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The Citadel’s Role in Halifax’s History
It’s not an exaggeration to say Halifax, a city on the sea, owes its existence to the Citadel. It was the large hill and its position overlooking the easily defended harbour below that led the British military to found the town there in 1749. Among the first buildings constructed was a wooden guardhouse on top of what would eventually be called Citadel Hill, with Halifax’s first settlers building their homes at the base of the hill, closer to the water. Over the years, as the fort grew, so too did the town, with much of Halifax dedicated to supplying the soldiers with both essential supplies and off-duty entertainment.
Citadel Hill Today
Today, the Halifax Citadel continues to watch over the city’s downtown core, although now its role is as a reminder of Halifax’s past and not as a military fortification. The present Citadel, completed in 1856, is officially called Fort George, named after Britain’s King George II, and is actually the fourth in a series of forts to sit atop what is now known as Citadel Hill. Its distinctive star shape is typical of many 19th century forts built by the British military and gave the garrison sweeping arcs of fire. From its deep defensive ditch, soldiers pointed muskets from every angle of its stout walls and large cannons lined its ramparts. It’s easy to see why no enemy force ever dared to attack the Halifax Citadel.
Things to do Around the Halifax Citadel National Historic Site
The Halifax Citadel National Historic Site gives visitors the opportunity to explore the history of the fortress and the soldiers who were stationed there, walk within its walls – both inside and out –, and literally touch a piece of Halifax’s military history.
- Tour the Citadel’s Army Museum, which showcases uniforms, weaponry and models of the fort and its soldiers throughout history.
- Watch the story of Halifax and the Citadel as told the through imagery, displays and sounds of the Tides of History exhibit.
- Take a private or guided tour of the Citadel grounds – just be sure to keep an eye out for the ghosts that are rumoured to lurk in its shadows!
Halifax Citadel Re-enactments
The Halifax Citadel is anything but a simple museum. Every day, the Citadel comes to life with the sounds and colour of its re-enactment actors, the 78th Highlanders and the Royal Artillery. Dressed in the same uniforms that their respective regiments wore in the mid-1800s, the 78th Highlanders guard the Citadel’s entrance and conduct marching and band drills on the parade grounds, while the Royal Artillery fires the Noon Gun every day at 12 pm – a Halifax tradition that is one of the oldest in the world.
Become a Soldier for a Day
For those who are even more serious about experiencing a soldier’s life in the mid-19th century Citadel, the Soldier for a Day program gives you the chance to step back in time and assume the role of a Highlander. Get fitted for an authentic uniform, including a cotton shirt, wool kilt, sporran, red wool Highland “doublet,” wool socks, boots, spats, and a Glengarry bonnet bearing the brass badge of the 78th Highlanders. You’ll need to look the part because the rest of your day will include learning to drill, fire a rifle (or, for those under 16, play the British Army’s field drum) and learning the ins and outs of a soldier’s life in Her Majesty’s army!
Citadel Admission and Hours of Operation
The Halifax Citadel National Historic site is open year-round and admission varies with the season. Guided tours are available May through October, with special events taking place on special days such as Canada Day. For more information, visit the Halifax Citadel National Historic Site of Canada website.
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President Barack Obama continues to earn extremely low approval ratings on economic issues, which continue to put his re-election in doubt. A new Gallup survey finds some of the lowest marks for Obama on economic indicators that the polling company has measured.
On the overall economy, Obama gets a 36 percent approval rating, while 60 percent disapprove. Just 37 percent approve of his work creating jobs (58 percent disapprove). And on the federal budget deficit, Obama gets an awful 30-64 approval-to-disapproval split.
His other approval ratings are mostly positive. Here's a look at the issues from Gallup:
It's hard to tell where this leaves Obama's re-election prospects, but historical precedents don't bode well for the president. At this point in 1992, George H.W. Bush — who wasn't re-elected — only had an 18 percent approval rating on the economy. Ronald Reagan, who was re-elected, had a 50 percent approval rating there. And George W. Bush sat with a 46 percent economic approval rating.
On the bright side for Obama, however, his approval rating on the handling of the federal budget deficit actually outpaces the Reagan's in 1984. And overall, his number on the economy has jumped 10 points in the past year.
Gallup's Lydia Saad writes that Obama should "focus singularly on raising his approval rating on the economy." Which is easier said than done.
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In his post, Ron Jones takes on the topic of career development for art and design students. I thought I would check in with Angela Myles Beeching, author of Beyond Talent: Creating a Successful Career in Music, for her perspective on the performing arts. As she says, “It takes more than talent to succeed in music.”
Beeching, who has a DMA in cello performance, is the former director of the Career Services Center at New England Conservatory. She currently directs the Center for Music Entrepreneurship at Manhattan School of Music and maintains a thriving private consulting practice.
Q (Sally): I once heard the dean of a prominent school of music say that typical undergraduate music students do not start thinking about what they might do after graduation until the spring semester of their junior year. Then they panic. What’s your response to that scenario?
A (Angela): Part of it is a developmental process: undergrads are so busy fulfilling their degree requirements and figuring out how to become adults, that the reality of graduation does not start to get real until junior year. However, students at every stage have entrepreneurial project ideas. So, the earlier you can engage students in developing leadership and entrepreneurial skills, the easier it is for them to think about longer-term career goals and the action steps needed to fulfill their dreams.
Q: SNAAP data from 2010 shows that most arts alumni are dissatisfied with the career development services offered by their institutions. Do you think that most music schools now ‘get it’ – that they accept that they have to do a better job?
A: The good news is that there are many more schools providing career development and entrepreneurial training and programming than there were 15 years ago. So yes, I think most institutions ‘get it,’ but many struggle with how they can best address student needs.In a typically over-loaded curriculum, how do you make an impact? It’s not up to providing one class or a series of workshops, and it can’t all fall on the studio instructors. You need the emphasis to resonate throughout the program and institution. How to do this in a way that best fits a particular institution’s culture is a particular fascination for me and focus area in my consulting work.
Q: There seems to be a new emphasis on entrepreneurship as a part of career development.
A: Yes, I see more and more emphasis on this, and each institution defines entrepreneurship in a different way. Essentially, most programs aim at encouraging entrepreneurial thinking, a forward-looking mindset, as in: “I want to be in charge of my own life and make things happen.”
Q: What do musicians find most difficult in taking the leap to address their own career development?
A: Musicians often have habits of thinking that get in their way. One is the assumption that there will be a position, a job we audition or apply for, and that this is the only way to success. This thinking precludes creating one’s own opportunities.
Another common musician “blind spot” is not being able to put yourself in the shoes of the “other,” a potential networking contact, funder, employer, or media contact. We have to interact well with others as fellow professionals.
Career advancement begins with reflection and introspection: figuring out who you are as an artist, what you have to offer the community and the world, and how you want to communicate this to others.
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|Some authors are good at presenting theories but unable to connect them to practice. Other are good at telling stories from the trenches, but without being able to produce an analysis of the situation and propose some solutions. On the less examined domain of agile testing, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory are, luckily for us, presenting a book that covers both the personal experience of being a tester in agile projects and a conceptual vision of the place of quality assurance in software projects. Thus you will find in this book “stories” that comes from past projects and “mind maps” that helps to have a high-level vision of the material of each chapter. |
The book offers resource to organize the quality assurance and testing activities in an agile project. It explains also the relationship between test automation and agility. It provides also a part dedicated to the chronicle of the agile testing activities during project life, showing how every member of the team could contribute to quality.
I think however that the more interesting contribution of the book is Testing Quadrants. This concept classifies testing activities depending on their focus (technology or business) and their intent (supporting the team or validating the product). Adding an agile perspective to the original work of Brian Marick, the authors provide resources and examples for each quadrant to make sure that you will cover all the aspects of testing for your project.
This book is certainly a very valuable resource for every people involved in software testing, even if this is not in an agile project. It will also be valuable for ScrumMasters and project managers that have to think on how to integrate the testing activities in their projects.
Click here to get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Click here to get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk
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The Composition Of Nacre
Nacre is composed primarily of crystallized calcium carbonate (CaCo3) and conchiolin. Conchiolin is a dark-colored substance secreted by the mollusk during the initial phases of pearl formation. Conchiolin is an organic protein that acts as a form of glue or adhesive. Generally it is the first layer deposited by the pearl sac; conchiolin surrounds the bead nucleus or irritant and functions as a base coat that will cause the pursuant nacre layers to bind together. The brownish material does not always confine itself to the initial coating, and may be observed throughout the nacreous stratum in cultured pearls that have been cross-sectioned.
A Mollusk Secretes Nacre To Form A Pearl
The mollusk continues to secrete concentric layers of nacre around the nucleus at irregular intervals; microns-thin sheets of crystalline material are laid down in starts and stops and do not fit perfectly together, resulting in a delicate lacework of ridges and swirls similar to a topographical map detailing mountainous regions and valleys. These patterns are often referred to as the pearl’s own fingerprint; each layer is singularly unique in composition and has no equal.
Nacre Is The Beauty Of A Pearl
The exact shape and size of the aragonite platelets are ultimately what influences a pearl’s two most important quality attributes: luster and orient. The platelets’ own thinness and transparency is comparable to a wavelength of white light, which makes the transmission and refraction of light rays possible throughout the crystalline layers. Upon coming into contact with the surface of the pearl, a significant percentage of white light is able to penetrate the top layer and work its way through the nacre strata. Each platelet that the light comes into contact with acts as a tiny prism, breaking up the beam and refracting back a subtle rainbow of color that is visible on the surface of the pearl.
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IMF Executive Board Concludes 2012 Article IV Consultation with the Lao People’s Democratic RepublicPublic Information Notice (PIN) No. 12/121
October 18, 2012
Public Information Notices (PINs) form part of the IMF's efforts to promote transparency of the IMF's views and analysis of economic developments and policies. With the consent of the country (or countries) concerned, PINs are issued after Executive Board discussions of Article IV consultations with member countries, of its surveillance of developments at the regional level, of post-program monitoring, and of ex post assessments of member countries with longer-term program engagements. PINs are also issued after Executive Board discussions of general policy matters, unless otherwise decided by the Executive Board in a particular case. The staff report (use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this pdf file) for the 2012 Article IV Consultation with the Lao People’s Democratic Republic is also available.
On August 31, 2012, the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded the Article IV consultation with the Lao P.D.R.1
Despite policy tightening, global uncertainty, and natural disasters in Lao P.D.R. and its main trading partner, Thailand. real GDP growth remained strong at 8.0 percent in 2011 compared to an average of 7 percent per annum over the last decade. This has allowed the country to make significant progress with attaining Millennium Development Goals (MDG) targets. Inflation has moderated to 3.8 percent (y/y) in May 2012—reflecting lower food and fuel price pressures, policy tightening, and favorable base effects. The fiscal deficit declined further in 2011 to reach the pre-global financial crisis average. Credit growth, however, has again picked up to over 40 percent (y/y) in the first four months of 2012, reversing positive progress towards maintaining financial stability in 2011. The current account deficit has widened and gross international reserves declined by US$50 million to US$677 million at end-2011, covering about two months of prospective nonresource imports, the lowest level in almost a decade.
Macroeconomic policies have remained generally sound; however, low reserve coverage and rapid credit growth amid high lending rates have emerged as sources of vulnerability. Although the FY2013 budget targets a broadly unchanged fiscal stance, the prospect for rapid increases in civil service wages could crowd out higher priority spending going forward. Monetary policy remains accommodative and recently the Bank of Lao P.D.R. has tempered the sale of its securities, thus contributing to an increase in credit to the economy. The supervisory approach remains compliance-based and the entrance of new banks in recent years have spread supervision capacity thinly. Data gaps and poor data quality also hamper the ability to adequately monitor the economy and to design proactive policies to prevent macroeconomic vulnerabilities.
Structural reforms have been accelerated in the context of commitments under the ASEAN Economic Community and the prospect of World Trade Organization (WTO) accession. The authorities aim to complete entry conditions for WTO accession by year-end.
Executive Board Assessment
Executive Directors commended the authorities for their sound policies, which have contributed to impressive economic growth, reduction in poverty, lower inflation, and improved debt dynamics. Directors encouraged the authorities to take advantage of the favorable conditions to maintain macroeconomic and financial stability, build external and fiscal buffers, and achieve sustainable and broad-based growth.
Directors recommended a further tightening of monetary policy to help address the risks stemming from rapid credit growth. Quasi-fiscal lending to local governments should be phased out, and the pace of monetary expansion reduced through sterilization and higher reserve requirements. Directors also encouraged the authorities to strengthen the monetary policy framework and avoid pursuing multiple policy objectives. Moving to an explicit inflation target range in the medium term would help enhance the effectiveness of monetary policy and anchor inflation expectations. Directors stressed the importance of replenishing international reserves, to be supported by tightening macroeconomic policies and taking advantage of the prospective large capital inflows.
Directors emphasized the need to strengthen banking supervision to maintain financial sector stability. Improving the regulatory and prudential toolkit will ensure the quality of credit amid financial deepening. They encouraged the authorities to participate in the Financial Sector Assessment Program in due course, and welcomed the efforts underway to address the shortcomings in the Anti- Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) regime.
Directors welcomed the commitment to prudent fiscal policy and to build buffers to deal with future shocks. They encouraged the authorities to exercise restraint in civil service wage increases which could crowd out higher priority spending. Directors recommended anchoring fiscal goals around the nonmining deficit. They welcomed the establishment of the State Accumulation Fund sourced by excess revenues and underspending, which will strengthen the ability of the budget to respond to future shocks. Directors recognized the improved debt sustainability assessment and called for further strengthening of the debt management framework and maintaining prudent borrowing policies.
Directors welcomed the authorities’ reform efforts to achieve sustainable and inclusive growth. Improvements in the business climate, under the umbrella of WTO accession and the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement, will be key to enhancing competitiveness in the nonresource sector, while stepped up efforts to strengthen public financial management will create more space for high impact spending. Directors also noted the importance of improving the quality of data. They agreed that technical assistance by the Fund would support the authorities’ reform agenda.
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Keseimbangan Cecair Badan Semasa Senaman Dalam Keadaan Berhaba
Singh, Rabindarjeet (2003) Keseimbangan Cecair Badan Semasa Senaman Dalam Keadaan Berhaba. Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences, 10 (2). pp. 4-19. ISSN 1394195X
Full text not available from this repository.
Official URL: http://www.medic.usm.my/publication/mjms/
Universiti Sains Malaysia, School of Medical Sciences, Sports Science Unit
Major sporting events in Asia are commonly staged in hot environments where the average daytime temperature is generally 29-31°C with the average relative humidity ranging from 80-95%. Exercise capacity and exercise performance are reduced when the ambient temperature is high and it has major implications for competitors as well as for spectators and officials. Prolonged exercise leads to progressive water and electrolyte loss from the body as sweat is secreted to promote heat loss. The rate of sweating depends on many factors and increases in proportion to work rate and environmental temperature and humidity. Sweat rates are highly variable and can exceed 2L.h-1 for prolonged periods in high heat. Since dehydration will impair exercise capacity and can pose a risk to health, the intake of fluid during exercise to offset sweat losses is important. Carbohydrate-electrolyte fluid ingestion during exercise has the dual role of providing a source of carbohydrate fuel to supplement the body’s limited stores and of supplying water and electrolytes to replace the losses incurred by sweating. The composition of the drinks to be taken will be influenced by the relative importance of the need to supply fuel and water which, is in turn depends on the intensity and duration of exercise activity, the ambient temperature and humidity. Carbohydrate-electrolyte solutions appear to be more effective in improving performance than plain water. There is no advantage to fluid intake during exercise of less than 30-minute duration. Complete restoration of fluid balance after exercise is an important part of the recovery process and becomes even more important in hot, humid conditions. If a second bout of exercise has to be performed after a elatively short interval, the speed of rehydration becomes of crucial importance. Rehydration after exercise requires not only replacement of volume losses, but also replacement of some electrolytes, primarily sodium. Studies show that rehydration after exercise can be achieved only if sweat electrolyte losses as well as water are replaced. Drinks with low sodium content are ineffective at rehydration and they will only reduce the stimulus to drink. Addition of small amount of carbohydrate to the rehydrating drinks may improve the rate of intestinal uptake of sodium and water and will improve palatability. The volume of the rehydration beverage consumed should be greater than the volume of sweat lost to provide the ongoing obligatory urine losses and palatability of the beverage is a major issue when a large volume of fluid has to be consumed.
|Keywords:||Exercise, dehydration, thermoregulation, fluid balance, sweating, fluid intake, electrolyte, carbohydrate, solutions, performance, sports science|
Repository Staff Only: item control page
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Leaders of the state of Florida’s public school system are drawing the ire of parents, civil rights group and even other educators over top city officials' controversial decision to institute different proficiency standards for students seemingly purely based on race.
Hailed as a “road map” for all public school students and approved by the Florida State of Education earlier this month, the plan sets goals in reading and math that sharply vary based on ethnic and socio-economic dynamics. By 2018, new standards mandate that 90 percent of all Asian students, 88 percent of whites and 81 percent of Hispanics be proficient in reading, compared to just 74 percent of blacks.
In addition, the plan also sets race-based principles for each district and individual school, again with the bottom-line philosophy being that black youngsters aren’t expected or required to perform as well as their white peers.
“All children should be held to high standards and for them to say that for African-Americans the goal is below other students is unacceptable,” Urban League of Palm Beach County President Patrick Franklin told the Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Sun Sentinel.
Additionally, in a letter sent to the U.S. Department of Education, the Orlando-based advocacy group Fund Education Now complained of the plans “overtly racist tone” with organization founder Christine Bramuchi adding “the Board’s plan makes race and data more important than human beings.”
Meanwhile, state officials are defending their program as part of a broader plan aimed at putting all students on a path toward mastering designated key subject matters, adding that they would require a faster pace of improvement from struggling students in an elongated effort to aid them in getting up to speed.
Critics, however, are quick to point out those goals seem conveniently aligned with aiding proponents in satisfying a DOE requirement and gaining a state waiver from the federally-instituted No Child Left Behind law, which is needed for such radical enactment.
“I know some parents are worried,” said Alice Braswell, president of the Central Florida Urban League. “They’re worried does this mean that some people think my child, because of their race, has different abilities?”
While Braswell somewhat agrees with the methodology of breaking down and studying achievement data with race as proponent, she argues the information should be used to aid those who are struggling and not send “you’re not as good” type messages.
“The undertone of setting lower targets for minority students for many feels like a step into a disturbing history,” said Orange Superintendent Barbara Jenkins. “The intent is lost in resounding negative perception.”
In a hastily arranged press conference, Florida Commissioner of Education Pam Stewart again went on the defensive. “This plan does not set lower standards for any student or any subgroup,” she said. “Florida believes every student can learn,” she added, noting that by the 2023 school-year all students are projected to be working at or above grade level.
According to state officials, this year 40 percent of black students were on grade level in math, compared to 82 percent of Asians. Under the new goals, projections estimate that by 2018 that 42 percentage-point gap will be cut to as little as 18 percentage points.
“It’s a sensible, ambitious goal,” argues Amy Wilkins, of The Education Trust, a Washington-based advocacy for low-income and minority students. Wilkins added that the much debated 74 percent reading proficiency level targeted for blacks nearly doubles (38 percent) the percentage of all such averages for students last year.
That rapid rate of improvement, Wilkins adds, is far superior to that projected for white students whose current proficiency levels standing at 69 percent and are targeted for 88 percent.
Currently, about 20 states, including Washington D.C. and Virginia, have adopted similar policies. Such guidelines, Wilkins insist, demand “more improvement and faster improvement for kids who are furthest behind. If people focused on that we might get a little further without the fireworks,” she said.
Florida Board of Education member John Padget is all for civility, but there’s just so much about the state’s plans that leaves him feeling uneasy. “I find differentiated race-or ethnicity-related goals very offensive,” he wrote in an e-mail. “They send the wrong signal to Floridians.”
Even Winnie Tang, president of the Asian American Federation of Florida, takes exception with the plan, telling the Sun-Sentinel the Asian community “has a lot of students that are average and below average. Being perceived as a higher achiever really hurts a lot of students.”
Glenn Minnis is a NYC-based sports and culture writer. Follow him on Twitter at @glennnyc.
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Frequency and Phase Modulation
In frequency modulation (FM), the frequency of the carrier wave is varied in such a way that the change in frequency at any instant is proportional to another signal that varies with time. Its principal application is also in radio, where it offers increased noise immunity and decreased distortion over the AM transmissions at the expense of greatly increased bandwidth. The FM band has become the choice of music listeners because of its low-noise, wide-bandwidth qualities; it is also used for the audio portion of a television broadcast.
Digital radio is based on frequency division multiplexing (FDM), which allows transmission of multiple signals simultaneously over a single transmission path, such as a cable or wireless system. Each signal travels within its own unique frequency range (carrier), which is modulated by the data (audio, video, etc.). Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) takes this concept further, separating an individual transmission into multiple low-frequency signals with a high resistance to interference. A further extension of the technology, coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (COFDM), is widely used in Europe and elsewhere where the digital audio broadcast (DAB) standard has been adopted. OFDM and COFDM offer the benefits of high spectral efficiency, resilience to radio-frequency (RF) interference, and lower multipath distortion.
Phase modulation, like frequency modulation, is a form of angle modulation (so called because the angle of the sinewave carrier is changed by the modulating wave). The two methods are very similar in the sense that any attempt to shift the frequency or phase is accomplished by a change in the other.
Sections in this article:
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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CyLab Mobility Research Center
The rapid development and social integration of mobile technology and mobile systems has permanently impacted the way people interact with one another, redefining what it means to work, play, learn, and socialize. “Anywhere-Anytime” computing, once a radical new concept, is now a way of life and its implications for living in a 21st century networked world are significant and far-reaching. The CyLab Mobility Research Center was established in 2008 in response to the ever-increasing presence of mobile computing in the personal and professional lives of people everywhere. The Center explores the possibilities for development of future mobile technology and mobility systems through a multi-disciplinary and experimental approach combining research in technology, usability, behavior, business, and policy.
The CyLab Mobility Research Center leverages Carnegie Mellon’s west coast presence in the heart of Silicon Valley, epicenter of the software industry and home to many of the major players in mobile systems and computing technology such as Adobe Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, and many others. Led by Dr. Bob Iannucci, the Center has gathered a consortium of Silicon Valley organizations, business leaders, and researchers to explore the possibilities for shaping the future of mobility and mobile computing through the development of innovative context-aware applications, enhanced mobile networks, creative uses for semantic information, and other mobile services. Through groundbreaking work in these and others areas, the Center hopes to fully realize a vision of a connected mobile future in which people work, play, socialize, and interact within holistic mobile environments.
In support of the CyLab Mobility Research Center’s mission of shaping the course of mobile technology, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley now offers students the opportunity to earn a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) with a focus in Mobility. The Ph.D. in ECE-Mobility focuses on the technical, economic, and social effects of mobile technology. Upon completion of the program, students are well prepared for future careers as leaders in application-driven research and technology development in the areas of mobile computing and mobility. The Mobility Research Center’s location on the Silicon Valley campus also provides an ideal setting for students in the Ph.D. in ECE-Mobility program, allowing them to take full advantage of Carnegie Mellon’s close and unique relationships with partner organizations both in Silicon Valley and globally. Students have the option of completing all of their Ph.D. studies at the Silicon Valley location, or dividing their time between Silicon Valley and the main Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh.
The CyLab Mobility Research Center is just one of several research centers and laboratories at CyLab devoted to exploring and developing the next generation of secure computing technologies. To learn more, visit the Center website.
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If you want to gain weight then first thing you should keep in mind is that it is not a thing that you can achieve overnight. To gain lean muscles takes time and hard work to attain that perfect body that can set an example for others and that can turn people’s eyes towards you.
Many times people start going to the gym but after observing not any appreciable difference in their body, they give up doing exercises and that’s where they fail in the process of muscle building.
If you really want to have a perfect male body you should keep in mind the following things:
- If you are really serious for gaining weight and building muscle you must become consistent and follow a routine that includes exercising daily, and remember that it is not a thing that you can achieve in one or two weeks. You will have to work hard consistently for a long time.
- To gain weight, it is important that you are taking a proper supply of nutrients that include a lot of proteins. You can have meat, sprouts, whole wheat bread and white eggs to gain more weight.
- Exercise is the most important thing for building body. It burns the calories and helps in gaining muscle tissues.
Here is a List of Exercises you can do to Build Lean Muscle Mass:
- Warm up is really important before exercising. You can start with jogging and stretching. Stretching helps in making body flexible.
- Lifting weight helps in building body. But start with lifting light weight because lifting heavy weights can put stress on your arms.
- Body weight exercises like chin-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, crunches and air dips also help in building body. Do these exercises slowly to make them more effective.
- During exercising use your muscular force only to lift your body or dumbbells. Don’t let the body or your arm to drop under the effect of gravity. This lessens the effort you are doing to burn calories and gain weight.
- After exercise it is important to relax your body. After the workout lie down straight for 15-20 min to give complete rest to your body.
It is also very important that you cannot eat anything during exercise. There should be a gap of at least 2 hr between exercise and having food. After following these instructions you will see a great positive change in your body definition.
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Knowing The Past
Old homes are loved not in spite of their years, but because of them. Character and mystery emanates
from the walls, whispering a thousand small stories of lives, loves, hopes, and struggles.
Curiosity in such spaces is natural. We wonder about the people, what they did,
and how their experiences reflected and changed the larger world. In this way, tales of everyday
workers meld seamlessly with news of prominent leaders, each story inscribed within the walls.
Historical Insights uncovers the value in the past, both mystical and measureable. Whether you market a home for sale,
gain tax credits, or support a historically sensitive renovation -- you can save money by resurrecting
your home's history. And when it is treasured a housewarming gift, anniversary present, or simply a gift to self,
it celebrates both the home and its owners.
Realty professionals profit from the value in home histories. So can you.
Hot Off The Presses!
We were recently featured on Channel 7 News! You can even see the broadcast if you have a few minutes (or hours, using dialup) to await the download. [Please contact us if you have trouble viewing the file.] And as featured on the broadcast, there's much more to learn about the homes of black firefighter Clarence Caldwell and aviation pioneer Elrey Jeppesen.
Our most recent history, the History of 881 South Gilpin Street, reveals the family of one of Denver's earliest saddlemakers. Look to page 23 as well for a historic transformation engineered by the folks at Monarch Renovation.
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How China's President Is Earning A Nobel Peace Prize
By Ralph Benko
China appears to be on the verge of closing, or, at minimum, seriously reforming its 350 forced labor camps, together with injecting due process into its system. It is an historic development, one under-reported in the mainstream Western media. The New York Times and Reuters, but far too few other media, are on this story. This may turn out to be the world’s most important humanitarian development of the year, perhaps even of this young century.The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs, last December 15, was the first first-string reporter to catch the Tea Party-like popular groundswell against China’s Gulags:
“’It’s high time we demolish this unconstitutional and abusive system that violates basic human rights, fuels instability and smears the government’s image,’ said Hu Xingdou, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology who frequently rails against the system that Mao Zedong created in the 1950s to take down suspected class enemies and counterrevolutionaries.
“People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, took aim at the system last month, saying it had become ‘a tool of retaliation’ for local officials. In October the head of a government judicial reform committee noted a broad consensus in favor of addressing the system’s worst abuses.
“And in a widely circulated recent essay, the vice president of the Supreme People’s Court, Jiang Bixin, argued that the government must act within the law if it is to survive. ‘Only with constraints on public power can the rights and freedoms of citizens be securely realized,’ he wrote.
“China’s incoming president, Xi Jinping, has not yet weighed in on the issue, but reform advocates are encouraged by a speech he gave this month talking up the widely ignored protections afforded by China’s Constitution, which include freedom from unlawful detention and the right to an open trial. “We must establish mechanisms to restrain and supervise power,” Mr. Xi said.
Hopeful sentiments for substantial liberalization — and even ultimate abolition — of forced labor camps promptly began to be borne out upon the inauguration of President Xi, as reported by Reuters’s Michael Martina and Terril Yue Jones in January:
China will reform its controversial system of forced labor camps this year, state media reported on Monday, which would mark a first step toward legal reform promised by new Communist Party chief Xi Jinping.
China’s “re-education through labor” system, in place since 1957, empowers police to sentence petty criminals to up to four years’ confinement without going through the courts, a system that critics say undermines the rule of law and is used against political activists.
China has 350 labor camps throughout the country, housing about 160,000 inmates, according to Xinhua, which cited the bureau of “re-education through labor” under the Ministry of Justice.
Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, said there has been a precedent for a new leadership to take a symbolic step of reforming problematic systems.
“It has been my sense that Xi Jinping means business and that there would be a departure from the caretaking years of Hu and Wen,” he said, referring to outgoing President Hu Jintao and outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao.”
Sure enough, on February 15 Asia News reported: “The Chinese government has started to release pro-democracy dissidents from the ‘re-education through labor’ camps (laojiao).”
“The Chinese leadership understands that there is much to be done and many challenges ahead. In addition to ceasing brutal persecution of religious sects, more humane treatment of ethnic minorities — such as the Tibetans, who are protesting oppression and cultural liquidation by self-immolation, and the beautiful Uyghur people and culture concentrated in Xinjiang — is essential. This is an imperative if the CCP wishes to retain legitimacy. It is encouraging that the new administration highlights in its platform the duty of the party to ‘lead people of all ethnic groups.’ Deeds must follow such words promptly.”
Deeds, indeed, promptly are following. This certainly has nothing to do with the small voice of this column and everything to do with the fundamental decency of the Chinese people … and the recognition by the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party of the imperative of human rights, the elimination of corruption, and reform as the high road by which China rapidly can come to the forefront of the world in the full dignity that befits this venerable culture.
The release of human rights advocates, which is beginning, and the closure, or deep reform, of the Gulags of China are one of the brightest human rights moments of the 21st century. China is overtaking the United States in volume of world trade. Of greater significance is that while Washington is moving retrograde on matters of civil liberties, such as Habeas Corpus, Beijing is moving forward.
President Xi’s statement that “We must establish mechanisms to restrain and supervise power,” Vice President of the Supreme People’s Court’s Jiang’s declaration that “Only with constraints on public power can the rights and freedoms of citizens be securely realized,” could have been taken directly from Locke and Jefferson.
Of course, more must follow, especially respecting the promised benevolence toward ethnic and religious minorities. It is in China’s, and the Chinese Communist Party’s, interests to nurture, rather than suppress, the Uyghurs and Tibetans and even to show forbearance toward shrill sectarians such as the Falun Gong. While Falun Gong would appear, from its rhetoric, to have more to learn than to teach about “truth, compassion and forbearance” it is not the Taiping Heavenly Army and doesn’t warrant comparable treatment. As that greatest of world sages, Lao Tzu, wrote (translation courtesy of Taoism.net ),
The large country only wishes to gather and protect people
The small country only wishes to join and serve people
So that both obtain what they wish
The larger one should assume the lower position
The Nobel Peace Prize Committee is called upon to play close attention. If justified by continued humanitarian deeds an award to Xi could be transformational both for China and the world. China, properly, cares deeply about its international prestige. Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize would be among the most powerful rewards for the advocates of deep reform.
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded, in 2010, to Liu Xiaobo. Liu’s relentlessly subversion of state power, for which he is imprisoned, is forthrightly seditious. Consider Liu’s provocative 1988 call for 300 years of renewed Western colonialism of China as the required instrument of reform. America, too, used to imprison people for sedition. Thomas Jefferson, upon becoming president, pardoned them all. To commute the sentence of this Chinese Abbie Hoffman, while not nearly as important as gentler treatment of ethnic and religious minorities, would be yet additional evidence that Xi “means business.”
The deadline for this year’s nominations of the Nobel Peace Prize closed on February 1. It would have been premature to award the Peace Prize to China in 2013. Yet if the release of political dissidents, and the intensity of the systemic reform — most preferably elimination — of its Gulags continues, and meaningful steps taken in implementing the official promise “… to unite and lead people of all ethnic groups in the new historic journey,” there is no nobler use to which the Nobel Peace Prize could go than to recognize Xi and the Chinese Communist Party.
Ralph Benko, an economics policy expert living and working in Washington, DC, served on detail as deputy general counsel to an Executive Office of the President agency under President Reagan and to a Reagan presidential commission.
Short URL: http://www.hawaiireporter.com/?p=292837
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Bloxx Cures Bandwidth Pains for NHS Waltham Forest
“The deployment of Bloxx has enabled us to identify and block access to popular streaming and download sites, which has freed up a considerable amount of bandwidth.”
Simon Midlane, Waltham NHS Head of ICT
North London NHS Trust deploys Bloxx’s third-generation web filtering solution to monitor its staff Internet access and ensure the smooth-running of its IT network
Bloxx, the web content filtering specialist, today announced that NHS Waltham Forest has deployed its Tru-View web filtering technology to monitor and control staff Internet access across its multiple sites.
The Primary Care Trust was established in 2003 to plan, commission and deliver NHS services to the residents of Waltham Forest, North London. Working in partnership with the Local Authority, Waltham Forest aims to ensure access to high quality care is available to the community, by commissioning a full range of hospital, specialist, community, mental health and primary care services.
Ensuring uninterrupted access to the Internet and a healthy, secure IT network is fundamental to the work of Waltham Forest NHS. The trust has recently upgraded to Bloxx’s TVT-1750 solution to track the Internet access of 850 staff across all of its 28 sites.
“Bloxx is primarily used to monitor staff’s access to all websites and restrict access to unauthorised or inappropriate sites,” explains Waltham NHS Head of ICT, Simon Midlane. “The deployment of Bloxx has subsequently enabled us to identify and block access to popular streaming and download sites, which has freed up a considerable amount of bandwidth.”
The Bloxx third-generation web filtering solution utilises all the conventional methods of web filtering, but with added layers of analytical intelligence that take content identification to the next level. Based on each organisation’s usage rules and policy, Bloxx’s Tru-View Technology performs real-time contextual analysis of each requested web page and classifies access requests into pre-defined categories, then determines based on a users access policy to deny or allow access to the page.
“The high level of detailed reporting Bloxx provides has proven particularly useful. We now have easy access to information about popular websites, heavy users of the Internet and download levels,” adds Midlane. “In addition to providing us with more control and providing valuable insight to the organisation’s web use, Bloxx also enforces our pre-existing Acceptable Internet Usage Policy, reminding our staff of when they should and shouldn’t be using certain sites, such as facebook.”
“The issue of staff accessing streaming sites to view multimedia files, as well as social networking sites, whilst at work is an ever increasing problem for organisations,” comments Bloxx’s CEO, Eamonn Doyle. “In addition to the obvious productivity implications, these types of sites can often prove problematic for the entire IT network, sapping valuable bandwidth. It is fantastic to hear how organisations such as Waltham NHS are benefiting from Bloxx by not just restricting access, but by improving communication regarding their organisation’s Acceptable Internet Usage Policy.”
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Become a Partner in this ministry!
Jewish Awareness Ministries
P.O. BOX 1808
ANGIER, NC 27501
Jul. 14, 2008
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST
At the end of the week, Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator, is scheduled to arrive in Geneva for yet another round of talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. It is unclear what the two have to discuss.
On July 4, the Iranians sent their written response to the West’s latest offer to appease them. In and of itself, the offer, made by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany and communicated to Iran by Solana, constituted a major achievement for the Iranians. It promised civilian nuclear power plants, economic assistance, new airplanes, agricultural assistance, hi-tech transfers and a freeze on the expansion of economic sanctions against the nuclear-weapons-seeking mullocracy. In exchange for all of that, the Iranians weren’t even required to end their uranium enrichment activities. To get the ball of concessions rolling, all the Iranians needed to do was promise not to expand their current enrichment activities.
If Iran were ever even remotely interested in reaching a deal with the international community, this was the deal it would have taken. For the unspoken subtext of the agreement was that the international community is willing to accept a nuclear armed Iran in exchange for the mere appearance of Iranian willingness to bow to international pressure. As David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, explained to Newsweek last week, at their current, known level of uranium enrichment the Iranians are producing 1.2 kg. of enriched uranium a day. And at this enrichment level, they will be able to produce a nuclear bomb by next year. So the international community’s willingness to accept continued Iranian uranium enrichment at current levels is a clear signal of the international community’s willingness to accept a nuclear-armed Iran.
And yet, that offer still wasn’t good enough for the Iranians. Their written response didn’t even discuss the issue of uranium enrichment. They just asked for more concessions in exchange for nothing. And now they believe that their "counterproposal" should form the basis of this week’s round of discussions.
As Iran submitted its response to the offer, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dispatched his foreign policy adviser Ali Akbar Velayati to the media to discuss Iran’s interest in accepting the West’s offer. The Western media and some EU officials were so thrilled by the gesture that the immediate coverage of Iran’s response lent the impression that Iran had in fact accepted the offer.
IT WAS only two days later, after those same officials sat down and read what the Iranians wrote that they realized that they had been tricked. And just to be sure that there was no residual optimism, senior Iranian leaders like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Foreign Minister Manoushehr Mottaki stated clearly that they would never accept any deal that places limitations on their uranium enrichment.
After verbally snuffing out all hopes for an agreement, Iran proceeded to show off its military prowess by testing ballistic missiles last week and augmenting those tests with verbal threats to destroy Israel and attack all US bases in the Middle East.
And still despite all of this, Solana looks forward to his meetings this Saturday with Jalili with hope for an accommodation. After Iran rejected a deal that effectively offered it acceptance as a nuclear-armed state, he still believes that the best way to deal with Iran’s clear intention to acquire and use nuclear weapons is to offer it membership in the World Trade Organization.
Solana’s unshakeable faith that Iran can be appeased is to be expected. After all, Solana was on the first flight to Teheran to begin negotiating with the mullahs the minute that Iran’s nuclear program was exposed five years ago. And he’s been running the talks ever since – first for France, Germany and Britain, and then starting last May, for the US as well.
Solana cannot acknowledge that the talks have failed. He is too personally invested in then to admit that Iran has been using him as the diplomatic fig leaf behind which it has pushed forward with its nuclear bomb program.
SOLANA IS a perfect example of why the oft repeated policy mantra "there’s never any harm in talking" is incorrect. The basic idea behind that assertion is that negotiations can never cause damage, they can only do good – by resolving a conflict without being forced to resort to force. But they can and often do cause tremendous harm – and to the wrong side.
If Europe’s initial justification for negotiating with Iran was that it wished to convince Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, over time that justification gave way to a more basic justification – to deny that the talks had failed. That is, after it became clear that the talks would not succeed in engendering a change in Iran’s behavior, the parties involved changed their focus from Iran to themselves. The talks were about them. And if the talks failed, it wasn’t because Iran refused to listen to reason. It was because the West hadn’t given it a good enough offer. So just by engaging Iran and its ilk, these Westerners were transformed from Western representatives to the Iranian regime to advocates of the Iranian regime in the West.
As a result it has become nearly impossible to have coherent discussion about the Iranian nuclear program. For when the "experts" are called to tell us how to proceed in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, they instead exhort us to engage at ever higher levels with the Iranians in order to show them our good intentions toward them.
And of course, it isn’t only Iran that is benefitting from the West’s false belief in the harmlessness of negotiations. Iran’s proxies in Syria and Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority are also prospering thanks to the West’s belief that negotiations can only do good.
THE LATEST display of this Western preference for the pomp of accommodation over the responsibility of confrontation was French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Mediterranean summit in Paris this week. The purpose of the parley, which Sarkozy has been trying to organize since entering office last May, was to project himself as a global leader in international affairs and to project France as an important country in Europe and throughout the world.
Although the summit – like the Barcelona and Madrid summits before it – was officially focused on building economic cooperation among the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea and Europe, its actual purpose was to propel France to the position of peacemaker between Israel and its neighbors, and specifically between Israel and Syria. And to do this, the success or failure of the entire conference was contingent upon Syrian President Bashar Assad’s willingness to participate and sit in the same room as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
To bring Syria on board, Sarkozy was compelled to accept the Assad regime as legitimate. And to do this, he needed to ignore the nature of the new Lebanese government, Syria’s role in establishing it, Syria’s support for terrorism, its feudal relationship with Iran and its role in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and a host of anti-Syrian Lebanese parliamentarians and journalists over the past three years.
Last Friday, just ahead of the Paris summit, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora announced that he had formed his new, Hizbullah-controlled government. Saniora was compelled to abdicate control over Lebanon to Iran’s foreign legion as a result of Hizbullah’s violent takeover of the country in May. And Hizbullah justified its coup by noting that Saniora’s pro-democracy March 14 movement in the Lebanese parliament had failed to elect a new president to replace Emil Lahoud, who completed his term last November. Of course, Saniora only failed to elect a new president because Syria and Hizbullah had murdered so many March 14 movement members of parliament that he no longer had enough votes to elect a candidate without Hizbullah’s approval.
After Saniora announced his new Iranian-controlled government, Assad was quick to announce that he would be opening a Syrian embassy in Beirut for the first time ever. Assad’s announcement was greeted with glee in the Elysee Palace and throughout the West. It was perceived as Syria’s first acknowledgement of Lebanese sovereignty. But this is a false perception.
Syria’s announcement was not a sign of moderation by Damascus but a sign of radicalization. Syria has not accepted Lebanon’s sovereignty. It has accepted Iranian dominion over Lebanon. And in accepting Iran’s control of Lebanon, Assad effectively acknowledged that today Syria is nothing more than Iran’s Arab vassal state.
Rather than stand up for Lebanon in its hour of need, Sarkozy joined forces with the Bush administration and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government and pretended that Saniora and his pro-democracy forces are still in charge of the country. He pressured Israel to give Mt. Dov to Iranian-controlled Lebanon in spite of the fact that the territory is both vital to Israel’s security and is part of the Golan Heights. And rather than boycott Syria for its role in destroying Lebanon, Sarkozy chose to embrace Assad as a peacemaker.
By doing all of this, Sarkozy argued he would place himself in a position of acting as an honest broker in talks between Israel and Syria. But of course like Solana in his constant struggle to find the right mix of concessions to convince Iran to only enrich small quantities of uranium, so Sarkozy’s concessions to Syria served only to embolden Assad still further.
Assad agreed to come to Paris. But he refused to have anything to do with Olmert. And then, once he arrived in Paris, he gave an interview to Al-Jazeera explaining that he wouldn’t sign a peace treaty with Israel even if it gives him the entire Golan Heights. As far as he is concerned, Israel has no right to expect him to normalize relations. And of course Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah al-Islam and all the rest of the terror groups living in Damascus are simply "resistance" groups and perfectly legitimate. And by the way, Iran, he assured us, is not developing nuclear bombs to the best of his knowledge.
So in exchange for recognizing the new Iranian-controlled regime in Lebanon and embracing Syria to the bosom of civilized nations, Sarkozy provided Assad with an international bullhorn to oppose everything that Sarkozy claims to be interested in achieving. But now that he’s embraced engagement as his chosen strategy for dealing with Syria and Lebanon, he can do nothing but proceed with what he started. And so he committed himself to paying a state visit to Damascus by September.
Neither Sarkozy nor Solana are at all unique. Their associates in Europe, Olmert and his ministers, the State Department and most US political leaders support negotiating with rogue regimes that refuse to agree to anything except the West’s need to make more concessions to them. And all of them, at a certain point, have claimed that those negotiations mustn’t be endangered by more confrontational policies that might actually have a chance of advancing their national interests.
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FESSING UP TO FOREIGN (POLICY) FAILURE IS FIRST STEP TO PREVENTING MORE DANGEROUS DISASTERS, PROTECTING WEST
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In 1987, part-time faculty member Raymond Helmick, SJ (Theology), began hosting at BC a series of "Trialogues" between area Catholics, Jews and Moslems. While the series organized by Rabbi Langer has been academic in nature, the Trialogue program was tailored to a community audience, drawing participants from local Catholic parishes, Jewish groups, and the Islamic Center of New England, a Quincy mosque.
The Trialogue series has its roots in a program of Catholic-Jewish dialogues launched in the early 1980s by the Boston Archdiocese. Fr. Helmick, who was teaching courses in interfaith relations at St. John's Seminary at the time, began attending the sessions around 1984, by which time Moslems had been invited to attend. When the group's meeting space in Harvard Square was destroyed in a fire, Fr. Helmick began hosting the Trialogue sessions at St. Mary's Hall.
Part-time faculty member Raymond Helmick, SJ (Theology).
Perhaps a dozen participants attended the meetings, which were held every other month, and dealt with community issues as well as interfaith relations, Fr. Helmick said. Religion and politics are not normally conducive to polite conversation, but the Trialogue sessions proved so convivial that even the most divisive of issues among Jews, Moslems and Christians were aired amicably, he said.
"For a long time, we carefully avoided the subject of the Middle East," he said. "After a while, group members got so comfortable with each other, they could discuss this touchiest of political and religious topics."
Fr. Helmick said the group's next meeting has been tentatively scheduled for May 20.
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Former U.S. president and special UN representative for Haiti Bill Clinton… (THONY BELIZAIRE, AFP/Getty…)
In the year following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, nearly $49 million poured into a relief fund led by former Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush to get aid to the victims and help rebuild the country.
With two of America's most prominent public figures appealing for donations, raising the money was easy. Spending it was not.
Newly released tax forms filed by the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund show that in its first year, 2010, the fund paid out only $7.7 million in grants – or about 15 percent of the contributions.
Nearly a full year after the January 12, 2010 disaster -- the fund had net assets – unspent -- of $40 million.
"We certainly are not trying to hold back our funds,'' said Meg Galloway Pearce, spokeswoman for Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. "We're trying to put out money where we can. We just want to make sure we do it in a smart way."
The fund has chosen a thoughtful, measured approach to distributing the money, born of a desire to help in a way it believes will do the most long-term good. It is focusing on promoting economic growth and fostering job creation, more so than delivering basic necessities.
The charity has faced the same logistical obstacles in Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest nation, that other aid organizations have, including political turmoil, protests, corruption, hurricanes and washed out roads.
"Anyone familiar with Haiti knows things just take longer in Haiti," Pearce said.
But some donors said they thought the money they sent the fund would be used immediately to ease the plight of earthquake victims, and were dismayed to hear so much of what had been contributed remained unspent a year after the disaster.
"That is disappointing. Very disappointing. Heart-rending," said Nadege Marc, an elementary teacher who has siblings, nieces and nephews in Haiti. "My family to this day, after the earthquake, still doesn't have a place to live. They still are struggling. They still are trying to provide for themselves."
Marc's school, Veterans Elementary in Howard County, Md. raised about $5,000 for the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund in one week. She said she did not expect the fund to have $40 million unused at year's end. "You should never have money left over. Every year you should be trying to raise money. You say: 'Hey, we've got no more money. We spent it! Help us out.'"
Today in Haiti 500,000 people are still homeless and living in camps under canvas. The majority of Haitians don't have access to clean running water. The country does not have major sewage systems.
Cholera has killed more than 6,400 people since an epidemic broke out in October 2010 caused by fecal contamination of the Artibonite River, which is used by many for bathing, drinking and irrigation.
Some critics say that fact alone suggests that the money collected by the Clinton Bush fund and other international non-profits could have been targeted better.
"When billions of dollars are raised in relief and rebuilding, a cholera epidemic shouldn't then kill 6,000 and infect hundreds of thousands of others," said Ben Smilowitz, executive director of the Disaster Accountability Project, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group that aims to provide greater oversight of relief agencies and their activities.
By January 2011 several dozen aid groups had raised a collective total of $1.4 billion for Haitian relief and reconstruction but had spent only half of it, according to a survey done by the project.
Smilowitz does not question the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund's focus on job creation. "But," he said, "I think when people donated to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund and other relief efforts they did not expect that their money would sit in the bank while people died."
In a video appeal for donations made in February 2010, Clinton and Bush urged donors to contribute to save lives, as well as to rebuild Haiti "in the months and years to come."
Additional financial records for the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund are not available yet for 2011.
The fund, however, is claiming greater success this year in awarding the money. The organization, on its Website, reported that from its inception through Sept. 14 it had raised $54 million and "committed $32.2 million to organizations working in Haiti" – which is about 60 percent of the donations received.
By its own admission, the fund has heard from donors confused or upset at the pace and direction of its efforts, such as its decision earlier this year to invest $2 million in the construction of a 130-room hotel in suburban Pétion-ville, one of the island nation's most upscale communities.
"I took a lot of calls from people wondering why wasn't the money going out, why are you giving money to the Oasis Hotel when there are people starving," Pearce said.
The fund's answer: by putting its money to work, it's helping put the Haitian people to work, so they won't have to rely on foreign aid. The hotel, once built, is expected to create 200 jobs.
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What is this Hunger Challenge?? For my readers who are not familiar with the parent blog, Mirch Masala, here is something about the Hunger challenge that AJ and I are participating in.
United Way of King County is organizing a Hunger Action Week from Apr 20-24, 2009 in an effort to create awareness about hunger issues in Washington. Many food bloggers and other individuals have been challenged to provide nutritious wholesome meals to themselves or their families in under $X amount per day. The $X is the maximum food stamp benefit ( known as Basic Food Program in Washington) that is given to individuals or families. The rule for this Hunger challenge are as follows:
· Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner spending only $X a day (see below)
· Salt and pepper don’t count but all other seasonings, cooking oils, condiments, snacks, drinks, etc do.
· Don’t use food you already own.
· Don’t accept food from family, friends, coworkers and others. Not even the free samples from Costco!
· Try to include fresh produce and healthy protein each day.
How Much Can I Spend Per Day?
Individuals can spend about $7 a day for the challenge. We chose that amount because it is the maximum food benefits a single person can get on Basic Food (what Washington calls food stamps). And while Basic Food is designed to be a supplement to food budgets, the reality is that many rely solely on their benefits for food because they don’t have enough money to buy food as well as all the take care of other expenses that they have.
This table shows how much allowance you’re allowed depending on family size:
Household Size Hunger Challenge Budget
1 $7 / day
2 $12 / day
3 $18 / day
4 $22 / day
5 $26 / day
6 $32 / day
7 $35 / day
8 $45 / day
Interestingly, the $7 is generous compared to most other hunger challenges. Many places set the budget based on the average food stamp benefits: $3 a day. For this challenge, we are just trying to emphasize that many, many people are living on tight food budgets and work at the same time, so it’s tough for them to have meals that are fulfilling and healthy.
What Is The Point Of The Challenge?
The Hunger Challenge is really an exercise in empathy – to live in someone else’s shoes for one week and learn how you can help fight hunger in our community.
You will find my menu for the week and other recipes in Mirch Masala. Grilled Chicken was one of the items in the menu for Monday’s dinner.
|Chicken Breast – 1 |
Mediterranean Spice Blend ( bought from World Market and is a blend of Oregano, Garlic granules, Lemon Peel, Dill Weed, Dill Seed, Chili Flakes, Spearmint Leaf, Cinnamon, Mace and Chervil) – 3 tsp
Olive Oil – 1/2 tsp
Marinate the chicken breast with the spice blend for about a couple of hours. Put the two in a ziplock bag, shake well and refrigerate for 2 hrs. Heat oil in a griddle or stove-top grill. Grill the chicken until thoroughly cooked and brown on both sides. You can use the conventional oven for this as well. Season with salt and pepper, if required and serve.
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Brandon Cruz and Clint Jones were just a couple of recent college graduates who didn't know much about health insurance when they plunked down $5,000 each on a startup to help agents do a better job.
Today their investment has ballooned into GoHealth LLC, a $50 million-plus health-technology firm that offers a Web portal where consumers can compare thousands of combinations of health care plans and buy insurance. Since launching in 2001, the two have gone from a Lincoln Park coach house that doubled as their home and company headquarters to a trendy River North office, an adjacent building and a third office in the West Loop to house their 450 employees.
Bigger things are in store. In June, GoHealth, originally Norvax Inc., snagged a $50 million equity investment from Minneapolis-based Norwest Equity Partners.
Messrs. Cruz and Jones, both 35, plan to use the money to get set for an influx of would-be customers who will gain coverage in 2014 under the federal health care overhaul. “There's a massive flow of people that are going to be going into the individual insurance market, and we're going to spend the money to make sure we're kind of the on-ramp for them,” Mr. Jones says. They plan to hire an additional 150 employees by spring.
Scott Lingle, Indianapolis-based chief of sales at Health Insurance Innovations, who has worked with GoHealth since its early years, credits the company's success to poaching “the rock stars” of the technology and health care sales industries.
Messrs. Jones and Cruz first teamed up as roommates at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, studying management information systems. Before everyone was tethered to smartphones and Facebook, they founded CheapShotz.com during their senior year. They snapped photos at frat parties, posted them online and sold them for $9 apiece. The business lasted two years before the friends were overwhelmed with orders (hand-printed and mailed) and closed up shop.
“What do you do when you have too much business?” Mr. Cruz says with a laugh. “You shut down, right?”
About a year after their 1999 graduation, they developed websites and software for small businesses. Meanwhile, their parents insisted that they get health insurance. The two met with a broker, but even though websites that enabled comparison shopping were popping up then, the broker was unable to compare insurers' rates. Messrs. Jones and Cruz had found an unmet need.
What started out as building customized websites and software for brokers to better manage clients and leads has grown into layers of products and revenue streams. Agents pay a match fee for GoHealth customer referrals, and if they have too many leads to keep up with, GoHealth buys and resells them to others.
At GoHealthInsurance.com, which began four years ago, individuals can compare rates or talk to a customer service agent, then buy a plan. Since the shopping tool was created, revenue has tripled, says Mr. Jones, who declines to be more specific.
GoHealth works with about 125 insurance companies, including Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois, the state's largest, and close to 20,000 agents, most independent.
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When I first began practicing yoga in 1983, my teachers didn’t just tell me to breathe; they gave me explicit instructions on how to breathe, how to feel the sensations of breath, and how to become familiar with the muscles of respiration. When I began studying the Ashtanga style of yoga at age 22, I was introduced to ujayii pranayama, or the triumphant breath. It was a complete revelation to me.
Breath equals life. Correct breathing in yoga is perhaps one of the most important keys to exploring the practice. Ujayii breath is one of many breathing techniques used in yoga — and I recommend you try it for stress relief and mind-body health even if you’re not a regular yoga practitioner.
How to do ujayii breathing correctly
Ujayii breath is created by restricting the muscles in the throat at the level of the larynx (voice box), which draws the delicate vocal cords together and produces a hissing sound as breath streams through them. It also induces a warming sensation and generates a noise similar to “listening to the ocean” inside a large sea shell, or the sound made when blowing air into a frigid winter day to “see your breath.”
Creating this wall of inner throat noise is very soothing. It can feel as if you are the DJ of your own inner soundtrack during practice. Focusing on ujayii also serves as a very meditative object of concentration. Producing the sound quite literally gives you the feeling of catching hold of your breath while harnessing its power. It’s an excellent way to relieve stress, even when you can’t stop what you’re doing to get into some yoga poses.
How NOT to do ujayii breathing
Ujayii has its benefits, but when done to excess it can be a tremendous energetic drain on the body. By repeatedly contracting the laryngeal muscles, you create tension in the delicate vocal cords that we use to produce sounds while speaking. Done fanatically and with aggression, ujayii can produce irritation, inflammation, and possibly polyps or nodes on those fine cords.
Ujayii breathing is actually a normal physiological response that happens quite spontaneously in a body under strain; it functions to increase pneumatic pressure in the lungs and abdomen. For example, while shoving a large piece of furniture across the floor, your body will automatically brace the finer and larger muscles of the neck, core and diaphragm, resulting in a “Hmmfgh!” sound as you push. That is an extreme form of ujayii (triumphant indeed, but hardly meditative!)
I recommend using ujayii in moderation and keeping the sound as soft and internal as possible. The rule of thumb being “create ujayii so that it is only heard by you” and disturbs no one else; ujayii will be your little secret.
If you find that you’ve become so attached to producing ujayii that you’re unable to complete a breath without it, you might want to take a closer look at the simple act of breathing and relearn how to breathe effortlessly, without any tension anywhere (and that, my friends, is a WHOLE other discussion).
For more tips on breathing for stress relief, see these great FREE how-to videos and audio clips:
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Now that we have had a 1-4-4 ruling from the Roberts court that the health care reform act is a constitutional exercise of the federal tax power, the next question is how it will be treated by Congress.
Unfortunately, the same Senate that has failed to pass a budget as required by law for the last three years will have to make the determination as to whether new laws are subject to filibuster or not. While principled parliamentarians may cling to the filibuster, in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling it is likely that more laws will be more subject to the budget reconciliation process of the Senate and less to filibusters.
This reconciliation process is reserved for revenue bills that raise or lower taxes. The same Senate that feels free to ignore the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 will likely rely on the court's newfound inability to distinguish between a tax and a penalty in order do away with the power to filibuster for many laws that formerly were stoppable without 60 Senate votes.
So now, the World's Greatest Deliberative Body will increasingly be subject to only a bare majority without the need to build consensus or reach across the aisle. This is another giant step in our march away from having a republic as our Founders envisioned. Instead, we have mere democracy, which was once reportedly described by Ben Franklin as "two wolves and one lamb voting on what to have for dinner."
It is likely to turn out as well for us as it did for the lamb. It was this ability to ignore the other side that got passions so inflamed in the health care debate.
Paradoxically, with more sources of news available than ever before, the electorate self-sorts so that each party plays more to its base than in the past. Think of the news as having an echo-chamber effect.
In this environment, we can expect more laws to be passed with bare majorities.
Historically this has not been good for the stock market. In the 15 years after 1933, when the party in power had a supermajority that could override any filibuster threat, the S&P 500 had annualized price returns (excluding dividends) of 1.9%. During the 63 years when the filibuster was available to slow government down, the annualized price increase was 6.2% per year, a difference of 4.3%.
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Survey: Most Baldness Treatments Don't Work
More Than Half of Men Say Hair Loss Treatments Not Effective
April 6, 2010 -- Most baldness cures just don’t cut it, according to a new
Consumer Reports magazine survey of more than 8,000 men and women who
have personal experience with hair loss.
Of the respondents, nearly 40% of women and 27% of men said they had tried a
treatment or product to help stop or reverse their hair loss. More than half of
the men polled said that the benefits of the baldness remedies were overplayed.
Most of them said they reached for over-the-counter baldness remedies, but
20% of men opted for Propecia, a prescription pill for men only.
In the survey, 27% of the men who used Propecia said it was “very”
effective. Propecia is a member of the class of medications called 5-alpha
reductase inhibitors, which block the body's production of a male hormone. This
drug is also used to treat enlarged prostate glands.
Alternatives to Propecia for Hair Loss
Other remedies did not fare quite as well. Over-the-counter minoxidil (Rogaine) is applied directly to the scalp and is the
only hair regrowth drug approved for use by women.
Just 4% of respondents said it was very effective, with 43% of users saying
it was not effective at all.
Dietary and herbal supplements touted as baldness cures were rated very
effective by 6% of those polled. When medications that target the underlying
cause of the hair loss were used, 12% of the respondents thought they were very
Only 2% of men surveyed underwent hair
transplants; but of these, 49% were either very or completely satisfied
with the results of their surgery, the poll shows.
Accepting Hair Loss
It may be time to adopt the mantra that bald is beautiful, the editors say.
The available treatments -- even those that were viewed as very effective -- do
have pronounced downsides.
“It’s a deeply personal, devastating issue to many who desperately want to
believe that there’s a panacea out there. Sadly, there is no magic
bullet. At the end of the day, the best remedy may actually be
acceptance,” Tod Marks, senior editor at Consumer Reports, says in a
Close to 60% of women and 67% of men said they sought treatment for their
hair loss because they had nothing to lose, but that may not be true, according
to the survey.
For example, Propecia needs to be taken for at least three months, and when
you stop using it, it may stop working. It can only be used by men, and
infrequent side effects may include depression and impotence. Minoxidil also stops working after you stop
taking it, and side effects include dry, itchy, or irritated scalp and
increased facial hair. Hair transplants can be pricey, and sometimes the
procedure must be repeated.
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Why not do a tutorial on a few races faces -- Indian man (Sioux), Japanese girl (Geisha), and an African American girl with cornrows. I really enjoyed drawing these three faces freehand because two of the races represent my heritage. When you finish the tutorial, can you to comment and guess which two races I represent? I will answer back. So, without further ado, have fun learning "how to sketch a face", step by step! Get your graphite pencils ready because you're going for a ride!
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You are here: FatWallet Blog > View Blog Entry
June 23, 2010 | Posted By: Khalid J Hosein
Sure, everyone knows you can use FatWallet to find the best coupons and deals online, or perhaps you use other price comparison sites as well. But do you know if the online vendor and/or your transaction is safe? While FatWallet and other shopping engines do their best to cut out the shady vendors, you should be wary.
It's great to save money, and you should always look for the best deal. But a deal is only good if you don't lose your money in the process! This easy-to-understand guide takes you through what you need to know and what you need to look for when you're shopping for your next must-have item.
First, The Basics: Computer SecuritySafe shopping starts with a safe computer. First, use a current Web browser that is fully patched. Don't use an old browser. IE 6 users, I'm looking at you! Microsoft has an up-to-date, modern browser in Internet Explorer 8 and of course there are many, excellent alternatives such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
Next, ensure your antivirus software (AV) is up to date on your computer. Out of date virus definitions and/or AV engine can sometimes be just as bad as no AV program. And if you don't have antivirus, then drop everything and get something installed ASAP. If you're unsure, just ask your friendly neighborhood geek. Ideally, your AV program should also detect and clean up spyware and malware.
Last, don't share your computer. Why? Because personal information such as names, addresses, what sites you've visited, and potentially even payment information like credit card numbers, can get lodged in little caves on your computer with techie names like cookies, files and caches.
If you must share your computer, it should only be with your spouse/significant other. And even then, it's best to set it up to use different user accounts.
The absolutely strict rule on computer use is not to use a public computer to shop online. Pretty much, you should think of a public computer in this way: "Don't touch it, you don't know where it has been!"
Beef Up Your Browser's SecurityWhen you're surfing the Web, it's almost impossible to tell just by visually examining a site whether or not it's dangerous or run by a dishonest operator. Luckily there are tools to tell us - while we're surfing - if those sites are (or are potentially) dangerous.
Two top extensions for your browser are WOT (Web of Trust) and McAfee's SiteAdvisor. These are available for Firefox, Chrome and IE. WOT also offers a bookmarklet for Opera and Safari. You may also go directly to their respective websites to punch in a URL/domain name to see if they (the questionable sites) have any black marks on their record.
Evaluate the Vendor's WebsiteMany online shopping websites sport 3rd-party certification-like images such as those from BBB and TRUSTe. Be a bit wary of those, as it is very easy for vendors to include the logos/images on their websites without actual certification.
Ensure the vendor is actually listed in those certifying databases - a good test is that the image/seal is clickable and takes you to their profile page on the 3rd-party certifier's site. However, also keep in mind another unlikely but possible scenario: the vendor can become certified then decide later on to turn to unscrupulous practices.
Next, check that they have disclosures and policies listed on their website. In particular, look for privacy, shipping, return, and refund policies. Vendors that don't have these scream amateur or worse, scam. Yes, I know you're not going to read them end to end, but at least skim them. Please.
Last, they should have a phone number and a real mailing address listed on their website. Try calling the phone number and just say you wanted to see if they were legit. At best, you might get a laugh. At worse, you'll find out it doesn't work and/or it goes to voice-mail.
Be a Detective: Find Dirt on the VendorStill not sure about the vendor? Well if they've been around for more than a few weeks, there's an excellent chance that someone has used them and has had a few choice words about them.
The first and easiest method is just to use your favorite search engine to see if any bad comments have bubbled up to the top. If that fails, and/or you want some more evidence, good or bad, try checking sites like BizRate, Google Shopping, Amazon (if they're listed in the Amazon marketplace) and of course, the FatWallet forums. Read some of the customer comments and you will notice a pattern. Reputation matters in the online world just as it does in the real world.
If you've never heard of the vendor before or seems like they're a small outfit, I tend to favor ones that use Google Checkout, or some other independent payment processing service, so that at least there's another buffer who I can turn to in case the vendor turns out to be flaky.
Despite all of these warnings, don't be completely scared off by small companies. Sometimes, you get a much better experience with them because they're hustling harder than their giant brethren to win new customers. I know I've found some amazing deals from small vendors over the years.
Beware of Scams & Too-Good-To-Be-True PricesThis is especially true in the high-end software market where in-demand, but expensive titles are pirated, just copied and sold at highly discounted prices.
One quick way to tell if a price is suspect is when you see a number of reputable vendors selling the product at about the same price, give or take a few percentage points, but then there's an outlier that is selling it for 20% or more less than the average.
If you still can't get that 'great deal' out of your head, then send the vendor an e-mail and ask them directly how their price is so low. Their response (or lack thereof) will tell you a lot as to their credibility.
Purchase and Checkout
So you've done your homework on the vendor and you're ready to whip out your credit card and pull the trigger. Here's what you need to know.
Next, don't ever submit your Social Security number or your bank account number. Honestly, why would an online vendor need that? Does Starbucks ask you for your SS# when you buy a latte? They only need some basic information: name, address, phone # and credit card information.
If you're really concerned, check with your bank to see if they offer one-time use credit card numbers. Bigger companies like Citibank, Bank of America and Discover offer this service.
If you need to create an account with the vendor, use a throwaway password or at least one that you don't use for important functions like banking and e-mail.
Save and/or print the order confirmation page just in case you don't get a confirmation e-mail.
Finally, review your credit card statement the minute you get it to ensure that you were charged exactly what they said they would charge you. Better yet, log into your credit card account online and check it immediately. You might have to wait an hour or up to a day or two in case your credit card company is stuck in the 90s.
Problems?Hopefully everything goes smoothly and in a few days, you'll get a box on your doorstep with a shiny new gadget packed safely in there. But if not, what do you do? Well, it's tough chasing down these nefarious vendors, but try the obvious. Send them an e-mail. Call them. You can even file a complaint with the FTC, and/or with the BBB.
Closing ThoughtsWhen all else fails, be conservative in your judgment. If a site looks dicey or your Spidey-sense is tingling, then don't take the risk. Of course, that doesn't mean if you don't like Amazon.com for one reason or the other that they're unsafe. That's similar to not liking Walmart. You may
Author BioKhalid J Hosein is a blogger, computer consultant and Internet junkie. He is a co-founder of the gadget blog Gizmos for Geeks.
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Embracing the world with positive creativity since Sept 2007.
Four thoughts on the nature of the darker inspirations behind the struggle for human creativity...
"And in the afternoon they entered a land - but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay."
-- George Washington Cable, October 12, 1844 – January 31, 1925
"Living is strife and torment, disappointment and love and sacrifice, golden sunsets and black storms. I said that some time ago, and today I do not think I would add one word."
-- Laurence Olivier, May 22, 1907 – July 11, 1989
"He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery."
-- Harold Wilson, (Baron Wilson of Rievaulx), March 11, 1916 – May 24, 1995
"He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger."
-- Salvatore Quasimodo, August 20, 1901 – June 14, 1968
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Louisiana State Senator A.G. Crowe has authored legislation that seeks to “Prohibit state or local governmental coercion of any Louisiana employer, health care provider, or individual to compel participation in any health care system or health insurance plan.”
The legislation spells out a number of findings that include:
- The U.S. Supreme Court in Printz v. United States, 117 S.Ct. 2365, 521 U.S. 898, 138 L.Ed.2d 914 (1997), has declared that states cannot be required by the federal government to provide services which are not compensated for by the federal government.
- Proposed federal mandates would require Louisiana taxpayers to pay for or subsidize all elective abortions and would be in conflict with state law.
- To coerce individuals to enter into contracts with private companies, particularly health insurers, would go beyond the authority of the Commerce Clause in Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution and, therefore, be unconstitutional.
- To require the citizens of Louisiana to pay for certain federally mandated services while exempting the taxpayers of certain other states is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
- The Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Issues regarding health care and health insurance were never delegated.
Louisiana is not the first state to propose such an action. According to the American Legislative Exchange Council, twenty-nine states have either proposed, or announced an intention, to propose similar legislation.
Ultimately, as has been proposed in other states, a constitutional amendment might have to be passed to facilitate implementation of such as law. In Louisiana, two-thirds of the members of both houses of the Louisiana State Legislature must either vote to put the issue on a statewide ballot, or call a constitutional convention.
The legal arguments that stem from this legislation will be lively. Clint Bolick, litigation director at the Goldwater Institute, argues that the case is “winnable”, and others, such as Mark A. Hall, a law professor at Wake Forest University, claim that there is “no way this challenge will succeed in court.”
Time will tell whether states have the ability to resist the continuing encroachments of the federal government into health care.
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"At the end of every street, there is a mountain": this is the magic of Grenoble!
An exceptional geographical location in the heart of Europe, in the Rhône-Alpes region, near Switzerland, Italy and the Mediterranean sea.
The UPMF is attractive thanks to the expertise of its researchers and the quality of its teaching. Add to that its strategic location in Europe, in the Rhône-Alpes region at the heart of three alpine ranges that can all be accessed on foot from the town center, by cable-car or public transport. An exceptional lifestyle
A melting-pot for scientific innovation
Our university belongs to the PRES Université de Grenoble, second French pole in terms of public research after the Ile-de-France region. Innovation in Grenoble is based on the synergy between Teaching, Research and Industry. Grenoble benefits from the expertise of its numerous laboratories and the grouping together of essential international research tools in the same location, in order to develop partnerships between private and public research.
A reference economic pole
Grenoble has 200 international groups, thousands of foreign executives and researchers, 4 universities, 500000 inhabitants among whom 60000 students. With its four large international research tools, eight research institutes, three competitivity poles, a recognized comitment to sustainable development (first eco-neighbourhood in France; a Sustainable Development Award in 2009-2011 for its "ambitious and visionary policy" launched years ago), Grenoble has always focused on innovation. This is why many large international companies have chosen Grenoble: HP, Schneider, ST Microelectronics, Caterpillard...
A historical and cultural town
At the heart of the French Revolution, pioneer in the hydroelectricity field, the town which created the first tourist information office in France, leader in nanotechnologies, Grenoblehas always been a pioneer in terms of science, tourism and social life. Stendhal was born in Grenoble, a town well-known for its various museums among which the Musée de Grenoble, famous for its paintings recounting the history of Western art from the 13th century to nowadays; for the first Maison de la Culture in France opened by André Malraux in 1968; for its multitude of music bands... Grenoble is a true cultural pool.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. | July 14, 2011 -
Since the start of the 112th Congress, the Education and the Workforce Committee has actively examined federal laws, rules, and regulations within our jurisdiction. The intent of our oversight has been to take a close look at federal policies and their impact on the economy, job creation, and taxpayers. As a result of these efforts, just yesterday we advanced bipartisan legislation to modernize the federal workers’ compensation program, updating assistance for beneficiaries and promoting better use of taxpayer dollars. I hope this hearing will build upon the success of yesterday’s bipartisan initiative.
We all agree that the Fair Labor Standards Act affects the lives of millions of workers. In fact, according to the Department of Labor, the act governs the employment of more than 130 million workers. The law was a significant expansion of the government’s authority when it was created in the midst of the Great Depression, and it wields considerable influence over the workplaces of today’s modern economy.
The law sets forth rules and regulations concerning minimum wage, the maximum number of hours worked in a week, and overtime pay. The law reflects our shared desire to see individuals receive fair compensation for their work. We all want, as the saying goes, to see a worker complete an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. That goal remains to this day, and it must be advanced in a manner that encourages economic growth and job creation.
However, as we have learned time and again with federal policies, good intentions can often lead to unintended consequences. It is hard to imagine a law intended for the workforce known to Henry Ford can serve the needs of a workplace shaped by the innovations of Bill Gates. Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly clear that current federal labor standards have fallen short of the times.
In recent years, the law has caused a number of challenges for employers. A long history of regulations and judicial rulings has created ambiguity and uncertainty for employers who attempt to follow its every detail. This burden falls especially hard on small business owners, who typically lack the expertise needed to understand the full scope of the law. As a result, an employer’s good intentions could leave him susceptible to costly legal challenges.
That is why the explosion in wage and hour litigation is so disturbing. Private lawsuits filed under the Fair Labor Standards Act have skyrocketed over the last two decades, rising from roughly 1,500 in the early 1990s to nearly 7,000 last year. At a time when every employer should be focused on creating jobs and hiring new workers, this is unacceptable.
The law’s unintended consequences also affect workers. As anyone who carries a smartphone knows, the advantages of modern technology have blurred the line between work and home. This has invited the opportunity for greater flexibility in the workplace, and can encourage more family-friendly work environments. Unfortunately, the law can often stand in the way of this progress, creating more unknowns than opportunities for workplace flexibility and growth.
As employers grapple with these complicated questions, they often institute defensive employment policies in order to better ensure full compliance with the law. As a result, workers are often kept to strict 40-hour work week requirements, even though they may welcome more work in exchange for additional income or a more flexible work schedule. Bonus payments and opportunities for after-hour job training can be limited. Employers may also curtail the use of certain technology that provides the very kind of flexible work schedules employees increasingly desire.
Last week, we learned unemployment continues to hover around 9 percent and more than 14 million are unemployed. Smart policies that encourage growth and worker freedom are desperately needed in today’s economy. I look forward to today’s discussion, and to considering positive solutions that will encourage greater flexibility and certainty in the workplace.
# # #
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Focus: Rise of emerging markets in energy
How China and other BRIC nations are changing the game
The global economy is undergoing a paradigm shift, from a Western-dominated economic model to one that is more complex and perhaps multi-polar. The centers of consumption, production, and innovation are no longer concentrated solely in Western economies but are shifting to Asia, specifically China and India, as well as other emerging economies such as Brazil and Russia.
Deloitte’s global Energy & Resources industry group and Deloitte China hosted the inaugural Asia Pacific Natural Resources Forum in Beijing, China on 13 July 2011. This one-day event was focused on China's globalization of its natural resources sector, which includes Oil & Gas, Mining, Shipping, and Power & Utilities.
Explore this collection of reports to learn more about how China and other emerging nations like Brazil, Russia, and India are impacting the future of energy across the world.
|Chinese corporate globalization: Influenced from the West, but practiced in the East
The closely wound relationship between the Chinese corporate world and the Chinese government is unlike anywhere else in the world. Therefore, Chinese corporations must take an approach to globalization that ensures sustainable growth while meeting the government’s demands. This report is an introduction to the China-based approach to globalization, and how it has been implemented in the natural resources industry.
|Global oil & gas tax newsletter, July 2011
The 2nd edition of the Global oil & gas tax newsletter focuses on technical developments in various jurisdictions around the world. Brazil is featured in this edition, plus hot topics from around the globe.
|Comparing BRICs and G6 nations in fossil fuels
This report, "If not BRICs, then what?" takes a closer look at the reserves, production, and consumption of fossil fuels in BRIC and G6 nations.
|Oil & Gas mergers and acquisitions: Rebounding with cash in hand
A recovering worldwide economy, stronger commodity prices, and credit markets are supporting oil and gas M&A activity. What are considerations for your next transaction? Watch our recent Dbrief webcasts to hear our leaders discuss these issues further.
|Empowering ideas 2011
The future of Nuclear. Risk management challenges. M&A – buy or sell? Renewables. Energy resource dilemmas. Data analytics and Smart Utilities. These are just a few of the top challenges facing electric power companies. Deloitte looks at the unfolding trends and how companies can manage these uncertainties.
|Global oil & gas tax newsletter March 2011
The first edition of a new Global oil & gas tax newsletter focused on technical developments in various jurisdictions around the world, including Australia, India, Malaysia, Russia, Vietnam, and Tanzania.
|Challenge to the industry: Securing skilled crews in today’s marketplace
Developed by the Shipping & Ports practice, this Deloitte survey of companies and practitioners addresses key issues confronting the global shipping industry and include the challenges to developing and retaining skilled seafarers.
|2011 Russian oil & gas outlook survey
Companies are planning to increase investments in areas that have suffered reductions in previous years, such as innovative solutions, research, and capital projects to prepare for rapid growth ahead. To learn more, get the report in English or Russian.
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<Apologies in advance: this post is a (major) re-write of an old post.>
Heart rhythm doctors are trained observers. We spend our days focusing on minute squiggles which are timed in milliseconds. It’s all a lot of observation.
It’s only natural that one’s work skills might spill over to normal life. Plumbers are handy around the house; bankers are good with the books; and journalists make good bloggers.
We heart rhythm doctors are good at observing things. (Which, to our spouses’ dismay, doesn’t make us very handy outside the hospital.) Heart rhythm doctors that write a blog are especially keen on looking for fresh new topics. Note to self. Evernote that. Dragon dictate this. Take a pic–that’s a good example of… Etc. Etc.
So while driving through the neighborhood, the trained observer in me noticed this image:
My teenage son asked why we were stopping to take a picture of old people.
I answered that this was a good visual of heart-health.
If the final common pathway of successful aging lies in soothing the inflammation that life throws at you, this picture speaks volumes. They walk through the neighborhood hand-in-hand, near daily. They talk to each other; they like each other; they are a team, for the past sixty-five years.
It strikes me how many times this pattern is repeated: the patient with advanced heart disease powers into my office together with their loving spouse of many years. They defy the illness. It’s as if two can fight disease better than one.
You can find oodles of websites proclaiming that long-term loving relationships are a key component of longevity. This I strongly believe. The anti-inflammatory effect of companionship cannot yet be measured, but if it could, I wonder whether it would be as potent as fish oil, or statins, or beta-blockers. Surely, for extending life, a hand-holding loving companion is a more powerful therapy than a coronary stent or defibrillator?
Life brings choices. Though my data is only anecdotal, I’m guessing that choosing to have a hand to hold is one heck of an important decision.
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Joseph L. Cardinal Bernardin
His Eminence Joseph L. Cardinal Bernardin is Archbishop of Chicago. Prior to his appointment, Cardinal Bernardin served the church in a variety of roles. He served as a priest in the diocese of Charleston, South Carolina, where he became assistant to the bishop, and was later appointed auxiliary bishop of Atlanta. He next served as general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and their social action agency, the United States Catholic Conference. His final position before going to Chicago was archbishop of Cincinnati.
Following his term as president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Bernardin became chairman of the Bishops' Committee on War and Peace. It was that committee which drafted the pastoral letter, "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response." Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, the president of the University of Notre Dame, has called the pastoral letter "the finest document that the American Catholic hierarchy has ever produced..."
At a speech at the University of Notre Dame, Cardinal Bernardin's comments on the pastoral letter stated in part: "A purely political definition does not adequately identify the threat posed by modern warfare. Today, the stakes involved in the nuclear issue make it a moral issue of compelling urgency. The church must be involved in the process of protecting the world and its peoples from the specter of nuclear destruction. Silence in this instance would be a betrayal of mission. The premise of the letter is that nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy constitute a qualitatively new moral problem."
In November, 1983 Cardinal Bernardin received the Albert Einstein Foundation peace prize. The prize of $50,000 was given by the Cardinal to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops for the implementation of the pastoral letter.
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Friday, November 16, 2007
Arcila an the Misunderstood Common Law History of Suspicion & Probable Cause
Posted by Mary L. Dudziak
Fabio Arcila, Jr., Touro College, has posted the abstract for a new article, In the Trenches: Searches and the Misunderstood Common Law History of Suspicion and Probable Cause. The article itself is not on SSRN, but it was recently published in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law (Vol. 10, No. 1, 2007). Here's the abstract: This article, the first of a two-part series, argues that during the Framers' era many if not most judges believed they could issue search warrants without independently assessing the adequacy of probable cause, and that this view persisted even after the Fourth Amendment became effective. This argument challenges the leading originalist account of the Fourth Amendment, which Professor Thomas Davies published in the Michigan Law Review in 1999. The focus in this first article is upon an analysis of the common law and how it reflected the Fourth Amendment's restrictions. Learned treatises in particular, and to a lesser extent a few case decisions, had articulated a judicial duty to monitor probable cause. But it is a mistake to presume that the law was necessarily implemented in accordance with this elite guidance. This is because justices of the peace, the non-elite judges who actually issued search warrants, had reason to believe that judicial sentryship of probable cause was often optional. Evidence supporting this conclusion can be found in treatises, as well as manuals for justices of the peace, legal forms, civil search statutes, and case law, as well as the extended development of probable cause sentryship jurisprudence, which continued well past 1960. American justice of the peace manuals and legal forms play a particularly important role in this story, as it is likely they had a profound influence on search warrant procedure given the laxity in legal education and judicial training, as well as the limitations on legal research, during the Framers' era.
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There are currently 5.2 million Americans with Alzheimer's, but that number is expected to balloon, with one out of eight baby boomers (10 million people) developing the disease in the coming years. Alzheimer's is incurable--though there are plenty of research initiatives trying to change that--but in the meantime, it's possible to leverage today's technology to protect seniors from some of the scariest parts of the disease. One deceptively simple solution: the GPS-enabled shoe.
Developed by Aetrex Worldwide and GTX Corp, the GPS Shoe features a location-based tracking service (powered by Omnilink and the MedicAlert Foundation) that alerts caregivers via an app when an Alzheimer's patient leaves a designated "geo-fenced" area, such as the boundaries of a housing facility. Caregivers can also remotely monitor the location of patients, who may be given more freedom to roam since they can be watched from afar.
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is perhaps the only peculiarly American school of philosophy. The name denotes a concern for the practical, taking human action and its consequences as the basic measure of truth, value, etc. This translates to experimentation not merely as a method of scientific
investigation but as the primary way humans engage each other and the world around them. Different pragmatists have different models of experimentation--some are basically scientific (Charles Sanders Peirce
), others so pluralistic and relativist (William James
) as to be almost anti-scientific. However, all pragmatists embrace some process(es) of ongoing inquiry and transformation of knowledge as part of the basic task of human societies.
A useful general account of pragmatism's origins during the late 19th and early 20th centuries is Menand's The Metaphysical Club. According to Menand, pragmatism took form largely in response to the work of Charles Darwin (evolution, ongoing process, and a non-epistemological view of history), statistics (the recognition of the role of randomness in the unfolding of events, and of the presence of regularity within randomness), American democracy (values of pluralism and consensus applied to knowledge as well as politics), and in particular the American Civil War (a rejection of the sort of absolutizing or dualizing claims (i.e., to Truth) that provide the philosophical underpinnings of war).
Some pragmatists and related thinkers:
- Immanuel Kant (for the category of "practical knowledge")
- Charles Sanders Peirce (note: pronounced "SAWN-ders PURSE": coined the term, though because he was so widely hated and seldom read, was not a prominent figure during his lifetime; he eventually distinguished his own philosophy from James's by calling it "pragmaticism." Peirce also invented semiotics)
- William James (influential psychologist and theorist of religion, as well as philosopher. First to be widely recognized for the term, though he would have preferred "humanist")
- John Dewey (American philosopher, key thinker in philosophy of education, referred to his own philosophy as "instrumentalism")
- George Herbert Mead (philosopher and social psychologist)
- Willard van Orman Quine (pragmatist philospher, concerned with language, logic, and philosophy of mathematics)
- Wilfrid Sellars (broad thinker, attacked foundationalism in the analytic tradition)
- Richard Rorty (controversial neo-pragmatist)
- Cornel West (important thinker on race, politics, and religion; operates under the sign of "prophetic pragmatism")
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January 03, 2013
Armed Groups in DRC Agree to Ceasefire
Several armed groups in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo have agreed to a ceasefire, and an alliance, after months of ethnic conflict. Observers say it is the first time the armed groups have reached such an extensive agreement, but they are worried that it may not last.
The village of Mashadi in Masisi territory has been on the front line of ethnic conflict between the Hutu and Hunde communities. On November 11 it was attacked by a Hutu militia, the Nyatura, who ransacked and burned the houses lived in by Hunde, but left all the Hutus’ houses untouched.
The local chief says 155 houses were destroyed and five people killed.
This has been a common pattern in Masisi this year as ethnic militias mainly from the Tembo, Hunde and Hutu communities have wreaked havoc across the territory. Many villages that used to have a mixed population are now empty or inhabited by only one ethnic group.
But last Saturday a government official, Ngwisha Mapendo, had news for the Hutu villagers who are still living at Mashadi.
Speaking at a village assembly he told them they could now have peace. He said he had been at a meeting on December 18 in which local authorities and other power holders had agreed on a ceasefire.
Speaking to VOA at Mashadi, Ngwisha explained that local people had approached armed group leaders and persuaded them to send representatives to the meeting where they arranged a ceasefire and a peace alliance.
He said that besides the Nyatura, other armed groups were represented at the meeting, included the APCLS (Alliance of Patriots for a Free and Sovereign Congo), the Raia Mutomboki (Angry Citizens alliance), and several so-called Mai-Mai groups.
Together these groups account for the bulk of the militias in North Kivu province, apart from the M23 rebels and their allies and the Rwandan rebel FDLR (the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda).
The militia alliance held another meeting on December 27 at the APCLS headquarters at Nyabiondo, in the Hunde heartland.
Speaking to VOA at Nyabiondo shortly after that meeting, a representative of the Mai-Mai groups known as General Samson said they had agreed to work under the APCLS leader, known as General Janvier Buingo Karairi.
Samson also said that if the government army was able to defeat the M23, the Mai-Mai would be ready to enroll in the army, and if it could not defeat the M23 on its own, the Mai-Mai would help.
Some local people think the ceasefire and the alliance are part of a government strategy.
Aimee Imoabita is a Hunde who had to flee his village and is now living at a displaced persons camp in Masisi Center, a town in the territory.
He said he knows the APCLS is now with the government because since that armed group came to the town it has not caused any trouble for the authorities or for local people. The APCLS do not kill people, he said, and they guard the population very well.
Other displaced people at the camp, including Hutus, agreed.
It is clear that the APCLS and government troops are collaborating, although they were fighting each other until mid-November. Peace talks between the government and the M23 are due to restart in Kampala Friday. What is not clear is how the APCLS and the other armed groups will react if the government signs a deal with the M23, which captured and briefly occupied the provincial capital, Goma, in November.
Speaking to VOA at Nyabiondo, APCLS leader Janvier said it was unlikely the talks would end the war.
He said the M23 have demanded that five of their leaders be given generals’ ranks in the army and have made other demands that will be difficult for the government to accept.
Janvier also said that he is not yet ready to enroll his troops in the army.
He said the government has given too many army posts to the enemy and he wants the government to expel the enemy from the army before his own troops enroll.
Activists in North Kivu helped to broker the armed groups’ ceasefire. The president of North Kivu group, Thomas d’Aquin Muitu, praised their efforts.
They should be encouraged to continue their work, he said, because divisive forces are still active. But he said a bigger task still lies ahead, which is to persuade the armed groups to join the army.
Meanwhile, the authorities are hoping they can persuade the Hunde and Hutu to live together in Masisi by relocating markets. Government official Ngwisha Mapendo told the villagers at Mashaki that a market would be moved to their village to encourage the Hunde to return.
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What We Offer
- Success Stories
- Professional Partners
Action Research Project Grants
Hoenny Center Project Awards for Teachers
Purpose: Hoenny Center Project Awards are intended to promote and recognize preK-12 classroom (action) research projects in the area of peer teaching.
Amount: A maximum of five awards will be given yearly—up to $500 per project.
Expectations: Proposals for a project award must meet the following expectations to be considered for funding:
1. The applicant is a professional educator in a full-time position teaching at any level from preKindergarten through 12th grade.
2. The applicant will carry out the project him/herself.
3. Data gathering and report submission can be completed in about six months.
4. The project consists of gathering and summarizing data related to a professional question of interest to the teacher within the general area of peer teaching/learning in the classroom. However, preference will be given to projects involving the analysis of a) descriptions of individual differences in students' teaching abilities; b) attempts by the teacher to improve students' teaching abilities; or c) reflections by students on the motivations, rewards, and/or strategies of helping other students learn.
5. The scope of the project should be such that it will take from four to ten weeks to complete the in-class part of it. To illustrate: there is a report in the "Research" section of our web site on a project in an AP calculus class at http://www.hoennycenter.org/research_reports.asp. The teacher assigned calculus topics to students, helped them to develop review pages for the class and teach the topic, collected the pages into a review booklet for the AP calculus exam, and gave the students some reflective questions about the experience. The report documents and analyzes this work. E-mail us for other examples of such projects.
6. The report is due 60 days after the planned conclusion date of the data-gathering phase of the project. Permission will be required for the report to be disseminated on the web site and in other publications of The Hoenny Center for Research and Development in Teaching.
Applications: 1) If you haven't already done so, email email@example.com with information about your teaching position, contact information, and brief description of your project idea. 2) If the project seems germane to our interests and is of sufficient scope, 3) we will email an outline and questionnaire for you to submit for your final project proposal, due July 1.
Deadline: July 1 is the deadline for receipt of final project proposals. Awards will be announced by August 31.
Information: J. Terry Gates, Ed.D., President/CEO; The Hoenny Center; PO Box 9388; St. Louis, MO 63117-0388. 314.567.5111 firstname.lastname@example.org www.hoennycenter.org
The Hoenny Center is committed to a policy of equal opportunity in all of its collaborations
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Tax season is prime tax scam season. As taxpayers are trying to decipher new tax laws, criminals take advantage of the confusion and concern about filing to dupe unsuspecting filers.
Some scam artists come up with patently false schemes to wheedle personal information and money from unsuspecting taxpayers. Others take real tax breaks, or portions of legal write-offs, and illegally apply them.
The IRS tracks the multitude of schemes and each year compiles a list of the 12 most egregious tax-related scams. This filing season, 11 of the scams are making a repeat appearance on this list, including the criminals' perennial favorite, phishing.
Other cons still making the rounds include frivolous tax arguments, retirement scams, misuse of trusts and improper charity deductions. And some folks can't even trust their tax pros, with unscrupulous preparers once again making the annual list.
You can read descriptions of the scams, as well as the 11 others that made the 2009 and 2010 lists, in Bankrate's look at last year's dirty dozen list.
Here are 2010's dirty dozen tax scams:
- Frivolous arguments.
- Abusive retirement plans.
- Disguised corporate ownership.
- Zero wages.
- Misuse of trusts.
- Fuel tax credit scams.
- Return preparer fraud.
- Hiding offshore income.
- Filing false or misleading forms.
- Nontaxable Social Security benefits with exaggerated withholding credit.
- Abuse of charitable organizations and deductions.
New to this year's list is No. 5, questionable claims regarding Social Security taxes withheld. The IRS says it's seeing more returns where taxpayers report nontaxable Social Security income along with exaggerated withholding amounts in order to get a refund. In many cases, say tax examiners, the income amounts and withholding figures are incorrect.
This is based on a real tax credit. Claiming overpaid Social Security taxes is legitimate in cases where, for example, you have multiple jobs and the 6.2 percent payroll tax is withheld from your wages on earnings that exceed the taxable wage base. In 2009, that income level was $106,800; it's the same in 2010.
In these cases, your multiple employers each collect the withholding, meaning your total wages upon which you paid Social Security taxes could be more than the limit so you paid more than the maximum of $6,621.60 in payroll taxes. You're allowed to collect any overpayment as a credit when you file your return.
Scams steep costsIf the IRS catches you making a fraudulent Social Security withholding claim, you could face a $5,000 fine.
But fines aren't the only price of false filing. Each of these tax-oriented cons has serious consequences, not just for the perpetrators, but also for their victims.
If convicted of tax fraud or evasion, scam promoters face tax penalties, interest and criminal prosecution.
And taxpayers who bought into a scam, even if they are unwitting victims, could themselves in deeper debt to the IRS. In addition to possible fines, federal law requires you pay your rightful taxes, plus any penalty charges and back interest that accrued because of your use of dubious tax-relief techniques.
Gone but not forgottenGone from the 2010 list is filing false refund claims and abatement requests.
But just because a scam didn't make the IRS's annual list doesn't mean that criminals have stopped using it. It's just that other scams are showing up more frequently.
The IRS says taxpayers should remain wary because old scams often resurface or evolve. And the absence of a particular scheme from the annual blatant scam list should not be taken as an indication that the IRS is unaware of it or not taking steps to counter it.
Reporting scamsIRS offices across the country keep constant tabs on not just the annual top 12 tax scams, but on the many other cons out there. If you encounter any of the dirty dozen or are approached with a new one, the IRS wants to know.
Report suspected tax fraud by filing Form 3949-A. The more information you can provide the IRS, the better the chance the agency's investigators have of catching those running the scam.
You don't have to identify yourself when you send in the form, but the IRS says it could help its investigation if it needs to contact you for additional information. If you do provide your name, the IRS says it will keep your identity confidential.
You also might be eligible for a reward for reporting illegal tax activity by filing Form 211 with the IRS Whistleblower Office.
Finally, remember that old tax saying: If a tax break sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
<< Back to Bankrate's 2010 Tax Guide table of contents.
Create a news alert for "taxes"
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Interviews with some of the Rosetta mission team
Position: Interdisciplinary scientist
Dr. Fulle was born in Chiavari, northern Italy.
He obtained a degree in Physics at the University of Genova in 1982. He then spent two years in a military research field, developing a system to analyse and identify submarines by their emitted noise.
In 1985, Dr. Fulle entered the International School for Advanced Studies as a visiting scientist in the Astrophysical Sector, starting to develop numerical codes able to analyse photometric data of comet dust tails. Since May 1989 he has held the position of astronomer at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste in Italy.
Since leaving university, he has specialised in studying comets, and his first paper, which was published in the journal Icarus, was devoted to the ion tail of Comet Austin (1982i). Since then, he has published more than 60 papers in refereed journals, all devoted to the physics of comets.
His studies have led to the discovery of new tail structures (neck lines - peculiar thin layers of dust rarely seen in comet dust tails when the Earth crosses their orbit plane - and the sodium tail) and new ideas about the physical properties of comet dust from photometric analysis of dust tails.
In order to take advantage of his experience as a comet expert, he was selected in 1996 as one of the Interdisciplinary Scientists on ESA's Rosetta mission.
Last Update: 01 Jul 2008
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http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=33422&fbodylongid=1255
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How to Manage Pests
UC Pest Management Guidelines
Damping off is a name given to a condition where seeds are killed before germination or seedlings are stunted or collapse and die. Seeds destroyed before germination are discolored and soft. After seed germination, symptoms include brown necrotic lesions along any point of the seedling. Lesions that girdle the young root or stem lead to plant death. Partially girdled plants, as well as those subject to continued root tip necrosis, may be stunted and yellowish in color to varying degrees.
A discolored, constricted area near the soil surface may be seen in older seedlings. The magnitude of the dark discoloration is dependent upon the age of the seedling as well as the duration of environmental conditions favorable for disease development.
Pythium ultimum and P. irregulare cause both pre- and postemergent damping-off of alfalfa in California. Pythium violae causes root tip necrosis and inhibition of lateral root formation. Rhizoctonia solani may cause preemergent death of seedlings but usually causes postemergent necrosis of the stem at or near the soil surface, which is marked by a distinct margin between infected and healthy tissue.
Phytophthora megasperma, another common soilborne pathogen, can be particularly devastating in poorly drained soils (see PHYTOPHTHORA ROOT ROT).
Pythium and Rhizoctonia are common in most soils where they persist indefinitely. Both fungi are transported by water, contaminated soil on equipment, and movement of infected plant materials. Both have wide host ranges. Damping-off is favored by poor growth of alfalfa seedlings resulting from such factors as unfavorable temperatures, excessive moisture, low light, or improper fertilization.
Damping-off caused by Pythium spp. usually occurs under cool soil temperatures in fields with poor drainage.
Damage by R. solani is often related to the amount of organic matter that remains in the soil from the previous crop, with damage increasing as the level of organic matter increases.
Planting high quality seed under environmental conditions favoring rapid germination and seedling growth reduces the chance of infection. Therefore, avoid planting in November and December. Also avoid excessive irrigation and compaction or poorly drained soils. Purchase seed treated with an appropriate fungicides to protect seedlings from the damping-off pathogens. Although crop rotations do not eliminate these pathogens because of their wide host ranges, rotations with crops like small grains may help to reduce inoculum levels.
UC IPM Pest Management Guidelines: Alfalfa
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PreBIND and Textomy - mining the biomedical literature for protein-protein interactions using a support vector machine
BACKGROUND:The majority of experimentally verified molecular interaction and biological pathway data are present in the unstructured text of biomedical journal articles where they are inaccessible to computational methods. The Biomolecular interaction network database (BIND) seeks to capture these data in a machine-readable format. We hypothesized that the formidable task-size of backfilling the database could be reduced by using Support Vector Machine technology to first locate interaction information in the literature. We present an information extraction system that was designed to locate protein-protein interaction data in the literature and present these data to curators and the public for review and entry into BIND.RESULTS:Cross-validation estimated the support vector machine's test-set precision, accuracy and recall for classifying abstracts describing interaction information was 92%, 90% and 92 respectively. We estimated that the system would be able to recall up to 60 of all non-high throughput interactions present in another yeast-protein interaction database. Finally, this system was applied to a real-world curation problem and its use was found to reduce the task duration by 70 thus saving 176 days.CONCLUSIONS:Machine learning methods are useful as tools to direct interaction and pathway database back-filling; however, this potential can only be realized if these techniques are coupled with human review and entry into a factual database such as BIND. The PreBIND system described here is available to the public at http://bind.ca webcite. Current capabilities allow searching for human, mouse and yeast protein-interaction information.
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http://www.citeulike.org/user/mjbell/article/612141
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Systems that help patients actively participate in their health care can see significant cost reductions.
- Midnight Snacks Mess Us Up on a Molecular Level
- Performing Music Gets Us High
- If We Could Fly, We Would All Be Superheroes
PROBLEM: At a certain point, there's only so much a doctor can do. Patients play a role in their health care not just in terms of chronic disease management and the lifestyle factors that lead to good or poor health, but also in researching their options, asking the right questions, and being an active participant in treatment decisions. All, of course, which is easier said than done. But having the knowledge, skills, and confidence to actively participate in one's care has been linked to better health outcomes; it would therefore make sense that patient engagement would also affect health care costs.
METHODOLOGY: Judith Hibbard of the University of Oregon and colleagues analyzed data from over 33,000 adults treated by a Minnesota health care delivery system. They determined the patients' level of engagement on a 0-100 "activation" scale, based on their agreement with statements like "I know how to prevent problems with my health," and "I am confident that I can tell a doctor my concerns, even when he or she does not ask." The researchers looked specifically at conditions that patients are required to take an active role in managing: asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol.
RESULTS: Average health care costs -- including inpatient, outpatient, primary, and specialty care, along with lab and medication expenses -- were 8 percent higher in the least activated patients (who scored a 25 or under) as compared to those who were most actively engaged (75 or above). This difference was most pronounced in asthma patients, who spent 21 percent more on health care.
Patient activation scores one year reliably predicted costs for the first half of the following year, and the association held even after the researchers adjusted for risk and anticipated future expenses.
CONCLUSION: Patients who were most skilled at managing their day-to-day health and most knowledgeable about their health care had significantly lower health care costs than more passive patients.
IMPLICATIONS: About 46 percent of the patients were in the highest category of activation level, which the authors say is similar to national distribution, and the mid-activation levels didn't have significantly different expenses. But the least engaged patients were at a significant disadvantage: Helping them take control of their health care could have desirable effects on both health and spending outcomes.
In an accompanying article, Hibbard and coauthor Jessica Greene review interventions that have attempted to teach patients to be more "activated." Such programs, they explain, don't have to be run by medical centers, but can instead result from community efforts. One workshop, for example, saw trained lay leaders facilitating diabetes management workshops, in which people living with the illness were helped to better deal with common problems, communicate with their care providers, and take steps to care for themselves, such as through exercise. Ideally, Hibbard and Greene write, interventions like this entail a broader effort to change the patients' social environment to "facilitate people's changes in beliefs, social norms, skills, and opportunities to engage in healthy behavior."
The full study, "Patients With Lower Activation Associated With Higher Costs; Delivery Systems Should Know Their Patients' 'Scores,' " is published in the journal Health Affairs.
This article available online at:
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http://www.theatlantic.com/health/print/2013/02/study-patients-who-are-confident-about-their-care-save-everyone-money/272850/
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At his Spiritual Politics site, Mark Silk takes a careful look at Bishop William Lori's recent kosher deli parable--what Jodi Jacobson calls the "ham-sandwich" defense of religious freedom. Silk's conclusion: Lori's parable is an exercise of the analogical imagination "fit to make David Tracy wish he was a Protestant."
As Silk notes, the analogy doesn't hang together, because kosher laws do not forbid Jews' selling or provision of pork. They forbid Jews' eating of pork. Silk concludes,
And that's the point. Orthodox Jews understand the requirement to keep kosher as a religious duty required only of their kind. The Catholic bishops feel that contraception is an evil in the world at large that they cannot be complicit in. And so rather than simply say, fine, you take your health care coverage and avail yourself of whatever legal services you're entitled to, they say, "Sorry, because some of those are sins for us, we won't pay for you to commit 'em."
But, just because the analogy didn't work, doesn't mean that Catholics cannot entertain and hold ideas, such as material cooperation with evil, that prohibit us from doing facilitating the actions of non-Catholics who, in the event, have chosen to work at or attend a Catholic institution and know they are signing up for no meat on Friday, some measure of episcopal and, ultimately papal, oversight, and no contraception coverage included in your health care package.
I'll admit that I have some difficulty parsing Winters's sentence, and I'm inclined to give up after the statement "Catholics cannot entertain and hold ideas." But I'll give it a try.
First of all, Silk's central point is that, for a tradition that prides itself on being analogical, it's crucial that analogies work. An analogical tradition can't hang together or be intellectually coherent when its analogies limp and are obviously absurd. I'll return to that in a moment.
Second "material cooperation with evil": really? Do Catholics really believe that they're materially cooperating with evil in helping other folks access birth control? When 90%+ of Catholics themselves use birth control in good conscience?
And here's a point Winters has not wanted to see all along as the "material cooperation with evil" notion has been discussed vis-a-vis the HHS guidelines for contraceptive coverage: Catholics in one predominantly Catholic nation after another have been cooperating materially with evil for some time now, if that's what the provision of contraception through health care plans really boils down to. Catholics in one nation after another have been silently and seemingly placidly engaging in material cooperation with evil as their national health care plans provide contraceptive coverage for all citizens. With not a peep of protest from the Catholic community, the bishops of these nations, or the Vatican.
What's special about the United States and its bishops? And why are they just now discovering how heinous this material cooperation with evil is in providing access to contraception, when Catholic institutions in the U.S. have already been providing contraceptive coverage in many places, and when laws have already been on the books to require such provision?
The phrase "material cooperation with evil" is patently silly when we're talking about provision of a component of health care that most Catholics themselves regard not as evil but as a positive good. I'd strongly recommend that Winters and others who are trotting out this patently silly phrase because they imagine it sounds theologically grave in the HHS discussion ditch the phrase if they want to retain people's intellectual respect.
Unless, that is, they're willing to push the U.S. bishops very hard to put their moral weight behind conscientious objection to some real material cooperation with evil--the kind in which all of us American Catholics are implicated on a daily basis, and which the bishops never open their mouths to decry, as they shoot their mouths off about women's access to birth control.
And then there's the real shocker of Winters's argument: if you're a non-Catholic and you sign up to "work at or attend a Catholic institution," please be forewarned: you "are signing up for no meat on Friday, some measure of episcopal and, ultimately papal, oversight . . . ." Read the fine print carefully, you non-Catholic workers in Catholic institutions: work in one of our institutions, and you're signing away your rights as an American citizen to be covered by some basic provisions of American labor law and American civil rights legislation.
Because you're placing yourselves under the "oversight" of the man who sits on a throne in Rome. And when he and his bishops prefer to think differently than the law of the land thinks about matters of labor and civil rights, the men in ecclesiastical robes deserve to win. Because they and their co-belligerents say so.
I suspect these conclusions (including the punchy little jab about meatless Fridays) will come as quite a surprise not merely to non-Catholics who work in Catholic institutions, but to most Catholics who work in these institutions, as well. And who never dreamed they were forfeiting basic rights of American citizenship when they signed on to work at a Catholic institution.
To return to the point about analogies and whether they work or not: in an analogical tradition like Catholicism, when analogies used by the tradition's central spokespersons not merely limp, but fall flat on their face, the tradition's ability to make its point in the public square is seriously impeded. Because when Catholics can't employ analogies clearly, they can't entertain and hold ideas.
Since the analogy is the container in which Catholic thought is contained. And when it's full of holes, the ideas it's designed to contain leak out.
And they've long since leaked out of the cracked pot in which the bishops and their co-belligerents are carrying around their little assortment of inconsequential notions about material cooperation with evil and meatless Fridays and the wondrous Constantinean worldview that gives clerics special rights to ignore secular laws in the battle against women's rights to basic health care.
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Noodles are one of the most loved items and we often cook them in bulk and have leftover noodles too. How to reheat noodles, so that you get them in perfect shape, soft and fresh, which taste just as original? I have always found reheating leftover noodles to be a complete treat – they make amazing hot lunch and dinner. Here is an easy way to reheat noodles, so that when you plan to cook these, well in advance and decide to serve them completely hot, you do not face any problem.
Reheating Noodles In Cooking Pot
Noodles are best reheated when a cooking pot is used. Here are some easy ways:
- Start by boiling water in the cooking pot.
- Pour unprepared, but cooked noodles in the pot and mix them in the boiling water for just a minute.
- Drain the excess water and dry the noodles.
Using A Microwave Oven To Reheat Noodles
This is one of the most preferred ways to reheat cooked noodles. Here are the steps:
- You will need a microwave safe bowl where you can put all the noodles.
- Put this bowl inside your microwave for just a minute, if the quantity is less. If you have a large quantity of noodles to reheat, it might take a little more time. In such a case, it is best to check the temperature after a minute and then if it is not of the desired level, it is best to put it back into the microwave and reheat for some more time.
- Keep checking in between frequently or else your noodles might just get burnt.
More tips on reheating noodles
- You should never try to reheat a large quantity of noodles together, which can make it messy and sticky too, if not heated properly.
- If you are reheating noodles on your stove top, ensure that the flame is low. Never turn on the flame too high, as it shall burn or heat the noodles quickly and things might get out of control.
- If you plan to cook noodles in advance and you are aware that you are going to reheat it in future, make sure you do not overcook the noodles, since reheating them will soften and cook them further. If they are already overcooked, reheating might just make them smudgy and your noodles will stick to one another, which you will surely not like.
If you are aware of any other way to reheat noodles, do let us know through your feedbacks and comments.
Image credits: recipetips.com
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Are there any set rules and truths when it comes to buying a ticket, changing a ticket or getting the best airfare available? Because not all airlines follow the same routes, there are several myths and misunderstandings that exist when it comes to airfares and airline tickets.
Top 10 airfare/airline ticket myths
1. Last minute means better deals - Every once in a while you can get a great deal at the last minute. However, usually the best bets are advance purchases and checking out sales that tend to appear most often on Wednesdays.
2. You can change the name on a ticket - On some low cost airlines you can change the name on a ticket for a fee, but on most airlines, and especially when international travel is involved, there are no name changes allowed. If in question, read the rules before you buy or contact the travel agent/airline you intend to buy your ticket from.
3. You can book tickets more than a year in advance - Reservation systems are really only built to book up to a year in advance. Anything beyond 365 days from now can be requested, but you will wait for it to get confirmed, and for the price.
4. You can upgrade a ticket to first class for a nominal fee - Some charter airlines, and low cost airlines may offer this, but don't ask the Lufthansa agent if you can upgrade your New York to Frankfurt flight to first class for fifty bucks - the price difference will have a few more 00's in the equation.
5. Airlines will accept tickets from another airline if you are traveling between the same airports - It may seem common sense but when airlines start cancelling flights and passengers see their options dwindling, they will often run up to other airlines. To change airlines you need to see if the airline you are booked with has a ticketing agreement with other airlines and if they will endorse your ticket for travel with another airline. A lot less common now that tickets are almost all electronic.
6. You need to stay over a Saturday night for the best airfare - This is less and less the standard for securing a good price for your ticket. International travel does usually still have a minimum stay requirement but domestically Saturday night is rarely a requirement anymore.
7. Airlines will offer discounts or special airfares for bereavement/family emergencies - Many airlines do offer discounts for this type of travel, but most low cost airlines do not. The discounts are offered for travel wholly on one airline. You won't be able to travel on several airlines and secure this type of airfare.
8. You always have the choice of booking a one way ticket, instead of a roundtrip - True enough again domestically, however several countries can and will refuse visitors entry into their respective countries without proof of a roundtrip ticket.
9. Airlines can change a ticket booked by a travel agency - Unfortunately, this is not always true. The travel agency, whether it be online or in person, owns the file and may have ticket rules that airline reservation agents simply have no access to. Or, you may be booked on more than one airline with specific flight routing that got you the airfare you wanted.
10. You can change/refund tickets bought through a wholesale outlet or a bucket shop - Because these tend to be highly discounted tickets, changes or cancellations are rarely permitted. The seats are often bought in bulk from the airlines and the airfares are private and are not accessible to airline reservation agents.
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http://airtravel.about.com/od/travelindustrynews/a/mythticket.htm
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Twenty-nine works of art by 14 of the most famous Indian artists are on display at the Ho Chi Minh City Art Museum.
The exhibition “Kalpana – The Indian contemporary plastic works”, opened on June 29. The event, co-organised by the Indian Consulate General in Ho Chi Minh City and the Ho Chi Minh City Art Museum , is among the activities marking 40 years of Vietnam-India diplomatic relations.
All works shown in the exhibition are copy paintings, drawing on the fabric material selected by reputable Indian artist, Anjolie Ela Menon. They reflect Indian art’s break away from the colonialist embrace to enter a new era of artistic expression, recognised and applauded worldwide.
The exhibition introduces visitors to the interference between classic and modern view of Indian artists between the ages of 25 and 58.
Through colours, Indian artists also take visitors to the world of Indian street art, traditional toys, Hindu epics, Islamic decorations and people’s daily activities in small towns of India .
The exhibition will run until July 6.-VNA
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<urn:uuid:22137730-1564-4bd2-804f-643d609e3cec>
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http://vxartnews.com/2012/07/indian-exhibition-feasts-hcm-city-visitors/
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| 0.940747
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September 9, 2008 Reported to have commenced drilling following the receipt of the necessary permits. The drilling program is a follow-up of the soil geochemical program and airborne survey completed in 2007. The geochemical sampling identified a number of multi-element geochemical anomalies which contain gold in amounts up to 3683 ppb but more commonly in the 20 to 500 ppb range.
February 14, 2008 Announced the results from the 2007 exploration program consisting of mapping and an extensive soil sampling program were completed over 20 sq km. Results from the soil sampling program have outlined regions where soils are anomalous in gold or arsenic, which is commonly a gold indicator element. On the western side of the Addie 2 an anomalous region was identified were gold in soils ranges from 156 ppb to 343 ppb. On the eastern part of Addie 2 an anomalous area was found were gold in soil ranges as high as 3,653 ppb.
July 10, 2007 Reported the completion of an airborne survey by Aeroquest Limited over Addie 1 claims in the Spanish Mountain region, a second airborne survey covering 655 line kilometres is scheduled to be flown in three weeks by Aeroquest over Addie 2 claims in the Eureka Peak region in the Cariboo Mining District.
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Harrisburg and the surrounding metro area ranked ninth in the U.S. for cities with the highest paying jobs, according to a recent study released online.
The list, published Jan. 5, includes locations with a high number of jobs paying at least $50,000 per year. It also ensured the amount of $50,000-plus per year job listings per 100 unemployed workers was greater than or equal to an average of 11.
Harrisburg’s metro area is made up by 549,475 people. Health care and the state are the top two employers in the capital region. The unemployment rate in the metro Harrisburg area is 7.4 percent, and the annual income growth rate is 2.95 percent.
The Harrisburg area boasts 3,703 job listings for positions that pay $50,000 or more, and there are 18 postings for jobs paying $50,000 or more per every 100 unemployed people, according to the list.
Harrisburg’s health care workers earn an average $66,000 annually, and 13 percent of the metro area works in government, where salaries vary, but managers can earn more than $100,000 per year, the study showed.
Manchester, N.H., was ranked number one, and Springfield, Mass., ranked 12th.
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Spending hours in the desert riding dirt bikes, ATVs, dune buggies or other vehicles can provide quite a bit of fun. Many enjoy the time they spend in the sun away from the regular world. The sandy desert provides plenty of fun for all those involve, but it does require special equipment. This equipment needs to be cared for and you need a place to store it when you’re not using it.
Storage can happen in a couple of different ways. If you live close to the desert, you can store your ATVs, dirt bikes and other equipment at home in your own garage. However, it will take up quite a bit of space, which you could use for other things. If you travel to the desert every time you want to enjoy your toys, you can use one of the Phoenix, AZ self storage units to keep your vehicles. This provides a convenient place to store your toys, so that you don’t have to haul them from home.
Preparing Your ATV for Desert Season
When desert season rolls around, you need to make sure your ATVs are ready to go. Taking them directly from storage to the desert isn’t a good idea. You want to check a few things before you ride. This will ensure your ATV is ready and won’t cause you any issues.
1. Check your Tires
Sometimes if you let your toys sit for a few months, the tires need a little air. You want to make sure they are good and a quick check will give you the safety you need. Make sure to adjust the tire pressure for the conditions and check the weather, so you will know what the proper tire pressure will be for the day you plan to ride.
2. Check your Fuel System
If you didn’t drain you fuel tank before storing your ATV, you need to check the fuel system. Sometimes water will end up in the fuel tank and this can cause your engine to run poorly or not at all. It’s a good idea to drain your fuel tank and replace old fuel with new fuel before heading out to the desert.
3. Clean or Replace your Air Filter
Another very important part of your ATV is the air filter. Riding in the sand causes it to get dirty very fast and you want to check and make sure it’s clean. If it’s not clean, you need to either replace it or clean it. This will help your motor run better and will prevent other issues.
It’s always a good idea to perform basic maintenance on any vehicles you decide to take into the desert. Whether you enjoy dirt bikes, dune buggies, ATVS or another type of fun toy, you need to make sure to maintain these toys or you could end up with other issues while out riding.
Lifecruiser Love Dune Rides
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Genomic DNA contamination in RNA sample
Posted 29 April 2009 - 08:08 AM
I have some problems to perform a RT-PCR becouse I have in my RNA sample a genomic DNA contamination. I treated my RNA sample using different DNase enzyme, but it didn't work. And I cannot using PCR primers construct in two exons.
Do you have any suggestion about it?
Thanks in advance
Posted 29 April 2009 - 04:30 PM
Posted 01 May 2009 - 04:19 PM
Another thing you could do is to dilute more your cDNA sample. Sometimes dilutions of 500x or 1000x are fine to avoid DNA amplification.
Edited by dvddecarvalho, 01 May 2009 - 04:29 PM.
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"Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." Mark Twain.
I'm generally of a mind to think that Mark Twain was correct about most things. But perhaps no more so than when he said this. Despite the fact that my life has not been all hearts and flowers, I've usually been able to find something to laugh about, even if it is only my own foibles. And I believe that those who cannot or will not laugh are taking themselves far too seriously.
One of my earliest realizations of my tendency to laugh in the face of problems came when I was a 17 year old college freshman. For the first time in my life, I was on my own and very concerned about my ability to succeed. So I sought out one of the university's counselors to hash out my worries. At one point during our conversation, he leaned back in his chair, smiled broadly and said, "You will never go crazy." Odd little pronouncement, I thought, so I asked him why not. He said it was because of my sense of humor. At which I told him that that was a rotten thing to say as I thought it might be much easier to have doctors supply me with lots of lovely drugs and order my life for me!
A few years later, in the early 1980s, I was living in Texas. Folks were up in arms about a group of local KKK members getting a parade permit for a march through town. There was a lot of discussion about how or if to respond and the ideas ran from the benign to the bizarre. One friend of mine had what I thought was a brilliant idea. He said that everyone should line the parade route in silence and, as the ridiculous people in their bedsheets progressed along the route, everyone should begin giggling. Given that the KKK is not known for their sense of humor, perhaps it would have ended badly. But it would have been a lovely thing to see attempted.
Amazingly, even death can have its sting lessened a bit by laughter. My maternal grandfather's family did not engage in hushed reverent funerals. There was always loud conversation and story telling going on. And, if one didn't know better, or notice the casket, one might have thought a party was in full swing. When my grandfather died, the once large extended family had disbursed, but the tradition still held among those remaining. One of my grandfather's nephews, whom I had never met, came in and began telling us a story about my grandfather. It seems that my grandfather had taken him on fishing trips as a boy. And he'd let my grandfather know that he was fond of Milky Way candy bars. My grandfather knew no moderation in supplying things that people liked. And he gave his nephew so many candy bars when they went fishing that the kid invariably got sick. And didn't much want the candy any more. Laughter ensued because we each had our Milky Way equivalent. Mine was strawberry ice cream......still can't touch the stuff, although I do look at it longingly sometimes in the grocery store. And we won't get into what happened to get me laughing uproariously in the ladies room at the funeral home. I still don't know which one of my relatives heard me and beat a quick exit. The laughter didn't eliminate the pain I was feeling, but it brought those of us remaining closer together and it is the laughter I remember now, more than the pain.
I find that I don't much trust people who don't laugh. Granted at a given moment someone may be in too much pain to laugh, but there are some that never, ever laugh and it makes me suspicious. People who can laugh together generally do not hurt each other. And those who can laugh at themselves are usually gentler with those around them. Victor Borge once said that laughter is the shortest distance between two people. And what a lovely way to close the gap.
Dear Writer: Three reasons people try to make you feel lousy about your writing. - It’s hard to fathom. But the moment you finally release your book or song or dance or sculpture or even a child into the world, you’ll hear that you did it...
1 day ago
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Question: Are antihistamines helpful for my child's atopic dermatitis (eczema)?
Answer: We find that the older, sedating antihistamines can be helpful in managing the difficult to control itching and scratching behavior that our patients with atopic dermatitis often exhibit.
However, they would then be used primarily at bedtime, or possibly with naps, exploiting that sedating effect that they have.
We wouldn't want our patients necessarily to be drowsy during the day, especially school-age children.
The newer, non-sedating antihistamines then have less of an effect on the itch that our patients feel and may be more helpful for controlling some of the hive-like symptoms that our patients experience.
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T. Knijn, C. Martin and J. Millar
Social Policy and Administration, vol. 41, 2007, p. 638-652
This article compares recent social policy reforms aimed at lone parents in France, the Netherlands and the UK. Each of these countries is promoting employment for lone parents as the road out of poverty and benefit dependency. This article explores whether there are significant differences in activation policies for lone parents between the two continental welfare regimes and the liberal welfare regime of the UK. Each of these countries has moved from the model of supporting lone parents to be full-time mothers at home towards an employment-based model. They have also introduced increased in-work financial support through means-tested transfers and tax credits and have paid attention to the need to offer childcare services and subsidies, parental leave and flexible working. Finally, all three have emphasised tailored and individualised activation services.
Social Policy and Administration, vol. 41, 2007, p. 597-617
Despite it being generally agreed that Bismarckian welfare states are stable and not prone to policy change, this article shows that Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands have witnessed considerable change in the field of unemployment policy over the past 25 years. Furthermore, the trajectory of change is often remarkably similar in all four countries, notwithstanding their considerable social, political and economic differences. It is argued that Bismarckian welfare institutions are crucial for understanding changes to the unemployment policies of these countries, and not merely for explaining their supposed inertia. Generally policies have enhanced protection for 'insiders', while targeting both benefit cuts and activation initiatives on 'outsiders'. After 25 years of reforms these countries have neither fully activating nor fully compensatory welfare states, but ones that combine these facets in apparent contradiction. Though they have not blocked unemployment policy change entirely, Bismarckian welfare institutions have influenced and probably constrained it.
T.K. Kim and K.A. Zurlo
International Social Work, vol. 50, 2007, p. 796-808
In response to the 1997 Asian economic crisis, South Korea launched a new policy initiative called productive welfare. Policymakers implementing this initiative developed a welfare system intended to promote capability of individual self-sufficiency through work rather than expanding the social security safety net through increases in benefits. At present, those between 18 and 65 can receive welfare benefits if their income falls below the poverty line, but are required to participate in the Self-Sufficiency Programme to maintain their welfare entitlement. This study describes the factors that facilitate or deter self-sufficiency by empirically analysing the dynamic between characteristics of participants in this workfare programme and their performance in the programme, comparing those who became self-sufficient with those who did not.
G. Whitehouse, C. Diamond and M. Baird
Community, Work and Family, vol.10, 2007, p. 387-407
In Australia, working parents have a shared entitlement to unpaid parental leave, none of which is reserved for the father. This arrangement reflects the fact that a high proportion of couple families with young children follow the traditional male breadwinner model. This paper examines Australian fathers' use of leave at the time of the birth of a child, drawing on data from the Parental Leave in Australia Survey conducted in 2005 and a subsequent organisational case study. The analysis shows that although Australian fathers take some leave for parental purposes, use of formally designated paternity or parental leave is low. This is unsurprising given the Australian policy framework . The analysis suggests that improvements in the policy framework would increase Australian fathers' propensity to take parental leave.
E.K. Scott, A.S. London and G. Gross
Sociological Inquiry, vol. 77, 2007, p. 601-625
The US federal government has over the past ten years sought to reduce dependency and encourage self-sufficiency among welfare-dependent men and women. Welfare-dependent women are expected to attain economic self-sufficiency through either paid work or marriage to an employed husband. This study uses longitudinal, qualitative interview data from 38 initially welfare dependent women to explore what self-sufficiency means to them and their perspectives on how work and marriage affect their ability to be self-sufficient. Analysis revealed that for these women self-sufficiency means independence from the state in the shape of cash benefits and men in the shape of marriage. They do not see marriage as a route to self-sufficiency given the pool of men available to them, but look to paid work as the best route to independence.
D. Neumark, P.S. Barth and R.A. Victor
Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 61, 2007, p. 121-142
Over the past decades, US public policy changes in workers' compensation have placed new restrictions on the ability of injured workers to choose their own medical providers. For example, in order to contain rising costs, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of states modified 'employee choice' laws to require workers to select providers from networks of approved physicians created by the employer. This paper provides estimates of the relationships between provider choice and a variety of workers' compensation outcomes, including medical and indemnity (cash benefits) costs, return to work, physical recovery, and worker satisfaction with medical care. Results show that costs were generally higher and return-to-work outcomes poorer when workers selected the provider, even though the two groups of workers reported similar recovery of physical health. However, workers selecting their own provider reported higher satisfaction with overall care. When employee choice is subdivided into choice of a new provider versus one who has treated the employee previously, results show that the adverse cost and return-to-work outcomes are largely associated with employee choice of new providers.
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Enjoy contributing and learning..
|Tips and Tricks: Focus, Depth of Field part1 by Jorg Fedler (based on an article by www.mediacollege.com)|
The ability to manually focus your camera is a critical skill at any level of video production.
If you find that your focus is sharp when you are zoomed in but soft when zoomed out, your back focus needs adjusting. This normally only happens to cameras with detachable lenses — consumer-level camera users shouldn't have to worry about it.
The Focus Pull
The focus pull (AKA rack focus) is a creative camera technique in which you change focus during a shot. Usually this means adjusting the focus from one subject to another.
Focus Throw / Defocus
Throwing focus usually means dropping focus completely. This can either refer to certain parts of the picture (e.g. the background) or to the entire picture.
Views expressed and information portrayed in this publication are not necessarily the views of the editor or GCVCC. All articles are produced in good faith and neither the presenter or any member of GCVCC accepts any responsibility for the originality or accuracy or functionality of content of the publication and will not be held responsible for any damage, loss or errors resulting from the use of any information appearing in the publication
All articles and photos appearing in this
magazine are subject to Copyright and
may not be reproduced in whole or part
without the author's consent. Enquiries
regarding permission should in the first
instance be directed to the editor Brisbane
|© Copyright GCVCC - Gold Coast Australia 1989-2012|
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UK app developer Ustwo has unveiled an experimental photo exchange platform that randomly shares your pictures with strangers, and in return, you also receive random snapshots.
Dubbed as Rando, the new app allows each picture you share to be framed within circles to provide it with a peephole effect and to differentiate the application from other mainstream photo sharing platforms.
Photo sharing applications usually vary from hyper-social platforms such as Instagram, where you can share and comment as much as you want, to secretive apps such Snapchat, where shared photos delete themselves based on the timer you’ve set.
In this realm, Rando belongs to the latter as the identity of both the recipient and the sender is a mystery. Apart from that, Ustwo’s app is considered anti-social because you can’t like or comment on the pictures.
Rando is not about creating a community or gathering credentials for your pictures. Instead, this application intends to take away the “social” aspect of “social media” and gauge user reaction.
The app is somewhat of an experiment designed to find out what people do when they cannot talk to each other in social media. Will they still flock to Rando and actively share their photos even if there are no likes or comments? What will happen if there is no control over the intended recipients?”
To prevent the proliferation of obscene photos in Rando that occurred in some of its counterparts, users can also report inappropriate pictures. Users also have to send out a photo before they can receive one.
At present, Rando can be downloaded for free from the iTunes store, but an Android version is not yet available.
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Americans, the saying goes, don't like to talk about class -- but they certainly enjoy reading about it. They also love to see how they stack up against their peers.
One of the most notorious and snobby books on the topic, Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, capitalizes on this repressed American passion with its "Living Room Scale," which measures social class based on your décor. A worn Oriental rug will earn you eight points; a new one (and, by extension, new money) will lower your score. A ceiling 10 feet or higher is good; the presence of Reader's Digest, framed diplomas, or "any work of art depicting cowboys" (sorry, pardners) is not.
Charles Murray, the prominent political scientist, doesn't shy away from awkward subjects -- he's best known for The Bell Curve, which stirred up a progressive hornet's nest in the mid-1990s -- and he tackles the charged issue of class in his new and important book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. America, Murray writes, "is coming apart at the seams -- not ethnic seams, but the seams of class." Culture, not money, divides the new upper and lower classes, which live in increasingly different worlds: one rarefied, walled-off, and at the helm of the country; the other dysfunctional, adrift, and hapless when it comes to the game of life.
Tracking white Americans to avoid blurring trends with race and ethnicity, the numbers Murray presents are startling: In the new upper class, which amounts to about 20 percent of the country, out-of-wedlock births are rare: around 6-8 percent. For the more dysfunctional working class, which accounts for around 30 percent of the country, the number is mind-boggling: 42-48 percent. The numbers also turn a few stereotypes on their heads: In the lower working class, for instance, the rate of church attendance has dropped at nearly double the rate as that of the supposedly secularized elite.
America's working class, Coming Apart argues, has increasingly forsaken traditional values like marriage, religion, industriousness, and honesty -- and, as a result, it is rotting from within. Happiness levels are down; participation in the labor force is down; television watching (an average of 35 hours a week) is up.
Elites, meanwhile, have quietly embraced traditional values, segregated into upper-class residential enclaves, and largely lost touch with the realities of those who haven't. Murray sees this as ominous, particularly for public policy. "This growing isolation" of the elites, he writes, "has been accompanied by growing ignorance about the country over which they have so much power."
While he declines to rate the rug in your living room, Murray does include a quiz to determine your upper-class street cred: "How Thick Is Your Bubble?" It's rather entertaining, delving into your NASCAR knowledge, hard-knocks childhood stories, and more, but I actually think it could be shortened into one question: Do you become horrified when you enter a Wal-Mart, not just because of an alarming selection of T-shirts with dramatic white wolves howling in a lightning storm airbrushed on them (also a staple at truck stops), but because of America's raging obesity problem? Done, done, and done. (If you have never entered a Wal-Mart, well then, we're also done.)
And here we get to an odd anthropological trait of the new upper class: a rather contradictory mix of high-level snobbery and quasi-religious "nonjudgmentalism." Your typical elite enjoys saying snooty things about cultural middle America (Obama's infamous "clinging to guns and religion" comment, for instance, or David Carr of the New York Times spouting off about "low-sloping foreheads" in "the middle places" of America). But when it comes to judging things like, say, rampant divorce, or having children out of wedlock, or being on welfare while also having children out of wedlock (just writing that, by the way, feels terribly judgmental) the new upper-classers tend to bite their tongues.
"Nonjudgmentalism is one of the more baffling features of the new-upper-class culture," Murray writes. "If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping the good stuff to itself. The new upper class knows the secret to maximizing the chances of leading a happy life, but it refuses to let anyone else in on the secret." Ultimately, he argues, the key to American success will be the willingness of the upper class to preach what they practice when it comes to marriage, children, religion, work, and more. But first, members of the upper class have to believe that their values actually matter -- and to understand why they do.
Coming Apart is a must-read for many reasons, but its main value comes from its insistence on drilling down beyond materialism. In a book ostensibly about class, Murray spends much of his time exploring the things that really matter in life, fighting against the presumption that we're here to merely pass our days as pleasantly as possible.
"If we ask what are the domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life -- achieve happiness," Murray writes, "the answer is that there are just four: Family, vocation, community, and faith." The advancement of the welfare state, he argues, results in the slow gutting of these domains, as well as personal responsibility, which are "the institutions through which people live satisfying lives." This cultural disintegration has had a disastrous human cost for the working class. It's a cost that many in the new upper class don't experience or understand.
Unfortunately, in today's political landscape, the idea that government "help" can sap human virtue is a radical concept. "Those in the new upper class who don't care about politics don't mind the drift toward the European model," Murray points out, "because paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience -- much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens."
Even the American political right, often caricatured as welfare-bashers, can fall into this trap: Republican front-runner and much-maligned rich guy Mitt Romney recently stepped in it by declaring he wasn't worried about the very poor, because, well, "we have a very ample safety net." Ah, then! Nothing to worry about. Everything's fine!
Murray ends his book with a bit of optimism, confident that "the more we learn about how human beings work at the deepest genetic and neural levels, the more that many age-old ways of thinking about human nature will be vindicated." A more accurate understanding of human nature, he argues, would lead to an understanding of the importance of traditional values and virtues -- for everyone, not just the new upper class -- and a restoration of the American experiment.
I hope he's right, but I'm a bit skeptical. In the pages of Coming Apart, we often find Murray bending over backward to explain obvious points, either to avoid offending his more sensitive readers (or to make sure no one thinks he's a racist). But certain facts -- say, that some people are smarter than other people, or that smart people who marry each other tend to have smart children -- tend to infuriate a certain sector of the population, polite explanation or no.
In another instance, Murray points out that children clearly do the best with two married, biological parents, but also acknowledges that "I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties."
Some of this stems from good intentions: People don't want to make struggling single moms or divorced parents feel worse than they already do. Much of this comes, as do many of the building blocks of hyper-progressive politics, from plain old wishful thinking. And some of it stems from a subtle hostility toward the idea of universal virtues existing at all.
"Discussing solutions is secondary to this book, just as understanding causes is secondary," Murray writes. "The important thing is to look unblinkingly at the problem." That task alone, it seems, is more than a big enough challenge for today.
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The world's ever-growing population is eating more and more fish and the oceans can't keep up. Fishing has depleted wild stocks of tuna, swordfish, cod and many other species.
Some scientists say the answer is a massive growth of fish farming -- a so-called "blue revolution" to help feed the planet. So far, fish farming has occurred on land or in protected harbors. But some see a future with large-scale off-shore fish farms in waters hundreds or thousands of feet deep.
One of the first companies venturing off-shore is Hawaii-based Kona Blue. It is raising fish in giant, netted cages off the coast of Hawaii, submerged in waters some 200 feet deep. Some scientists say that farming in such deep waters can avoid environmental concerns raised by fish farms close to shore. If you get too many caged fish in a harbor, the fecal matter will pollute it. But offshore at the Kona Blue site, powerful ocean currents constantly flush so much water through the farm that Kona Blue reports it can't detect any change in nutrient levels up-current versus down-current of the farm.
A big challenge, of course, for off-shore aquaculture is designing a fish farm that can survive the open ocean. Anyone who read the book or saw the movie The Perfect Storm got a sense of the forces that are unleashed on the ocean's surface.
The trick has been to sink the giant cages down well below the surface of the water and tie them to a series of anchors using high-strength polymer ropes. The only things exposed above water are several large metal feed buoys. One experimental fish farm off the coast of New England has survived several northeasters with 40-foot waves and high winds.
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Last month I described the
situation where your opponent has executed a safety, placing the cue ball behind
a cluster and you have to kick out and make a good hit. How will you respond? Do
you walk up to the table and think, “Now what do I do,” or do you think,
“No problem. I know how to kick this”? I expect you feel a new confidence about using the Tips of
English Kicking System.
This month we will look at the
same system, only we'll be shooting the length of the table to kick out and hit
the object ball.
the cue ball in front of Diamond Point 0, from 4 inches to 7
diamonds up off the rail.
matching numbered object balls on the rails at Diamond Points 1, 2, 3,
4, 5, & 6, as shown in the diagram.
with a ½-Tip of English, into Diamond Point 0 to hit the 1
with 1-Tip of English, into Diamond Point 0 to hit the 2 ball.
with 1½-Tips of English, into Diamond Point 0 to hit and
maybe even pocket the 3 ball.
with 2-Tips of English, into Diamond Point 0 to hit the 4 ball.
with 2½-Tips of English, into Diamond Point 0 to hit the 5
with 3-Tips of English, into Diamond Point 0 to hit the 6 ball.
This long Tips of English
Kicking system can be further studied by experimenting with other diamond
contact point locations. Keep in mind that you’ll need to determine what one
tip of English on your cue stick tip equals. Obviously a 10.50mm tip verses a
13.25mm tip will see one, two and even three tips differently.
By hitting the targeted diamond points accurately, you’ll be able to
determine what the striking point on the cue ball is that equals one, two, and
three tips of English for you. Work hard on this and you’ll soon become a
tough player to play a safe on, and you’ll surely be saying good-bye to those
three foul losses.
can find these drills in their entirety in Pro Skill Drills’ Volumes 1 through
8 of the Books and DVDs, endorsed
by Nick Varner.
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The Clivus composting toilet uses aerobic decomposition to slowly break down both urine and feces into stable compounds within the polyethylene composting unit. The sloped design (“Clivus Multrum” means inclined chamber) separates urine from feces.
As urine moves by gravity to the lowest point of the composting unit, bacterial action causes a chemical transformation that converts the chemically unstable components of urine (urea and ammonia), into a liquid end-product containing nitrite and nitrate. This liquid end-product is biologically and chemically stable and contains nutrients which are valuable for fertilizer. The liquid end-product is generated at a rate of about one gallon for every 20 uses and, in most cases, is automatically pumped from the compost chamber into a separate storage tank.
The separation of urine from feces ensures that feces remain in an aerobic environment which includes bacteria, fungi, insects and compost worms. The organisms slowly break down feces into a compost material that has chemical, biological and aesthetic characteristics similar to topsoil and reduces its volume by over 90%.
Since the mass of organic matter in the composting unit available to the decomposer organisms is relatively small, temperatures inside the composting unit never exceed 100°F. Carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor are the primary vent gases. A continuously operating fan pulls air down the toilet fixture and out through a vent stack creating a completely odorless bathroom at all times.
Potential human pathogens are either killed by predatory organisms or by the long retention time in the system, as demonstrated by National Sanitation Foundation field testing. No compost is removed before a year of use and it is often several years before any is taken out of the compost tank.
All Clivus compost toilet systems are certified under the National Sanitation Foundation’s Standard 41, as required by many state and local governments. Health or environmental codes regulate the use of the liquid or solid compost products from the Clivus system. We encourage the use of these compost products as a fertilizer/soil conditioner wherever codes allow.
This process is distinct from anaerobic decomposition, which takes place naturally in water-saturated environments such as swamps, and is typical of septic tanks. Anaerobic, or liquid-saturated, conditions produce methane and the offensive odors associated with septic systems.
Organisms found in the composter include bacteria, actinomycetes, fungi, arthropods, and earthworms and are added manually once the system is operating. Energy, carbon dioxide and water vapor are released by the organic matter in feces through the activity of the composting organisms. A less chemically complex, more chemically stable substance, rich in organic matter, is produced. Feces volume, which is mostly water, is reduced by over 90%.
Temperatures in the compost toilet remain in the middle, or mesophilic, range (65-113°F) and don’t exceed 100°. Potential pathogens in feces are, therefore, not destroyed by heat. Those pathogens that require an aqueous environment die quickly in the non-saturated condition of the compost chamber. Others die because of the intense competition for nutrients; still others are consumed by predators which populate the system. The biological content of the dry end-product is similar to that found in topsoil. As a measure of its stability, the dry end-product from the Clivus Multrum contains less than 200 MPN (Most Probable Number) of fecal coliform per 100 grams. This meets the level required under National Sanitation Foundation Standard 41 for Non-saturated Systems. The dry end-product contains a wide array of plant nutrients and is intended to be used as a fertilizer/soil conditioner. Its use may or may not be regulated by local authorities.
Urine is also transformed by the activity of microorganisms. As compared to feces, urine contains most of the nitrogen from food. The primary form of nitrogen in urine is urea. Left alone, urea will degrade into ammonia and carbon dioxide. Bacteria in the compost unit (specifically Nitrobacter and Nitrosomonas) prevent this degradation and, instead, convert urea into nitrite and nitrate. That these are forms of nitrogen required for plant growth indicates the value of the compost toilet for nutrient recycling. The liquid end-product from the Clivus Multrum contains less than 200 MPN of fecal coliform per 100 ml. This also meets the level required under National Sanitation Foundation Standard 41 for Non-saturated Systems. The nitrogen-rich liquid end-product is intended to be used as a fertilizer. Use of the liquid-end product as a fertilizer may or may not be regulated by local authority.
Although greywater contains less than 10% of nitrogen found in blackwater, greywater has a higher level of un-reacted organic material readily available to micro-organisms and therefore decomposes much faster than blackwater. Blackwater, by contrast, contains material already exposed to one of nature's most efficient "treatment plants": the digestive tract of the human body, which means further decomposition will proceed much more slowly. The high decomposition rate of greywater allows it to quickly achieve chemical stability through organic reactions in the soil, but this rapid decomposition rate also requires greywater to be treated within 1-2 days of its production. Greywater should not be stored in holding tanks as it will quickly use up available dissolved oxygen and begin to decompose anaerobically, producing an offensive odor.
The Clivus Multrum system releases greywater into the biologically active, aerobic layer of the soil (the top 8-12") in order to fully stabilize the liquid. In this level of soil greywater is treated by many of the same soil organisms present in the compost toilet: bacteria, actinomycetes, fungi, arthropods, and earthworms. Nutrients in greywater from soaps are used by plants and the greywater not taken up by plants assists in groundwater recharge. Although pathogen levels in greywater are much lower than blackwater content, most potential pathogens will be slowly consumed by naturally occurring predators.
Sewer and septic systems invite toxic substances from industry and homes to be mixed with excreta. Thousands of chemicals from manufacturing processes are inevitably found in sewage sludge. Toxic household chemicals are dumped into toilets as a matter of course. Once this mixture is made, excreta are ruined for reuse. More importantly, the toxic components make their way back to water and our food supply. In a perversion of the idea of recycling, sewage sludge is applied to farmland as fertilizer or sold at retail stores for use in home gardens under the disingenuous title “biosolids.”
These dangerous practices are new and unprecedented. For nearly all of our agricultural history, humans have practiced sustainable farming, including the use of our excrement for fertilizer. Only in the second half of the 20th century did those of us in North America and Europe begin to abandon the principles of reuse that were once required by our circumstances.
1. Nutrients in excreta become available for sustainable reuse in agriculture. By returning these nutrients to agriculture we reduce the use of fossil fuel which is a major ingredient in the production of chemical fertilizer. We also broaden the spectrum of available plant nutrients: healthful food requires all the nutrients plants need, not just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous which are the only constituents of chemical fertilizers.
2. Keeping toxic substances out of excreta makes it possible to reconsider their role in manufacturing processes. If industry became responsible for the disposal of the toxic substances it uses, it could either use them in a closed-loop system or find less harmful, alternative substances. If alternative substances are not possible, then a decision can be made about whether the use of toxics is to be continued. That decision would be made properly with participation by all those potentially affected by it. At the moment, the decision is made surreptitiously thanks to the mostly unregulated opportunity for industry to use the sewer as a low-cost dump.
Right now, the way our society currently handles human excreta, food production, and industrial waste is neither sustainable nor rational. The broad acceptance of these practices might make source separation seem naïve or impossible, but we at Clivus Multrum believe it is the only rational way forward.
Here are links to a fuller discussion of environmental issues addressed by Clivus Multrum technologies:
Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan Discusses the problems factory food production in the US
Enriching the Earth, Vaclav Smil A background on the creation of the world agricultural fertilizer industry
Unquenchable, Robert Glennon The present water crisis in the US
Toxic Sludge is Good for You, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton How the PR industry promotes the use of sludge
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable world of human waste and why it matters, Rose George A highly readable look into the practices and politics surrounding human waste.
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| 0.922612
| 1,873
| 3.53125
| 4
|
Welcome To Tennessee American Water
Tennessee American Water is your local water company.
Our lives revolve around water. It’s somehow involved in everything thing we do, everything we use. We are experts in water delivery.
In Tennessee we serve more than 300,000 people, in nine communities, supplying high quality water service. We abide by regulations, invest in our vast infrastructure, develop industry innovations, educate our customers on wise water use, and help out where we can in our cities and towns.
In Tennessee, the Tennessee Regulatory Authority (TRA) sets rules and we carefully follow them. Those regulations are what help to ensure that everyone is receiving high quality water at a fair price. All increases in service rates are directly related to the cost of providing high quality service and subjected to a public review process and approval by the TRA.
In addition, Tennessee American Water follows strict United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) regulations that help to provide high quality drinking water. Because we work in cooperation with the USEPA to help in the development of national drinking water standards, we are often years ahead of the industry in implementing regulations.
Tennessee American Water is committed to delivering high quality water to all of our customers. In Tennessee, we conduct more than 5,800 tests per year for about 100 potential contaminants, checking drinking water quality at every stage of the water treatment and delivery process.
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http://amwater.com/tnaw/About-Us/
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|
en
| 0.935693
| 284
| 1.515625
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|
Fighting for a Victim’s Dignity and Privacy
In the early morning hours of November 22, 2009, a college student was raped by another student at a party held at the defendant’s home. Defying statistics, the victim quickly reported the rape to a student health services nurse and to the police. Defendant was arrested and charges were brought against him.
Nearly a year after the rape, defendant filed a number of motions that invade the privacy of this rape victim. Among these, defendant is seeking the court’s authorization to get all of the victim’s cell phone records. The stated reason for the subpoena was that the defense wanted to call every single one of the phone numbers and talk to them about the rape and see whether they had any useful information.
Tragically, the trial court agreed with the defendant in this case. Unfortunately, the prosecuting attorney in the case does not believe he has standing to fight the issue (without standing you can’t appear before a court), and therefore cannot fight for this victim’s rights. NCVLI and its Oregon pro bono legal clinic are stepping in to ensure that this victim’s privacy is not violated in this outrageous manner. We are fighting this request by the defendant to ensure that this victim is not re-traumatized, and to ensure that positive precedent is set in courts to make sure that the next victim doesn’t have to encounter these same invasions of privacy.
NCVLI’s Responding to Violence Against Women Project actively works to stop these tragic invasions of privacy and to give all victims, including women victimized by these crimes, the opportunity to exercise their rights in the criminal justice system in the manner that they choose.
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|
en
| 0.962408
| 354
| 1.523438
| 2
|
Bone stock is neither soup nor broth, but it is the base for both and can be used in the making of nearly any savory dish. An ingredient rather than a finished product, stock doesn’t taste like much on its own. And making it right is a lot more involved than boiling a leftover turkey carcass.
One of the more noteworthy non-soupy applications of stock is in the making of espagnole sauce, one of the five "mother sauces" of classic French cooking. Espagnole sauce can be mixed with yet more stock and reduced by half to make demi-glace, a rich, flavorful and altogether labor-intensive creation that is itself the base for many other sauces.
For all the prestigious places it goes, a good stock can be made from ingredients that a wino could find in a dumpster, like bones, fish heads, chicken backs and vegetable scraps. Made from mammal bones, it's called "brown stock," which is what goes into demi-glace. This is the stock that I stock up on this time of year, when I'm done stalking deer, and the venison has been cut from the bones.
Long bones, i.e. the animal's front and rear leg bones, work best, as that's where the most marrow is. To allow the marrow to melt into the stock, the bones need to be opened. Purchased bones usually come pre-cut. If you're processing meat at home, a bone saw really helps. Or do like me: wrap bones in a towel and smash them with a cast-iron skillet on the sidewalk. But that comes later.
I begin by placing the bones on a pan in the oven at 350 degrees for about an hour, stirring occasionally so they're golden brown all the way around but not burned. If you aren't in a hurry, you can also cook them longer at 300. Twenty minutes before you're done browning the bones, remove them from the oven and allow them to cool to the point where you can comfortably rub the bones with tomato paste (I use homemade ketchup). Roast for another 20 minutes, checking often to make sure the tomato paste doesn't burn.
Remove the bones from the roasting pan. Now is the time to smash them with that frying pan (or hammer) if you started with intact bones. Place the browned and broken bones in a large empty pot along with the roasting pan drippings. Put the pan on the stove over medium heat and deglaze (i.e., pour liquid into the hot pan) with wine or water, gently scraping the fond (aka the bits of goodness stuck to the bottom of the pan), assuming said fond is not burned. Never scrape a burned fond, except when cleaning the pan. Pour the deglazed pan contents into the stock pot.
Add a bay leaf, a few peppercorns, and cover everything with water. Cook very slowly at your stovetop's lowest setting, for 12 to 24 hours, maintaining full coverage of water over the bones. You don't want the stock to boil because that would make it cloudy in both appearance and taste. Try to keep the pot at the "lazy bubble" stage—the point at which a single bubble lets go from the bottom of the pot every few seconds.
Let the stock cool to room temperature, and then put it in the fridge overnight. By morning the fat will be floating on top in a solid raft that you can easily remove.
Reheat the stock back to the lazy bubble. While it's heating, prepare a mixture of equal parts celery, carrot and onion—the mixture is called a mirepoix, since we're having French class today. For two pounds of bones, use roughly a bunch of carrots, half a celery head and two onions. The veggies don't need to be cut much; indeed, larger pieces are easier to filter out, which you'll need to do when the stock is done. Carrots and celery sticks can be left whole or broken in half, and cut the onion in half. Many cooks oven-roast their mirepoix before adding it to the stock. If doing so, don't use oil or salt, and cut the vegetables into smaller chunks, which will transfer more roasted flavor to your stock.
Add the mirepoix to the stock, and cook for three more hours of lazy bubble. Strain the bones and mirepoix, and pour your finished stock into jars. Refrigerated, it will last about a week. For longer storage, freeze the stock but not in glass jars because they can crack. Or freeze smaller portions in ice-cube trays, and keep the frozen cubes in plastic bags or other storage containers. If you're stocked on stock, then whenever you want to make a little savory sumthing-sumthing, you'll be ready with your cubes.
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en
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|
Erik Kain, Contributor
I write about video games: the industry and the culture.
The buzz these days in the tech universe has been all Pinterest all the time, and with good reason.
Pinterest gives people the ability to curate photos on various online pinboards easily and quickly, and to follow pinboards curated by others.
Instead of asking users to set up their own account from scratch, Pinterest users can login with their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Integration, rather than direct competition, with the giants of social media appears to be the strategy, and it seems to be working.
Storify does something similar. Not only does the “social story-telling” site allow users to login in via Facebook or Twitter, it allows them to curate stories or events on the web using Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and various other social media and news sites.
Tech blogger, Robert Scoble, is impressed.
“Storify is even easier than Pinterest, in quite a few ways,” he notes. “Finding new content is awesome. Dragging it around and redesigning it is mondo easy (try to move a Pin from one pinboard to the next in Pinterest and you’ll see that Storify’s iPad app is a lot easier).”
Cultivating The Wild Web
Scoble notices a trend over the years, as new services like Twitter and Tumblr and now Pinterest and Storify emerge to compliment blogs, new media, and social networks like Facebook.
“With each year pushing content out to friends is getting easier,” he points out.
It’s not only getting easier, but the results are getting better.
Pinboards on Pinterest aren’t just collections of interesting photos. They’re often really great collections of photos. Rather than just searching on Google for images and ideas about home design, you can follow curators of home design ideas. This makes searching for images a social experience.
Storify allows people to easily comb Twitter, YouTube and other sites for relevant information and then piece that information together into a story. It’s not exactly blogging – it’s social story-telling.
This is the propulsion of the web. The internet as we once knew it is changing from an autonomous search-geared experience to one that is social and hyper-connected. Google is redesigning its entire approach to search by creating a social umbrella across all its services. Google+ isn’t so much a social network as it is a way to transform all of Google’s products into social products. Nothing is linear anymore.
With sites like Storify and Pinterest, the search-driven experience is changing even more. New media is growing up, moving closer and closer to the sort of hyper-participation that is increasingly defining it.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/02/23/how-storify-and-pinterest-are-cultivating-the-wild-web-and-why-social-media-will-civilize-the-internet/
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en
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In 1967 Penguin Books published The Mersey Sound, number 10 in the Modern Poets series. It brought together approximately 100 poems by Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten, the Liverpool Poets. Over 5oo,ooo copies have sold, more than any other poetry anthology. I’ve been along to see the exhibition at the Victoria Gallery and Museum that explores the various art forms all three poets used during the period. The University of Liverpool recently acquired archival material from the three poets with a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Items from the archive are on display here for the first time, supplemented with additional material borrowed from the Estate of Adrian Henri.
Liverpool in the1960s was a focal point for popular culture. The Liverpool Poets were working in an environment where art, music and writing were closely connected. I arrived in the city as a student just when this multimedia scene was at its peak. I remember the weekly performances by the Liverpool Scene at O’Connor’s Tavern. The music was provided by Mike Evans (sax), with Mike Hart and Andy Roberts on guitar. Roger McGough, Brian Patten, Adrian Henri and others read their poems. The Everyman was another important venue: I remember seeing out-of-town poets such as Christopher Logue and Adrian Mitchell read there. We all bought The Mersey Sound when it first came out, though my copy, sadly, has long been mislaid.
The exhibition focuses on the work of the poets in the 1960s, and takes a thematic approach. Concepts such as popular 6os comic book heroes, love and the city are explored by the different writers individually and collectively, using written, drawn and spoken forms.
The exhibition guide summarizes the main themes as follows:
Like many young people in 1960s Britain, the Liverpool Poets were greatly influenced by the hippie subculture of the US. Young Americans grew long hair, lived communally, practised free sex and drug use and attended mass outdoor music concerts.The Vietnam War, racial unrest and pressure to conform frustrated them. ‘Peace’ and ‘Love’ were their slogans. The Liverpool poets wrote extensively on the subject of love. They explore love’s many forms, from brief encounters and desire to enduring relationships and falling out of love.The poets also used love as a theme for performance, staging at least three Lovenights at the Everyman Theatre. In exploring and expressing this fundamental human emotion they sought to make their poetry accessible to everyone. The summer of 1967 was declared the Summer of Love, focused on a mass gathering in the Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
Adrain Henri, Love Is…
Love is feeling cold in the back of vans
Love is a fanclub with only two fans
Love is walking holding paintstained hands
Love is fish and chips on winter nights
Love is blankets full of strange delights
Love is when you don’t put out the light
Love is the presents in Christmas shops
Love is when you’re feeling Top of the Pops
Love is what happens when the music stops
Love is white panties lying all forlorn
Love is pink nightdresses still slightly warm
Love is when you have to leave at dawn
Love is you and love is me
Love is a prison and love is free
Love’s what’s there when you are away from me
A poem by Brian Patten poem is seen in the exhibition elegantly written out in the poet’s notebook:
You come to me quiet as rain not yet fallen
You come to me quiet as rain not yet fallen
Afraid of how you might fail yourself your
dress seven summers old is kept open
in memory of sex, smells warm, of boys,
and of the once long grass.
But we are colder now; we have not
Love’s first magic here. You come to me
Quiet as bulbs not yet broken
Out into sunlight.
The fear I see in your now lining face
Changes to puzzlement when my hands reach
For you as branches reach. Your dress
Does not fall easily, nor does your body
Sing of it won accord. What love added to
A common shape no longer seems a miracle.
You come to me with your age wrapped in excuses
And afraid of its silence.
Into the paradise our younger lives made of this bed and room
Has leaked the world and all its questioning
and now those shapes terrify us most
that remind us of our own. Easier now
to check longings and sentiment,
to pretend not to care overmuch,
you look out across the years, and you come to me
quiet as the last of our senses closing.
Performance was key to the work of the Liverpool Poets and vital to the city During the early 1960s Liverpool generated up to 350 beat pop groups according to Mersey Beat newspaper. Henri, Gorman, McGough and Mike McCartney (younger brother of Paul, who re-styled himself Mike McGear) formed a theatrical humour group which toured as The Liverpool One Fat Lady All Electric Show. One Fat Lady is a bingo reference to the number 8: Liverpool 8 was the area where much of this bohemian movement originated. Later Henri formed the Liverpool Scene, which included Mike Evans, Mike Hart, Percy Jones and Andy Roberts. McGough with Gorman and McGear performed as The Scaffold. Liverpool Scene opened for Led Zeppelin during their 1969 tour and released their last studio album in 1971.The Scaffold achieved a number one hit in the UK in November 1968 with Lily the Pink.
The demand for popular performance tied into Henri’s interest in innovative US performance art — Happenings —led by Allan Kaprow. Liverpool’s first happening, City, was part of the Merseyside Arts Festival. It was organised by John Gorman, Henri and McGough and held in a club in the basement of Hope Hall — later the Everyman Theatre. The happenings included poetry, dancers, recorded jazz music and even Henri performing painting. Mike Evans, member of The Liverpool Scene and a performer at some of these events says:
“Subsequent events at the ‘Hopie’ included Death of a Bird in the City and The Machine, while the sixth such happening Night blues was something of a breakthrough as it featured live music from a local rhythm and blues group, The Roadrunners. Significantly, from here on poetry-and-music on Merseyside evolved in a rock/R&B context rather than jazz — reflecting the dominance of beat groups and rock ‘n’ roll in the city generally.”
Adrian Henri, Tonight at Noon
Tonight at noon
Supermarkets will advertise 3p extra on everything
Tonight at noon
Children from happy families will be sent to live in a home
Elephants will tell each other human jokes
America will declare peace on Russia
World War I generals will sell poppies on the street on November 11th
The first daffodils of autumn will appear
When the leaves fall upwards to the trees
Tonight at noon
Pigeons will hunt cats through city backyards
Hitler will tell us to fight on the beaches and on the landing fields
A tunnel full of water will be built under Liverpool
Pigs will be sighted flying in formation over Woolton
And Nelson will not only get his eye back but his arm as well
White Americans will demonstrate for equal rights
In front of the Black house
And the monster has just created Dr. Frankenstein
Girls in bikinis are moonbathing
Folksongs are being sung by real folk
Art galleries are closed to people over 21
Poets get their poems in the Top 20
There’s jobs for everybody and nobody wants them
In back alleys everywhere teenage lovers are kissing in broad daylight
In forgotten graveyards everywhere the dead will quietly bury the living
You will tell me you love me
Tonight at noon
The Liverpool Poets sought to make their work relevant by reflecting experiences that their audience could understand. Distinguishing themselves from the subculture of the US and the rest of the UK, their work is firmly grounded in Liverpool and its everyday life. George Melly commented that:
“The focus was often on the little things that brought just a bit more colour and choice to life — frozen peas, free plastic daffodils…”
The need for relevance was partly driven by audiences. Henri remembered an early poetry reading in Liverpool with McGough and Patten:
“It was a basement club and it was lousy … I was looking at all these disinterested people with a drink in their hands and it was a revelation to me. Every poem from then on had to have a surface meaning. Maybe you could get to another level by reading it but it had to mean something immediately.”
The three poets took different approaches to the theme. McGough, for example, detailed the amusing outcomes of the commonplace in poems such as My Bus Conductor. Patten reworked traditional themes in works such as Come into the City, Maude, and Henri drew much inspiration from the city of Liverpool itself. All three came together to explore the urban theme in an event at Hope Hall in 1962 called Death of a Bird in the City. This type of realistic poetry was not universally accepted. Alfred Alvarez criticised “the fashion for the diluted near-verse designed for mass readings and poetry-and-jazz concerts”. He described linking poetry with pop as “the logic of a traditional form at its weariest”. Overall, he saw the trend as “the poet resign[ing] his responsibilities” and concluded “what he offers is not poetry”.
Extract from The Entry of Christ into Liverpool by Adrian Henri:
City morning, dandelion seeds blowing from wasteground
smell of overgrown privethedges. children’s voices
in the distance. sounds from the river.
round the corner into Myrtle St. Saturdaymorning shoppers
down the hill
THE SOUND OF TRUMPETS
cheering and shouting in the distance
flags breaking out over buildings
black and red green and yellow
Union Jacks Red Ensigns
LONG LIVE SOCIALISM
stretched out against the blue sky
over St George’s Hall
now the procession
THE MARCHING DRUMS
Henri, McGough and Patten met against a backdrop of the Vietnam War. It was not much more than a decade after World War Il had ended, and they were in the midst of the subsequent atomic arms race of the US and USSR, and the on-going war in Vietnam. The Liverpool Poets wrote about all these issues, reflecting their interest in both popular and contemporary political concerns and also in the history of the 20th century. In general they were anti-war and anti-bomb and were often critical of North America.
The Mersey Sound includes material by all three poets examining these ideas, with World War II being a particularly important theme for McGough. In 1964 all three also performed in a ‘happening’ at the Cavern Club called Bomb Event.
One of Brian Patten’s poems featured in the exhibition has, I think, an extra resonance these days:
Little Johnny’s confession
being rather young and foolish
I borrowed a machine gun my father
had left hidden since the war, went out,
and eliminated a number of small enemies.
Since then I have not returned home.
swarms of police with tracker dogs
wander about the city
with my description printed
on their minds, asking:
‘Have you seen him ?
He is seven years old.
likes Pluto, Mighty Mouse
and Biffo the Bear,
have you seen him, anywhere?’
sitting alone in a strange playground
muttering you’ve blundered, you’ve blundered
over and over to myself
I work out my next move
but cannot move.
The trackerdogs will sniff me out,
they have my lollypops.
- Mersey Sound relaunched: Daily Post feature 2007
- The Liverpool Poets: Wikipedia
- The Mersey Sound book: Wikipedia
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Blog posts tagged in NYS budget
With budget negotions in a bit of a tangle and new deals floated every day, one policy that hasn't recieved much attention is the DREAM Act that would give undocumented youth tuition assistance to attend college.
So far it seems that Speaker Sheldon Silver is fighting a losing battle to push for some sort of funding for the program to be included in the budget.
Sen. Jose Peralta has continually called on Gov. Andrew Cuomo to make The DREAM Act part of his budget and to lead on the issue but so far it hasn't worked.
Cuomo has been quiet on the issue and a spokesman told the Gazette last week that Cuomo supports the federal DREAM Act but is considering proposals on the state level.
The DREAM Act could be dealt with outside of the budget, but most insiders think that budget negotiations gives proponents the strongest hand to negotiate.
There is no budget deal to report as of this afternoon, but there are a few "tentative" ones the table — or at least floating around the halls of the Capitol.
The first deal would see the state's minimum wage incrementally increased to $9 an hour by 2016. That deal has some mainstream Senate Democrats rankled. Sen. Mike Gianaris told Susan Arbetter of The Capitol Pressroom that Senate Republicans who cut a deal with the Independent Democratic Conference have "outsize" influence in negotiations and that the deal is "half a loaf."
Sen. David Valesky of the Independent Democratic Conference responded in a statement accusing Gianaris of the "type of absolutism that prevented progress in the past."
Now there is word of a deal on marijuana laws. The New York City Council would be allowed to make possesion of small amounts of marijuana in public a ticketable offense rather than an arrestable offense under proposed legislation.
Some upstate legislators are upset that the measure would only impact New York City.
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It looks like there will be more financial bleeding of federal tax money for green energy projects. As if the bankruptcy of the ill-fated Solyndra solar plant weren’t enough, now a government-backed geothermal plant in Nevada seems headed for insolvency.
According to a report in The New York Times, Nevada Geothermal Power is struggling with debt as sales from its output of power fail to cover its operating costs. Its own auditor concluded there was “significant doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
Nevada Geothermal has received a federal government loan guarantee of $79 million, in addition to $66 million in federal grants. At least taxpayers can take solace in the fact that they’re on the hook for only $145 million, rather than the $528 million lost on the Solyndra boondoggle.
One has to wonder if the funding of these two green energy projects was due to the ineptitude of U.S. Department of Energy officials, or if they were just responding to political pressure to give these risky projects the green light. In either case, top officials at the Department of Energy should be fired.
The house of cards built on the foundation of green energy ideology is collapsing. The Obama administration and Congress should immediately cease and desist wasting taxpayer money on green energy projects (congressional “super committee,” take note). Some of these projects may merit funding, but those investments should be made by private investors risking their own money — not a political class spending someone else’s money with little or no repercussions when projects fail.
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Here's another great marketing ploy!!
Makes me want to buy THREE!!
When you're 101, be careful about sleeping too well, especially if you have no detectable pulse and don't seem to be breathing.
You may be placed in a coffin and be prepared for burial.
Here's the link to the story.
The best part is where she sits up and says "Hello, there" to the mourners.
Quick, change the sign -- "
Maybe you read Jane Brody's column for May 11, 2010.
People of normal height or taller might be inclined to assume, as that silly Randy Newman song put it, that “Short people got no reason to live.... Short people got nobody to love.”
As someone who never broke the 5-foot mark, I can attest that most assumptions about short people are just that: assumptions. Here are a few facts.
¶ Children who are naturally short are no less socially competent or intelligent than taller ones.
¶ Being short was no deterrent to the likes of Yuri Gagarin, who, at 5-foot-1, was the first man in space; the actor Danny DeVito or the pop singer Prince, both 5-2; former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, a mere 4-10; or George Stephanopoulos, TV correspondent and talk show host, just over 5 feet.
¶ Short people can run countries (though not necessarily well): Napoleon, Caesar, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco.
¶ Being short is no impediment to financial success: Ross Perot and Michael Bloomberg.
¶ Even professional basketball is not out of reach: Spud Webb, 5-6, and Muggsy Bogues, just 5-3.
Or maybe you read "FOR CRIME, IS ANATOMY DESTINY?"
printed just a few pages afterwards.
Poverty, greed, anger, jealousy, pride, revenge. These are the usual suspects when it comes to discussing the causes of crime. In recent years, however, economists have started to investigate a different explanation for criminal activity: physical attributes.
A small band of economists has been studying how height, weight and beauty affect the likelihood of committing — or being convicted of — a crime. Looking at records from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, they have found evidence that shorter men are 20 to 30 percent more likely to end up in prison than their taller counterparts, and that obesity and physical attractiveness are linked to crime.
There is already a sizable stack of research that examines the connections between physical characteristics and the labor market. Economists have found, for example, that every inch of additional height is associated with a nearly 2 percent increase in earnings...
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4. July 2012 10:26
July 17th Deadline - Aggregate Resources Act Review
As Ontarians we rely for our health and wealth on many natural resources supplied by our environment and much of this is found in our rural landscapes. This is a legacy of geological, biological and climatic processes at work. Some are renewable, if we steward them, and some simply cannot be replaced. The sources of our food, our lumber, our water and the natural ecosystems that we live in, need to be protected and conserved. These areas also provide the sand, gravel and stone to build our structures and roads. Here lies the conflict – society needs the resources but we destroy productive land and impact watersheds to get them. The province’s land use policies (Provincial Policy Statement) and natural resources regulations including the Aggregate Resources Act reflect this confusion with several varying statements about which values will guide our decisions. On balance our current system favours aggregate extraction and trumps farmland protection. Because aggregate is costly to transport in dollars and energy, there has been strong policy at the provincial level which requires municipalities (esp. in southern Ontario near urban areas) to designate areas in their Official Plans so that aggregate extraction is a permitted use, subject to the regulatory licence requirements of the Aggregate Resources Act.
A number of battles have been and are being fought in the countryside surrounding the granting of licences - from Duntroon near Collingwood; through the “mega-quarry” in north Dufferin; south to Puslinch and Flamborough - the resulting conflicts have been playing out in tribunal boardrooms.
Now that the Province is reviewing the Aggregate Resources Act and the Provincial Policy Statements under the Planning Act, many are arguing that farmland needs better protection as a strategic resource. The Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA), Ontario Farmland Trust (OFT) and Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario (CFFO) are all making their voices heard (see links below). Have your say too - we encourage rural stakeholders to share their point of view.
Written submissions should be forwarded to the Clerk of the Committee at the following address by 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, July 17, 2012. David Orazietti, MPP, Chair / Tamara Pomanski, Clerk pro tem., Room 1405, Whitney Block, Queen's Park, Toronto, ON M7A 1A2
The terms of reference for the review are available on the Legislative Assembly website at: www.ontla.on.ca
Norman Ragetlie, Director, Policy & Stakeholder Engagement
OFA -Standing-Committee-on-General-Government-Aggregate Resources Act.pdf (2.06 mb)
Ontario Farmland Trust - Brief to Standing Committee on General Government regarding Review of the Aggregate Resources Act, May 14, 2012.pdf (156.53 kb)
CFFO Submission to the Standing Committee on General Government re ARA review 2012.pdf (161.58 kb)
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What is a Heritage Overlay?
The Heritage Overlay identifies places which are of heritage importance. The overlay seeks to conserve and enhance places of natural and cultural significance, and ensure that new development does not adversely affect the significance of the heritage place.
The Heritage Overlay provisions are set out at clause 43.01 within all Victorian Planning Schemes. A local Schedule to the Heritage Overlay lists the properties affected by the Heritage Overlay and any additional controls which may apply to that particular site.
What does being in the Heritage Overlay mean?
The Heritage Overlay aims to:
- conserve and enhance places of natural or cultural significance
- conserve and enhance those elements which contribute to the significance of heritage places
- ensure that development does not adversely affect the significance of heritage places
- conserve specifically identified places by allowing a use that would otherwise be prohibited if this will demonstrably assist with the conservation of the significance of the place.
Under the Heritage Overlay a planning permit is required from Council to:
- subdivide or consolidate land
- demolish or remove a building (including part of a building)
- construct a building (including part of a building)
- externally alter a building
- construct or carry out works
- construct or display a sign
- externally paint an unpainted surface
- externally paint a building if the painting constitutes an advertisement.
In some instances, other external paint controls, internal alteration controls and tree controls may also apply. The Schedule to the Heritage Overlay will identify whether these additional controls apply. There may also be other overlays that apply.
Property owners and developers are strongly encouraged to discuss proposals with Council's Statutory Planning unit on 9205 5373 prior to committing to a project.
Is a planning permit required for repairs and maintenance?
A planning permit is not required under the Heritage Overlay to carry out routine maintenance and repairs which do not change the appearance of the heritage place. If the repairs or maintenance involve replacing 'like with like', then a planning permit may not be required. For example, a rusty iron roof may be replaced with a new iron roof but a planning permit would be required for a change in materials (eg. to use tiles instead of iron). If in any doubt, clarify your intentions with the local Council before committing to the repairs or maintenance.
Am I expected to restore my building to its original appearance?
No. The Heritage Overlay cannot force an owner to restore or maintain their property.
Can I demolish a building in a heritage overlay?
Being able to demolish a house or building depends on a number of factors. The primary purpose of the Heritage Overlay is to protect the heritage significance of a building, place or area. If the heritage place is individually significant, or if it contributes to the significance of an area, a permit for demolition may be refused if the proposal would adversely affect the significance of the place. If a planning permit is refused, it is possible to have this decision reviewed by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
If you wish to demolish part or the whole of a building, structure or fence and which Council has assessed as being significant or contributory value, your planning application will need to include a statement on why the demolition is necessary. This must include evidence on the structural soundness of the building or structure, and that all viable options for conservation have been explored. It is recommended that this be undertaken by a qualified professional experienced in conservation architecture or structural engineering. You will also be expected to provide information that you have explored options for retaining the building or structure.
An application for the demolition of a significant or contributory heritage place will need to be accompanied by an application for new development.
Can I make additions and extensions to an existing building?
Changes to buildings in a street can make a difference to the heritage value of a place or a precinct. Careful planning and design can limit the impact an extension or addition to a building may have on the heritage qualities of the place or precinct.
In some cases, it is the rear of a building that may contain the original structures of that building. The heritage value of a place relates to the whole site, not just what is visible at the street frontage.
I want to replace my fence, what style fence can I replace it with?
The style, materials and height of any new fence will be dictated by the style of the building. Fences are often an important part of the streetscape. Original and significant fences should be retained.
Can I externally alter an existing building?
A planning permit will be required to externally alter an existing building in a heritage overlay. This includes alterations to structural work, rendering, removing paint from bricks or stone, and works done to roofs, chimneys, walls, windows and doors.
Can I remove a tree in my garden?
In some instances the heritage overlay may include tree protection controls. If your site has tree controls, you will need to show where the trees are on the site and provide written information on the tree species and information. Trees that are significant should be retained and conserved. This may mean including measures that protect tree roots from development ie. root guards, avoiding building up the soil within the tree canopy and avoiding excavation works near tree roots, as well as designing and siting the building in such a way to avoid the need to lop the tree. In instances where contributory or significant trees are being removed your planning application will need to include a statement on why the removal is necessary. This must include evidence on the health of the tree, and that all viable options for retention have been explored. It is recommended that this be undertaken by a qualified arborist.
Can I subdivide my property?
Any subdivision of a heritage place will require planning approval. You will need to provide a plan showing the proposed new boundaries in relation to existing heritage buildings or features. The plan must be prepared by a surveyor.
Subdividing Checklist (172.29kB)
How was my property identified as being of heritage significance?
Most heritage places are identified by Council during the process of carrying out a municipal heritage study. During the initial stages of the heritage study, the community is normally encouraged to nominate sites and places of potential historic significance. Nominated places then undergo a heritage assessment in order to determine whether or not the place is significant and warrants heritage protection at either a state or local level.
Does Council have floor plans of my house?
Council’s Building Services Unit has some floor plans of buildings. Council can generally supply copies of plans if:
- Your property is in Fairfield and a building permit was issued later than 1990; OR
- Your property is in all other areas of the City of Yarra and the building permit was issued later than 1960.
If the building was constructed prior to 1960 the Council will not have plans of your building. Your local historical society, the State Library of Victoria, or the Public Record Office Victoria may have copies of plans.
To obtain copies of plans from Council, you will be required to provide identification and proof of ownership, such as a rates notice. If you are not the owner of the property, you must produce written authorisation from the owner to obtain copies of the plans.
Viewing a residential or commercial property file costs:
$69.30 for residents.
$115.50 for commercial.
Please note that there is an additional fee for photocopies of plans.
You can request the plans through Yarra Building Services at the Richmond Town Hall.
Please bring identification.
Strategic Planning Branch
Back to top
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African banks finally waking up to the needs of SMEs and the unbanked
We estimate that the banking penetration level in most of Sub-Saharan African markets (excluding South Africa) remains relatively low at about 10%.
In fact, a recent McKinsey study noted that just 20% of the population of Africa had access to banking services (including South Africa). In Zambia, for example, an estimated 25% of the population has access to a bank whilst in Benin there are just 2.89 commercial bank branches for every 100,000 adults. The comparable ratio in Germany is 18 and for Brazil 14.
Generally, South Africa dominates the financial sector in Africa, accounting for over 30% of all banking assets and 80% of life insurance premiums. Looking at the top 200 banks in Africa by assets (2010), the top four are South African. Of the next sixteen, four are from Egypt, three each are from Algeria, Nigeria and Morocco, two are Libyan and one is from Togo.
On another note, according to research by the IFC and McKinsey, there is a US$140 billion to $170 billion financing gap for SMEs on the African continent. Bank financing to SMEs in Africa has remained less significant and more short term in nature compared to other emerging nations. Generally, in other emerging nations, bank loans devoted to financing small firms average about 13%, while around 5% of loans are allocated to such firms by banks in Africa.
Traditional banks have largely been avoiding providing finance and other banking services to Africa’s SME markets because of the perceived high risks.
The good news, however, is that micro-finance is now picking up rapidly across the continent and is fast changing the banking landscape by providing services to individuals who earn modest incomes. The provision of loans for vehicles or housing by micro-finance institutions has largely helped to boost consumer spending as well as provide the start-up capital for small businesses. Some players within Sub-Saharan Africa include the likes of African Bank Investments Limited (ABIL), Blue Financial Services, Letshego Holdings and Real People.
According to a recent report on CNBC Africa, Standard Bank Group is now financing SMEs and is tapping into a lucrative segment that was previously ignored by mainstream lenders. Standard Bank, says the report, is aiming to extend $122.5 million of loans by the end of 2012. The new SME financing product known as Quick Loan lends between $300 and $30,000, over a period of three, six or 12 months at a cost of between 1.2% to 6.0% interest per month. Standard Bank has rolled out its SME financing product in four countries so far: Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and Tanzania.
Other banking institutions now are focusing on the “consumer” as opposed to simple loan advances. A good example is ABIL’s strategy of offering credit for the purchase of consumer items through its South African furniture retailing business, Ellerines Holdings Limited (TN Holdings in Zimbabwe is pursuing a similar model).
In Kenya, Safaricom is now evolving its financial and digital inclusion agendas through the M-Pesa mobile money platform. The group envisages M-Pesa accommodating the diverse needs of customers through micro-insurance, micro-savings, micro-credit and easy payment facilities. In May 2010, Safaricom announced that M-Pesa users in Kenya without a bank account will be able to use their mobile phones to open proper savings account (called M-Kesho) with Equity Bank. This therefore means that consumers can easily “borrow or spend for consumption” using the mobile money platform.
Other examples include the likes of Equity Bank (Kenya) and Capitec Bank (South Africa) whose strategies are specifically geared towards the consumer.
In conclusion, we believe the “wakening up” of banking institutions and even telcos in servicing the “unbanked” is indeed an important step towards boosting financial inclusion across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Imara is an investment banking and asset management group renowned for its knowledge of African markets.
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For example, say I'm building a hotel with a conference room. The room is large enough for 1,000 people, and I assume everyone weighs 250 pounds ... So maybe we build a room that can take 2,000 people weighing 250 pounds ... Now I have reasonable assurance that this thing is not going to collapse.
ICN: And probabilistic risk assessment [now part of the NRC's 'risk-informed and performance-based' approach to safety planning]?
Lam: Probabilistic is, 'alright, outside of these predetermined parameters, there's something we have not thought about.' Of those we have not thought about, let us stack them up in terms of these things: One, how likely are they to occur? Two, how major are the consequences? And three, how effective are the remedies? All three need to come together.
For example, a meteorite comes in once every 5 million years, and nothing can defend against that, so I'm not going to consider that. Ah, but the flooding, once in 100 years, you'd better design against that. It's all a balance of how effective [the prevention measure] is and how cost-beneficial it is.
Looking at Fukushima, all they needed to do to avoid disaster was to elevate one or two diesel generators above the 50-foot tsunami level. And the cost, if they were to do it, would probably have been $10 million to $30 million. I'm just guessing, but let's say it's $100 million. If you knew about the tsunami coming, you would have spent the $100 million. Now [cleanup is] going to cost $100 billion, easy. So it's a matter of, 'Well, tell me what's going to happen? How much is it going to cost?" (Editor's note: The Japan Center for Economic Research put the accident's cost at between $71 billion and $250 billion.)
To be fair, a lot of things fall into that category besides a tsunami. And that's where probabilistic risk assessment comes in. What about a hurricane? The water ... would it hurt my diesel generators? Would it collapse my building? The building may not collapse on you, but if something else collapses and falls on a cable and cuts it, you are in equal jeopardy. What about a solar flare? These are the types of deliberations we need to go through.
ICN: Some people believe it's impossible to adequately protect the public from nuclear mishaps, and that belief forms the basis for opposing the technology altogether. What do you think?
Lam: They raise an interesting point. Are there any alternatives to this technology, so that if an accident were to happen, it would not cause so much harm? I think they're probably coming.
I would say that one should be really open minded as to what the future will bring, with or without nuclear power. And before we get there, our number one task is whatever nuclear power plants we have running, let's make sure they are safe.
ICN: Has the independent safety committee for Diablo Canyon affected things like safety culture at the plant?
Lam: I think the committee may play a part in enhancing that safety culture since three of us go down there nine times a year. We meet all the senior managers; we meet the rank and file, middle managers and first-line people. They probably know that the committee is there. They would not hesitate to tell us things that don't get appropriate attention.
The [NRC has] a program for whistleblowers. But perhaps we are a little bit more informal. We hear things. I usually meet with the site vice president behind closed doors. I would definitely let him know what I hear unless the people who told me things request confidential agreement. My job is to make sure, to the extent that we can contribute, that the plant operates safely.
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A central and hard-earned engineering principle in older engineering areas such as mechanical engineering and civil engineering is that simplicity rules.
the way to improve seems to be to master one thing at a time by doing a lot of it until quality naturally emerges.
Quality is not a flag in the company car park.
This book will argue forcibly that there is a property of software which experienced programmers can identify with quality without knowing the function of the software.
The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free (quoting Stravinksy)
Early versions of a number of Beethoven's pieces exist and give strong evidence of being written by a mere mortal; indeed, some are extraordinarily naive. Greatness emerged only after considerable refinement.
a profoundly important step in the maturity of a discipline is the enforcement of hard-learned previous experience and the recognition that complexity must be strictly controlled to that which necessary and no more.
A human programmer reads a programming language just as a compiler does. Therefore, languages that are difficult to write compilers for are likely to be difficult to read if those features that cause difficulty are used.
the content is more important than the style.
The author has always believed, however, that if something is statically detectable and therefore easily removeable, but likely to fail only once in the lifetime of the galaxy, it should be removed, because that occurrence might be next week and might kill someone. If its presence is known and its implications understood, it may well be negligent in the eyes of the law to leave it.
You can't test quality into software.
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02 / 07 / 2008 - Catholic doctors attack abortion proposals
Proposals made by the British Medical Association to strip doctors of their right to refuse to arrange abortions have been criticised by Catholic clergy and medics.
"The right of conscience is a fundamental human right. The doctor's right to act according to his conscience remains firmly embedded both in medical practice and in the law," said Archbishop Peter Smith of Cardiff.
Archbishop Smith is head of the Department of Christian Responsibility and Citizenship of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales.
Under the proposals, doctors would no longer be able to conscientiously object to authorising abortions but will be compelled to send any woman requesting the procedure directly to an agency or a physician offering the procedure.
It is expected that the move will be discussed by the association's policymaking body July 10 at its annual general meeting.
But Catholic medics said they would argue at the meeting that it would be unlawful to deny them a right of conscientious objection that is enshrined in Section 4 of Britain's 1967 Abortion Act.
"This would spell the death of the rights of conscience," said Dr Tony Cole of the Catholic Medical Association. He said the proposal was unlawful and can be challenged.
"A doctor whose conditions of service (were) affected by this might be able to seek redress through the courts," he said.
Dr Majid Khatme of the Islamic Medical Association said Muslim doctors were also "very unhappy" about the proposal.
"The conscience clause should not be removed," he said. "You cannot force me, as a doctor, to do things against my conscience. Something very dangerous is going on."
The proposals, initiated by the Oxford division of the association, insist that doctors "must refer" any woman to a doctor who will arrange an abortion if they will not do so themselves.
Source : The Universe
Doctors could lose the right to turn down abortions
Doctors could lose their right to refuse to arrange abortions under proposals to be debated next month.
They would be compelled to send any woman requesting the procedure to an abortion clinic.
The growing number of doctors who have moral objections to abortion - 25 per cent refuse to sign consent forms for it - are furious with the proposal.
Some are considering legal action if, as expected, the move is ratified by the British Medical Association's policy-making body in July.
Roman Catholic doctors are particularly opposed to the move, saying it will make them complicit in something they believe is evil, but doctors of other faiths and no faith have also condemned it.
Dr Tony Cole, of the Catholic Medical Association, said: 'This would spell the death of the rights of conscience. This takes away the right of conscience already guaranteed by statute. This is open to legal challenge.'
Dr Majid Khatme, of the Islamic Medical Association, said Muslim doctors were 'very unhappy' about the scheme.
He said: 'You cannot force me, as a doctor, to do things against my conscience. Something very dangerous is going on.'
Neil Addison, a barrister and expert on religious discrimination law, said he believed the motion was in breach of human rights and employment rights legislation.
The motion was tabled by Dr Evan Harris, a LibDem MP on the BMA's ethics committee, who has also tabled an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill to remove the need for two doctors to consent to an abortion before it can go ahead.
Dr Harris was unavailable for comment.
Source : Daily Mail
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The holidays are known as “the giving season.” It is a time when the amount of donations to charities and organizations increase. People are often more soft-hearted about giving during the holidays than any other time of year. Donations range from clothing, money, and sometimes even property. While donating is a great way to give back, donors should use caution when deciding to whom and what to donate. The holiday season is a time when criminals prey on the generosity of donors. Charity scams are the highest during this season. Criminals use this opportunity to set up money scams and even fake charities, leaving donors clueless and resulting in lost profit for a charity in need.
Here are five ways to avoid charity scams this holiday season:
- Research the charity- Be sure that it is a charity that you can trust or a charity that is familiar to you. Consider asking friends and family for suggestions, but still do your homework by calling or checking out the website. Look for past accomplishments and years in business. The larger the donation, the longer you should think about it before transferring funds to a charity.
- Don’t give in to pressure to give on the spot- Do not give on the spot, whether it is by phone, with a credit card, or a runner coming to get the donation. The charity that needs your gift today will welcome it tomorrow. Ask for a pledge card instead, this will give you time to do your research.
- Never give out credit card information over the phone- If a solicitor claims that the charity will support a local organization that you are familiar with, this is not a green light to give all of your information. Do not give your credit card or any other banking information over the phone. Call the charity in question directly to verify the claim. Phony charities will use familiar names of charities that are located in the area code that donors are calling from so that it appears that contributions are going to support local causes. People like to help their neighbors, especially during the holidays, and scam artists won't hesitate to exploit a donor’s kindness.
- Make your monetary contributions by check- When giving a monetary donation, use a check instead of cash. This is the most secure method of tracking your donations. Be sure to make your checks payable to the charity and not to an individual.
- Check the IRS and Better Business Bureau-. Most states require charities to register and file annual reports showing how they use donations. Ask your state or local consumer protection agency how to get this information. The Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance also offers information about national charities. You can check www.give.org for more information.
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1927 Peace Dollar Replica Antique Silver Coin Pendant
- Model #: 11168
When you buy from us, you can be sure you're getting the best price!
Share with your friends:
The Peace Dollar represents the American public's desire for peace after World War I.The 1927 S Mint Mark Peace Dollar was created by Anthony de Francisci, and made famous to celebrate peace in victory.
The replica coin is held by an antique silvertone bezel and hangs on a 30" antique silvertone chain. The necklace stays securely closed with a lobster claw clasp.
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Study Done for Constitutional Litigation Clinic Shows NJ E-Voting Machines Very Vulnerable to Tampering
October 17, 2008 –A report released today in a four-year lawsuit spearheaded by the Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers School of Law–Newark shows that approximately 10,000 voting machines used in 18 out of the 21 counties in New Jersey can be manipulated to throw an election. The Constitutional Litigation Clinic represents voting rights advocacy groups such as the Princeton-based Coalition for Peace Action, as well as a state legislator and a voter who was disenfranchised.
The report was written by Princeton University Professor Andrew Appel, an expert on computer security. The report details many ways in which the State’s 10,000 Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machines are insecure. After spending two months examining the voting computers, Professor Appel concluded that vote-stealing software can be easily installed in the AVC Advantage in less than eight minutes. The technical knowledge needed to write vote-stealing software is widespread and common.
The AVC Advantages also falsely indicate that votes are recorded when they are not. The machines can be programmed to print fraudulent reports that differ from the official results. Professor Appel’s report can be found at http://citp.princeton.edu/voting/advantage/.
“The possibility for disenfranchisement due to voting machine insecurities puts at risk the more than five million registered New Jersey voters,” says Rutgers Professor Penny Venetis who has been pushing for examination of the voting computers for four years. “It is most unfortunate that the State continues to defend these insecure voting systems.” The lawsuit asks that the court de-commission the electronic voting machines and order the State to replace them with more reliable and secure voting systems.
For more information, contact Professor Penny Venetis at 973-353-5687 (office) or 917-617-3524 (cell); Irene Goldman, Chair, Coalition for Peace Action, Princeton, NJ, 609-505-7554 (cell); or Professor Andrew Appel, Princeton University, 609-489-3045 (cell).
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Like the subjects of Brave New World who think their history begins in 1 A.F. ("After Ford"), the youth of Canada tend to regard 1982, the year the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was introduced, as their Year 1 in the era of freedom. Before 1982, Canadians lacked liberty. This, of course, is nonsense, and reading the Founders enables them to see the genuine origins of their regime.
The ignorance of Canadians for the ideas and beliefs of the Founders, as well as the character of the founding act, has bred a lot of confusion. Canadians have been taught that their Founding was simply a pragmatic act by pork-barrel politicians who, if they could barely arise to articulating principles, certainly could not implant principles into their constitution. They were too partisan. Even our Prime Minister gets caught up in this confusion…
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RALEIGH — Still puzzled about how North Carolina can rank so highly on some national measures of business climate, and still have among the worst-performing economies in the country? Let me take another crack at explaining it with this sentence: It’s pretty much all about the incentives.
The propriety of giving big companies special tax breaks or cash grants to open or retain locations in North Carolina has been a controversial issue for two decades. Politicians have debated it. Lawyers and judges have adjudicated it. As a longtime incentives skeptic, I’ll have to admit that my “side” has not fared well in either venue. North Carolina has become one of the most aggressive players in the incentives business, and the state’s judiciary has been reluctant to intervene to enforce constitutional limitations on the resulting misuse of state government’s taxing power.
Before the 1990s, our state was not considered a high bidder on incentives. Past governors and lawmakers prided themselves on competing effectively for economic development by providing good-quality public services at relatively low cost. Maybe they were right. Maybe they were wrong. But during Gov. Jim Hunt’s third term in the early 1990s, the state’s strategy changed. As other Southern states landed big industrial prospects, particularly automobile manufacturers, North Carolina began to ramp up our incentives programs to remain “competitive.”
In one sense, the policy shift has clearly succeeded. If you look at most of the business rankings that praise North Carolina – those from Site Selection, Chief Executive, and CNBC, for example – the availability of tax incentives or cash grants is one of the dominant variables. Even in the case of Forbes magazine’s conclusion that North Carolina has the best regulatory climate in the country, if you look past the label “regulatory climate” to see what Forbes is actually measuring, economic incentives are a big part of the “regulatory climate” calculation. (So are governmental credit ratings and right-to-work laws, both factors for which North Carolina rates highly but that have little to do with health, safety, or environmental regulation.)
Another good example of the effect can be found by contrasting two different studies by the Washington-based Tax Foundation. One looks at the overall tax climate for business by state. Because of North Carolina’s high marginal rates and poorly designed income and sales taxes, our state ranks a dismal 44th by this measure. But early this year, the Tax Foundation did a very different study that looked at actual taxes paid divided by revenue for major, capital-intensive facilities such as manufacturing plants, distribution centers, and research-and-development firms. After factoring in our generous incentives and relatively low property taxes, North Carolina fared well in several categories.
So if the goal of moving the state aggressively into the incentives business was to score highly on national surveys and attract the interest of economic developers working for large companies, consider it a success.
However, if the goal was to make North Carolina’s economy healthier and more productive, it didn’t work. At the same time that we got more aggressive with incentives, our economic performance began to deteriorate. Since the late 1990s, the state has continued to gain population, but economic production, job creation, and incomes have not keep pace. From 2000 to 2010, real per-capita income growth declined in North Carolina for the first time since records have been kept, even as real per-capita income growth grew modestly in the rest of the South and in the nation as a whole.
The problem here is that while incentives may be of great interest to big, mature companies, they are largely irrelevant to the creation of new companies that generate most of the new jobs and income growth in a modern economy. Entrepreneurs demand low marginal tax rates, regulations that are sensible and predictable, and public services such as public safety, fair courts of law, adequate infrastructure, and effective education.
North Carolina’s rankings in these areas range from poor to middling. We may be able to bribe big companies to overall that fact, but this is not a recipe for long-term growth.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and author of Our Best Foot Forward: An Investment Plan for North Carolina’s Economic Recovery.
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Much of the discourse surrounding the Shafia murder case has circled around the use of the term “honour killing”. In the CBC radio episode Shafia-Muslim Reax, Alia Hogben (Canadian Council of Muslim Women) quite rightly states her dispondence with regards to the use of the term. She states that she would prefer for such killings to be referred to as “Femicide”. The murder of women or misogynistic murders. I happen to agree. Tribal patriarchy is alive and well everywhere. Domestic abuse and murder are universal problems however there are some cultural contrasts. Community acceptance and responses to such acts differs, as well as the fact that Femicide among conservative Muslims (and other South Asian cultures) is often perpetrated by more than one person. In this case the entire immediate family. To make matters worse, perpetrators of such crimes in these communities are often not sufficiently condemned by their peers. In the radio piece above, you will first hear the prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis being heckled by (what I can only assume) are members of communities where patriarchal values are strongly at play. Their rejection that the Shafia case was indeed a case of first degree murder, despite all of the evidence, is testament to that.
Shahla Khan Salter (Muslims for Progressive Values) emphasises that femicide is not a religious issue but a cultural one. I partly agree. “Honour killings” have existed before Islam, and they have and do exist in non-Muslim societies. Until quite recently they happened with a degree of regularity in European Mediterranean countries, because like Muslim cultures, those cultures too buy into the honour/shame dichotomy. We see the same among Middle Eastern Christians, and in some African countries with Christian majorities. Murders of this nature are perpetrated in Latin America, and they happen in India (and non-Muslim Indian communities in the West) – again because honour/shame is a prominent cultural theme. In all these cultures, most of this “honour” (of men, families, tribes etc) is bound to the (actual or perceived) sexual behaviour of women.
Femicides are not Islamically sanctioned
For those who seek to disassociate such murders from Islam through stating that “honour killing” are not a feature of Islam, this not so easy to do. How does one explain that the religious establishments in many Muslim majority countries openly support merely nominal sentencing for these crimes throughout the Middle East? Jordanian liberals have been trying for years to nullify a clause that allows for reduced sentencing in the cases of honour crimes. Who opposes this most vociferously? The clerical establishment. The Mullahs, the Muftis, the Imams. They have been instrumental in drumming up opposition to the nullification of such laws.
The Palestinian Authority uses an even older Jordanian penal code that largely exempts men from being charged altogether. How do Muslims explain the fact that research has shown that in many Muslim majority countries, a significant section of the population thinks that honour crimes are something sanctioned by religion? It’s great that some Muslims can identify and state that this wrong, but this doesn’t mean that every Muslim is in agreement with you.
Despite the fact that this is not an issue that is exclusively Muslim, despite the fact that it is not something that is sanctioned in the Qur’an or other Islamic texts, it is obtuse and dishonest to proclaim that religion has nothing to do with it. A religion is what its followers do. Islam is no different. When Islamic religious establishments lobby to have lenient laws for perpetrators of honour killings in Muslim majority states, honour killings become part of “religion”. When a significant part of the population thinks honour killing is religiously sanctioned, it is a part of religion. If we are to address the issue of honour crime head on (what I prefer to describe as femicide), we cannot disconnect Islam from these murders, particularly when 95% of honour killings in the West are perpetrated by Muslim fathers, brothers or their proxies.
Femicides are a cultural phenomenon
Cultural distinctions are important to make, however culture alone is not at the root of the problem. A particular common feature of many cultures is. There is not a single culture on earth where women aren’t killed for opposing male control. Yet, when a Caucasian woman is killed for cheating on her husband, or a Caucasian highschool boy turns a gun on his schoolmates after his girlfriend broke up with him, that is not referred to as an “honour killing” (nor should it be. It’s femicide. The target is a woman and anyone else who gets in the way is regarded as collateral damage by the perpetrator).
When people of colour commit the murder of a woman, it becomes exoticised and termed an “honour killing” when in fact, we should be least bothered by the feelings of shame/honour the perpetrator(s) harbour and call the crime what it is. A murder of women i.e. femicide.
Comparatively, when a Caucasian man (or in some cases, a woman) is driven by the same values of patriarchy, it is presented as a “tragedy”, “gun rampage” or “random act of violence”. This is what happened in the Tabitha Stepple case in Alberta, Canada. News reports began by talking about the deaths of the two baseball players who were with Tabitha at the time. Interviews of the grieving friends of the players were broadcast first and reports were almost entirely focussed on the loss of two baseball players and their sporting talent as opposed to pointing out that this was a case of femicide. The mention that the key target of this killing was a woman who had recently split from the man who killed her came rather late. Almost as an “addition” to the reports as opposed to the central message. This was a case of violence against women and femicide, yet not a single news report used such terms. (Stepple’s ex boyfriend had tracked her down and turned a gun on her and the two men with her at the time before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide.)
Femicide / Honour crime: Racism and misogyny in the public discourse.
Media outlets in North America need to overcome their innate misogyny and start telling the complete story when a woman is murdered for being a woman, as opposed to focusing on loss of male sporting talent. Lawyers, judges and media outlets, once again, need to fight this rather racist inclination towards labelling the murder of non-Caucasian women as “honour killings” (putting the focus on the perpetrator’s honour and his feelings) whilst simultaneously turning the same acts perpetrated against Caucasian women into “random acts”. To be clear, this does not absolve the Conservative Muslim communities or other communities within which these murders happen, of their responsibility to challenge patriarchal values and to stop femicide from being perpetrated. What it does mean, is that whenever a woman is killed for her free choices, it leads back to the same reasons regardless of the ethnicity or religion of the woman or the perpetrator(s). Patriarchy. An inability to see a woman as a complete human being who is entitled to make personal choices without the permission of the males around her. We must move away from this double standard. Killings of non-Caucasian women are not some exotic anomaly. Murder is murder is murder. We must stop making cultural excuses for the perpetrators of these crimes. Femicide is universal and must be condemned and tackled wherever it is found. However, the universality of femicide does not change the fact that 95% of such murders are perpetrated by Muslims fathers, brothers and their proxies. Femicides are disproportionately, a Muslim problem in the West. Changing the label to focus on what happened to the victim as opposed to the “honour” of the perpetrators does not absolve Muslim communities of their responsibility to change attitudes and stop femicide from taking place.
The term “honour killing” is a favourite among cultural relativists who subscribe to a racist brand of feminism (or are just plain racist) that creates cultural excuses for crimes such as domestic abuse, Female Genital Mutilation, violence and murder. Australian feminist Virginia Haussegger addresses this quite beautifully in an Intelligence Squared Debate (Melbourne, 2010). See below.
I would like to take a moment to thank Alia Hogben (whom I mentioned at the beginning of this post) for ignoring the CBC radio interviewer’s rather blatant attempt to silence her on the issue of femicide. Thank you for being brave enough to re- state your disapproval of the use of the term “honour killing”. As long as the term “honour killing” remains mainstream, we are essentially descrating the memory of murdered women by turning their deaths into an exotic story about the perpetrator’s “cultural” honour, as opposed to maintaining a focus on the universal humanity of victim’s of femicide. Murder of women motivated by a hatred of women.
When a man is killed for the colour of his skin (e.g. Stephen Lawrence, UK), do we call it a “racially motivated killing”? Or do we use the word “murder”? My proposal is for femicide to become synonymous in gravity of meaning with the word “murder”, since at present, the term honour killing doesn’t adequately describe the violence, the premeditation or the real motive. The fact that the victim was a woman. ”Killing” detracts from the seriousness of the crime as opposed to the term “murder”. If femicide is understood as murder of women, this will provide less justification to the perpetrators for their feelings of honour since their actions will focus on the demise of the victim and not the feelings of the perpetrator.
Penultimately, despite the universal nature of femicide, I must emphasise firstly, that I do acknowledge that men are also victims of such murders. Due to their sexual orientation, for being involved with someone’s daughter. And this is where we run into problems with the word “femicide”. However, perhaps we need to create new words to refer to all of the victims of such murders as opposed to focusing on the “honour” of the perpetrator?
Finally, I refuse to ignore the fact that some communities and cultures deal with femicide better than others. Conservative Muslim communities (particularly from South Asia) are certainly not among those. Neither in their homeland, nor when they emigrate to Western democracies. Abusive behaviour towards children, particularly female children as a method of discipline is widely accepted and unchallenged by their peers. Conservative Muslim women from the South Asia (of a variety of ages) are often guilty of deep, deep misogyny towards other females in their proximity. This is visible from the participation of Tooba Yahya (Mohammad Shafia’s wife) in the murders. This prevents young Muslim women in these communities from being able to turn to their mothers or other Muslim women for solace, since many such women will refuse outright, the idea of challenging the patriarchal norms that they have lived with all their lives.
Conservative Muslim women (particularly from South Asia) too have an integral responsibility in stopping this cycle from persisting. If they do not find the courage to reject their subordinate status and the mistreatment of other women as standard, their daughters and grand-daughters will re-live the horrors that they themselves have lived. The more independent a young Muslim woman becomes, the more she educates herself, the more problems she might face at home for voicing her opinions or deviating from cultural norms. Some Conservative Muslim communities in the West still hold true the notion that the honour and reputation of their family and their community rests mainly (if not solely) upon the sexual behaviour (real or perceived) of their daughter. This notion is maintained despite Muslim boys often being able to engage in whatever sexual behaviour they so wish.
Such double standards and the notion of female responsibility for honour must be challenged and rejected by all Muslims and communities where femicide is perpetrated. If the communities in question are to sincerely address the issue of femicide, they must acknowledge the above and challenge the tribal patriarchial values that deeply permeate the cultures of their communities. Nothing less will suffice. Values that put community perceptions of “reputation” above the personal development and happiness of their own children do not have a place in any home. Particularly those homes that wish to be free from emotional or physical abuse.
Note for readers wishing to republish any of my posts: Thank you for reading. Please respect my intellectual property and my copyright and leave all the identifying information intact. Feel free to “re-blog” and share my work, but please do not reprint or republish my work in any other format without my permission. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
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Over the last few years we have experienced a growth in information and communication technology which few would have dreamt of just four or five years ago.
The commercial and mass popular uptake of the Internet is the catalyst; the merging of information and communication technology a precondition. World Wide Web, interactive TV, electronic commerce, virtual reality are some of the hyped buzz-words; while human resources are the real bottleneck.
In several respects the situation is emergent as in the early 1970s: the use of information and communication technology is spreading into new areas where no one paradigm is the obvious choice, fact and fiction are difficult to differentiate, and public education lags behind.
In this situation, where most people seem to think that products have to come from Microsoft to be worth buying, and ideas from MIT's Medialab to be worth buying into, European IT-industry and research are fighting an uphill battle. There is no silver bullet, but ERCIM can provide some useful ammunition in the form of informal, dynamic structures and processes which can strengthen our ability to act quickly, develop and try out promising ideas when they are new and not when a formal proposal is accepted.
ERCIM already has a rapidly growing membership of public research organisations and through working groups connections to private companies are being established. Thus ERCIM offers important opportunities for building personal networks that connect research, industry and the rest of society. Networks that give better faster communication and which create the informal frameworks for new initiatives with and without the direct participation of ERCIM.
Secondly, ERCIM can play an important role in developing the 'EU inner labour market' of information and communication technology, with a focus on research and PhD studies. The existing fellowship programme is an important element of this, but it can, and should, be supplemented by a less formal means of matching the interests of people with opportunities across borders.
Thirdly, ERCIM could play a role in creating a broad spectrum of pilots and experiments in broadband networking. This issue presents a special section on Research Networking in Europe. Hopefully it will show exciting new opportunities, not only for research cooperation, but for all kinds of structures across borders, international as well as private/public.
Finally, we should reinterpret the 'I' in ERCIM to stand for both Informatics and Interaction, and the 'M' for both 'Mathematics' and 'Media'. The IT scene is rapidly changing and the technical/rational approach is no longer credible on its own. To revitalise European IT we need new forms of cooperation merging traditional technical, scientific approaches with the humanities, aesthetics, art and design.
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Rural Health Workforce Australia
Rural Health Workforce Australia (RHWA) is a non-governmental organization that works to develop national solutions to the shortage of healthcare workers. It is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing. RHWA’s vision is a health workforce providing accessible, quality health care services in rural and remote Australia. RHWA works in partnership with its member Rural Workforce Agencies (RWAs) to complement their on the ground knowledge and expertise. The main belief is that in order to increase the health workforce in rural and remote Australia, we need a system that trains and educates graduates with an interest in living and working in rural Australia.
RHWA supports and represents the seven RWAs that operate in each State and the Northern Territory. They directly recruit and support GPs in rural communities through a number of services:
- Provision of information on rural practice and opportunities to students, registrars and practitioners.
- Provision of relocation assistance and relocation grants.
- Orientation of Overseas Trained Doctors to rural Australia.
- Provision of upskilling training & grants for rural doctors.
- Workforce planning and national rural general practice minimum data set collation and analysis.
- Assistance to communities to develop sustainable health services and policy input on issues and needs.
Links to the health workforce crisis
RHWA’s role is to develop solutions to improve the recruitment and retention of the health workforce throughout rural and remote Australia. Underlying all its work is a commitment to the health workforce needs of Australia's Indigenous communities. RHWA will focus on three goals over the next three years:
- Making general practice viable in rural and remote Australia;
- Supporting International Medical Graduates to live and work in rural and remote Australia; and
- Ensuring that future health professionals are attracted to rural and remote health careers.
Call for knowledge information:
Alliance Members are invited to submit any relevant knowledge products such as documents, reports, tools, multimedia, links to specific project web sites by sending an email to email@example.com. The Alliance Secretariat will publish relevant products on the Member's page.
Visit our Knowledge centre.
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Haryana Runaway-Couple Totals Have Quadrupled Since 2010 reports Security Training Network
Experts state village traditions to blame for the fear that force couples to run
According to the report that was tabled on Tuesday, the tally of couples grew to 1,345 in 2012, compared to 366 two years earlier.
Sampat Singh, the Congressional MLA, raised the question on the issue, stating, "It certainly shows that the conflict is increasing between the couples and their parents on the issue of choice of marriage. The couples feel insecure when elders raise objections to their relation due to social traditions."
"When any boy or girl is thrashed or killed following their affair, it sends fear among others forcing them to rush to courts to seek police protection," said Sampat, who was state home minister between 1987 and 1991.
Punjab and Haryana high court judges were originally authorized to issue orders to protect the life and liberty of runaway couples. However, as of April 2010, the High Court gave such capability to the session judges of each district for the runaways.
President Malik khap, Baljeet Singh Malik stated that the couples run in fear of the perceived violation of tradition. "Government promotes such trend (to provide security) to claim that authorities take prompt action," he said and added that khaps now generally don't intervene into these matters to avoid court cases.
President of women's wing of Haryana Sarv Jat Sarv Khap Mahapanchayat Santosh Dahiya stated that most cases stem from the same village marriages.
"Villagers don't accept same gotra or same village marriages as they consider all girls and boys in a village as brothers and sisters," said Dahiya, who is an associate professor in Kurukshetra University.
About Security Training Network:
Security Training Network (http://www.securitytrainingnetwork.co.uk/) provides training information and services for security personal in multiple fields. Learn how to gain access to individuals that can bolster training and facilitate proper maturation of security forces in your business.
Tel: 0203 322 8340
This is a press release. Press release distribution and press release services by EmailWire.Com: http://www.emailwire.com/us-press-release-distribution.php.
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Lesbian and Gay Band Association (LGBA) is a musical organization comprised of concert and marching bands from cities across the United States and the world. Formed in 1982 as Lesbian and Gay Bands of America when seven independent bands met formally in Chicago, the Association has grown to 38 member organizations including international bands.
LGBA remains dedicated to its original goals of providing a network of lesbian and gay bands at all stages of development, promoting music as a medium of communication among people, improving the quality of artistic and organizational aspects of member bands, and stimulating public interest in the unique art form of community band music in our culture.
Lesbian and Gay Band Association meets annually in different cities to plan events, encourage the formation of new bands, and share the gift of music with gay and non-gay audiences. Seminars on topics such as musicianship, programming, and organizational skills are held in addition to general business and committee meetings.
Great performances are the most visible manifestation of the lesbian and gay band movement. Member bands across the country appear in hundreds of concerts, parades, and community events every year. Member bands in geographic proximity often perform together, and a typical marching schedule will include Pride Parades in several different cities.
Band music was the first true love that brought us together. By uniting men and women who share this love, bands help create and enhance the “community” their members call home. Through musical performance, LGBA bands make a powerful political statement in a non-political way.
Whether marching or playing a concert, we proudly proclaim “We Are Who We Are.” LGBA bands are sources of pride within their cities, as well as positive symbols of the same communities.
Making music creates a family where affection means more than affectional preference. By “banding together,” LGBA shows that people of different sexes, ages, creeds, races, and challenges can build a strong community.
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March 28, 2003
By 2020, 76 Million Worldwide Could Go Blind Without Prevention
Vision 2020 Initiative Could Cut Figure by Nearly Two-Thirds
Over 52 million people worldwide can avoid going blind if current and new resources are successfully implemented, according to a new study. Researchers for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that without extra intervention, the global number of blind individuals would increase from 44 million in 2000 to 76 million in 2020. “Vision 2020 - The Right to Sight”—an initiative cosponsored by the World Health Organization and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness and aimed at eliminating avoidable blindness from cataract, trachoma, onchocerciasis, vitamin A deficiency and refractive errors—would decrease the 2020 projection by 52 million individuals. The economic gain of this program would be approximately $102 billion. The study, “The Magnitude and Cost of Global Blindness: An Increasing Problem That Can Be Alleviated,” will appear in the April 2003 issue of the American Journal of Ophthalmology.
Researchers used existing data and epidemiologic models to estimate blindness prevalence, and combined these and other data on national populations, gross domestic product per capita, labor force participation, and unemployment rates to project the economic productivity losses associated with blindness. The global loss could grow from $42 billion to $110 billion if efforts to decrease vision loss do not change.
Kevin D. Frick, PhD, lead author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the School, said, “The economic costs of blindness can be decreased by either finding ways to facilitate economic productivity of individuals who are or will become blind or eliminating avoidable blindness. VISION 2020 is an initiative aimed at the latter goal. If VISION 2020 were to be successful at decreasing the prevalence of blindness in all regions of the world to near the levels that are found in the established market economies today, a conservative estimate of the economic gain from increased productivity is $102 billion.”
Dr. Frick and his co-author projected that the aging and growth of the global population over the next 20 years will lead to a large increase in the number of blind persons. The researchers state that this increase could be avoided by using existing and new resources at the causes of blindness for which proven interventions are available, such as cataract surgery.
Dr. Frick said, “Blindness and low vision are public health problems that will increase because of demographic trends unless there are additional interventions. If successful, VISION 2020 will reduce avoidable blindness by 429 million blind person-years and a minimum saving of $102 billion for unaccommodated blindness along from 2003 to 2020.”
Allen Foster, FRCS, FRCOphth, medical director of Christoffel-Blindenmission through the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, co-authored the study.Public Affairs Media Contacts for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Kenna Brigham or Tim Parsons at 410-955-6878 or firstname.lastname@example.org.
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By Wayne Visser
I write my waking incoherence
And when I sleep, I dream in words;
I write out lines as daily penance
And let them go, like captive birds.
The words are seeded in the darkness,
Plucked like stars from midnight skies;
I may not know their rhyme or reason,
Or if they’re foolish, foul or wise.
I write in ink on crushed papyrus,
I write in blood to spread the virus;
I write for love, I write for money,
I write in vinegar and honey.
The joy is in the puzzle making,
In finding pieces that might fit;
It’s not unlike the art of baking,
Or solving riddles bit by bit.
I write in pictograms and stone,
I write with feathers and with bone;
I write for fame, I write for history,
I write in code and silent mystery.
The pain is in the shards of meaning
Piercing into mental flesh;
It’s not unlike the knife of healing
Cleaning out a wound that’s fresh.
I write in tones that cast a spell,
I write in heaven and in hell;
I write alive, I write when dormant,
I write in tune and script discordant.
The words are borrowed, begged and stolen,
Yet these words are mine to give;
The belly of my words are swollen
And given birth, they start to live.
I write my muddled hero’s journey
And when I fall, words pick me up;
I write out sentences that turn me,
Questing, towards the gilded cup.
I write to breathe, I write to survive,
I write to believe, I write to strive;
I write to conceive, I write to thrive,
It’s writing that keeps me alert and alive.
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- K-12 Education
- Higher Education
- Who We Are
The troubled state of teacher evaluation is a glaring and largely neglected problem in public education, an enterprise that spends $400 billion annually on salaries and benefits. Because teacher evaluation is at the heart of the educational enterprise —the quality of teaching in the nation’s classrooms—it has the potential to be a powerful lever of teacher and school improvement. But that potential is being squandered throughout public education today.
A host of factors—a lack of accountability for school performance, staffing practices that strip school systems of incentives to take teacher evaluation seriously, union ambivalence, and public education’s practice of using teacher credentials as a proxy for teacher quality—have resulted in teacher evaluation systems throughout public education that are superficial, capricious, and often don’t even directly address the quality of instruction, much less measure students’ learning.
In this Education Sector report, Co-founder and Co-director Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform examine the causes and consequences of the crisis in teacher evaluation, as well as its implications for the current national debate about performance pay for teachers. And the report examines a number of national, state, and local evaluation systems that point to a way out of the evaluation morass.
This research was funded in part by KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation. We thank the foundations for their support but acknowledge that the findings and conclusions presented in this report are those of the authors alone and do not represent the opinions of the foundations.
Connect With Education Sector
Subscribe to our Biweekly Digest, event invitations, and more.
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I recently visited Cuba for the first time, to participate in scholarly meetings. For an American citizen this short voyage requires a leap through hyperspace. It was my third attempt over ten years to get there. Obstacles had included both the US government and the Cuban government.
This was a trip back in time, to 1959. For one thing, a majority of the (few) autos on the street in Havana are large American cars from the 1950s. Most are beautiful. One hears about the cars, but I had thought the reports must be exaggerated.
Cuba’s economic system is out of Alice in Wonderland. It has one of the world’s longest lasting dual exchange rate systems. Currently the cost of dollars in the market is 25 times higher than the official rate of one peso per one dollar. This means that a worker in the hotel sector or restaurant sector who is able to keep dollar earnings has an income 25 times higher than one who must turn them in to the government.
The island long ago developed an advantage in skilled services such as medicine and education. But doctors and professors earn far less than those who join the fledgling private economy. The latter features 178 possible approved jobs. The possible choices on the list by design make no use of an educated person’s skills. They include waiter, bathroom attendant, taxi driver, automobile battery repairman, mule driver, and wheel barrow operator. Most people are still employed by the state, however.
Perhaps American consumer society has too many goods available; but Cuba has far too few. Most things that one would want — a toaster to make breakfast, leather to make shoes, tools for auto repair, software to upgrade a computer, spare parts to keep all those appliances from the 1950s running, …everything – is only available either by rationing, waiting in line, or going to the black market. Many are not available at all.
How can such a system have persisted for so long? Why doesn’t everyone see the folly?
Repression and fear don’t explain it. The fact is that the advantages of the market system are not hard-wired into human brains — not anywhere, and especially not when they have been portrayed as the allies of selfishness and corruption, in opposition to such noble ideals as cooperation, fairness, and equality.
When the Soviet Union was collapsing, Robert Shiller and co-authors surveyed residents of Moscow and New York regarding their attitudes toward free markets. Unsurprisingly, many of the Russians gave answers that strike an economist as failing to appreciate adequately the virtues of the marketplace as a mechanism to bring supply and demand into equality. For example 66% of the Russian respondents thought it was unfair of flower-sellers to charge higher prices on holidays. The surprising finding, however, was that just as high a percentage of Americans thought it was unfair of the flower-sellers to raise prices! (Economists, of course, point out that demand is much higher on holidays, and that without the higher prices flower-growers would have no incentive to increase the supply at such times.)
People in Eastern Europe eventually figured out that communism does not work and that the market system does. If the United States of America did not exist, or if the embargo did not exist, Cubans could do likewise: infer that there is something fundamentally wrong with an economic system that involves so much time wasted and so many simple desires frustrated. But in the case of Cuba, there is an alternative explanation right at hand. Many of these goods would be imported from the United States, or produced at home with inputs from the United States. Therefore it must be the US and its embargo that is to blame. So it seems to many Cubans.
When makers of foreign policy ”get tough” with another country, they often under-estimate the extent to which the opponent’s government can derive long-lasting legitimacy by pointing to the external threat to rally its people. The citizens of the last two countries still clinging to communism, Cuba and North Korea, both vividly remember military conflict with the United States (the Bay of Pigs and the Korean War, respectively) and both countries have long been subject to American sanctions. The first communist country to experiment with market reforms, Poland, was one that never came into military conflict with the West. Lesson: the US should end its obsolete embargo against Cuba. Let those private-sector auto mechanics have their spare parts!
Harvard’s Jorge Dominguez likens the Cuban reform path to an accordion that alternately goes in and out. Liberalization took hold out of the desperate economic situation (”special period”) that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s long-time benefactor. The reform process was then slowed from 1996 to 2005 — even stopped altogether — in part because Venezuelan support made it less necessary.
Reforms have been renewed in recent years– now under “los lineamientos,” translated as “the guidelines.” For example, the government announced in 2011 it would let people buy and sell houses. Farmers can sell directly to the market, to hotels and restaurants, rather than just to the government. One explanation for the recent reforms is that the more pragmatic Raul Castro took over after his brother became ill in 2006. But another explanation is that money from Venezuela has lately begun to level off and appears uncertain in the future. (For one thing, Venezuela’s oil production has declined during a period when everyone else’s has boomed, due to mismanagement by Hugo Chavez of his own economy.)
Referring to the heavy economic dependence on the US that had ended abruptly after the 1959 revolution and to the heavy dependence on the Soviet Union that had ended abruptly after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuba’s Minister for Heavy Industry in 1995 vowed, “We will never let this happen to us for the third time.” (Jatar, 1999, p.38). Yet that is what is now happening with respect to dependence on Venezuela.
For now, Cuba is casting about for a model to follow. The example of Sweden shows that it is possible to combine a strong social safety net with a strong private economy. But what Cuba seeks is a model of transition out of communism.
The Chinese economic miracle is the obvious model, beginning with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. This judgment assumes that income equality is in reality not as important to Cuba as the requirements that the Communist Party maintain control and the country’s leaders never have to say they were wrong. The Cuban slogan has long been “Socialism or death!” Cubans are proud, and mindful of their history of ill-treatment by larger powers. In this they resemble the Chinese, who have converted to capitalism more energetically than the capitalists while yet leaving the giant picture of Chairman Mao up in Tiananmen Square.
But when the Chinese and Soviets split in the 1960s, Cuba went with the latter. Only in some American college dorm rooms did posters of Mao and Che appear side-by-side. So for now the model is Vietnam, rather than China. (Unfortunately, the Vietnamese economy has been troubled of late.)
Four things will happen soon, probably at approximately the same time: the aging generation of Cuban émigrés who have dictated American policy on Cuba will give way to the next generation; the Castros will pass from the scene as well; American-Cuban relations will be normalized; and the world’s 2nd-to-last museum of communism will spontaneously convert to a rapidly growing service-exporting economy. Lineamientos and models will no longer seem so necessary.
I just hope that before the wave of American money and tourists arrives on its shores, the government of Cuba undertakes the appropriate regulatory intervention: a zoning law that all car bodies in some designated part of Old Havana must date from 1959 or earlier.
• Jorge I. Dominguez “Hello from Havana,” Harvard Magazine, July-August 2009.
• Dominguez, et al, eds., Cuban Economic and Social Development (Harvard University Press), 2012.
• Anna Julia Jatar-Hausmann, The Cuban Way (Kumarian Press), 1999.
• Robert Shiller, Maxim Boycko & Vladimir Korobov, “Popular Attitudes Towards Free Markets: The Soviet Union and the United States Compared,” American Economic Review81, no.3, pp.385-400, June 1991.
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UN Urged to Protect Muslims Who Change Religion
By Patrick Goodenough
CNSNews.com Pacific Rim Bureau Chief
August 02, 2004
Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - Campaigners for religious freedom have urged the United Nations to act to protect "Muslims who choose to convert to another faith."
A petition signed by almost 90,000 people in 32 countries was presented last week to U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, the organization spearheading the campaign said Monday.
The Barnabas Fund, a UK-based charity working among Christians in Islamic societies, said Muslims who change religions, often called "apostates," should be "free to do so without having to face a lifetime of fear as a result."
The organization's advocacy manager, Paul Cook, said the petition was launched a year ago on behalf of apostates who face persecution and prejudice in many countries.
Under Islamic (shari'a) law, Muslim men who decide to adopt another belief and refuse to return to Islam -- usually within a limited period of time -- may be put to death.
It remains a contentious point in Islam, but countries where people have been accused or convicted of apostasy include Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Mauritania.
In 2002, a shari'a-based penal code was introduced in a Malaysian state controlled by an Islamist party. It said any Muslim who converted to another faith had three days to repent, failing which he faced having his property forfeited and being sentenced to death.
The criminal code of Mauritania similarly provides for a three day period of reflection and repentance for any Muslim guilty of apostasy "whether by word or action." "If he does not repent within this time limit, he is to be condemned to death as an apostate and his property will be confiscated by the Treasury."
Although the Koran says "there is no compulsion in religion" (sura 2:256), the Islamic canonical tradition called the Hadith contains references to execution for apostasy, including one in which Mohammed commands, "Any [Muslim] person who has changed his religion, kill him."
According to the Barnabas Fund, even in countries where converting to another religion is not punished by law, apostates often face hostility from their families and communities.
The organization said supporters of the campaign had over the past year written to Muslim political and religious leaders around the world, "urging them to speak out on this crucial issue."
In Britain, it said, not only has there been no reply from the Muslim Council, the main umbrella body, but also "virtually no response" from leaders of major Christian denominations who had been contacted.
"It is a tragic day when so few politician or religious leaders can be found who are prepared to stick their necks out by simply publicly affirming the most basic of human rights to change one's religion," said Barnabas Fund international director Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo.
He noted that the right to change religion had been enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for more than 50 years.
Sookhdeo said he hoped and prayed that campaign would "help to end the turning of a blind eye to the suffering of converts from Islam, and instead put their desperate needs firmly on to the international human rights agenda where they very much belong."
Last April, four experts held a panel discussion on apostasy in Geneva where the U.N. Commission on Human Rights was holding its 60th annual session.
One of them was Dr. Younas Sheikh, an intellectual who was freed in November 2003 after spending three years in prison in Pakistan accused of "blasphemy," most of that time on death row.
The Arabic word kafir has been used to describe both an "apostate" and a "blasphemer."
The Barnabas Fund says many people accused of "apostasy" are not converts at all, but rather Muslims who have questioned fundamentalist interpretations of Islam and called for a more tolerant approach.
They include Sudanese Islamic scholar Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who was executed for apostasy in 1985, after publishing a leaflet calling for the reform of Islamic law to make it more just and humane.
In 2002, Iranian history professor Hashem Aghajari was sentenced to hang for blasphemy, after saying in a speech that Muslims were not "monkeys" and "should not blindly follow" clerics.
The death sentence was later reviewed after widespread student protests, and a retrial saw him jailed for five years instead. Last week, Aghajari was freed on bail.
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For Immediate Release
Contact: Howard M. Shanker, The Shanker Law Firm,
PLC, 480-838-9448; email: email@example.com
Arizona Defends Its Right to Destroy the Last Free Flowing River in the Desert Southwest for Developers’ Benefit; Center for Biological Diversity Counters With Lawsuit
Phoenix, AZ– June 8, 2004 – A number of citizens and environmental groups, led by the Center for Biological Diversity, are waging an uphill legal battle to try to protect the San Pedro River Basin, a wildlife area located
The state is required to evaluate a developer’s water supply plans. If the state determines that water supplies are inadequate, then that determination must be disclosed in all promotional material and contracts related to the sale of the lots. Prior to September 29, 1993, the state issued most developers in the Sierra Vista Sub-basin of the San Pedro River, statements indicating that there was not an adequate supply of water. Since 1993, the availability of water in the sub-basin has been diminishing at an alarming rate. Nevertheless, since September 29, 1993, the state has maintained a practice of issuing statements to developers indicating that there is an adequate water supply.
The San Pedro River is internationally renowned for its biological diversity. In 1993, Life Magazine recognized the San Pedro River as one of “America’s Last Great Places.” In 1995, the American Bird Conservancy recognized the San Pedro River as its first “Globally Important Bird Area”
According to Robin Silver, M.D., the Conservation Chair for the Center for Biological Diversity and a San Pedro property owner, “ADWR adequacy determinations are a sham. An adequate supply of water does not exist without loss of the San Pedro and the taking of federal water rights. ADWR has issued approximately 1,345 new well permits and adequacy statements for more than 13,000 homes in the area since its 1993 policy reversal. As a result, an estimated 7,400 acre-feet per year of deficit groundwater pumping was projected in the sub-watershed for the year 2000, and the deficit is on target to increase to almost 13,000 acre-feet per year by 2020.”
Howard Shanker of the Shanker Law Firm, PLC, who is representing the plaintiffs, says, “The state appears to be doing everything in its power to destroy an ecologically unique and valuable area – all to benefit a handful of developers. There is no supportable scientific or technical basis to justify the state’s reversal in practice, yet our state government is continuing to mislead people who want to purchase homes in the area. They think they have a sufficient supply of water to last 100 years, but they do not.”
Shanker continues, “There is a clear connection between the draining of the groundwater for subdivisions and the viability of the base flow of the San Pedro River. The state argued in court that ADWR does not have to consider impacts on the river or surface water when it makes an adequacy evaluation – but that is tantamount to legally closing its eyes. In reality, the only way a 100-year supply of water in the Upper San Pedro Basin could possibly exist, is through the illegal denial of federal water rights and the resulting loss of the San Pedro River.”
In March 2004, the State Superior Court ruled, in part, that the plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge the state’s adequacy determinations. Shanker says, “According to the court, only the developers who benefit from this nonsense have standing to challenge the practice.” Plaintiffs have just filed their Notice of Appeal.
The Shanker Law Firm, PLC, is located at 600 E. Baseline Rd., Suite C-8, Tempe, Arizona 85283-1210; phone 480-838-9448; fax 480-838-9433.
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Health & Safety
American Journal of Nursing - December, 2003 - Volume 103, Issue 12
'Hierarchy of Controls'
Providing a framework for addressing workplace hazards.
By A.B. (Butch) de Castro, PhD, MSN-MPH, RN
Occupational safety and health professionals, including occupational health nurses, occupational health physicians, industrial hygienists, and safety engineers, use a framework called the “hierarchy of controls” to select ways of dealing with workplace hazards. The hierarchy of controls systematically identifies hazards and prioritizes intervention strategies. It is based on the premise that the best way to control a hazard is to remove it from the workplace, rather than relying on workers to reduce exposure. Additional means can be used but offer less protection.
The following control measures are listed from most effective to least effective: elimination, substitution, engineering controls, administrative controls, work practice controls, and personal protective equipment.
Elimination—complete removal of a hazard from the work area. An example is when hospitals go “latex free” by not purchasing or stocking latex products such as gloves and tubing, thus doing away with the risk that employees will develop an allergy or have an allergic reaction to latex materials. Elimination is the method preferred in controlling hazards and should be selected whenever possible.
Substitution—replacing a conventional material or process with a less harmful alterative. Glutaraldehyde, typically used as a cold sterilant to disinfect heat-sensitive equipment such as endoscopes, can cause dermatitis. Less toxic brands are equally effective and reduce the potential for adverse effects.
Engineering controls—removing or isolating a hazard through technology. This measure focuses on the source of the hazard or the pathway of transmission. For example, using a ceiling-mounted system for lifting patients out of bed and into a chair is an engineering control. The equipment, rather than the nurse, bears the burden of lifting.
Administrative controls—policies aimed at limiting worker exposure to a hazard, typically accomplished through work assignments. For example, to prevent a patient from assaulting a nurse, staff members may work in pairs when providing care to or transporting a patient on a psychiatric unit. The presence of multiple staff members may discourage patients from attacking.
Work practice controls—reduce exposure to occupational hazards through the behavior of workers. Recapping used or contaminated needles violates the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s bloodborne pathogens standard because it places the nurse at risk for a sharps injury. Compliance with this regulation relies on the health care worker’s not engaging in this practice.
Personal protective equipment (PPE)—the least effective measure of control in the hierarchy. PPE includes clothing and equipment designed to be a barrier between worker and hazard. This measure should be the last option when trying to reduce worker exposure, since it doesn’t control the hazard itself. Examples of PPE are the gowns, gloves, masks, and eye shields used when caring for a patient diagnosed with severe acute respiratory syndrome. If the PPE fails or is in poor condition or of poor quality, workers may be exposed.
By understanding and using the hierarchy of controls, hospitals can prevent or minimize exposure to occupational hazards. It is critical to strive for the most effective measure possible and when selecting control measures, use a combination of methods. Nurses should be familiar with hazard control measures within their workplaces and use the hierarchy of controls framework to assess whether the appropriate health and safety measures are being taken.
A.B. (Butch) de Castro is the senior staff specialist for the ANA Center for Occupational Health and Safety.
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Coach first – always communicate with your coach first even if your concern is with the coach. A lot of the time this will resolve the issue.
Coaching Director second – If you feel you have made the effort to communicate responsibly with your coach but been unsuccessful then contact your Age group Director of Coaching.
The Coaching Director , administrator, coaching staff, and board all support the clubs desire to compete at the highest level and be successful in every age group (boys and girls) within Cal South, Regional and National competitions, while creating an environment which allows every player to reach their true potential and enjoy the game of soccer. This is done through the excellent coaching staff, developmentally appropriate coaching curriculum and the desire to continually recruit talented young soccer players on a yearly basis. It is the vision of Santa Barbara Soccer club to have a white team competing at the Gold level and a Red team competing at the Silver level by the time they enter the Under 16 age bracket.
Player Development – Different children develop at different rates and in different areas in their lives physically, mentally, emotionally and socially. Every child develops in these areas at different times (ages) and this is especially true at the younger ages.
The key to player development is touches on the ball, playing time and confidence. Santa Barbara SC practices and playing time policy ensure the first two, touches on the ball and playing time, while the Red and White team system ensures the third, confidence. Every player within the club needs to be challenged at a developmentally appropriate level because if a challenge is continually to easy then a player becomes bored and if a challenge is continually too difficult the player will become discouraged. The Red and White teams provide an environment where players receive confidence through success in their efforts while still being challenged to a level where they can make mistakes and learn from it and try it again with more success each time.
There are also transitions during a season from red to white and vice versa for these reasons. There are many stories within Santa Barbara SC of players successfully making the transition at the older ages from red to white teams due to this developmentally appropriate system.
White and red team selection is decided thorough discussions with the coaching staff of the age group and coaching director. It should be noted that although these decisions are made in the latter stages of the season, during the months of April (U9-U13) and May (U14-U19, coaches are observing the players on both teams over the entire competitive year and decisions are made based on this. New players that arrive throughout the primary ‘try-out’ months of April and May are recruited based on their ability compared to the players within the current squad that competitive year. NO players are guaranteed a place in either the white or red teams of any age group.
Santa Barbara Soccer club promotes its coaching staff to recruit all year round. That said the primary ‘try-out’ period is throughout the months of April and May, whereby players are invited to come and train with the team allowing them to get a feel for the club environment. In addition after state/national cup competitions are over, coaches are permitted to invite potential recruits to come and ‘guest play’ in one tournament, as long as the coach adheres to the playing time policy of the club for all players.
Official try-outs will be advertised and held in the month of April also.
At all other times of the year a 2 week try-out can be arranged by contact the Coaching Director Lloyd@santabarbarasc.org
High school soccer officially starts after thanksgiving weekend. High school season runs from December 1st to around mid February (sometimes longer depending on CIF playoffs). During that time players are not allowed (CIF rule) to participate in club soccer. Hence all teams U15-U19 stop training Dec 1st and resume around mid February.
- U9 & U18 = $1425
- U10-U17 = $1800
- $500 non-refundable Registration fee is required up front. Payment plans are available. Scholarships are also available.
The $500 non-refundable registration fee goes to pay the up front costs that the Club incurs in anticipation of the seasonal year. Field rentals, CSL and Cal South membership costs, equipment purchases, tournament fees, and operational expenses. These fees are un-recoverable for the Club which is why the registration fee is also non-refundable to families.
All families must volunteer 4hours of their time per SBSC tournament. SBSC hosts 2 tournaments per year. Summer Cup , August and Spring Cup, March. Player costs are actually $2200/player but because of the fundraising efforts at these events, we can subsidize the amount that families are charged annually.
- Coaches Wages
- Administrative Costs
- Practice Field Costs
- Game Field Costs
- Referee Costs
- League Costs (including League Cup)
- National /State Cup Entry
- 2 Santa Barbara Tournaments
- 2 Additional Tournaments
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Spyware is designed to collect and use information about anyone using the computer it is installed on. It watches what sites you visit and where you shop on the Internet in order to create a marketing profile. It is usually combined (called: bundled) w/ another program that you have downloaded. Commonname.com (CN) is considered a piece of spyware. It takes everything you type while you are using the browser and sends it to their website server.
Credit Card Info:
For those who are concerned about internet security, you should be aware that some spyware is sending everything you type in the most easily readable form called: clear text! Some spyware can even capture your credit card information and that information gets stored on their server. If that isn't bad enough, anyone between your computer and them can also read and capture your personal information.
If you're not concerned about security, let's talk about performance. If the web pages you and a million other people are browsing has to go through this one server (Commonname.com for example), it may slow down the performance of your PC. It can come from the installation of several programs; the most popular are KaZaA, and iMesh.
KaZaA and iMesh:
Why do you think their programs are free? It always comes back to money! CN will resell the information it gets from you, to someone else. Here's a short list of other programs w/ spyware-KaZaA, Limewire, Audiogalaxy, Imesh, Morpheus, Xolox, Grokster
When you go to a site that requires you to register in order to use their service these can potentially be spyware sites. Sometimes these types of websites/programs don't show on a "spyware" list because they notified you via the policy statement that it's going to be collecting information. You agreed to this when you registered. If you look closely to the disclaimers and registration information they will include wording such as, "...These applications may deliver advertisements, collect information, overlay content or graphics...or modify your system settings." This is a quote from the download area of the KaZaA website. For searching for Internet we recommend a site like Google.com for limiting your spyware exposure.
We recently installed a program called Ad-aware on the computers in the labs that has helped us to remove spyware from the computers. There are hundreds of different types of spyware, some MUCH worse that Commonname.com. Ad-aware is helping us to keep the student PCs clean.
Computing Services is now blocking the CN site, in the student labs and on all employee PCs, as of Wednesday October 23rd. If you have a problem with a machine, related to CN, spyware or anything else, please feel free to give a call at x7741.
Spyware Removal and Spyware Informative Websites
Ad-aware - a spyware removal tool:
Ad-aware is a totally free program which scans your memory, registry, and disk drives for known adware and spyware. You can also choose to have Ad-aware remove any that it finds. I strongly suggest you download and use it regularly. You may be surprised at the nasties it finds. ASU currently has the licensing to load Ad-aware on all our PCs. It can be downloaded at: www.lavasoftusa.com or call Computing Services at x7741 for assistance.
Spybot - a spyware removal tool
Works like Ad-aware and is also free. Can be downloaded from their website at: http://security.kolla.de/
It's also helpful to keep your machine up to date. To update -select "Windows Update" in your Internet Explorer browser.
Spychecker maintains a database of known spyware. You can search from the site or use their small program to see if a program you want to download contains spyware. They update the database daily. (Windows) . SpywareInfo (spychecker.com) SpywareInfo has a large array of resources to help you keep your computer free of spyware and most of them are free.
Some spyware prevention software is from us. Please call x7741.
KaZaA Lite, RollingStone.com, Amazon.com; MP3.com, Shareaza, Blubster, Farmclub.com, LiquidAudio.com.
* this list is as of the writing of this flyer 10/15/02. Go to spychecker.com to verify any program/site.
Some of the information listed above is from the website "About.com" in their -Computer Security Freebies http://freebies.about.com/cs/securityfreebies/
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||This article needs additional citations for verification. (June 2012)|
T'aarof, Ta’arof or Tarof (Persian: تعارف) is a Persian form of civility emphasizing both self-deference and social rank, similar to the Chinese art of etiquette, limao. The term encompasses a range of social behaviours, from a man displaying etiquette by opening the door for a woman, to a group of colleagues standing on ceremony in front of a door that can permit the entry of only one at time, earnestly imploring the most senior to break the deadlock.
The prevalence of t'aarof often gives rise to different styles of negotiation than one would see in a non-Iranian culture. For example, a worker negotiating a salary might begin with a eulogy of the employer, followed by a lengthy bargaining session consisting entirely of indirect, polite language -- both parties are expected to understand the implied topic of discussion. It is quite common for an Iranian worker (even one employed in an Iranian neighborhood within Europe) to work unpaid for a week or two before the issue of wages is finally broached. Likewise, a shopkeeper may initially refuse to quote a price for an item, suggesting that it is worthless ("gh'aabel nadaareh"). T'aarof obliges the customer to insist on paying, possibly several times, before a shopkeeper finally quotes a price and real negotiation can begin.
T'aarof also governs the rules of hospitality: a host is obliged to offer anything a guest might want, and a guest is equally obliged to refuse it. This ritual may repeat itself several times before the host and guest finally determine whether the host's offer and the guest's refusal are real or simply polite. It is possible to ask someone not to t'aarof ("t'aarof nakonid"), but that raises new difficulties, since the request itself might be a devious type of t'aarof.
At times t'aarof can lead to one performing a task that one does not want to perform. For instance, if one friend offers a ride to another friend only because they are being polite, they may become stuck in the situation if the friend agrees to get the ride. Of course if one was going by the rules of t'aarof, one would refuse the offer many times before accepting.
It is a way of denying your will to please your counterpart, however the will is only denied because of the custom and not to please the counterpart. But there are situations where tarof persist upon a request to make the counterpart genuinely satisfied. Tarof may cause misunderstandings between both parties and can be a source for awkward situations in a social setting.
Some political theorists have argued that during the period of serfdom, at princely courts, t'aarof regulated diplomatic discourse. It involved a sharp curbing of one's comportment, speech, and action to make people, honour, and prestige calculable as instruments for political advancement.
According to D. M. Rejali, for the feudal elite the ornamentation of speech symbolises prestige. With the advent of capitalism and its scientific paradigm, communication became more precise and the formality of t'aarof a hindrance in the pursuit for rapid capital accumulation.
In the West
The closest one can come to tarof in the western culture is the question of "Who's paying the restaurant bill?" This is an awkward situation where everybody in the company is reaching for their wallets and it's usually resolved by social status, the one with the highest income, biggest reason or most power pays. But, still everyone insists on paying.
Common words used in tarof:
- Ghabeli nadare (It has no worth) = It's not a big deal.
- Ghadamet ro chesham (May your footsteps fall on my eyes) = You are more than welcome.
- Ghorbanet beram (I will sacrifice myself for you) = Thank you very much.
- Cheshmet roshan (May your eyes be enlightened) = You're worth it.
- Khahesh mikonam (I plead with you) = You are humbling me.
- Fake tarof
A customer comes to the cashier to pay for groceries. The cashier says “it's okay, you honor me with your presence” When the customer insists on paying, the charade of tarof continues with a customary word exchange which is culturally learned from a young age. The discussion concludes with a minor argument and the cashier is finally paid the full amount of the groceries and the customer leaves. The cashier wants the cash and the customer just wants to pay but this is a cultural and social game.
- Genuine tarof
A person will offer guests every comfort available by discomforting him/herself. Sometimes this leads to offering things above one's means. As an example the host will use the last funds to buy groceries to make an overly pleasant stay for the guest. This may have dire consequences for the host, but this is the generous side of tarof and its only purpose is to satisfy the guest. The host is satisfying the guests and feeling good about being a generous and humble person, independent of its consequences.
- Awkward tarof
A host insists upon a request for the guest to sleep on the main bed while the host him/herself sleeps on the floor. Or a host piling food on a guest’s plate since the host is believing that the guest is tarofing, but the guest is actually full and satisfied. The guest feels awkward by putting the host in an uncomfortable situation. The guest might finish all the food to show respect to the host.
At times, not doing tarof can be considered very rude and almost offensive. For example, If one offers a present that you already have, telling the truth would be very rude. Likewise, if someone offers to take you for dinner, you must refuse at first, professing their great kindness. This is normally be two to three times, but one must be careful not to do it in excess, and to always end in a yes, so as to avoid offence. It is not expected of young children to tarof, but most Iranian children over the age of ten are aware of, and engage in, the custom.
- "Limao and Ta'arof Similarities".
- D M Rejali, "Torture & Modernity: Self, Society, and the State in Modern Iran". An exception would be the Japanese Tea Ceremony, which seems to have adapted well to modern requirements (see MT issue no 1).
- D M Rejali, Torture & Modernity
- Umberto Eco, Political Language: The Use and Abuse of Rhetoric
- The New York Times, Iranian 101: A Lesson for Americans; The Fine Art of Hiding What You Mean to Say, Michael Slackman
- The Atlantic, Talk Like an Iranian, Christopher de Bellaigue, 25 August 2012
- The Art of Taarof
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Google has bought a new search algorithm called Orion, which incorporates a super-advanced technique for prioritizing relevance in text-searches.
Google has bought a new search algorithm penned by Ori Alon, an Israeli student from the University of New South Wales, Australia. Apparently they beat Microsoft and Yahoo, who were also interested in the super-advanced technique for prioritizing relevance in text-searches.
The algorithm called Orion, works out the most relevant text on which to perform a search. It only works in English and rates the text by quality of the site in which it appears. Orion will make searches less-time consuming, by working with existing search engines and expanding on their function. Moreover, instead of finding pages on the net that contain keywords, then providing links, the new search engine will provide expanded text extracts which will eradicate the need to open every link.
Orion had sparked interest from the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, with Google eventually acquiring the rights to the algorithm. Alon stated that Orion would improve the speed and focus of internet searches making it an invaluable service. As its developers say, the new search-engine tool will revolutionize the way people retrieve information from the internet. Alon further explained that, it also provides a list of terms or topics related to the original search keyword. This new tool would make net surfing much easier and less frustrating, giving information directly and immediately making it a great time-saver for users.
According to sources, it is confirmed that Ori Alon works at Google's Mountain View, California offices. Unfortunately there is no public demo of Orion, but this system is said to give users the most relevant results and a list of suggested topics that the user may not be aware of.
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In this play, young Orestes is commanded by Apollo to murder his mother. Does this exonerate him of responsibility for his crime? Could he disobey the God if he wanted? His family seems to be under a "curse" given that murder, betrayal, and mayhem have plagued its last five generations. Does this mean such events are beyond the control of individuals? Electra explores just how much free will a person has in the fate-driven world of Greek mythology.
In Electra, the characters misinterpret justice as something dictated by the gods. In this way, they avoid taking responsibility for their own actions.
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The software is offered freely in support to organizations or associations with an education project which goal is to reduce considerably the current rate of illiteracy in their area and/or to develop literacy or language courses for children of all ages or adults within the next 3 to 5 years.
Are you not getting the results you were expecting with your current program?
Learning Now v1 is fully customizable and can be adjusted to reflect all your pertinent needs.
This tool is designed for children, adolescents and young adults already exposed to technology and off track traditional education. It can also be used for adults and elders.
In order to receive a free copy of Learning Now v1 and our full support, you must have one or more computers, or be willing to apply for free computers to build a community network. If you have computers in idle most of the time, you must use them to provide education to all children in need. Maximize the use of your equipment and change your teaching approach.
The deployement of the software and the creation of the content requires low budget and can be achieved with the support of creative community members, and a team of educators with wild ideas and commitment to new methodologies!
The software can be used in support to various high tech educational programs to help and train people with talent to edit and format photos or create all types of designs and files (audio and video) in order to help with the production of multimedia resources more typical to your region and culture.
If your team is already familiarized with Adobe Flash, and counts with a few local designers, you should contact the author immediately.
Software can be installed on single computers or on a broadband Internet or Intranet Network.
Deployment of software requires the formation of a team of educators that will work on the creation and integration of the content of the courses to be developed. Designers might be needed to create new modules.
The type of support provided by the author of the software will be defined per individual case, according to the size of the project and the technical requirements.
Learning Now v1 is not exclusively targeted to Africans or West Indians, and can be deployed in any environment and culture worldwide, including Europe and North America.
United Nations Literacy Decade, Strategic Framework Symposium January 26-28, 2009.
Experts mapped out three major objectives which will guide literacy promotion for the remaining years of the UN Literacy Decade, tackle the challenge of raising literacy rates worldwide and give new opportunities to 776 million illiterate adults and 75 million out-of-school children." Sixty experts from five continents gathered at UNESCO, Paris to discuss a strategic action framework for the second half of the UNLD. Over three days, 26 – 28 January, specialists from government, civil society, the private sector and multilateral organizations debated what strategies and actions will be needed to make the objectives reality." The Consultation agreed on three main thrusts: mobilizing stronger political commitment to literacy; reinforcing effective programme delivery; and harnessing new resources for literacy."
Speaking at the High-Level Symposium which opened the Technical Consultation, Mr André Luiz de Figueredo Lázaro, Vice-Minister of Education of Brazil, called on participants to ensure that illiterate people ‘are not cast adrift’ and appealed to governments everywhere to deliver on promises of literacy and basic education for all." Participants concluded with an emphasis on the need for urgent action on literacy so that no one is excluded from the knowledge society of the twenty-first century." [UNESCO reference here]
Extract from the EFA Global monitoring report - 2002: "Is the world on track?"
"This Report re-confirms the diagnosis of the World Education Forum that almost one-third of the world’s population live in countries where achieving the EFA goals remains a dream rather than a realistic proposition, unless a strong and concerted effort is made. High-risk countries are found primarily in South and West Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab States and North Africa. The populous countries of East Asia and the Pacific are making some progress but will not achieve EFA without an intensified effort, while a number of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, with a rich education tradition, are in jeopardy of falling back from goals that had been attained."
Explore the various current reports from the UNESCO and you will see that the situation is far from improving.
"When I see that there is a billion of people who need basic education, and a billion of people who are undernourished, while another billion eat too much, I become enraged. None of the big companies are acting. They only think of profits. UNESCO is spending more money to produce reports that real solutions. That is why I am committed to this project and I've been working alone for a few years. To change the world, it takes a personal commitment. It's my belief. " Fabrice Menoyot.
The EPA estimates that 29.9 million desktops and 12 million laptops were discarded in 2007. That's over 112,000 computers discarded per day! See full report.
Learning Now v1 and the author have been featured on various media outled. Find below a brief list of references.
"Direct testing of literacy suggests that the global challenge is much greater than the conventional numbers, based on indirect assessments, would indicate, and that it affects both developed and developing countries." [Extract of the Global Monitoring Report of EFA.]
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|Home > National News > Article|
In the cynical love affair people have with Port Phillip Bay, the downside sits largely with the belief that the sparkling blue waters are tainted with the permanent horror of brown stuff. You know, poo.
Over the summer, twice a week, the Environment Protection Authority samples water from 36 bay beaches, from Portsea around to Queenscliff and then, factoring in weather conditions, makes predictions on the beaches' health for the following days.
It's a simple affair. Three samples of water, about 100 millilitres each, are taken from the shallows, from sites about 20 metres apart. The samples are then analysed for enterococci, a group of bacteria found in the gastrointestinal tract of warm-blooded animals, according to the authority's website. Results are posted on the website - www.epa.vic.gov.au - as part of the authority's beach report.
Beach report coordinator Tanya Wansbrough says the enterococci group was adopted as the prime indicator for faecal fouling earlier this year, in place of E.coli, bringing the authority in line with the World Health Organisation and global best practice.
This summer is one of the cleanest on record for Port Phillip Bay, with only one beach closed, Canadian Bay, for a day because of a raised bacteriological count following heavy storms.
This compares with seven beaches closed last summer: Half Moon Bay, Rosebud, Seaford, Carrum, Canadian Bay, Mount Martha and Frankston.
Contrary to local reports, Half Moon Bay wasn't closed early last week by the EPA. Not officially, anyway. Rather, a cautionary word that raised levels of bacteria had been found was apparently enough to see the pretty spot temporarily abandoned.
Another sampling 24 hours on showed bacteria levels had dropped to acceptable levels - and the "unacceptable water quality" alert was withdrawn. Chris Bell, the authority's director for environmental strategies, says rogue industrial pollution has been virtually eliminated over the past 20 years - pointing to the return of the platypus to suburban creeks as evidence of waterway recovery. "I think people forget how it was in the '70s," he says.
Or perhaps they remember too well, when the suburbs were flush with pan toilets and septic tanks, and the modest surf at St Kilda beach was choked with floating faeces by the fistful.
Mr Bell remembers Prince Charles saying as much when he took an unhappy dip at Elwood.
Mr Bell and Ms Wansbrough were in Queenscliff on Friday, to present one of six Beach Care events the authority is staging over the summer. The message is: the water's looking pretty fine, and the biggest threat to its health comes from regular citizens dumping crud into the gutters and drains, along with general thoughtless littering.
Since 1994, the authority has run the Litter Report Line, a free call service (1800 352 555) where people can report motorists seen dumping rubbish from cars. In the past financial year, the EPA fined 8523 motorists - up a thousand on the previous year. Ninety per cent of the fines related to cigarette butts. "They remain a big problem," says Mr Bell.
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Copyright © 2003 The Age Company Ltd
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INTERSSESSION ACTIVITY REPORT
THE COMMITTEE FOR THE PREVENTION OF TORTURE IN AFRICA
COMMISSIONER CATHERINE DUPE ATOKI
To the 51st Ordinary Session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights
18 April – 2 May 2012
Banjul, The Gambia
Overview of the situation of torture prevention on the continent
The status of the implementation of the Robben Island Guidelines on the continent did not evolve significantly during the intersession. The CPTA has continued to receive reports of acts of torture perpetrated by law enforcement agents; reports of excessive use of pre-trial detention, incommunicado detention, solitary confinement, inhuman and degrading detention conditions characterized by high levels of overcrowding, poor hygienic conditions, disease etc as well as impunity for perpetrators of torture.
Torture persists because of ignorance, and impunity for perpetrators of torture only breeds more torture. Poverty, corruption, lack of transparency in places of detention, blatant disregard for basic procedural safeguards, lack of appropriate legislation criminalizing torture, lack of monitoring mechanisms as well as difficulties occasioned by problems of the criminal justice system in most African countries all conspire to make the fight against torture an uphill task.
Of the forty four African countries that are parties to the UN Convention against Torture, Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), and hence under an obligation to adopt specific legislation criminalizing torture, only eight (8) have so far done so. Of these forty four, only eleven have ratified the Optional Protocol to the CAT (OPCAT), and only eight (8) have signed the instrument.
This bleak picture notwithstanding, the CPTA is encouraged that there are draft bills on the criminalization of torture that have been initiated in many States Parties and that the process of OPCAT ratification in Cameroon, Mauritania and South Africa is at an advanced stage. The CPTA is also encouraged that a momentum around issues of torture prevention has been building up on the continent and that torture prevention has now become an issue of open debates in most countries.
Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, what follows is an outline of the activities that the Committee for the Prevention of Torture in Africa undertook during the Intersession in furtherance of its mandate of promoting and facilitating the effective implementation of the Robben Island Guidelines.
- In pursuance of its efforts to constructively engage with States Parties and other relevant stakeholders on issues bordering on the prohibition and prevention of torture, the CPTA undertook a promotion mission to the Islamic Republic of Mauritania from 26 to 30 March 2012. The mission was aimed among other things at, promoting, disseminating and facilitating the effective implementation of the Robben Island Guidelines in Mauritania, engaging in a dialogue with the authorities on the fight against slavery, the situation of persons deprived of their liberty and the progress made by Mauritania in the process of OPCAT ratification.
- During the visit, the CPTA delegation met with top officials of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania relevant to the objectives of the mission, including the President of the Republic, the Ministers of Justice and Interior, the Commissioner for Human Rights, Humanitarian Action and Relations with Civil Society, the Presidents of the National Assembly and of the Supreme Court as well as the Presidents and members of the National Human Rights Commission and the Bar Association. The delegation also met with the Representative of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human in Mauritania and various civil society organizations active in the domain of human rights.
- In its meetings with the various officials, the CPTA made recommendations aimed at reinforcing the protection of all persons in the territory of Mauritania from being subjected to slavery, torture or other forms of ill treatment. These included amongst others, the enactment of specific legislation criminalizing torture; the ratification of OPCAT and the setting up of an effective National Preventive mechanism; a more effective application of the law against slavery, the respect of procedural safeguards contained in the criminal procedure code and various measures to ameliorate conditions of detention. A full report of the mission containing the recommendations of the CPTA will be made public as soon as possible.
- The CPTA extends its appreciation to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania for inviting it as well as for its transparency and cooperation throughout the visit. The CPTA seizes this opportunity to implore other States Parties to invite it in order to initiate a constructive dialogue on the prohibition and prevention of torture and other forms of ill-treatment.
- From 24 – 26 January 2012, in Yaoundé, Cameroon, the CPTA jointly organized a seminar with the Government of Cameroon under the theme ‘’the prevention and repression of torture in Cameroon’’. The organization of this seminar was a fall out of the presentation of the 2nd Periodic Report of Cameroon during which the African Commission had recommended that the Cameroon Government should collaborate with it to ensure the implementation of the Robben Island Guidelines.
- The seminar brought together participants from diverse backgrounds including from civil society, personnel of the security forces (police, gendarmerie and the army), officials of the penitentiary, civil and military magistrates, civil and military prosecutors, medical doctors, and officials of the Ministries of Justice and External Relations ,and was aimed at sensitizing participants on international norms on the prohibition and prevention of torture with particular emphasis on the Robben Island Guidelines and reflecting on the implications of the ratification of OPCAT by Cameroon. For three days, participants were treated to presentations on the international legal framework on the prohibition of torture, torture in the context of deprivation of liberty, the challenges of investigating cases of torture and the protection of victims of torture. A full report of the workshop and the recommendations resulting there from will be made available on the website of the African Commission in the coming days.
- The CPTA welcomes the political will demonstrated by the Government of Cameroon in the fight against torture and hopes that other African countries will follow in its footsteps by engaging with the African Commission in undertaking joint initiatives to ensure the effective implementation of the Robben Island Guidelines in their respective jurisdictions.
- From 10 to 11 November 2011, CPTA members participated at the Global Forum on the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture (OPCAT) that was held in Geneva, Switzerland. The Global Forum, which was organized by the Association for the Prevention of Torture (APT), was aimed at assessing the impact of the OPCAT five years since it entered into force, and to share ideas and experiences in order to ensure its effective implementation.
- Members of the CPTA also participated in a one day Strategic Consultative Meeting for Africa which was held on 9 November 2011 as a precursor to the discussions at the Global Forum. The strategic Consultative Meeting brought together African actors involved in torture prevention and was meant to build on the momentum generated at the Dakar Regional Conference on Torture Prevention, which was jointly organised by the CPTA, the APT and Amnesty International - Senegal, in April 2010, in Dakar, Senegal.
- CPTA members used the opportunity of both the OPCAT Forum and the Strategic Consultative Meeting for Africa to exchange views on how to mobilise and build on regional synergies towards effective prevention of torture in Africa and to network with other national, regional and international actors involved in torture prevention worldwide.
- From 6 to 7 February 2012, a member of the CPTA participated in a regional consultation for Africa on enhancing cooperation between United Nations and regional human rights mechanisms on prevention of torture and the protection of victims of torture, especially people deprived of their liberty, which was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The consultation, organized by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was aimed at ensuring coherence, avoiding gaps and overlaps, as well as strengthening complementarity and maximizing the impact of the work of both UN and African human rights mechanisms on the prevention of torture and the protection of persons deprived of their liberty.
- During the consultations, participants identified and made recommendations on concrete means and tools of cooperation between UN and African mechanisms on the prevention of torture, in the areas of information sharing, possible joint activities and follow up on recommendations emanating from the various mechanisms. In particular, proposals were made on possible joint reports (including both thematic and country reports), joint press releases, joint visits, joint capacity building activities, joint publications, meetings and conferences, exchange of staff, coordinated early warning actions and identification of common priorities.
- It should be noted that the CPTA has pioneered cooperation with UN mechanisms on many of the above areas and hopes that the recommendations made during the consultation will be fully implemented.
- The fourth edition of the biannual CPTA newsletter – the Africa Torture Watch, has been published. This edition of the newsletter highlights the activities of the CPTA in the past six months, and shares best practice on the use of community service as an alternative to detention and as a means of ameliorating prison condition in Burkina Faso. It also contains an updated standard page on the ratification of the Convention against Torture and its Optional Protocol, as well as the criminalization of torture and the applicable penalties in African countries. Copies of the newsletter are available at the Secretariat of the African Commission.
To states parties to the African Charter
The Committee for the Prevention of Torture in Africa recommends to States Parties to take the following measures:
- Ensure that torture is criminalized in the national legal framework in conformity with the Convention against Torture and the Robben Island Guidelines. States Parties must go beyond the simple prohibition of torture in their constitutions and adopt specific legislation criminalizing torture that provides for adequate sanctions and a framework where victims of torture can be compensated and rehabilitated;
- For States Parties that have bills criminalizing torture pending before their legislatures, to speed up the process of adoption and enactment of this bills in to law;
- For states parties that have not yet done so, to ratify as soon as is practicable, the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention Against Torture and ensure its effective implementation, notably by setting up effective National Preventive Mechanisms (NPM) with all the requisite guarantees to undertake regular unannounced visits to places of deprivation of liberty.
- In that regard, the CPTA particularly urges the Republic of Cameroon to deposit the instruments of ratification of OPCAT as soon as possible and to initiate an inclusive dialogue on the process of NPM establishment;
- To ensure that adequate training is on human rights standards and specifically on the Robben Island Guidelines is provided to all services responsible for dealing with persons deprived of their liberty, notably, judges and magistrates, the police, correctional services personnel, immigration officials, defense forces etc.
- To take all necessary measures to ensure that allegations of torture are thoroughly investigated and that all perpetrators are subject to the legal process in order to curb impunity. Measures should also be put in place to ensure that victims of torture and other forms of ill-treatment are adequately compensated and rehabilitated.
To the African Commission:
- To provide adequate resources in order to ensure the effective implementation of the 2012 – 2014 CPTA Strategic plan and mainstream the prevention and prohibition against torture into all aspects of its work;
To civil society organizations,
- To accompany the efforts of the CPTA in sensitizing the general public on the absolute and irrevocable nature of the prohibition against torture and help in disseminating the Robben Island Guidelines to various relevant actors in their respective areas of operation;
- Promote the criminalization of torture in national legislation and advocate for the ratification and effective implementation of the OPCAT and accompany the implementation of the CPTA strategic plan.
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Voter ID Law On Hold
A judge’s ruling Tuesday morning means, as of now, you will not need a photo ID to vote in next month’s presidential election.
The ruling by the commonwealth court judge appears to have stopped the controversial voter ID law from taking effect, at least for this election.
But the fight isn’t over yet. Even though a judge ruled that voters won’t need an ID next month in the presidential election, the whole dispute could still end up back before the state’s Supreme Court prior to Election Day, November 6.
But as of now, here’s what the ruling means:
- When you show up to vote November, you will not have to bring a photo ID.
- Workers at the polling place can still ask you for a photo ID, but you won’t be required to show one in order to cast a ballot. Basically, you’ll vote the same way you did back in May during the primary.
Supporters of the law believe requiring photo ID would prevent voter fraud. However, opponents claim the law would discourage people from casting ballots.
The ruling is likely to be appealed to the state’s Supreme Court.
If you plan to vote in the upcoming general election, you’ll need to be registered by October 9.
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Hi i notice a lot of people on here asking for info on lever locks well take yourself down to your local locksmith or shoe repairer (yes thats correct) and see if they can order you a book called " An Encyclopaedia of locks and builders hardware" by josiah parkes-union works-willenhall-england.
It has a brown hardback cover and is about 9inches by 6inches size
This book was first published in 1958 then 2nd print 1968 and 3rd print 1979. All this information is all i could find inside about print.
It is quite an old book and may be hard to get but i ordered mine when i was a shoe repairer about 5 years ago through one of my key suppliers at about £20 quid. It is a goldmine of info on most locks and will certainly educate you on most lever locks and general lock history.
Bearing in mind when this was written its amazing a lot of the locks havent changed that much just been modifiyed over time.
If this book doesnt open your eyes to how advanced locks can be take up knitting !!
It shows mushroom pins,side bar cylinders,deadlock levers,wards and much more.
Seek this book out
I am going to see a shoe repairer i used to with and see if it still available otherwise im sure a little "google" will help.
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Chris Dixon on the increasingly popular notion that startups are working on features instead of big ideas:
One thing these critics need to be careful about is that, as Clay Christensen has long argued, many important new inventions start out looking like toys.
He argues that Twitter is a great example of this, which it is. 5 years ago, the consensus of many — particularly those in the tech blogosphere — was that Twitter was just about the dumbest thing ever invented. Today, it’s a fundamental communication protocol for hundreds of millions around the world.
I’d go even further — back to the founding of Apple. At the time, people considered personal computers to be niche of the market at best, a toy at worst.
Apple is now worth $600 billion dollars and has fundamentally changed the world a few times over the past 35 years.
Hell, this guy thought the iPhone was little more than a toy just 5 years ago.
Oddly, this seems to always want to breakdown into a hardware versus software argument. Which is silly.
Things that change the world tend to sneak up on us all. If they were obvious enough to be immediately recognizable, everyone would be working on them. You have to start somewhere.
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