk/tag/drought/
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Starting a business requires funding in the form of start-up capital and initial operating costs. Although personal savings and loans may be adequate to start a small business along with a great idea, some businesses require a lot more capital that can be borne by savings alone. Of course, with greater capital required comes a higher risk level as more sales and revenue would need to be generated by the business in order to support the repayment amount as well as to produce a healthy return on investment percentage.
The second option to obtaining capital would be from people that you know, such as friends, family and relatives. Equity financing could be obtained from there sources, or just as a low-cost loan payable over a certain period of time. This will be a great benefit to you as you won't have to adhere to conditions and the higher interest rates imposed by financing intuitions or other stakeholders.
The most common source of financing would be from lenders such as banks and credit unions. These organizations are in the business of providing financing and will impose a particular interest rate on your loan. Apart from that, they may impose restrictions on conditions on repayments and even on limitations on the usage of funds provided to you. This type of loans are normally known as debt financing, as obtaining capital from these sources increases the debt of your company.
Equity financing can be obtained by other shareholders or venture capitalists. Capital obtained from venture capitalists are regarded as an investment into the company and not as a loan. As venture capitalists are very selective in the projects that they fund, as they want to ensure that their investments pay off multiple-fold. Therefore, venture capitalist funded projects are subjected to scrutiny from venture capitalists in terms of management, decision making and accounting procedures.
The U.S. government has realized that the importance of funding to fuel the growth of small businesses and thus have launched the Small Business Administration organization for this purpose. There are various loans offered based on the nature of the business, the amount of financing required as well as the repayment period. Apart from that, certain types of loans are funded by lending partners of the SBA, with the SBA acting as a guarantor for the loan. This way, a longer loan repayment period can be obtained, with a lower risk on the lender.
There are also many other capital sources that can be obtained by a small business. This would be a loan from a credit card, employee stock ownership, home loan refinancing or even purchase order financing. All of these are just glimpses of the various ways in which money can be obtained to start a business, each of them with varying cost levels. Therefore, it is up to the business owner to decide on the type of financing source would be most suited for the business.
Once you have determined your financing source, you will then need to develop a business plan that you will propose to your potential capital source. This requires expertise in producing a viable and impressive business plan, and therefore needs to be as comprehensive as possible in provided business information, forecasts and budgets.
The first section of the business plan would be on the background of the company. Here, details of the name of the business, the physical location, the amount required for the startup and information on the business owners are provided. Then, the next section will be a holistic explanation on the nature of the business, its uniqueness, the long-term potential as well as the sustainability of the business. A listing of key success factors as well as the strength of the business idea would be ideal to be used to support the business plan.
After that, a listing of the management team of the company, their background and credentials as well as their stake in the company is drafted. Information on the industry and market of the business will follow, where the maturity and opportunities available within the industry is highlighted. Finally, critical financial information, incorporating forecasts and budgeting are listed. This would be an area of utmost importance to anyone evaluating your plan, and thus needs to be done with accuracy to create a positive impression.
About the Author: Matt Bacak became "#1 Best Selling Author" in just a few short hours.
Recent Entrepreneur Magazine?s e-Biz radio show host is
turning Authors, Speakers, and Experts into Overnight Success Stories.
Discover The Secrets http://promotingtips.com
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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en
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Judith S. Beck, Ph.D., therapist.
In this videotape, Judith Beck, Ph.D. interviews a depressed patient. While the videotape can stand on its own, it is a valuable companion to Dr. Aaron T. Beck's classic videotapes, providing explanations of the techniques he uses in the videotapes listed above. This videotape is in two parts. In the first part, Dr. Judith Beck is interviewed about the forthcoming therapy session with a depressed patient. The interview continues periodically throughout the therapy session, as Dr. Beck explains what she is doing and why. In the second part of the videotape, the viewer can watch the entire therapy session without interruption. Dr. Beck illustrates the basics of cognitive therapy: doing a mood check, setting and prioritizing an agenda, discussing a problem, collecting data, eliciting and responding to automatic thoughts and images, problem-solving, assigning homework, and eliciting feedback.
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<urn:uuid:a62b8f65-ee79-4376-b6ca-6c1b2153e564>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.beckinstitute.org/cbtstore/CBT-Techniques/Product-Detail/89/categoryid--1/productid--7/
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en
| 0.900588
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The audacity of stem cell hype
Barack Obama overturns Bush order, permits funding of ESCR
On March 10, U.S. President Barack Obama signed two executive orders in support of embryonic stem cell research, reversing course on two significant, life-affirming restrictions on the research that had been put in place during the Bush administration. The president and supporters of the new policies predict that embryonic stem cell research will bring about cures and treatments for diseases and illnesses as diverse as diabetes and Parkinson’s, and perhaps even repair spinal cord injuries. That there is little indication such enthusiasm is warranted has been ignored.
Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent – that is, the cells can turn into any other cell in the human body and, theoretically at least, be coaxed into transforming into tissue and organs necessary for regenerative medicine. Pro-life opposition to such research is based on the fact that the embryonic human being is killed in the process of harvesting the stem cells; thus, the process is tantamount to murder. But opposition need not rely on moral arguments, considering that somatic (adult) stem cells harvested from ethical sources including bone marrow, skin cells and umbilical cord blood, have provided actual clinical trial success stories.
In 2001, then-president George W. Bush signed an executive order limiting federal funding of embryonic stem cell research to existing lines of embryonic stem cells. He was reaching for a political compromise that made researchers and patient advocacy groups happy on the one hand by providing taxpayer funding of then-promising research and pro-life and religious groups on the other satisfied that the sanctity of human life would be protected in such research by limiting scientific exploration on the existing stem lines and prohibiting funding for newly harvested stem cells. At the time, pro-ESCR forces applauded Bush’s decision.
Over time, however, the media and Bush’s political opponents characterized the policy as a ban on ESCR. That’s not true. Private companies faced no legal restrictions on creating or harvesting embryonic stem cells for research and numerous states, including California, Michigan and New Jersey, have provided state taxpayer funding of ESCR.
Notably, private capital has supported somatic stem cell research. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that of 150 private biotech companies engaged in stem cell research, only one, Geron Inc., has a clinical stage embryonic stem cell product.
The lack of private sector interest in embryonic stem cells is an indication that they are considered inferior and are nowhere near delivering the promised treatments their enthusiastic boosters promise. That is why ESC researchers so desperately want federal funding for their work.
While many supporters of the new funding policy are heralding the potential of ESCR, the president warned that treatments may prove elusive, saying, “I cannot guarantee that we will find the treatments and cures we seek.” For Obama, lifting the restrictions on funding was about getting politics out of science policy. Announcing the executive order, Obama chastised his predecessor for putting political decisions – appeasing his religious base and his own pro-life principles – ahead of promoting science. Indeed, Obama went so far as to couch his new policy in morality, while condemning the moral considerations of others. “In recent years, when it comes to stem cell research,” he said, “rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values. In this case, I believe the two are not inconsistent. As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering. I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research – and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly.” Harold Varmus, co-chair of Obama’s science advisory board, said the new guidelines on ESCR to be developed by the White House Office of Science and Technology would restore “scientific integrity” to government decision-making.
Pro-life and religious leaders condemned the new policy.
Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, said the funding is as wrong as it is unnecessary: “Embryonic stem cell research is a destructive and outdated method that has become a holy grail to political and scientific activists who seek no moral restraints on their work.”
Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, said March 10 was a “sad day,” because Washington was now going to “fund research that exploits living members of the human species as raw material for research.”
Pointing to the clinical trial success of somatic stem cells and the recent discovery of a technique in which scientists can induce pluripotent stem cells from ethically derived stem cells, Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, called ESCR “the research of the past.” She noted that tax dollars are better spent on “research that protects life and helps patients now.”
Speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives on the day Obama made his announcement, Rep. Chris Smith (R, NJ) condemned the “dehumanizing of nascent human life,” noting that alternatives “work on both ethics grounds and efficacy grounds.”
Cardinal Justin Rigali, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, said it was wrong to treat “vulnerable human beings as mere products to be harvested.” He warned that it will encourage further “destruction of innocent human life.”
Indeed, the ink on the executive order wasn’t even dry when pro-ESCR forces were calling for liberalization of legal limits on the creation of embryos for the purpose of research. A 1996 law, the Dickey-Wicker amendment, prohibits federal funds from being used to create embryos that will be destroyed for research purposes. Some politicians and scientists are clamouring for a repeal of the Dickey-Wicker law to increase the availability of embryos as a source of stem cells. The National Right to Life Committee warned of “human embryo farms” to be used for the mass harvest of stem cells. The NRLC’s Douglas Johnson said researchers “will never be satisfied only with the so-called leftover embryos” from fertility clinics.
Earlier this year, Congress voted a 33 per cent increase in funding for the National Institutes of Health, from $29 billion to $39.5 billion. Obama’s announcement will allow the NIH to use some of that $10.5 billion increase to fund ESCR. The Wall Street Journal reported that one (unnamed) senator has floated the idea of a government bailout for the biotechnology sector, which could open the floodgates to embryonic stem cell research.
On the same day as the funding announcement, Obama reversed a 2007 Bush executive order requiring the Department of Health and Human Services to support ethical and more promising adult stem cell research. The move was defended as necessary to permit taxpayer funding of ESCR, but critics noted that Obama’s signing ceremony for this reversal was held in private and was not accompanied by a press conference or alluded to during his earlier press conference on funding.
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Historians of the Depression frequently point out that at first one couldn't necessarily see it, so it was difficult to get leaders to act. The mortgage crisis poses a similar problem of representation. How do you visualize predatory lending? defaults on adjustable rate mortgages? foreclosure? Put another way, what exactly do we see when we look for the mortgage crisis?
The visual narrative of the mortgage crisis tends to be about places rather than people. While you will see a few images of people (typically, women) who have lost their homes, for the most part you get lots of images like these. "For sale" signs speak not of opportunity (what a cute house! what a great neighborhood!) but of threat. Shot from ground level at an unnatural angle, they are yellow, the color of warning, where "must see inside" is not an invitation but a plea, and "auction coming soon" is the sad and perhaps predictable end to an unknown story. And it's not just the signs, it's the houses those signs are in front of. Nice houses with freshly painted shutters and front porches. New houses in "good" neighborhoods. But everything is visually distorted. The houses loom over us, practically shouting out the question, if everything is so nice, why isn't anything moving?
In contrast to these unpopulated images of stasis, another image seems to be emerging, that of the repo bus:
Whether you call it preying on others' misfortunes or think of it as good business for hard times, either way it's repo-tourism. The smiling, casually-clad tourists on the buses cruise around town, looking for bargains and listening as the real estate agent-cum-tour guide chats them up, makes jokes, and turns grim statistics into the dream of big returns. This is where the movement is and this is where the people are.
(Top, left to right: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters; Kimberly Wright/Reuters. Bottom, left to right: therealestatebloggers.com; Jim Zarolli, NPR)
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Cisco Meraki MX Security Appliances support cellular connectivity through 3G and 4G USB modems, maximizing WAN uptime by relying on the cellular connection in case of downtime of primary ISP links.
Cellular support for maximum uptime
3G cellular support includes 1xEV-DO, W-CDMA, and HSPA from major cellular carriers, and 4G cellular support includes LTE and WiMAX.
Seamless, automatic failover with traffic prioritization
In the event of a connectivity failure of the WAN interfaces, traffic is automatically redirected to the 3G/4G cellular modem interface within seconds. The MX's built-in traffic prioritization engine redirects flows and allocates capacity based on your prioritized application needs.
WAN connectivity for remote sites
Use 3G/4G connectivity to connect remote sites that have no Internet connectivity, are limited to slow, high latency lines, or only have prohibitively expensive broadband connectivity options.
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Psychological Issues and Challenging Behavior Some psychologists say'reinforcement' is central to the way we behave. In other words we repeat certain behaviors because we get something positive from doing them and we restrain ourselves from other activities because of the potential for punishment of some sort. Learning never stops but certainly can change in diseases such as Alzheimers. So in Alzheimer's the learnt responses from the past may be disorganised or inappropriate as the person misperceives their surroundings and attempts to form, what for them, is a course of behavior likely to achieve their needs.
A change in mood state, such as depression, can certainly result from Alzheimer's. Equally, mood states can follow the person into Alzheimer's. A mood state such as depression can be just as much a challenge to the caregiver as hypomania. Progression into dementia is sometimes classified as simple or paranoid deterioration.
Related Resources about challenging behavior in dementia
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Jason's life is beginning to unravel. His grades have slipped, he's moody, he doesn't talk to his friends, and he has stopped showing up for practice. Jason's friends know he has been experimenting with drugs and now they're worried he has become addicted.
Defining an addiction is tricky, and knowing how to handle one is even harder.
What Are Substance Abuse and Addiction?
The difference between substance abuse and addiction is very slight. Substance abuse means using an illegal substance or using a legal substance in the wrong way. Addiction begins as abuse, or using a substance like marijuana or cocaine.
You can abuse a drug (or alcohol) without having an addiction. For example, just because Sara smoked pot a few times doesn't mean that she has an addiction, but it does mean that she's abusing a drug — and that could lead to an addiction.
People can get addicted to all sorts of substances. When we think of addiction, we usually think of alcohol or illegal drugs. But people become addicted to medications, cigarettes, even glue!
And some substances are more addictive than others: Drugs like crack or heroin are so addictive that they might only be used once or twice before the user loses control.
Addiction means a person has no control over whether he or she uses a drug or drinks. Someone who's addicted to cocaine has grown so used to the drug that he or she has to have it. Addiction can be physical, psychological, or both.
Being physically addicted means a person's body actually becomes dependent on a particular substance (even smoking is physically addictive). It also means building tolerance to that substance, so that a person needs a larger dose than ever before to get the same effects.
Someone who is physically addicted and stops using a substance like drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes may experience withdrawal symptoms. Common symptoms of withdrawal are diarrhea, shaking, and generally feeling awful.
Psychological addiction happens when the cravings for a drug are psychological or emotional. People who are psychologically addicted feel overcome by the desire to have a drug. They may lie or steal to get it.
A person crosses the line between abuse and addiction when he or she is no longer trying the drug to have fun or get high, but has come to depend on it. His or her whole life centers around the need for the drug. An addicted person — whether it's a physical or psychological addiction or both — no longer feels like there is a choice in taking a substance.
Signs of Addiction
The most obvious sign of an addiction is the need to have a particular drug or substance. However, many other signs can suggest a possible addiction, such as changes in mood or weight loss or gain. (These also are signs of other conditions too, though, such as depression or eating disorders.)
Signs that you or someone you know may have a drug or alcohol addiction include:
- use of drugs or alcohol as a way to forget problems or to relax
- withdrawal or keeping secrets from family and friends
- loss of interest in activities that used to be important
- problems with schoolwork, such as slipping grades or absences
- changes in friendships, such as hanging out only with friends who use drugs
- spending a lot of time figuring out how to get drugs
- stealing or selling belongings to be able to afford drugs
- failed attempts to stop taking drugs or drinking
- anxiety, anger, or depression
- mood swings
- changes in sleeping habits
- feeling shaky or sick when trying to stop
- needing to take more of the substance to get the same effect
- changes in eating habits, including weight loss or gain
If you think that you or someone you care about is addicted to drugs or alcohol, recognizing the problem is the first step in getting help.
Many people think they can kick the problem on their own, but that rarely works. Find someone you trust to talk to. It may help to talk to a friend or someone your own age at first, but a supportive and understanding adult is your best option for getting help. If you can't talk to your parents, you might want to approach a school counselor, relative, doctor, favorite teacher, or religious leader.
Unfortunately, overcoming addiction is not easy. Quitting drugs or drinking is probably going to be one of the hardest things you or your friend have ever done. It's not a sign of weakness if you need professional help from a trained drug counselor or therapist. Most people who try to kick a drug or alcohol problem need professional assistance or a treatment program to do so.
Tips for Recovery
Once you start a treatment program, try these tips to make the road to recovery less bumpy:
- Tell your friends about your decision to stop using drugs. Your true friends will respect your decision. This might mean that you need to find a new group of friends who will be 100% supportive. Unless everyone decides to kick their drug habit at once, you probably won't be able to hang out with the friends you did drugs with.
- Ask your friends or family to be available when you need them. You might need to call someone in the middle of the night just to talk. If you're going through a tough time, don't try to handle things on your own — accept the help your family and friends offer.
- Accept invitations only to events that you know won't involve drugs or alcohol. Going to the movies is probably safe, but you may want to skip a Friday night party until you're feeling more secure. Plan activities that don't involve drugs. Go to the movies, try bowling, or take an art class with a friend.
- Have a plan about what you'll do if you find yourself in a place with drugs or alcohol. The temptation will be there sometimes, but if you know how you're going to handle it, you'll be OK. Establish a plan with your parents, siblings, or other supportive friends and adults so that if you call home using a code, they'll know that your call is a signal you need a ride out of there.
- Remind yourself that having an addiction doesn't make a person bad or weak. If you fall back into old patterns (backslide) a bit, talk to an adult as soon as possible. There's nothing to be ashamed about, but it's important to get help soon so that all of the hard work you put into your recovery is not lost.
If you're worried about a friend who has an addiction, you can use these tips to help him or her. For example, let your friend know that you are available to talk or offer your support. If you notice a friend backsliding, talk about it openly and ask what you can do to help.
If your friend is going back to drugs or drinking and won't accept your help, don't be afraid to talk to a nonthreatening, understanding adult, like your parent or school counselor. It may seem like you're ratting your friend out, but it's the best support you can offer.
Above all, offer a friend who's battling an addiction lots of encouragement and praise. It may seem corny, but hearing that you care is just the kind of motivation your friend needs.
Recovering from a drug or alcohol addiction doesn't end with a 6-week treatment program. It's a lifelong process. Many people find that joining a support group can help them stay clean. There are support groups specifically for teens and younger people. You'll meet people who have gone through the same experiences you have, and you'll be able to participate in real-life discussions about drugs that you won't hear in your school's health class.
Many people find that helping others is also the best way to help themselves. Your understanding of how difficult the recovery process can be will help you to support others — both teens and adults — who are battling an addiction.
If you do have a relapse, recognizing the problem as soon as possible is critical. Get help right away so that you don't undo all the hard work you put into your initial recovery. And, if you do have a relapse, don't ever be afraid to ask for help!
Reviewed by: Michele Van Vranken, MD
Date reviewed: January 2011
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- Potential measures against the Faroe Islands
- Council Mandate Brings CFP Reform Closer
- North Sea RAC meets the Norwegian Fishermen’s Association
- European Commission unveils maritime strategy for the Atlantic
- All Aboard for the Reform of Common Fisheries Policy
- New Managing Director at Qalut Vónin
- Commission calls for cooperation to boost sustainable aquaculture in Europe
- Russia complains over EU-Mauritania Fisheries Partnership Agreement before WTO
- Damanaki at Seafood Expo 2013
- Damanaki launching new online market intelligence tool for fisheries
- Action Plan to save sea birds
- World`s largest Seafood Trade Fair opens tomorrow
- Agriculture and Fisheries Council, 22 April 2013
- Reviving the Mediterranean blue economy through cooperation
- Commissioner Maria Damanaki Welcomes European Parliament support to ban discarding in the Skagerrak
Mitsubishi hoards frozen bluefin tuna
At the time of crisis when the fishing stocks decline Japanese firm Mitsubishi hoards frozen bluefin tuna.
Mitsubishi, Japanese mega-conglomerate, was alleged to have started hoarding thousands of tons of bluefin tuna just as stocks of the fish plummet worldwide. This raises eyebrows and a wave of concern spread out globally. It is observed that if the fish goes commercially extinct, the company is hopeful that it can turn a hefty profit from its frozen bluefin cache. It is fact that bluefin is one of the world’s most endangered fish, and is expected to go commercially extinct by 2012 if drastic measures aren’t taken to stem overfishing.
Conservationists informed that legally commercial hauls are limited to 22,000 tons per year, but the actual catch is 60,000 tons, more than four times the maximum sustainable level. By its own estimates, Mitsubishi controls 35 to 40 percent of that stock. Commenting on that Mitsubishi admits that it deep-freezes some of its catch to smooth out short-term supply, some environmentalists believe the company is attempting to corner the bluefin market and hoard inventories as supply continues its downward spiral.
Charles Clover in his environmental documentary film The End of the Line shows that big-fishing is accountable for deep-freezing up to 20,000 tons of the fish annually. Clover is at the forefront of an international campaign to raise awareness about overfishing. Last year, Greenpeace launched an advertising campaign likening bluefin to their critically endangered land counterparts.
WorldFishingToday d. 06-06-2009
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Excellent learning tools and great sounds at a remarkable price!
Not only does the 61-note Casio LK-230 feature the helpful Step-Up learning system, in which the practice pieces are broken down into small learning units that are then learned step by step, the keyboard also inspires musical creativity. Its Voice Pad function makes it really simple to play back voice samples and other sounds and effects. The LK-230 also includes the AHL sound source that boasts of 48 notes, 150 rhythms, an extended automatic accompaniment feature with an on-bass chord, and a large, easy-to-read display.
The 61 light-up keys on the LK-230 keyboard guide you through a whole host of songs. A practice piece is divided into individual sections and then learned step by step, just like in a traditional music lesson. This 3-level, interactive learning system features light-up keys and offers a simple way to achieve your goals.
Some additional benefits of the LK-230 Casio keyboard include: vivid sound diversity, in that the LK-230 can play up to 48 notes simultaneously. Also, the innovative 400 AHL tones produce top-quality sound perfectly suited to both classical piano music and other genres. 150 rhythms provide you with a colorful overview of the world of music, and you can listen, sing along, and play along while the LK-230 stores 110 top-quality songs. The large, easy-to-read LC display shows you key information at a glance, and whether you're giving a live performance to an audience or alone in your living room, an impressive 10 reverb effects enhance the sound diversity of your keyboard.
The tried-and-tested interface quickly and simply connects your Casio keyboard with the computer: plug and play with Windows XP/Vista and Mac from OSX 10.3 ensures optimum compatibility. Recordings can be played back with the keyboard and pads using the sampling function (audio input), and 10 additional sound effects are provided to boost the fun factor.
The Voice Pad function provides a simple way of playing back voice samples, as well as other effects and sounds using the keyboard's pads. Moreover, the audio-in function lets you record your own samples of up to ten seconds, which can then also be played through the Voice Pad function. In addition, you can simply plug in and get singing: The Casio LK-230 has a practical microphone input that allows users to sing along to a selection of songs or make recordings using the sampling function. It's easy to connect a CD or MP3 player to the audio input and play along with your favorite song on the keyboard.
The 110 practice pieces in the electric keyboard's Song Bank can be controlled through the Song Bank Controller in a similar way to a CD player, allowing players to practice the piece effectively. The system features two loudspeakers, and with a power of two times two watts, it produces an impressive and balanced sound.
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Visitors arriving by car or transit have no more than a ten-block walk between the farthest points on campus, including the buildings in the Fairlie Poplar District. Most trips between parking and the main campus buildings are much shorter. (See Figure 3.4)
Decatur Street is the primary pedestrian corridor. From the heart of campus, there is a shortcut to the Fairlie Poplar District facilities through Kell Hall and Hurt Plaza, then on through Woodruff Park and across Peachtree Street.
A mid-block pedestrian crossing on Courtland Street at University Center is controlled by a traffic signal. This is a busy connection between the primary academic block and the numerous student activities and support spaces to the east. The same connection between the two blocks is also possible at grade, below Courtland Street, by crossing on Collins Street between the plaza stairs on the west to the University Center ground floor on the east. (See Image 3.15) Ground floor and internal routes provide an option for covered circulation during inclement weather. However, these spaces are unattractive and may feel unsafe after dark.
© 2006 Georgia State University.
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Mental Accounting and Gasoline Consumption
When the price of gasoline increases ... the market share of regular gasoline increases while the market share of higher quality gasoline falls.
While conventional economic theory suggests that decisionmakers treat a dollar as a dollar no matter how it was earned or is to be spent, in practice some households may engage in "mental accounting" -- setting aside special budgets for certain purposes, like food, clothing, or transportation. Households that budget this way may respond to a given income gain, or loss, differently depending upon how it arrives. For example, a household may react differently to a tax rebate than to a comparable raise in salary. Or, a household may reduce spending on vehicle-related luxuries more in response to an increase in fuel prices than in response to a comparable loss in financial wealth.
In Mental Accounting and Consumer Choice: Evidence from Commodity Price Shocks (NBER Working Paper No. 18248), Justine Hastings and Jesse Shapiro consider this type of mental accounting with data on purchases of gasoline. Using aggregate data covering 1990 to 2009 and data on purchases at a retailer for 2006 to 2009, the authors find a clear and positive effect of gasoline prices on the market share of regular gasoline, the lowest quality gasoline available. When the price of gasoline increases -- typically by similar amounts at all quality levels -- the market share of regular gasoline increases while the market share of higher quality gasoline falls.
The extent of this substitution from higher quality gasoline to regular gasoline cannot be explained by income effects alone. During the 2008 financial crisis, for example, the income effect would have predicted an increase in the purchases of regular gasoline and a decrease in the purchases of premium gasoline. In practice, the opposite occurred.
Moreover, the income effects necessary to explain the relationship between gasoline prices and quality choices are extremely high. Households adjusted their mix of gasoline purchases almost 20 times more to a reduction in their buying power because of an increase in gasoline prices than to an equivalent reduction in income from other sources.
Psychological models of decisionmaking may be able to help explain the buying patterns observed in the data. These findings also have interesting implications for retailer behavior -- they indicate that consumers will put a higher premium on saving money on gas in high-gas-price times than in low-gas-price times. This implies that retailers will face more intense competition during high-price times. That prediction is borne out in data that shows lower retail margins on gasoline in periods when oil prices are high.
--Claire BrunelThe Digest is not copyrighted and may be reproduced freely with appropriate attribution of source.
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A tangible product of early city planning and housing reform, the absorption of the garden city movement by the town planning cause enshrined aspirations of house-and-garden living within a planned suburban environment as a cornerstone of urban reform worldwide. In Melbourne, both idealists and technicians took up the goal of 'one family one house one garden'. Sir James Barrett used his long-term presidency of the Victorian Town Planning and Parks Association to endorse low-density garden suburbs over several decades.
Finding fertile ground in the self-styled garden metropolis, the town-planned house-and-garden suburb was adapted to local conditions in various ways. The State Savings Bank's Garden City estate (1929) at Fishermans Bend was the most notable outcome. The 184 duplex 'cindcrete' houses designed by G.B. Leith were directly inspired by British models like Welwyn Garden City and London County Council's Becontree Estate. Progressive surveyors worked with private subdividers to define the garden suburb as a distinctive physical entity with a street pattern breaking the hegemony of the gridiron, discouraging through-traffic, and reserving land for parks and gardens and other public uses.
The leading practitioner was Saxil Tuxen whose largest commission was the 100-acre Merrilands estate at Preston, designed complete with civic centre. Walter Burley Griffin lent his expertise and name to several schemes: the Mount Eagle and Glenard estates at Heidelberg were compact, curvilinear schemes respectful of conservation values and exemplifying the sensitivity of Griffin's distinctive 'land planning'. Other Griffin projects included the Ranelagh Country Club at Mount Eliza and the City View estate at Keilor East. By the depression years the garden suburb was reduced to harmonious cul-de-sac developments like Lempriere Avenue in St Kilda and A.V. Jennings' Beauville estate at Murrumbeena. But the goal of orderly and complete residential communities had been accepted universally by the planning profession, state housing authorities, and enlightened developers.
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Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Is Machine Learning Losing Impact?
File under: Seminar Room
The basic argument in her paper is that machine learning might be in danger of losing its impact because the community as a whole has become quite self-referential. People are probably solving real-world problems using ML methods, but there is little sharing of these results within the community. Instead, people focus on existing benchmarks which might have originally had some connection to real-world problems which has been long forgotten, however.
She proposes a number of tasks like $100M solved through ML based decision making or a human life saved through a diagnosis or an intervention recommended by an ML system to get ML back on track.
The paper already generated quite some buzz. There is a heated discussion thread on reddit and many people have responded to it on their blogs, for example, Cheng Soon Ong on the mloss.org blog. I also just found out that she built a website called mlimpact.com which hosts a discussion forum around these topics.
I partly agree with her assessment, however, I think it is wrong to take the main ML conferences and journals as a reference to how much application work is going on. Our group at TU Berlin has always had a strong focus on applications, including neuroscience (in particular brain-computer interfaces), bioinformatics, and computer security, and eventually, you have to start to publish in the conferences and journals of the application field, not in pure ML conferences.
I also think that it is perfectly okay that pure ML is somewhat removed and abstract from real applications. After all, being able to formulate methods abstractly is one of the main reasons there is a discipline like machine learning at all. If everything were always very application specific, it would be very hard to transfer knowledge between people working on different applications.
On the other hand, it is true that there is little return of information from the applications into the pure ML domain, partly because it is very hard to publish application related papers at ML conferences unless they have a significant methodological contribution. I think we’re missing out a lot of interesting insights into the capabilities and limitations of the learning methods we have developed that way.
But I think there are also other problems. The hype around Big Data and Data Science is pretty big right now. As I’ve discussed in a previous post I think machine learners are one of three groups who can potentially contribute a lot to this field (the others being data ming people, and computational statisticians). Still, from talking to my colleagues and other people in ML I get the feeling that we’re losing the race to get our share of the cake, mostly to data mining people who have much better expertise on the technological side, but often lack the methodological depth of machine learners.
I think the main reason why this is happening is that machine learning has been a bit too successful in finding an abstract mathematical language in which to formulate their problems, which mostly statistics and linear algebra. If faced with a concrete problem, the typical machine learner goes through a very painful stage where he tries to get the data, convert it into matrices, cleanse it, so that he can finally load it into matlab, scipy or R. Now he can relax and finally feel at home. Honestly, many of my colleagues consider databases as just another file format, a way to store and retrieve data.
The problem with this, however is that as a data scientist, you also need to be able to put your stuff into production, which means dealing with all kinds of enterprise level technology like web services, databases, messaging middleware, and questions of stability and scalability. Also, as opposed to the batch processing mode which one often uses to get results for papers (load data, grind data for a few hours, write out the results), you have to run your analyses in a much more tightly knit fashion, for example, by hooking up your algorithms to a web services and doing all the communication over a network.
Of course, acquiring this kind of expertise also takes a lot of time, and it’s also not strictly required for an academic career in machine learning. However, in particular for many web related tasks, this is exactly what it takes to make an impact in businesses and on the world for machine learning. Instead, I often get the impression that people consider this extra work as merely “programming”, and something which is outside of the scope of a machine learner.
I’m not sure how to change this. In the end, everyone has to decide for himself what pieces of technology to learn. If you want to apply ML beyond academia, you certainly have to learn about Java, databases, NoSQL, Hadoop, and all this stuff at some point.
Actually, I’m not even convinced that it would make sense to have more technical contributions at core ML conferences. However, I definitely think it should become more common place that you know how to implement an algorithm in an enterprise environment as opposed to a ML-friendly matrix based language such as matlab or R.
So in terms of teaching, I think there is a lot of room for improvement. Students should learn a lot more about how to bridge the gap between a purely mathematical version of an ML algorithm and how you would implement it in the real-world. People have been doing this kind of work at Google, Yahoo, and all the other data driven companies for quite some time, but it’s something different than having students implement SMO in matlab.
Thanks to Johnny D. Edwards for originally telling me about the paper at the Berlin Buzzwords conference.
Posted by Mikio L. Braun at Wed Jun 27 21:10:00 +0200 2012blog comments powered by Disqus
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January 10, 2008 | 2:40 pm
Posted by Brad A. Greenberg
Yesterday, I added to my story list the fact that many Jewish Angelenos are upset with American Jewish University for inviting Karl Rove to speak at its vaunted Public Lecture Series. Then today I opened The Jewish Journal and saw that Rob Eshman had dedicated his column to that exact topic, and I realized how much better a story like this reads when it has the voice of someone who is allowed to inject their opinion.
Something has happened in the Jewish community, all across the political and religious spectrum, and it isn’t good.
Somehow too many people in the Jewish community have become stuck in a very dangerous place: their comfort zone.
They are loathe to confront and really hear ideas that differ from their own, and they cleave to the company of voices that echo their preconceived ideas and long-formed opinions.
A few people have picked up on this.
“There was a time,” Haaretz’s Gideon Levy said in an interview with The Nation, “when you’d ask two Israelis a question, and you’d get three different opinions. Now you only get one.”
In The Jerusalem Post, columnist Larry Derfner noted the problem in Israel, where public opinion fell into “lockstep” behind the war in Lebanon, the invasion of Iraq and the criticism of the National Intelligence Estimate report on Iran. How different, Derfner writes, from the Israel of old, where robust public debate was the norm.
“This is a society that’s been brainwashed by consent,” he wrote. “And when all hands are raised together, it not only enhances certainty, it offers the added comfort of unity.”
J.J. Goldberg, The Forward’s brilliant executive editor, wrote that the national Jewish debate is similarly afflicted. In fighting nouveau anti-Semitism, he wrote, “It doesn’t help when Jews ignore or deny Israel’s genuine shortcomings. It doesn’t help when they overreact to criticism—hostile, benign or just clumsy—and intimidate their critics into resentful silence, reinforcing their enemies’ worst stereotypes.”
The response to Goldberg’s essay? One organization head accused him of blaming the Jews for their own victimization.
And here at home things aren’t any better.
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Are Cell Phones Dangerous?
New Assessment from International Research Group Says Cell Phones May Be Carcinogenic to Humans
A leading international group of researchers now says that cell phones may be carcinogenic to humans. The group, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), just completed a meeting from May 24 to 31, 2011, in which they reviewed dozens of studies focusing on the relationship between use of cell phones and cancer. Some of those studies focused specifically on the relationship between use of cell phones and gliomas (a malignant type of brain tumor).
The IARC researchers agreed that there may be a connection between higher rates of cancer and a form of electromagnetic radiation released from cell phones, and have now classified cell phones in Category 2B, a category reserved for materials that may possibly be carcinogenic to humans. Examples of other Category 2B materials include gasoline and napthalene (the traditional ingredient in mothballs).
IARC, which is part of the World Health Organization, published their statement on Tuesday, May 31, 2011, in Lyon, France. IARC’s assessment that cell phones may be associated with higher rates of cancer in humans will now be reviewed by WHO and various national health agencies throughout the world for further decisions and health guidance.
IARC’s assessment is not without its retractors, however. Many researchers question the validity of studies that focused on the relationship between cell phone usage and cancer rates. A major study completed in 2010, for example, looked only at people who already had cancer and asked them how heavily they used their cell phones. Other studies, retractors claim, have not shown that patients with brain tumors reported significantly more use of their cell phones than people who did not have brain tumors.
What are brain tumors?
Brain tumors are tumors that start in the brain and directly destroy brain cells. Brain tumors can also damage cells by creating inflammation that places pressure on various parts of the brain and increasing pressure within the skull. Possible risk factors for brain tumors include radiation therapy to the brain and some types of inherited health conditions (such as neurofibromatosis, Von Hippel-Lindau syndrome, Li-Fraumeni syndrome, and Turcot syndrome). [Learn more about brain tumors.]
Recent Studies About Brain Tumors at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center
New Brain Tumor Vaccine to Be Tested in Humans
December 1, 2010 - For patients with low-grade gliomas, or slow growing brain tumors, a shot in the arm might soon lead to a new treatment therapy. A groundbreaking, first in humans vaccine will be tested in an early phase clinical trial that will soon begin at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Eighteen patients will be the first in the world to receive it. Read more.
"Designer Protein" Opens the Door in Brain Tumor Research
February 1, 2011 - New findings from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Brain Tumor Center of Excellence are redefining future treatments for brain cancer. Proteins designed by Waldemar Debinski, MD, PhD, director of the Brain Tumor Center of Excellence and professor of neurosurgery at Wake Forest Baptist, and colleagues provide a new way to target and destroy glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) cells, the most deadly form of brain cancer, without harming healthy cells. Read more.
No, cell phones don’t cause cancer
Experts say cellphones are possibly carcinogenic
Cell phone radiation ‘possibly carcinogenic,’ experts say
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See how the owners of a large townhome have a landscape designer solve the problem of a sloped backyard and a dull front yard.
By June MaysMore in Outdoors
A Birmingham, Ala., couple couldn’t believe their luck when a larger townhome down the street came up for sale. Before moving, they wanted to have both the new front yard and new backyard redesigned and landscape plans drawn. The busy professional couple were not gardeners, so low maintenance was a priority. They wanted year-round good looks, so evergreens were sure to be part of the solution.
In the front yard, previous owners had taken the shrubs with them, leaving only a dogwood tree, small pane of grass, sidewalk, driveway and mailbox — practically an empty slate.
The backyard would be more of a challenge because the developer had used a bulldozer to scrape the building site out of a steep hill of chert. There were no surviving plants and only thin soil on that hillside. At the top of the hill along the property line was a chainlink fence. An existing 25’x 25’ wooden deck extended from the house. The only hardscape was an existing deck. The owners’ intention was to replace the existing deck flooring and try to make the steep, scarred chert slope look presentable.
Alongside the driveway, a line of evergreen holly, Ilex crenata ‘Soft Touch’ (zones 5-9), was chosen. Growing only 2 to 3 feet tall and wide, it will not interfere with passengers getting out of cars, will need no pruning, yet separate their front yard from the neighbor’s. At the beginning of this low hedge, behind the mailbox, a specimen of Calamagrostis x acutilfora ‘Karl Foerster’is planned for interest.
The panel of Zoysia grass was left bordering the street. Around the dogwood and under the windows, Camellia sasanqua ‘Mino-No-Yuki’ (zones 7-9) was selected for its glossy dark evergreen leaves and pure white long-lasting blooms in late fall/early winter. It is a slow grower and will not need to be pruned for several years. A pyramid holly (Ilex aquifolium ‘Pyramidalis’ zones 3-9), another dependable slow-growing evergreen, will mark the corner of the house.
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Recently spent a delightful couple of hours at Deryck Johnson’s garden and apiary listening to him give a talk on beekeeping equipment.
Over the years I’ve been drawn to various hobbies, and in that time have found the following to be universally true: the advice you treasure most is always of the, “now here’s a trick that’ll save you half an hour / 50 quid / sore thumbs” variety.
Deryck basically spent an hour giving us the benefit of decades of experimentation. I wish I’d filmed it and put in on You Tube. Instead, here’s the novice beekeeper’s print-out-and-keep guide to “25 beekeeping tips you will otherwise probably take years to pick up”. All credit to Deryck Johnson.
A national beehive (with eke to convert it to 14x12), placed on a milk crate stand, and showing coloured crown board, clearer board and queen excluder
Advice on beehives
Empty milk crates – of the type used by milkmen to store milk bottles – make ideal hive stands. Deryck gets a supply of old broken ones from his local dairy.
White catering trays (price £1) slide neatly between hive floor and crate to create a removable surface on which varroa will stand out for monitoring purposes.
Make it easy to ‘read the hive’. Paint the edges of crown boards, queen boards and clearer boards so that you can see at a glance from a distance how the hive is made up:
Crown boards = blue
Clearer boards = green, because workers can ‘go’ through them
Queen excluders = red, because they ‘stop’ the queen.
Use different coloured plastic frame spacers to quickly identify different age foundation (e.g. white new, yellow old).
Squares made out of Xtratherm building insulation make ideal winter beehive insulation if placed between crown board and roof.
In winter, prop open the corners of your crown board with matchsticks to improve ventilation and avoid mould.
Drape a net over the hive in winter to protect it from woodpeckers, being careful to peg the edges away from the sides of the beehive. The bees will still be able to get in and out, but the woodpeckers won’t get through the net.
Home-made bee frame feeder - holds around 3.5 pints of syrup
Car body filler works just as well as wood filler to repair beehives.
Advice on beekeeping smokers
Buy a stainless steel smoker.
Dry grass makes the best and cheapest smoker fuel. It’s cooler and less acrid than cardboard or egg boxes.
Attach a square hook to the back (bellows wide) of your smoker to hang it from your hive and because a square hook is easier to carry with one finger.
Useful things to have in your beekeeping toolkit
Apart from the obvious (hive tools, uncapping tool, marker pens etc) keep:
a laminated (photo)copy of brood timings (Ted Hooper’s Guide to bees and honey features a useful table);
a small tin of drawing pins for marking the top of frames (should they contain queen cells or anything unusual, for example);
hammer and nails (two nails hammered into the top bar of a frame makes a handy emergency lug if the wooden end breaks off);
an empty plastic container (to store any excess bits of wax);
Cheapest beehive mouse guard around:four nails
an empty matchbox (to keep bee samples);
matches (for testing for foul brood);
nail scissors (for wing clipping).
Miscellaneous beekeeping musings
Don’t bother buying propolis remover.
Fabi-Spray, on the other hand, is a good 5-10 second alternative to using a smoker, for quick manipulations.
Nails hammered vertically into a wooden entrance at short intervals make an ideal (and dirt cheap) mouse guard.
After every inspection stick your hive tool through the dishwasher.
Do you have any simple beekeeping tips that save money and hassle? Please share them by leaving a comment.
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It was pointed out to me in a comment this morning about Bertand Russell's Teapot, that theists dismiss the ideas of Santa Claus and The Celestial Teapot outright because of the silliness of the ideas and the incredible unlikeliness that they exist, but fail to see their own shortcomings in judgement about their belief in god or Gods along the same premise. I see why this is, after all, who in their right mind would believe a Teapot could be orbiting the sun? The proposition is ludicrous of course, and it is untestable, unfalsifiable, and not least of all, completely fanciful.
The problem as I see it is that, while the proposition of God is just as untestable, unfalsifiable and fanciful as the idea of a Celestial Teapot
, the God believers have has this idea rammed down their throats by society for their entire lives, and been told not to question it by the same authorities and religious texts that make the claim in the first place. Like I said in my last piece, if something like Russell's Teapot were taught in every school to every child, and referred to by parents and others alike, there would be no doubt that it would be accepted as fact that the teapot actually exists. The difference here is of course that the teapot serves no purpose, whereas the God appeals to some of the very basest fears we have about our lives, deaths and the future. People also claim that we owe our very existences to a god or gods, and that by his very own divine words that we should never question that fact. But unlike the teapot, people make assumptions about the world based on the apparent certainty of God's existence, where he teapot only exists in philosophy and atheistic argument.
If we were to apply the same level of scrutiny to gods as theists apply to Russell's Teapot, the answer would be that there is no proof for his/her/its existence. But even when this is pointed out, it is never enough to convince the true believer. And this is because of the problem of faith.
As CJ Werleman pointed out in my interview with him last weekend, most people who claim to be Christians or Muslims, while they may be familiar with their holy books, have never bothered to try to place these books into an historical context, or question why an author may have written certain passages in a certain way. Who wrote it? What was their intention at the time of writing it? Has it been presented to the reader in these contexts, or has it been interpreted to the reader, either by translation or by a preacher? And if so, what is the likelihood that these texts have been manipulated to suit the wants and needs of the person interpreting it, or the authority over the religion?
People fail to ask these questions of the one thing they claim guides their lives. Surely if something were as important as so many claim in their lives as religion, there would come a point that the questioning of what it really is should come up, but people are told that the victory in this situation is to believe regardless of facts, regardless of doubts and regardless of any historical or social context that may be presented. That's right, the victory over doubt is to ignore the doubt and continue on as if it had never been raised. Name any other situation in life where this is considered to be a virtue. In most cases where doubt surfaces the situation is analysed until either the doubt has proven to be either warranted or unwarranted, but not so for faith. Faith goes against all better judgement of the mind, and it depends upon unerring acceptance of a ludicrous proposition, that just because a person believes something that it is therefore true. If I truly believed that Russell's teapot existed, what would you say about my mental state, given everything else you take as reality in the world?
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Feemster family; Poetry; Religious poetry; Grief; Death
Poem dedicated to Loulie Feemster by Martha A. Feemster at Ridgeway, sympathizing in the loss of her young son, Henry, and assuring her friend that he is happy in heaven. ''Original poem on death of little Henry'' is written on the reverse. 1862.
Grant, Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson), 1822-1885; Civil War; Politicians; Presidents; Politics and government; Generals
Volume 2 of a continuing series (currently 31 volumes) showcasing an edited collection of documents by and about Ulysses S. Grant. Materials in the series span the dates of 1837-1885; volume 2 spans the dates of April-September 1861.
Feemster family; Gaston family; Breastfeeding; Furuncle; Traditional medicine; Feemster, Alexander Whitfield, 1827-1911; Lowndes County (Miss.)
Letter from Loulie Feemster to her husband, Alex W. Feemster, in Selma, Alabama, mainly regarding a boil on her breast, which makes it difficult to feed their baby, Mattie. The doctor recommended that she use ''Tansy poultice'' on it, but she...
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Save water and save cents – or even dollars – on Oct. 5-7 as Georgia holds a sales tax holiday for WaterSense-labeled products.
Those products will be exempt from both state and local sales taxes.
Toilets, showerheads, faucets, irrigation controllers and other products that use at least 20 percent less water while still performing as well or better than conventional models get the WaterSense label. Independent third parties certify that products meet EPA criteria for water efficiency according to the Metropolitan North Georgia Water District.
“Some people think a new showerhead won’t make a difference, but it does,” said Dallas Mayor Boyd Austin, chair of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District. “Every drop of water counts in metro Atlanta, and we can all do our part.”
Showerhead Thousands of gallons a year
Toilet More than 2 gallons a flush (most new homes use low-flow toilets)
The savings could be even greater as residents who buy a WaterSense-labeled toilet may qualify for a rebate. Details about which utilities offer rebates, either directly or through the Metro Water District, are available online.
The following water providers participate in the Metro Water District’s Regional Toilet Rebate Program:
- Cherokee County Water and Sewerage Authority
- City of Woodstock Water and Sewer
The sales tax holiday on WaterSense labeled products will start Friday, Oct. 5 at midnight and will continue through the weekend until 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 7. WaterSense-labeled products with a sales price of $1,500 or less purchased for noncommercial home or personal use during the sales tax holiday will be Georgia state and local sales tax-free.
WaterSense is a partnership program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that seeks to protect the future of our nation's water supply by offering people a simple way to use less water with water-efficient products, new homes and services. Search for WaterSense-labeled products online on the EPA's website.
Check out other water savings strategies online, too.
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Please join us for this very engaging, energizing, and motivating workshop that will focus on helping students understand and combine what they know, what they have learned and who they are to form a meaningful action plan for career and job search navigation in creative related industries. Workshop Presenter James Levin will address bridging the gap and making connections between your education, skills and current job market trends in creative related industries so you can effectively market yourself for potential opportunities. James inspire, teach and callenge students to think, not from outside the box, but from deep within the box.
This workshop is targeted to SCPS students in the following program areas: M.A. Graphic Communications Management and Technology, M.S. Digital Imaging and Design, M.S. Publishing, B.S. Digital Imaging and Design, M.S. Integrated Marketing, M.S. Public Relations and Corporate Communications and Professional Certificate Programs in areas related to Advertising, Digital Marketing, New Media, Graphic, Web, Product and Digital Design, Animation, Visual Effects, Digital Imaging, Photography and Publishing.
Please note this workshop is only open to SCPS degree and declared certificate students. A NYU picture ID will be required for admittance.
Presenter Bio - JAMES LEVIN
www.jameslevinstudios.comCareer ending eye surgery in 2007 dictated a new direction. This life-changing incident provided James with an opportunity to leverage many years of industry experience and knowledge and transfer his skills as a creative service provider. He is now a Director at CTI Graphics & New Media. CTI is an employment agency specializing in New Media, Advertising, Editorial & Print career placement. The core clients are advertising and new media agencies, publishers, public relations & fortune 500’s with internal creative departments. www.ctimetropolitan.comJames also has a career counseling business that has helped guide many through the challenges of job search and transition. He has become known as “the job search therapist”. James has lectured in the Media Arts Masters Program at LI University and presented seminars for the APC (Advertising Club of NY).
Who James Levin is, begins with who he was, an award winning NYC Commercial Photographer, specializing in children. His core client based included advertising firms, publishing firms and toy manufacturers. (Scholastic, Mattel, Fisher Price, Marvel Entertainment, Random House, Little Brown, Ogilvy & Mather, Grey Advertising, Hearst, Conde Nast & Hachette)
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This story is from BostonGlobe.com, the only place for complete digital access to the Globe.
Cohen said that initially it was “jolting” to hear the request; his first instinct as a doctor and psychiatrist was to think about possible problems, like depression. He made it clear he could not fulfill her request. But he thinks policy should change to take into account the thoughtful, considered decisions of those who wish to control the end of their life.
“I have, like most physicians, a bias to reflexively begin to think this is suicidal behavior on their part,” he said. “What I have begun to develop is in fact an appreciation that there are a lot of people out there that if you put yourselves in their shoes, it actually does make sense what they’re saying and it’s high time we dropped our biases and prejudices and listened to what they had to say.”
Nate Lamkin, a social worker at Hospice of the North Shore & Greater Boston, said he opposes the initiative because access to palliative care and hospice are not widespread enough and it would be premature to offer patients medication that could end their lives before improving other services.
“It’s not uncommon for any of us on the team to hear people expressing a wish to die, and our nurses regularly get asked by people who are just getting started with us and in a lot of pain,” he said. “The vast majority of the time, when someone’s symptoms are brought under control, they withdraw that request. . . . Even patients who are terminally ill and facing their own death within the next weeks or months, if they’re physically comfortable they can have a lot of meaningful time with loved ones.”
It is also unclear how doctors, hospitals and hospices will respond should the initiative pass. Dr. Britain Nicholson, chief medical officer at Massachusetts General Hospital, said that last month nurses, physicians, and others at Partners HealthCare began meeting to examine basic questions about the initiative so they would be prepared should it pass. For example, he said, what programs might they need to put in place to refer patients if physicians do not want to offer the prescription?
Statistics kept in Oregon and Washington show that very few people go through the process to get a prescription. Many people who receive the prescriptions never take the drugs, dying naturally of their underlying disease. Oregon is now known for having excellent end-of-life care, in addition to the option for physicians to prescribe drugs to end life.
Dr. Susan Tolle, a physician at Oregon Health & Science University, said that although she has not taken a stand on whether having the option is good or bad, many assume too quickly that what happened in Oregon — improvements in end-of-life care — will simply take place if similar initiatives are passed in other states.
“We chose to take this opportunity to push harder, to improve end-of-life care,” Tolle said. “That does not mean that will automatically happen in Massachusetts.”
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Get Addresses From Google Maps With Reverse Geocoding
Google Maps has long been able to convert an address into a latitude/longitude pair. Now it can do the opposite: converting a latitude/longitude pair into an address.
Blogger Amit Agarawal has created a mashup to display the reverse-geocoded address when you click on a map, and MeetWays provides you with an address of location equidistant between you and someone you'd like to hang out with.
To learn how to use GeneaNet, please read the "GeneaNet First Steps" pages.First Steps
To ask for help on any topic related to the GeneaNet website, to report a bug and to make a suggestion, please go to our forum.Forum
Questions not related to blog notes will not be answered here. Many thanks for your comprehension.
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Just recently I have been lucky enough to be exposed to some fantastic new product design technology. Of course we are at the dawn of a brand new and exciting CAD age with the birth of Synchronous Technology. However we have also been involved with a great new graphical search tool called PartBrowser which makes finding your 3D cad data quick and easy. This ultimately promotes design re-use and improves your productivity.
Now even though Solid Edge with Synchronous technology only released a couple of weeks ago, PartBrowser already 100% supports this latest version. As such I wanted to show you these two products working together in harmony.
What is PartBrowser?
Well PartBrowser is essentially a desktop search tool which has been specifically designed for 3D CAD data. It enables CAD models in your design database to be found quickly and easily even when you do not know the file name or any properties of the file. This is achieved by using a unique search by shape technology.
PartBrowser will allow you to start your search in many different ways. To begin with you can run a full text search or view a selection of the representative shapes you have in your database, then select one of the components and refine the search based on the shape of that component. Alternatively you could use Solid Edge to model a simplified representation of the part you are looking for, then PartBrowser will search for all similar shapes. Once again the search may be refined until you find the component you are looking for.
One aspect of PartBrowser that I really like is the way it represents the search results. They are not shown as boring static thumbnails, instead they are displayed as full 3D rotating thumbnails. You can even interact with them and zoom in to get a good idea of the components finer detail and physical size.
PartBrowser will also allow you to find and eliminate any duplicate models from within your database. The duplicate search function will generate a full report of suspected duplicate components as well as display them on the screen for further investigation.
As ever with CAD tools, it is far easier to see them in action so I have put together a short video (below) showing Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology working with PartBrowser in a real world design situation – enjoy.
Please visit www.3dPartBrowser.com If you want to find out more about PartBrowser. Here you can purchase the product or request a free 7 day trial.
The informative posts highlighting Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology capabilities will continue so keep an eye open for these. Alternatively consider subscribing to our feed for automatic notification.
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Women's Studies Databases & DescriptionsIndexing and abstracts for 3,484 journals with fulltext for over 2,000 journals, including more than 1,500 peer-reviewed titles.
VAST is a package of video collections, accessible through the new Academic Video Online cross-search.Cites biographical articles appearing in any of more than 3,000 periodicals and some 2,000 current books of individual and collective biography, as well as biographical material in otherwise non-biographical books. Besides biographies and autobiographies, you'll find citations to interviews, obituaries, and collections of letters, diaries, memoirs, juvenile literature, book reviews, bibliographies and exhibition reviews. People covered range from antiquity to the present and represent all fields and nationalities.
A comprehensive listing of biographical content to some 623,000 articles and book citations. It includes interviews and profiles of history-makers, covering 40 years. You will find citations to feature articles, biographies, obituaries, books and book parts. The number of people covered in the database is about 300,000. It covers asked-about public figures, including writers, artists, statesman, sports figures, politicians, religious leaders, scientists, educators, military leaders, teachers, actors, business people, and more.
Searchable database of all the articles contained in journals published by Duke University Press.
An index only database that provides access to essays in nearly 5,300 anthologies and collections. Coverage spans the entire range of humanities and social sciences, including literary works, art history, drama, and film. Coverage begins in 1985 to present.In the First Person is a free, high quality, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world. The index contains approximately 20,500 months of diary entries, 63,000 letter entries, and 17,000 oral history entries.Provides full text access for scholarly journals in the areas of African-American studies, anthropology, Asian studies, ecology, economics, education, finance, history, literature, mathematics, philosophy, political science, and sociology. The Life Science Collection is also available. This database covers a complete journal run from the first issue up to the most recent three to five years.Provides access to journals, magazines, and newspapers in full text format. The subject areas covered are news, business, law, health, and reference. This database is updated daily, and sources can be searched for the last five or ten years, and in some cases back 30 plus years to provide bibliographic records. This database contains over 5200 sources.The MLA International Bibliography provides a classified listing and subject index for books and articles published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. It is compiled by the staff of the MLA Office of Bibliographic Information Services with the cooperation of more than 100 contributing bibliographers in the United States and abroad. The MLA International Bibliography annually indexes over 66,000 books and articles.Full-text news resources consisting of more than 500 regional, national and international newspapers and newswire sources. Covers the time period of 1991 to the present. Updated daily.The Philosopher's Index is a bibliographic database with informative author-written abstracts covering scholarly research in the fifteen fields of philosophy, published in journals and books since 1940.The POIESIS database contains 42 full-text journals, 8 conference proceedings, and 8 book series. The database is dedicated to various areas of philosophy, which include: Aesthetics, Ethics, Catholic Intellectual Thought, History of Philosophy, Peace & Violence Studies, Social and Political Philosophy, as well as many Journals which publish in all areas of Philosophy.Access to the full text of over 100 scholarly journals published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in the areas of arts and humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. The coverage is from 1990 to the present.ProQuest Social Science Journals™ includes over 535 titles, with more than 310 available in full text. Topics include Addiction studies, Urban studies, Family studies, International relations, and more.Covers over 550 periodicals in the fields of anthropology, economics, geography, law and criminology, political science, social work, and sociology. Covers 1983 to the present. Updated monthly.The SEP is a dynamic reference work, in which each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and updates are refereed by the members of an editorial board before they are made public. SEP covers wide variety of subject disciplines within the sciences and humanities, including aesthetics, ethics, feminism, philosophy of law, logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of science.
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Antioch College: Where It All Began
May 12, 2006
by Samantha Harris
Gettysburg College may be the latest school to criminalize unsolicited hugging
, but it wasn’t the first. That distinction belongs to Antioch College, which made national headlines in the early 1990s when it first introduced its Sexual Offense Prevention Policy
. Both policies have the exact same definition of consent: “Consent
is defined as the act of willingly and verbally agreeing to engage in specific sexual conduct.”
Antioch, however, apparently feels that a simple definition is not enough; rather, its students need explicit examples of how the policy might apply in everyday situations:
- "[G]rinding on the dance floor is not consent for further sexual activity."
- "[M]oans are not consent."
- "A person cannot give consent while sleeping." (Really, consciousness is an element of consent? Well I'll be.)
And just in case you were wondering, “[t]hese requirements for consent do not restrict with whom the sexual activity may occur, the type of sexual activity that occurs, the props/toys/tools that are used, the number of persons involved, the gender(s) or gender expressions of persons involved.” You have to love the specificity here—“Tools”? “The number of persons involved”? I guess the folks at Antioch wanted to make crystal clear that the chainsaw-wielding orgy is totally okay—just as long as everyone gives specific verbal consent.
Jokes aside, the real point here is that this policy, like Gettysburg’s, infantilizes students by treating them as incapable of making even the most basic judgments about sexual interactions. And by its sheer silliness, it dangerously makes light of a truly serious subject matter. When your sexual offense policy is the butt of late-night television jokes, how seriously will people take claims of “sexual offense” on your campus? Policies like this jeopardize the claims of students who have actually been the victim of a sexual offense, as well as the futures of other students for engaging in innocent behaviors. It is a lose-lose situation for students at these institutions, and it needs to change.
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We've been seeing a gradual shift in malicious PDF file coding (no surprise there, we know malware authors can and do adapt their techniques).
For a long time, we saw malicious PDF files that were simple enough to allow us to readily decipher the intent of the malicious code — shell code, download/execute, drop and load, et cetera.
Now we're seeing more and more complex obfuscation being used, which requires us to break down the PDF file. This can make an Analyst's daily life more miserable or interesting, especially as the obfuscation can bypass automated analysis tools and even AV detectors.
Note how it uses old-school style spacings. Comments in the notepad were added for easier readability.
Anyway, once this is normalized, it becomes something much easier to read and analyze:
An interesting analysis about PDF obfuscation is also available at SANS.
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Out, out and out.
Peskov was chatting over coffee here in Sochi with a few reporters, and he fixed them with a true-believer gaze as he described the Russia that will be revealed — especially to Americans viewing the world through Cold War-frosted glasses — as the flags are raised for the Opening Ceremonies on Feb. 7, 2014.
Olympics fans will encounter an open country — open for investment, open for engagement, a country capable of making visitors feel welcome, he said. “A country where smiling people live. A country like other countries.”
Putin was so determined to win the Games for Sochi that he flew to Guatemala City in July 2007 and wooed delegates of the International Olympic Committee in assertive English, a language he almost never speaks in public. (When he crooned “Blueberry Hill” in English at a children’s cancer benefit in St. Petersburg two years ago, the star-studded audience almost swooned.)
He informed the delegates that the ancient Greeks had lived around Sochi, that he had recently skied above the city in the Caucasus Mountains and had seen the rock where the Greek gods had bound Prometheus, an eagle feeding on his liver each day as punishment for giving humanity fire. Fire . . . Olympic flame . . . Russia. Get it? He finished his presentation in mellifluous French. Russia won the Games by four votes.
“Russia has risen from its knees,” German Gref, then the economic development minister, told reporters at the time.
Putin has made Sochi his personal monument, just as Peter the Great did with the city of St. Petersburg, Fiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution, said in a Washington Post video interview last week.
“This is Putin himself on the line,” she said.
Peter, a man of outsize personality and stature (he stood 6-foot-7), built his Baltic Sea city on an empty, bleak bog. Putin, a loyal native of St. Petersburg, has taken up the unpretentious Black Sea city of Sochi, where he often goes to ski or relax behind the walls of a waterfront mansion.
Putin’s goal, according to Peskov, is to demonstrate Russia’s competence and class to the world by transforming a modest Soviet city into a grand, year-round resort. Sochi stretches along the coast, with one main road — Resort Prospect — so clogged with traffic that it can take an hour or more to drive a few miles. Before the Olympics bid, it had few Western-style hotels and no stadiums or ice rinks to rate an athlete’s glance. Thirty miles away, the Caucasus Mountains stood magnificent and undeveloped.
Peter ordered his noblemen to supply a steady stream of serfs to labor on his city, replenishing them as they died from disease and malnutrition, so Russia could show an imposing, European-featured face to the world.
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Do not ask me to believe in the rational human.
No society took to the enlightenment with the same vigor as the Germans. Granted, the French butchered each other and regularly overthrew their republican governments in their illuminated fervor, but they do not compare to the Germans when it comes to how deeply the enlightenment took in the middle and professional classes. One might question what drove this exceedingly advanced attitude--and unusual stability--I do not know quite enough to say, but I intend to find out.
This advanced society continued to flourish as the most progressive and cultivated society of the middle 19th and early 20th centuries. None equaled them in the field of academics, in the sciences or humanities. Yet all know that this great society went on to wage war against most of the world, and to kill off large segments of its own people, many of whom were the best and brightest of German progress.
They held the single most evil belief which has ever infiltrated the human race; they believed in the perfectibility of humanity. That through the magic of technological, literary, and sociological advancement a lasting, peaceful, society might be attainable. All that is necessary to the completion of the project, the accomplishment of this greatest human goal, is to remove all those who would resist perfection. To remove the ultimate roadblock to universal love, one must remove the unlovable and unloving.
The Jews have always been a people apart, governed by their own rules, customs, and quirks--really kind of amusing and lovable in a modern context. Quaint, perhaps. To the Germans, however, they represented two elements. One, they were an element which would not conform and consent to lose itself in the national whole, which made them the second element, the enemy within, who must be crushed and subjugated for the sake of national unity. After all, the ends justify the means, and a unified people, working together, is a prerequisite for societal well-being.
No society is ever perfect, so those who believe in perfection only know that something must be changed. Furthermore, since we are presently embroiled in injustice, a change from where we are must be for the better, and those who oppose this change, it follows, are not only the enemies of change, but the champions of injustice; monsters, to be dealt with firmly.
Change is a constant, and societies must obviously change to adapt to revelations in science and shifts in demographics. The point of difference comes with the view taken on change. To change suddenly and without thought is to invite disaster. In the case of Germany, an eternity of national regret, and universal embarrassment for more than half a century--not to mention having fostered the most--ok, Stalin wins--second most monstrous deeds of the age.
All change must be proceeded by careful thought and examination. Change for the sake of change is not good, any more than stasis for stasis sake is any good. I believe that governments primary duty is to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens, and thereafter, to encourage them in virtue. Yes, I believe that government has an interest in creating virtuous citizens by encouraging sound mores, so long as these measures do not impinge on life, liberty, or property.
Yet, as I reflect, the best virtues for the maintenance of peace and order in the city are not strictly rational. The human capacity for rationality is infinitely limited. I, perhaps egotistically, consider myself well beyond the norm in terms of the degree to which I engage rational thought in my everyday life, but purely rational--read calculating--thought would not be a great guarantor of my good behavior. I am, however, possessed of an irrational religious idea that it is my duty to be good, to accord basic dignity and respect to those I meet, and to hold--or try to hold--to a stark moral code.
Examine, again, the Germans. The greatest atrocities they committed came after German faith had waned. The enlightenment was not kind to either the Lutherans or the Catholics in Germany. Faith in a merciful God, who would, nonetheless, come again to judge the nations, ceased to be a serious part of the physiognomy of the German mind. Man was God, his kingdom would come, and it would never end.
Rationality is cold. The hot juices sloshing around in side us might lead to mistakes, but those same hot juices are the stuff of friendship, love, and Gemütlichkeit. I have never heard of love founded on cold rational.
I will not believe in the perfectly rational human for two reasons. First, because he does not exist. Second, God save us if he does.
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Poetry Friday is here to enchant our eyes and ears!… In anticipation of Hispanic Heritage Month (Sep 15 – Oct 15), I am currently re-reading The Tree is Older Than You Are, an incredible anthology of bilingual poems from Mexico, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. And I’d like to share one of its many gems with you all:
The Poet Pencil
by Jesús Carlos Soto Morfín, translated by Judith Infante
Once upon a time a pencil wanted to write
poetry but it didn’t have a point. One day a boy
put it into the sharpener, and in place of a point,
a river appeared.
Wild Rose Reader is brimming with poetic activity as host of this week’s Poetry Friday round-up. Check it out.
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January 7, 2013
WARREN FARRELL: Mass Shootings The Result of Abandoning, Abusing Boys. “For boys, the road to successful manhood has crumbled. In many boys’ journey from a fatherless family to an almost all-female staff elementary school such as Sandy Hook, there is no constructive male role model. . . . There are few things a culture does as important as raising children. We can’t continue to fail half of them.”
As I’ve noted before, perhaps we need Title IX style legislation to address gender discrimination in K-12 teaching.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
I find your article stating we need more male teachers interesting…I reinvented myself after 20+ years in the private sector, deciding to help educate our young people in high school math.
And yet, 2 years after reciving my masters and constantly hearing “we need more male high school math and science teachers” I’m not getting any love. Looks like its back to the private sector.
See, that’s why we need legislation!
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| 0.955533
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|
How to Make a Life Plan?
No matter in what stage of life you are currently in, you must sit back, take a deep breath and contemplate a plan for your life. Chalking out your life plan is not futile because the future is not defined. It is the decisions you make and the steps you take that give shape to your life-your past, your present and your future. Who we are is not a result of our capabilities, but that of the choices we make. Here’s some advice on how to make a life plan: How to Make a Life Plan?
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|
- Created on Monday, 03 September 2007 02:58
- Written by Staff
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is developing the Safer Detergents Stewardship Initiative (SDSI) to recognize environmental leaders who voluntarily commit to the use of safer surfactants. The Design for the Environment Program has identified safer alternative surfactants through its partnership work with industry and environmental advocates.
These safer alternatives are comparable in cost and are readily available. The SDSI initiative is designed to promote green chemistry through informed substitution of safer surfactants
Safer surfactants are surfactants that break down quickly to non-polluting compounds. Nonylphenol ethoxylates, commonly referred to as NPEs, are an example of a surfactant class that does not meet this definition. Both NPEs and their breakdown products, such as nonylphenol, are toxic to aquatic life.
SDSI complements the Aquatic Life Ambient Water Quality Criteria for Nonylphenol. These criteria are designed to protect aquatic life in both fresh and saltwater and can form the basis for state and tribal water quality standards.
The SDSI program differens from the Design for the Environment Formulator program in that the SDSI program is taking an informed substitution route of a specific ingredient – surfactants. SDSI focus’ on one component in a product vs. looking at all the ingredients. The program is seeking partners from businesses engaged in the production or use of surfactants, as well as from those involved in the purchasing or distribution of products containing surfactants.
Quick Rinse - News From Around The World
Commercial Laundry Cited by OSHA
ELM GROVE, W. Va. — Uwanta Linen Supply, a commercial laundry, was recently cited for 21 health and safety violations by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The laundry faces $62,400 in penalties for the violations. Eighteen of the the 21 violations are considered serious by OSHA. The serious violations include failing to properly guard floor holes and failing to provide hepatitis B vaccines to workers who are potentially exposed to blood borne pathogens.
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| 0.938488
| 454
| 2.515625
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Hilaire Thierry’s exquisite drawing, Salon in the Restoration Taste, from the early 1820s, is one of more than 70 19th-century European interiors from Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum that are on view at the Musée de la Vie Romantique through January 15, 2013. The exhibition, Intérieurs Romantiques, highlights donations to the collection, made in 2007 and 2012, by Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw, of 89 interior portraits.
The fashion for commissioning watercolors after existing interiors was a feature of aristocratic life in the 19th century. This trend was popularized by Queen Victoria, who commissioned artists and architects to execute watercolor portraits of the rooms in all of her palaces and, wherever she traveled, hired artists to create watercolors of the places she visited, especially the palaces and the rooms that she inhabited. Ever the model for the typical Victorian married couple, she and her husband, Prince Albert, would spend quiet, intimate evenings together reminiscing over the watercolors, which she kept in individual albums. Victoria was also in the habit of having duplicate drawings made to give to her children or her friends as gifts. During this era, on the Continent, interest in interior decoration, social fashion, and the proper drawing education of young upper class women, encouraged the practice of making interior portraits by both professionals and amateurs.
Hilaire Thierry’s interior most likely documents a room in a French royal palace, perhaps the Château de Saint-Cloud. In this elegant interior, afternoon light filters through two floor-to-ceiling windows, highlighting various decorative objects such as the gilded tea service, the rock crystal vases, and the hanging chandelier, all of which date back to the Napoleonic period. The chairs and canapé, however, are in the later style of Bourbon Restoration after 1814.
Hilaire Thierry (active 1815-25) worked for an aristocratic, royal, and royalist clientele close to the Bourbon family, including the Duc and Duchesse de Berry. As members of the royal family, the Duc and Duchesse had an apartment at Saint-Cloud for their use when Louis XVIII was in residence. After the assassination of the Duc in February of 1820, the Duchesse, aged 22 and expecting a child, was given the former apartment of the Empress Marie-Louise at Saint-Cloud for her use. Salon in the Restoration Taste may portray a room in the Duchesse’s Saint-Cloud apartment, and would appear to have been commissioned by her or by someone in her entourage.
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4-Year-Old Urges: "Give a Chance 4 Peace"
So my friend T'chaka was visiting his sister and his four-year-old niece, Aurora, last December. Aurora began a stream-of-consciousness rant about the need for more peace in the world. Well, rant is maybe too strong a word -- it's more a complex set of observations about world history, politics, peace, money, and bedtime, as seen by a four-year-old. T'chaka captured Aurora's message on his phone, turning it into a song by singing along and playing improvised guitar. In the year since, T'chaka created an animated film to go along with the song. Check it out below.
Representative lyrics: "You're hurting the dirt / you're hurting the rain / you're hurting crabs / you're hurting crowds / you're hurting the whole wide world. ... Give a piece! A chance for peace, vote for Barack Obama...."
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Thursday, May 26, 2011
A Review of The Brothers Foot: A Hare Raising Story
The Brothers Foot: A Hare Raising Story
Written by Steve Cormey
Illustrated by Ronda Eden
Published in March 2009
Published by AuthorHouse
The Brothers Foot is a children's picture book about three rabbit brothers with rather peculiar names. The brothers like to jump and play in the briar patch, but best of all they like to sing. The trio likes to sing their special Foot Foot song. One day three hunters, with guns, come to the briar patch. What do you think happens? I don't want to spoil the ending, so you will just have to read the book to find out for yourself!
The Brothers Foot has fun, colorful illustrations that compliment the story. In the back of the bok, you will find the words to The Foot Foot Song along with guitar chords, so you, too, can sing and play. The available CD has one song on it. The Foot Foot Song! Now you, too, can sing along with this folksy song. Who knows, you might even catch yourself humming or singing this catchy tune, when going about your day. The DVD has both the story and song along with the same whimsical illustrations that are in the book.
I would definitely recommend reading this fun book. I think that it will be enjoyed by both children and adults. The book, CD and DVD will have you laughing and singing along. Who doesn't need a little laughter and silliness in their day?
PLACES WHERE BOOK IS AVAILABLE TO BUY
- AuthorHouse bookstore
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The ASME Student Design Competition
As such, the purpose of this short tutorial is to demonstrate a unique method of wall climbing, and show dual functionality of a 1 DOF robot arm (not counting the gripper). Ok technically it is 3 DOF, because of the moving/rotating robot frame . . .
The rules basically went as this:
Without further boring descriptions, watch the video!
The bucket was built from bended aluminum sheet metal, and the frame was both milled and CNCed out from aluminum raw material.
Specially shaped foam was used inside the bucket to keep the objects inside from rolling out while wall climbing.
2) Rubberband was used as belt tensioner.
3) The four wheels were custom CNC machined.
4) Conveyor belt material was glued onto the wheels and grippers for its high friction properties.
5) RC reciever antenna, wrapped so as to not tangle
Control, and the Driver
The agility of a remote control robot is very much a function of driver skill. If you ever have a remote control robot contest, driver skill can significantly affect robot performance. Practice practice practice. Know exactly how your robot will perform. Practice in realistic settings, too. We went as far as to reconstruct the test course ourselves, timing everything the robot did for speed optimization, and pushing the limits to see what the robot can do. In the video I was operating 5 servos simultaneously with two hands on the remote, a skill that took many many hours of practice to do. But it all paid off . . .
An image of a prototype version climbing a wall in our recreated test course:
You probably did not gather this from the video, but the arm was used as a balancing weight shift as it climbed the wall - not just a lifting mechanism. The claws also had to be opened up during the climb, too, so as to not break.
This early plastic-made prototype version attempted to climb the wall before we learned about the weight shift feature of the arm. Embarassingly, the basket was lowered accidently and the bot got stuck on its way over. The gripper on this version was made from nylon, and broke during the climb.
The SolidWorks CAD file of this robot is available for download (7.1mb). If you use the CAD (or any part of it) for your robot, please give credit and link back to this page.
Has this site helped you with your robot? Give us credit -
link back, and help others in the forums!
Society of Robots copyright 2005-2013
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Tokyo Electric Power Co. and nuclear regulatory authorities “intentionally” delayed taking measures against earthquakes and tsunami, causing a "man-made disaster" at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, Diet-commissioned investigators said.
“Given that countermeasures could have been formulated on many occasions before it took place, the accident (on March 11, 2011) was clearly a man-made disaster,” the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission said in its final report released July 5.
The commission proposed setting up a new independent panel of private-sector and other experts at the Diet to continue investigations into the accident.
The 641-page report was submitted to the heads of the Diet’s two chambers. It is based on more than 900 hours of interviews with 1,167 individuals and 2,000 documents and other records.
But the 10-member commission, chaired by Kiyoshi Kurokawa, did not go so far as to call on the Diet to exercise its right to investigate state affairs by having the government and TEPCO submit records for public disclosure.
The panel also did not say whether criminal complaints should be filed against government officials or TEPCO executives.
According to the commission, TEPCO, operator of the Fukushima No. 1 plant, called on the government to postpone introducing enhanced safety measures, saying the measures would “lower a capacity utilization rate.” Regulatory authorities accepted the utility’s arguments, the report said.
Specifically, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency asked TEPCO to evaluate earthquake safety based on guidelines revised in 2006. But only limited reinforcement work was taken, the report said.
The commission said TEPCO put off taking safety measures on grounds that suspending nuclear power plants would pose a risk to management. The commission questioned whether the company is qualified to operate nuclear power plants.
The report said Japan entered March 11, 2011, “in a vulnerable condition, without any guarantee that (nuclear power plants) would be able to withstand earthquakes or tsunami.”
The commission said collusion between TEPCO and NISA led to delays in implementation of safety measures.
“The roles of regulators and those to be regulated were reversed, and regulatory authorities became a ‘slave’ of electric utilities,” the report said. “As a result, the monitoring and supervisory functions with regard to nuclear safety had collapsed (before the accident).”
TEPCO has argued that the earthquake did not damage important equipment in terms of safety at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, blaming only the ensuing tsunami, which it says was much larger than previously expected.
But the commission said piping for an isolation condenser, a type of cooling equipment, at the No. 1 reactor may have been slightly ruptured by the temblor.
“The possibility of damage caused by the earthquake cannot be ruled out,” the report said.
The commission criticized Masataka Shimizu, TEPCO president at the time of the accident, for causing the prime minister’s office to “misunderstand” that the utility was planning to withdraw all workers from the Fukushima No. 1 plant.
“It goes without saying that the way Shimizu communicated (with government officials) lay (behind the confusion),” the report said.
TEPCO has argued that it had planned to leave a small number of workers at the plant, but former Prime Minister Naoto Kan and other politicians said the utility was abandoning the plant.
The report said Shimizu was ambiguous throughout the process of liaising with the government. It attributed his stance to “TEPCO’s management culture of behind-the-scenes maneuvering with a tendency to shift responsibility to others in collusion with the government.”
The commission was equally critical of Kan and the prime minister’s office.
Kan rushed to TEPCO’s head office early on March 15 after he and other government leaders concluded overnight that Shimizu was abandoning the Fukushima No. 1 plant.
“It cannot be said that Kan prevented TEPCO from evacuating all workers,” the report said. “If one says Japan would have been exposed to a serious danger without the prime minister, it cannot be supported."
The report also said, “It is difficult to understand why the prime minister’s office continued to intervene with TEPCO, even setting up an integrated headquarters at the company.”
The commission criticized the overall responses of the prime minister’s office. “The crisis management system did not function,” the report said.
But the commission did not have TEPCO submit video footage from an in-house teleconferencing system, which is expected to show how the utility's executives dealt with the crisis during the early days of the accident.
Only some commission members viewed part of the footage at a TEPCO facility.
“The commission said the accident is man-made, which I agree with,” Kan said July 5. “On the other hand, I have a different interpretation of the responses made by the prime minister’s office, TEPCO’s evacuation and other issues.”
At a news conference on July 5, Junichi Matsumoto, acting general manager of TEPCO’s Nuclear Power and Plant Siting Division, indicated that the utility disagrees with some points in the report.
Matsumoto also said the company may review its own investigative report on the accident, released on June 20, after analyzing the Diet commission’s report, as well as a government panel’s yet-to-be published report.
The report's executive summary is available in English at (http://naiic.go.jp/en/).
- « Prev
- Next »
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Grace Warrick can’t justify staying in college for another five months – not when it comes with the University’s price tag.
Warrick said she would rather jump-start her job search instead of continuing to pile on debt for another semester, noting that graduating early was a better option than finishing an eighth semester, which would have forced her to take out a small loan.
“Even though I have had a fantastic experience at GW and love being a student, I am more comfortable supporting myself with the money I will save, rather than going into debt or job searching under immense pressure,” Warrick said. “It also means a lot to my family for me to finish my undergraduate degree within my budget.”
Thinking of savings and debt, she set herself on a track to graduate early during her sophomore year, a plan she formalized this semester.
Although GW is no longer the most expensive university in the country, the cost of attending has discouraged some students from staying for four years. Current seniors pay fixed tuition and fees of $40,437 yearly – a figure that rose to $44,148 for the Class of 2015.
Of students who entered the University since 2003, 520 students graduated early, internal data show. Seventy-five members of the Class of 2011, or 3.5 percent, completed requirements in three years or fewer – down from the year before, when 4.6 percent of students in the Class of 2010 graduated two or more semesters early.
University statistics do not distinguish between students who graduate in seven semesters from those who graduate in eight. Data for three-and-a- half-year graduates of the current senior class, who entered college as the economy slipped into recession, will be lumped with those who finished in four years when data are released.
Placing a national spotlight on student debt concerns, President Barack Obama launched the “We Can’t Wait” campaign to reduce student debt earlier this month, changes a University administrator said would benefit few on campus.
Students have expressed similar concerns about college costs. Most adults ages 18 to 34 consider college harder to afford than it was five years ago, according to a report by The Institute for College Access and Success released Nov. 9. Of those surveyed, 73 percent said graduates accrue more student debt than they can manage.
“In general, factors such as tuition, availability of grant aid and income background all influence the level of debt,” the institute’s program director Matthew Reed said.
Senior Alex Pazuchanics also said he plans to graduate early to avoid debt and enter the job market as early as possible.
He adjusted his class schedules to ensure he’d be able to graduate in less time, a choice that geared his courses to be more “vocational” and prevented him from taking others that would “expand his horizons,” he said.
“I think that there are opportunities that I probably would have taken advantage of had the cost structure been different,” he said. “Debt is scary for all of us,” he added.
More than half of the District’s college students graduate with debt, according to 2011 data from the Project on Student Debt. Students in D.C. with loans have, on average, $24,191 in debt – the 17th highest figure in the nation.
While the University’s Office of Financial Aid tries to maintain enrollment by meeting the needs of students, it must stay within its “federal and institutional guidelines, as well as the University’s aid allocation in granting assistance,” Dan Small, vice president of financial assistance, said.
“We try our very best to bridge the gap in what the family can pay and the cost of education,” Small said. “It is an individual decision as to whether a student chooses to graduate early to save money or stays to receive the full college experience.”
For Warrick, trading in a full college experience for a future without debt is worthwhile sacrifice that will allow her to pursue a career on her own terms.
“I think the decision is personal and totally unique to each individual’s situation,” she said. “I’m much more comfortable in this situation."
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At the recent South East LinuxFest in June 2012 I gave two MySQL presentations.
The first was on Explaining the MySQL Explain. This presentation details the MySQL Query Execution Plan (QEP) of an SQL statement and how to understand and interpret the information from the EXPLAIN command. Also discussed are additional commands and tools that exist to add supplementary information. These are essential skills that will be used daily in production operations. Download Presentation (PDF)
More detailed information about EXPLAIN and associated commands is available in book Effective MySQL: Optimizing SQL Statements.
The second was on MySQL Disasters, and how to avoid yours. Organizations are always making improvements for scalability, however disaster preparedness is the poor cousin. This presentation will show you how to easily avoid the most common MySQL disaster situations.
Backup and recovery is critical for business continuity, many websites run the risk of data loss or corruption because existing procedures (if any) are generally flawed.
Download Presentation (PDF
More detailed information about the right backup and recovery strategy and associated tools is available in book Effective MySQL: Backup and Recovery.
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Effective Thursday July 21, 2011 at 08:00am the statewide ban on burning will be lifted, subject to any parish or municipal regulations.
The statewide burn ban was issued in response to extreme dry conditions within the state and a high wildland fire danger. When the ban to cease burning went into effect, Louisiana was experiencing an average of 300 fires and nearly 4000 acres lost per month due to the dry conditions.
Following the order, the fire incidents dropped to 150 fires and 900 acres burned monthly. The ban was extremely effective in preventing wildland fires, officials said.
Although this ban will be lifted, the public is encouraged to use caution while burning as dry conditions still exist and many local governments may decide to continue "Burn Bans" in their communities.
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|New International Version (© 2011)|
Soon afterward, Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went along with him.
King James Bible
And it came to pass the day after, that he went into a city called Nain; and many of his disciples went with him, and much people.
American Standard Version
And it came to pass soon afterwards, that he went to a city called Nain; and his disciples went with him, and a great multitude.
Young's Literal Translation
And it came to pass, on the morrow, he was going on to a city called Nain, and there were going with him many of his disciples, and a great multitude,
Luke 7:11 Additional TranslationsClarke's Commentary on the Bible
Nain - A small city of Galilee, in the tribe of Issachar.
According to Eusebius, it was two miles from Mount Tabor, southward; and near to Endor.
Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Acts 10:38 How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good...
Luke 7:11 Parallel CommentariesAccompanied Afterward Afterwards City Crowd Disciples Found Friends Great Health House Jesus Large Morrow Multitude Nain Perfect Returning Servant Soon TimeAccompanied Afterward Afterwards City Crowd Disciples Found Friends Great Health House Jesus Large Morrow Multitude Nain Perfect Returning Servant Soon TimeTHE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica®.
Luke 7:11 Mobile Bible
Luke 7:11 Bible Suite
Luke 7:11 Biblia Paralela
Luke 7:11 Chinese Bible
Luke 7:10 Then the men who had been sent returned to the house and found the servant well.
Luke 7:12 As he approached the town gate, a dead person was being carried out--the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the town was with her.
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What the Bleep Do We Know!?
(also written What tнē #$*! D̄ө ωΣ (k)πow!?
and What the #$*! Do We Know!?
) is a 2004 film that combines documentary
-style interviews, computer-animated graphics
, and a narrative that describes the spiritual
connection between quantum physics
. The plot follows the story of a deaf photographer; as she encounters emotional and existential
obstacles in her life, she comes to consider the idea that individual and group consciousness can influence the material world
. Her experiences are offered by the filmmakers to illustrate the movie's thesis about quantum physics and consciousness. The 2004 theatrical release of the film was followed by a substantially changed, extended DVD version in 2006.Bleep
was conceived and its production funded by William Arntz, who co-directed the film along with Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente: all three were students of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment
. A moderately low-budget independent production
, it was promoted using viral marketing
methods and opened in art-house theaters in the western United States, winning several independent film awards before being picked up by a major distributorTom Huston, "", What is Enlightenment? Magazine
. Retrieved January 25, 2008. and eventually grossing
over $10 million.http://www.einsteinyear.org/bleep/
Einstein year, What the Bleep do we Know.......
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| 2.25
| 2
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Sri Lanka's first Net Metered Hotel:
Heritance Ayurveda Maha Gedara- opens
Aitken Spence Hotels its first hotel property, Neptune Hotel,
recently re-opened as Heritance Ayurveda Maha Gedara. Leveraging on
innovative strategies in the area of renewable energy the Hotel recently
broke new ground by being the first hotel in the country to enter into a
Net Metering Agreement using solar photovoltaic as the renewable energy
The Government of Sri Lanka approved the concept of Net Metering in
August 2009. In early 2010, LECO was the first to announce the new
procedure. Net Metering is a special metering and billing agreement
entered between utility companies and their individual customers which
facilitates the connection of small, renewable energy generating systems
to the power grid.
Heritance Ayurveda Maha Gedara.
Solar Photovoltaic Systems can be broadly connected either as an
Off-Grid System (solar power used to charge batteries) or an On-Grid
System (solar power fed directly to the grid). The system installed at
Heritance Ayurveda Maha Gedara is a unique design having both features
integrated into a single system.
During the day, the power produced from the solar panels is used to
charge the batteries as well as feed power to the grid. This has been
achieved by increasing the capacity of the solar panels so that excess
power is generated, more than required to charge the batteries. Once the
batteries are fully charged, excess generated power is fed to the grid
via the netmeter. During the night, the charged batteries are used to
power the hotel garden lighting. The annual savings from the system is
4,639 kWh, equivalent to a reduction in the hotel's carbon footprint by
In addition, the hotel also has a solar hot water system for
pre-heating the water before it is sent to the heat exchanger which acts
as a storage for hot water. This reduces the furnace oil consumed by the
boiler. The hotel will be saving 1,417 litres of furnace oil annually
thus mitigating its carbon footprint by 4.6 Tonnes.
The biogas plant uses kitchen garbage as the primary source for the
production of biogas which is utilized in the herbal preparation unit of
the ayurveda resort.
"It is encouraging that Aitken Spence Hotels has taken the initiative
in implementing the first net metering installation in the LECO
distribution network with renewable generation. We hope that other
private establishments will follow suit and thus reduce the carbon
burden on the environment," said Head of Engineering, Lanka Electricity
Company (Pvt) Ltd Dr. Narendra De Silva. By adopting net metering,
Heritance Hotels further reaffirms their commitment towards practising
"The installation of systems such as this help break our dependency
on fossil fuels, add to the diversification of our current energy
portfolio and most importantly helps lessen the environmental footprint
associated with electricity generation and consumption. We all have
worked extremely hard in order to maintain our existing sustainability
practices while constantly coming up with new and innovative ways of
enhancing the edge we have on the sustainability front, and we are
delighted to be the first hotel in Sri Lanka to enter into a Net
Metering agreement with the Lanka Electricity Company," said Vice
President, Engineering, Aitken Spence Hotels Rohitha Rajaratne.
Heritance Hotels and Resorts believe passionately in Sustainable
Tourism and have been very active in engaging both guests and
communities in promoting these ethics.
"All forms of tourism potentially has an environmental, social and
economical impact on a country, we at Aitken Spence Hotels take all
necessary measures to negate any detrimental impact a guest may have on
the environment while holidaying with us," said Managing Director,
Aitken Spence Hotels Malin Hapugoda.
The company's premier resorts operate under Heritance Hotels &
Resorts. Its latest Heritance property, Heritance Ayurveda Maha Gedara,
commenced operation in July 2011.
It has joined the award-winning Heritance Hotels & Resorts portfolio
consisting of Heritance Kandalama, Heritance Ahungalla and Heritance Tea
Siam House wins Best Restaurant award
House, the authentic Thai food restaurant in Colombo, has been awarded
"The Best Restaurant" tittle by the Municipal Council of Colombo in
recognition of the excellence in cleanliness and food hygiene.
"The Best Restaurant" Award for excellence in cleanliness and food
hygiene received recently by this famous food destination show their
commitment to provide their clients with a happy and memorable dining
Siam House received this prestigious award at the Awards Ceremony
held at Hilton Hotel, Colombo on 8th December 2011.
Siam House, in operation since 1993, has always deserved its place as
a top favourite among its loyal clientele of corporate and family
diners, tourists and all other fashionable elite.
Surrounded by a peaceful atmosphere filled with sea breeze, Siam
House Colombo lets the Diners enjoy authentic Thai cuisine in their
enchanting Thai House.
SriLankan Airlines launches easy payment scheme
An exciting new offer from SriLankan Airlines will make travel abroad
even more affordable to all their customers. With the introduction of an
easy payment scheme, passengers have the option of paying for their
ticket with credit cards, in installments of three, six, twelve or even
upto twenty four months at their convenience.
Under this scheme, people can now travel abroad for initial rates as
low as LKR 725 per month to India, LKR 2,000 per month to many cities in
Asia, and LKR 4,000 per month to Europe. These attractive rates make
family travel more affordable enabling all SriLankans to experience an
overseas trip with their loved ones during the upcoming holiday season.
Passengers can now purchase their tickets online www.srilankan.com
using a credit card issued by any of the partner banks and thereby make
the payment at their convenience through the easy payment scheme. The
partner banks are - Bank of Ceylon, Commercial Bank, HSBC, Seylan Bank
and Hatton National Bank. Head of Commercial Operations, Mohamad Fazeel
said, "The primary purpose of this facility is to enable more people to
indulge in the pleasures of air travel. With all the benefits of modern
technology, the world is shrinking at a rapid pace. However there is
still a segment of people in this country who think twice before
embarking on a foreign trip because of the cost factor. We've turned
that around and with this new offer on our website we have brought the
world to their doorstep".
With air travel now becoming even more affordable with the
introduction of the easy payment scheme, the SriLankan Airlines website
- www.srilankan.com is expected to emerge as the most preferred channel
for air ticket purchases.
"This facility is open to all Sri Lankans in all income groups. In
fact we have a great relationship with our partner banks and this makes
it all the more easier and convenient. As the national carrier and a
responsible corporate citizen, we are committed to make air travel more
affordable and more accessible to as many Sri Lankan consumers as
possible." Manager Channel Management, Ajith Weerasekera said.
Sri Lanka's award winning airline flies to six cities in Europe -
London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Frankfurt, Moscow, Middle East - Kuwait,
Dammam, Riyadh, Jeddah, Muscat, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Doha,
Subcontinent region - Karachi, Male, Colombo, Madras, Trichy, Trivandrum,
Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore, Kochi and the Far East - Singapore, Kuala
Lumpur, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Tokyo.
SriLankan's latest destination will be Zurich, with a thrice-weekly
service that commences on December 23.
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MacPhail, who with his father forms the only father-son duo in the baseball shrine, died of natural causes Thursday at his home in Delray Beach, Fla., the Hall of Fame announced.
During a baseball career that spanned five decades, the younger MacPhail was president and general manager of the New York Yankees and general manager of the Baltimore Orioles before serving as president of the American League from 1974 to 1983.
Earlier, he spent a decade as farm director and player personnel director for the Yankees, helping to develop players who would win seven World Series titles.
As American League president, Lee MacPhail oversaw the league's expansion to Toronto and Seattle and, in 1981, played a role in negotiations that helped end a players' strike.
After Brett, the Royals' third baseman, hit a two-run, two-out, ninth-inning homer in the July 24 game at Yankee Stadium, Yankees manager Billy Martin protested, arguing that Brett's bat was covered with more than the permissible amount of pine tar. The umpires agreed and called Brett out, giving New York a 4-3 victory.
Several days later, MacPhail overruled the umpires, saying the home run should count and ordering the game continued. When the contest resumed three weeks later, the Royals held on to win, 5-4.
Although the pine tar did indeed reach more than 18 inches past the bat's handle — the limit set by major league rules — MacPhail said the umpires' interpretation did not reflect the intent or spirit of the rules.
"Although manager Martin and his staff should be commended for their alertness," MacPhail wrote, "it is the strong conviction of the league that games should be won and lost on the playing field — not through technicalities of the rules."
He stepped down as league president at the end of that season.
MacPhail's son Andy became general manager of the Minnesota Twins, president of the Chicago Cubs and president of baseball operations for the Orioles. A grandson, Lee MacPhail IV, who has worked for the Cleveland Indians, is a scout for the Orioles.
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The Arts For Young People
Get your teen or pre-teen involved in a good after-school arts program
Teens often struggle with issues of self-identity. They also want their voices to be heard. The arts are a great way for young people to learn about themselves and express themselves.
Research shows that being involved in the arts helps young people:
- Be more confident and self-aware;
- Solve problems and make decisions;
- Become leaders;
- Build teamwork skills;
- Be more tolerant of others; and
- Do better in school, including in reading, writing, and math.
If they start a creative practice as a young person, they will be much more likely to do creative activities throughout their lives. They will be more fulfilled and will be more self-aware as adults. And art is great fun!
The arts are for everyone.
As a parent, the most important thing to remember is that all kids can be creative, have an active imagination, and make good artwork. Just because your kids may not see themselves as artistic, or they may be focused on athletics or other interests, doesn't mean they shouldn't try arts projects. It is important for all kids to participate in creative arts projects.
You may not see yourself as an artist either, but you might be surprised by how much you would enjoy an art activity with your teen. It can be a great way to spend time together and get to know one another better. Also think about taking your child to an art museum. There are museums and galleries in almost every community. Everyone can appreciate the wide variety of art styles and media on display in museums. And it can be a fun way to spend time with your teen, which is so important.
After-school is a perfect time for young people to pursue new interests
Community arts programs for teenagers have become very popular throughout the country during the past year. Research has shown that teenagers respond best to programs where they feel some level of ownership and a sense of belonging, and where they have the opportunity to experiment in new art forms.
Add your own comment
Today on Education.com
- Kindergarten Sight Words List
- The Five Warning Signs of Asperger's Syndrome
- What Makes a School Effective?
- Child Development Theories
- 10 Fun Activities for Children with Autism
- Why is Play Important? Social and Emotional Development, Physical Development, Creative Development
- Should Your Child Be Held Back a Grade? Know Your Rights
- Bullying in Schools
- First Grade Sight Words List
- Test Problems: Seven Reasons Why Standardized Tests Are Not Working
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Cantherellus cibarius, the golden chanterelle, grows on forest floors, often near conifers and deciduous trees beginning in July and ending as late as January, and is found throughout the world.
Chanterelles have never been cultivated, because it is impossible to recreate the complex symbiotic relationship they have with host plants. Lucky for us, the beautiful golden-orange cap with its goblet shape is easily spotted on the forest floor by foragers. Our European chanterelles are packed and flown to us within 24 hours of being plucked from the forest, to keep them as fresh as possible. For such a delicate looking mushroom, the flavor of the chanterelle is powerful, with apricot nuances and a slightly peppery punch that works well with cream and butter. Some maintain that chanterelles need little more than a generous amount of butter and some salt and pepper. Chanterelles have firm, meaty flesh which stands up well to cooking. A simple sauté with olive oil and shallots will allow you to experience the full flavor of this extraordinary mushroom. Use chanterelles anywhere you would use a mushroom: on a burger, in risotto, quiche, or in a white wine sauce. Chanterelles and pasta make a natural pair, but eggs and chanterelles are heavenly together. They are also perfect with pork, chicken, rabbit, veal and quail, either in a stuffing or with a sauce. They will add depth to stews and can be miraculous with scallops or shellfish. And it’s hard to mask the flavor, even with cheese, which makes them an ideal wild edible for all kinds of cooking.
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The style of the service will be quiet and contemplative with plenty of time for reflection and will include Holy Communion, laying on of hands, anointing and prayer ministry.
The services have been arranged in response to requests from people in the congregation and the local community. We hope that they will give people an opportunity to bring their difficulties before God and to receive his love and care. God wants all of us to know more of his love and this service offers a quiet and different way of becoming deeply aware of God. Perhaps you’re feeling overwhelmed, perhaps your life isn’t going the way you’d like, perhaps you’re ill or grieving. You may be the kind of person who enjoys being with God in a quiet or healing way.
For further information contact Revd Jan Kearton (see our 'Contact Us' page for contact details)
Questions about Healing
What are we doing when we pray for healing?
We worship a God who has created us in his image, loves us as his children and longs to draw us into a relationship with him. When we pray for healing we are bringing ourselves, or those for whom we pray, into the loving presence of God. We don’t know what the outcome will be: occasionally prayers for healing are answered with a sudden and complete healing but more often there will be some degree of healing on a physical, psychological or spiritual level. Even when there seems to be little hope of a cure it is good to pray for comfort and peace for the sick person, for their family and for all those involved in their care.
What does the Bible say about healing?
Miraculous healings were an important part of Jesus’ ministry. During his ministry he restored sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, helped a paralysed man to walk again, healed those suffering from leprosy and even raised the dead.
But curing physical ailments was not the only way in which Jesus brought about healing in those he encountered. Just as important as the physical cure was the restoration of individuals who had been excluded to their rightful place within the community. For example the lepers whom Jesus healed were no longer outcasts but could return to their homes and their families.
What about other kinds of healing?
God heals people in many ways, including through the work of the medical and caring professions. When we are ill we naturally turn to the medical services which form a large part of God’s provision for us. Prayers for healing work alongside the care which is provided through our doctors and nurses.
Why does God allow suffering?
There are no easy answers to this question. Sickness, pain and suffering can be very difficult to endure and can cause us to question the goodness of God or even whether he exists at all. We may find inspiration in the example of others who have a faith which has remained strong through many difficulties. We may also find that when we are feeling most burdened we find a new sense of reliance on God as we ask him to help us carry that load.
Prayer for Healing
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who wake or watch or weep tonight, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend those who are sick, Lord Christ; give rest to those who are weary; bless those who are dying; soothe those who are suffering; pity those who are afflicted; shield those who are joyous; and all, for your love’s sake. Amen.
Augustine of Hippo
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Fun Facts Part 2
I hoped you like my first set of facts. Here are some more.
*Ruby, Saphire, and Emerald have the same first letters as Raikou, Suicune, and Entai.
*There isn't really a Pokemon that has a type that is JUST Flying.
*Latios, Latias, Cresselia, and Heatran have a gender. *Still being legendary Pokemon*
*Mantine has been drawn *Whatever you see it in battles* with a Remoraid under one of its fins.
*Aerodactyl is the only Fossil Pokemon to not have any evolutions.
*Cresselia's colors, pink, blue, and yellow can represent the three lake Pokemon, Mesprit, Azelf, and Uxie!
*Ever noticed something with Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan
*Dragonair is taller than its evolve form Dragonite. *Check your pokedex on their heights*
*Dewgong Have you ever heard of the animal Dugong They look very much alike.
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On January 22, the increasingly popular relay running series, Ragnar, announced that it is partnering with Salomon to launch the world’s first overnight trail running series. "For years we have dreamed of taking Ragnar to the trails and now it’s a reality," says Tanner Bell, who founded Ragnar Events a decade ago with a 200-mile team road race in Utah. Since then, the series has grown to 15 events in the U.S. and Canada, with nearly 100,000 racers competing last year.
The new two-day trail series will feature 120-mile courses and teams of four to eight runners. Unlike the road series, in which teammates who aren’t running drive by van to meet up with their runners at pre-determined transition points, Ragnar’s trail relays will consist of three loops run out of a central base camp à la traditional 24-hour mountain bike races. Not only does this alleviate the discomfort of cramping muscles during long car rides, but it also caters to parent runners who want to bring their kids to check out the action. Simply pitch a tent, set up a few chairs, and voila—front row seats to the race. (Kids must be at least 12 to enter.)
The science of barefoot running form hit the ground somewhat simply at first. In a January, 2010, Nature article, “Foot Strike Patterns and Collision Forces in Habitually Barefoot Versus Shod Runners," Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman and colleagues said that traditionally unshod populations likely ran with a soft forefoot or midfoot strike. They said that rearfoot strikes, or heel strikes, involved higher collision forces that could lead to repetitive stress injuries over time. Since staying healthy was important for survival, and survival for early humans may have included running long distances to forage or hunt, they hypothesized that forefoot or midfoot strikes were probably more common for barefoot runners. They also said that forefoot or midfoot strikes might protect today's runners, who often heel strike, against a high degree of impact-related injuries.
The scientific debate about running form picked up, with a lot of back and forth about the economy, injury rates, and performance benefits of foot strike patterns and running. Lieberman and co. added traction to their theory in 2012 when they published a study that said college cross-country runners with rearfoot strikes had a higher rate of repetitive stress injuries than those with midfoot and forefoot strikes. A 2012 lawsuit brought against Vibram for deceptive advertising about the supposed health benefits of their shoes added attention and debate. The science about foot strike patterns and barefoot running is young and far from conclusive.
This month, things got more convoluted. Lieberman's 2010 Nature study, which found a high rate of forefoot strike among traditionally barefooted runners, focused on one particular group of people, the Kalenjin of Kenya. A January study published in the journal PLOS One, “Variation in Foot Strike Patterns During Running Among Habitually Barefoot Populations,” looked at another group of traditionally unshod runners—the Daasanach of northern Kenya—and found they favored rearfoot striking.
Kevin Hatala of George Washington University and colleagues tested the footstrike patterns of 38 traditionally barefoot Daasanach adults and found that the majority ran with a rearfoot strike at endurance speeds. They impacted the earth with some part of their heels 72 percent of the time, a midfoot strike in 24 percent of trials, and forefoot strike four percent of the time. "We were surprised to see that the majority of Daasanach people ran by landing on their heels first and few landed on their forefoot,” Hatala said in a press release. “This contradicts the hypothesis that a forefoot strike characterizes the 'typical' running gait of habitually barefoot people."
In addition to the 50 sunsets and sunrises that ultrarunner Jez Bragg plans to take in while trying to run 2,000 miles across New Zealand's newest cross-country trail in the fastest time ever, there are less dramatic sites that require more of his attention. For example, there are seven sheep for every person in New Zealand, which means a lot of herding dogs. On day 18, at 3:30 p.m., Bragg was in the middle of a long run when he ran into a cowboy with five such dogs. The chance meeting led him to refocus his attention on the trail beneath him. "Five dogs means high statistical probability of dog poo," read a post on his blog, written from the perspective of his shoes, which had already trudged over more than 600 miles of terrain. "I am running almost 100km today, having my back pressed into dog poo would be the last straw."
Here's a bit more on Bragg's 50-day planned journey, in case you'd like to follow along.
Yes, carrying an umbrella is the simplest way to stay dry when it's raining. For science's sake, let's just say it starts raining unexpectedly on a day when an umbrella just isn't a possibility and you have somewhere specific to be. What's the best way to get less wet while traveling to your destination?
Not everyone wants to show it all when they run. Slit-up-the-side, three-inch inseam, built-in underwear, nearly-a-speedo running shorts are about as revealing as you can get in public without getting arrested.
If that's not your look, Brooks Running is now making the Board Short, a pair of running shorts just for you. They look and feel like surf shorts, with a classic lace-up fly, a modern plaid print, and a full nine inches of inseam in a super supple stretchy fabric that won't get hung up as you click off the miles.
The shorts are so light, our tester reported, "more than once I looked down to make sure that I was still actually
wearing something." In the Board Short, you'll be unencumbered and you'll dry fast—it's DWR coated—whether you're running, hiking,
swimming, or cycling. Wear them all day long.
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Getting the thumbs up: Who gets the coveted Honey Boo Boo endorsement?
With the presidential election only days away, voters who still find themselves undecided may be turning to endorsements for guidance.
Thankfully, we have been treated to some of the most politically savvy celebrities’ opinions, such as the presidential picks of Honey Boo Boo (Obama) and Jenna Jameson (Romney).
However, as we saw when Spectator published its endorsement of President Obama on Oct. 16, newspapers are one of the main providers of political endorsements. The question is, though, do these news organization endorsements actually affect voters?
The Des Moines Register, a publication in the swing state of Iowa that backed Obama in 2008, generated buzz when it published its endorsement of Romney on Oct. 28. Overall, though, most of the endorsements so far have come in on Obama’s side. Of the newspapers with the top five largest circulations, two have endorsed Obama (The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times), two generally do not endorse candidates (The Wall Street Journal and USA Today), and one (The New York Daily News) has not yet given an endorsement, but supported Obama in 2008.
Since these organizations have a larger readership, might they have the opportunity to influence more voters? Most of the endorsements, though, don’t come as a surprise—most are predictable from the start, reflective of the general political climate in the geographical regions they serve or typical of the publication’s own political bent. Maybe they are just telling their readers what they want to hear.
Take, for instance, The New York Post, the most widely circulated newspaper to endorse Romney, and The New Yorker, which recently endorsed Obama. The Post’s endorsement embodies the publication’s usual conservatism and offers a slight dose of its infamously punchy, often sensationalist style. Overall, though, it focuses on the economic issues at stake: “Americans need jobs—jobs for those trying to raise a family, jobs for those who are leaving school, jobs period!”
Meanwhile, the more liberal New Yorker, sometimes criticized for catering to an intellectual elite, published a sprawling, stylistically intricate endorsement professing that, based primarily on social issues, “Obama’s America—one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality—represents the future that this country deserves.” Which issues matter more to you? Which publications do you read? Is there any link between the two? We’ll find out after we visit the polls on Nov. 6th.
For more election coverage, check out Spectator’s special issue, here. Featured election endorsements include:
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Garden Talk: March 8, 2012
From NGA Editors
Perennial Plant of the Year
Each year the Perennial Plant Association (PPA) chooses an easily grown, widely adapted perennial with multi-season interest as its Perennial Plant of the Year. Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost', the selection for 2012, is truly an outstanding choice.
Also known as Siberian bugloss and false forget-me-not, its broad, heart-shaped leaves are covered with a with frosty silver accented with a tracery of green veins, forming a mound 12-15 inches tall and about 20 inches wide. Rising above the foliage in mid to late spring are sprays of tiny, bright blue, forget-me-not like flowers.
Brunnera does best in a shady spot with fertile, moisture-rententive soil. It makes a lovely spring picture with bleeding heart (Dicentra), which blooms at the same time. Other good shade-loving companions include hostas, ferns, epimediums, heucheras, and hellebores. After the flowers fade, brunnera continues to light up the shade garden with its shimmering leaf color and provides excellent cover for the withering foliage of spring bulbs. The rough texture of brunnera's leaves causes deer to usually pass it by. Adapted to Zones 3-8, brunnera rarely needs division and when well sited, is an excellent choice for a low maintenance garden.
To find out more about Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost' and the Perennial Plant Association, go to: PPA.
Casting Votes, Saving Rivers
River Network is an organization devoted to saving one of the earth's most precious resources -- fresh water. Population growth, climate change, stormwater-caused pollution, and wetland destruction are just some of the many factors contributing to the degradation of our fresh waterways. River Networks's approach is to work with local groups to develop strategies to address river and watershed conservation and protection in diverse ways.
To that end, River Network has joined with MillerCoors to award nearly $60,000 in grants to support watershed protection programs. They have selected six finalists from across the country. And they want you to help select the winners!
Through 5 p.m. PST on March 19, 2012, you can vote online for the project you think will do the best job protecting water resources. The finalist with the largest vote total will receive a $25,000 grant. Second and third place vote getters will be awarded $15,000 and $10,000, respectively, with the remaining projects receiving $2000 each.
The finalists are Friends of Marsh Creek in Oakley, California; Clinton River Watershed Council in Rochester Hills, Michigan; Friends of the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota; Ohio River Foundation in Cincinnati, Ohio; Lake Champlain International in Colchester, Vermont; and Friends of the Rappahannock in Frederickburg, Virginia.
To find out more about River Network, read more about the projects each of the contest finalists has planned, and to cast your vote, go to: River Network.
Overfed and Undernourished
Here's an alarming statistic. According to a nationwide dietary survey conducted by researchers at the USDA Agricultural Research Service's Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, ″For people over age 2, grain-based desserts accounted for a greater proportion of daily calories than any other food group.″ This means that foods such as cakes, cookies, pies, cobblers, sweet rolls, pastries, and donuts are ″the main source of excess calories in the U.S. diet.″ Wow!
What else are we getting too much of? Salt for one. The survey found that most American adults consume more than twice the maximum recommended daily sodium intake.
What is lacking? Vitamins C and A, and magnesium, nutrients that fruits, vegetables, and whole grains can provide. But the survey found that the average woman gets only one of the recommended one-and-a-half to two servings of fruit a day and men only slightly over one of the recommended two to two-and-a-half servings. And while it's recommended that adults get a minimum of seven cups of red, orange, and dark-green vegetables per week, most of us are consuming a mere half that amount. Consumption of whole grains is similarly low.
What's an easy and economical way to increase the amounts of fruits and vegetables in your diet? You guessed it -- grow your own! A food garden is an excellent way boost your nutrition -- and to have some fun and get some healthful exercise in the process. A handful of sweet strawberries or blueberries fresh from garden or a just picked, fully ripe tomato makes a delicious snack that will put any nutrition-poor donut to shame.
To read more about the national "What We Eat in America" survey, go to: ARS.
Fighting Plant Viruses with Biomarkers
When you have a pest or disease outbreak in your garden, it may feel like the insects or microorganisms have the upper hand. But scientists are working hard to fight back in ways that are economical and environmentally sound.
A team of researchers from the USDA and Cornell University is studying aphids and their role in transmitting virus diseases to plants. Some species of aphids are efficient virus vectors; others are not. Specifically the scientists are looking to see if the aphids that do transmit disease can be distinguished through protein biomarkers from those that don't.
Controlling the spread of viruses is important because there is no cure for plants once they are infected. The best controls involve either breeding resistant plants or preventing insect vectors like aphids from feeding on plants and infecting them in the process.
The goal of the research is to develop a simple test kit that farmers can use out in the field to determine if the aphids infesting a crop carry particular biomarker proteins indicating they are capable of virus transmission. This will allow for more targeted pesticide use, aimed only at those species that transmit disease, saving the farmer money and reducing the amount of pesticides put out into the environment.
To read more about this research, go to: Cornell Chronicle.
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TEOMIM, ARYEH LEIB
TEOMIM, ARYEH LEIB (d. 1831), Galician rabbi and author. In his youth Teomim became famous as a prodigy and while still very young was chosen rabbi of Lyzhansk (Lezajsk) in Galicia. Despite his youth he vigorously opposed Ḥasidism which began to spread in Galicia, with its center at Lyzhansk, headed by *Elimelech of Lyzhansk, author of No'am Elimelekh. However, he did not remain there long. After the death of his wife, he married the daughter of Samuel Bick, at that time one of the wealthiest men of Galicia. Teomim moved to Brody, where he occupied no official rabbinic position. In 1815 he was appointed rabbi of the town and, being a man of wealth and property, conducted his rabbinate with great firmness, without fear of the wealthy lay leaders. When in 1818 the grammar school in Brody was established under orders from the emperor of Austria, Teomim was among those who welcomed it, since "the Torah has to be combined with general knowledge." The Ḥasidim were vigorously opposed to this school. In 1827 he became ill and as a result was unable to carry out his rabbinic functions. The community appointed Eliezer Landau as its rabbi, but out of fear of angering Teomim did not inform him. However, the latter died during Teomim's lifetime. According to the tradition in Brody, Teomim saw a large funeral passing by his house. He asked the maid: "Whose funeral is it?" She innocently replied, "The rabbi of the city." Sorely hurt, his condition deteriorated, and he died two months later. He was the author of commentaries on the Torah, Esther, Ruth, and the Passover Haggadah; Ayyelet Ahavim, novellae on talmudic tractates, and Ya'alat Ḥen were both published in Zolkiew in 1802.
Y.A. Kamelhar, Dor De'ah, 2 (19632), 159–61; N.M. Gelber, Toledot Yehudei Brody (= Arim ve-Immahot be-Yisrael, vol. 6, 1955), index.
Source: Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.
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Explore The Côte d’Azur
The seventeenth-century villa lying between the Roman excavations and the arena is the Musée Matisse. Matisse spent his winters in Nice from 1916 onwards, and then from 1921 to 1938 rented an apartment overlooking place Charles-Félix. It was here that he painted his most sensual, colour-flooded canvases of odalisques posed against exotic draperies. As well as the Mediterranean light, Matisse loved the cosmopolitan aspect of Nice and the presence of fellow artists Renoir, Bonnard and Picasso in neighbouring towns. He died in Cimiez in November 1954, aged 85.
The Roman remains and the Musée Matisse back onto an old olive grove, at the eastern end of which are the sixteenth-century buildings and exquisite gardens of the Monastère Notre-Dame de Cimiez. The oratory has brilliant murals illustrating alchemy, while the church houses three masterpieces of medieval painting by Louis and Antoine Bréa. On the north side of the monastery is the Cemetery of Cimiez; the simple tomb of Matisse is signposted on the left-hand side.
At the foot of Cimiez hill, just off boulevard Cimiez, Chagall’s Biblical Message is housed in a museum built specially for the work and opened by the artist in 1972. The rooms are light, white and cool, with windows allowing you to see the greenery of the garden beyond the indescribable shades between pink and red of the Song of Songs canvases. The seventeen paintings are all based on the Old Testament and complemented with etchings and engravings.
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Solutions for High School Students
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- Identifying and strengthening your job skills. Job skills are what count in the workplace. With marketable skills you are in the driver's seat. The Foundation Skills: Job Skills All Workers Need describes what they are. Evaluate yours and work to strengthen those that need it. Be sure to read The Free Agent Outlook on Work and Identify Your Skills and Make Them Work for You.
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President, Career Key.
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